Illusionist is Good; Many Good Fall Movies On the Way

My wife and I just enjoyed the historic thriller THE ILLUSIONIST, starring a mysterious Edward Furlong, an evil Rufus Sewell (longtime Brit heart-throb) and a dangerous Paul Giamatti. The plot is compelling, the effects are clever, the performances are very good and the sense of time and historic place is very accurate.

Watching the Coming Attractions, I was reminded that September through Thanksgiving is usually the period when the most intelligent movies appear on American screens. The summer teen crap is over, the Holiday teen crap hasn't arrived yet and this is the best opportunity for Oscar-worthy films to get a serious viewing--and still be remembered at nomination time. True, some very good films are slipped into the Holiday period, amid all the explosions and special effects of the vapid studio blockbusters, but Fall is really the golden period for adult moviegoers.

Some of the interesting trailers we saw were for the promising films: Hollywoodland, The Black Dahlia, Al Franken: God Spoke, The Science of Sleep and The Last King of Scotland.

Other Fall arrivals that sound like they could be good are Steve Zaillian's All the King's Men, Pierrepoint and The History Boys.

At this moment, the good films currently in theatres, in my view, are Scoop, Little Miss Sunshine, The Illusionist, Who Killed the Electric Car and An Incovenient Truth. A Prairie Home Companion and The Da Vinci Code.

The best fairly-recent DVD releases, I believe, are: Munich, The Constant Gardener, Syriana and Inside Man.