Branagh's 'Sleuth' makes viewers feel a little conned

Six reviews. No waiting.

• In "Sleuth," Kenneth Branagh's remake of the 1972 thriller with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, the icy set decor and antiseptic production design easily overpower the two-man cast and Harold Pinter's ominous, creepy script.

More of a complete reworking than a remake, "Sleuth" begins with a zillionaire novelist Andrew Wyke (Caine, now playing Olivier's role) letting a young man named Milo Tindle (Jude Law) into his posh, isolated mansion riddled with technological gimmickry and security devices.

Tindle boldly announces he's in love with Wyke's never-seen wife and demands the author divorce her. Wyke does him one better. If Tindle can take his wife off his hands, Wyke says he'll give him a fortune in diamonds.

All Tindle has to do? Break into Wyke's house and steal them, so Wyke can claim the insurance loss.

Tindle doesn't bite. Not until his greed and Wyke's insistence wear down his apprehensions.

From this point on, "Sleuth" detonates a series of reversals and surprises, none of which shall be revealed here.

I admired the production values in "Sleuth." I liked Caine as the scheming novelist. Not so much Law, who plays Tindle as a bit too stupid to pull off what he later does.

Pinter's script, in typical fashion, creates tension in interrogative replies ("Did it?" "Does it?"). Yet, Branagh can't shake the abject sense of artificiality that permeates his movie and ultimately suggests that the people being conned the most aren't Tindle and Wyke, but us.

"Sleuth" opens today at the Century Centre Cinema in Chicago, the Evanston CineArts 6 and Renaissance Place in Highland Park. Rated R (language). 86 minutes. 2 stars

• In Robert Cary's "Ira & Abby," Ira Black not only talks to a shrink, both his parents work as shrinks, and everyone in this domestic comedy winds up seeing shrinks.

By the time the shrinks explain their patients, and other shrinks explain the shrinks, "Ira & Abby" force-feeds us all of their emotions, leaving nothing for us to actually discover for ourselves.

The indecisive and thoroughly negative Ira (Chris Messina) hates everything in life. His world seems to change when he meets the free-spirited Abby (charismatic screenwriter Jennifer Westfeldt), the embodiment of carefree compassion.

They marry almost the moment they meet, and seem to be perfectly happy -- until Abby's past brings Ira's naturally nasty personality bubbling to the surface.

Ira has anal-retentive analyst parents (Robert Klein and Judith Light). Abby has emotive, open parents (Fred Willard and Frances Conroy). This clash of the right-brained vs. left-brained parents-in-law plays as a less humorous version of "Meet the Fockers," which wasn't high comedy to begin with.

"Ira & Abby" takes a bold stand at the end, holding love as a wholly separate entity from marriage. But how seriously can you take a movie whose epiphany comes from Jimmy Stewart in a film clip from "Harvey"?

"Ira & Abby" opens today at the Century Centre Cinema in Chicago. Rated R (language, sexual situations). 101 minutes. 2 stars

• "Broken" feels like a one-set, one-act stage play front-loaded with expository nonsense about drugs and emotional interdependency designed to explain the roots of the violence in the finale.

Heather Graham stars as Hope (metaphor alert!), an untalented and naïve young Ohio woman who moves to Los Angeles to become a music star. Instead, she works as a waitress.

She gets desperate enough to hook up with bad boy Will (Jeremy Sisto, delivering yet another variation of the self-centered cad he last played in "Waitress." Coincidence? I think not).

It doesn't take Will long to hook Hope on heroin. When her survival instincts finally kick in, she kicks the habit and Will gets his kicks by tracking her down at a lonely diner late at night. He has a gun and unrequited love.

This movie merges the drug-drama "Candy" with the hostage tale "The Desperate Hours," then adds a steady supply of wincing philosophical observations, such as "Everybody's selling something!" and "The only place you can really be is right now. Right now!"

"Broken" opens today at the Century Centre Cinema in Chicago. Rated R (language, sexual situations). 97 minutes. 1 1/2 stars

• What we get in Amir Bar-Lev's documentary "My Kid Could Paint That" far exceeds a static report on a child who might or might not be the artistic prodigy as people presumed.

This doc breaks through a journalist's invisible barrier to reveal the feelings and thoughts of the filmmaker/reporter. Here, Bar-Lev expresses anguish over presenting material potentially damaging to the family who he has practically lived with for months and has come to genuinely love.

At the age of 4, Marla Olmstead became an international phenomenon for creating sophisticated, artistically significant abstract paintings. The New York Times published a story on her.

With hype in full overdrive, Marla's paintings sold for thousands of dollars and she became a media darling.

Critics of abstract art rejoiced because, if a 4-year-old could rival the works of Jackson Pollock, modern art could be called a sham after all.

Then, everything disappeared as quickly as it occurred after a segment on "60 Minutes" charged that Marla's dad, Mark, an amateur painter himself, had orchestrated the paintings, or made them himself.

The Olmsteads, anxious to set the record straight, invited Bar-Lev into their home to follow Marla and show the world her true talent. His final conclusions didn't turn out to be exactly what the Olmsteads expected.

The question of whether Marla did the paintings becomes less important here than the question of "How does a journalist maintain an objective stance in the throes of emotional ties and doubts, not only about his subject, but himself?"

Professional journalists deal with this question all the time. Most keep their professional cool. Some forget their ethic rules.

In "My Kid Could Paint That," Bar-Lev gives us candid insights into how he dealt with his emotional and professional conflicts, and it's an illuminating process for both budding journalists and curious nonprofessionals.

"My Kid Could Paint That" opens today at the Music Box Theatre, Chicago. Rated PG-13 (language). 82 minutes. 3 stars

• Ryan Gosling puts his acting chops to the test in "Lars and the Real Girl," a dicey romantic comedy that weirdly confirms the African axiom that it takes a village to raise a child. Or here, to nurture a damaged adult to emotional stability.

Gosling, wearing ill-fitting clothes and slicked-down hair, plays Lars, a social misfit who retreats to his own world and won't have anything to do with people, not even his brother (Paul Schneider) and his wife (Emily Mortimer).

His life, and everyone else's, changes instantly when Lars brings over his new girlfriend, Bianca, a life-size, anatomically correct doll with big eyes and other parts.

He treats her as a real person. He talks to her. He puts her to bed. He feeds her.

Sure, this movie could easily have lapsed into some pathetic, caustic comedy or some hammy horror opus.

But director Craig Gillespie, operating with a script from Nancy "Six Feet Under" Oliver, plays this comedy dead straight, creating a high-wire act for Gosling and his co-stars to walk.

All the people in Lars' small town love Lars, and they fight their instinct to ridicule. Instead, they accept Bianca as a real person, and they allow Lars' infatuation with the doll to play out.

Gosling walks his tightrope with astonishing grace and sells us on Lars' view of her as a flesh-and-blood person. (Reportedly, people on the set of "Lars" kept Gosling in character by treating Bianca as real, too. She even got her own trailer.)

As silly as this premise sounds, Gillespie and his cast strike a surprisingly emotional chord in the final act, and even if Gosling's co-star is a literal silicone girl, the story reaffirms the concept of community support in fresh and endearing terms.

"Lars and the Real Girl" opens today at the Century Centre Cinema in Chicago. Rated PG-13 (sexual-related images and references). 97 minutes. 3 stars

• The chilly, hard-to-swallow family tragedy "Reservation Road" finally gives Mark Ruffalo the role he was born to play: the guilt-stricken, internally conflicted dad who kills a little boy in a hit-and-run accident, then tries to go on with his normal life as if nothing happened.

In this script, updated from John Burham Schwartz's 1998 novel, Ruffalo plays Dwight, a Red Sox fan who, while driving his sleeping son home from a baseball game, strikes and kills the young son of Ethan and Grace (Joaquin Phoenix and Jennifer Connelly).

Dwight's kid doesn't know what happened. So Dwight mothballs his Ford Explorer, and through some strained plot contrivances, evades suspicion and capture.

Meanwhile, Ethan goes to pieces, vowing to get the man responsible for his boy's death. He seeks out an attorney to help him and goes right to -- you guessed it -- Dwight, a local attorney.

"Reservation" boasts more ironic intersections than an O. Henry short story, and all feel contrived and forced.

Director Terry George demonstrated a much tighter grasp of the subject in his critically acclaimed drama "Hotel Rwanda." Here, George achieves a sort of fever-pitch made-for-TV boiler plate project with Ruffalo opening his emotional veins every other scene and Phoenix exploding into vigilante rage at the drop of a gun hammer.

We don't know much about either father outside of this tragedy, and at the end of the "Road," we gain little insight into the nature of guilt, revenge or forgiveness.

"Reservation Road" opens today at the River East 21 Theaters in Chicago. Rated R (language, disturbing images). 102 minutes. 2 stars