Movie Review: The Man In The Moon (1991)

Genre: Coming-of-Age Drama  

Director: Robert Mulligan  

Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Sam Waterston, Tess Harper, Gail Strickland, Jason London, Emily Warfield  

Running Time: 99 minutes  

Synopsis: The setting is rural Louisiana in the late 1950s. 14-year-old tomboy Dani (Reese Witherspoon) is growing up on a farm with her older sister Maureen (Emily Warfield) and their parents Matt and Abigail (Sam Waterston and Tess Harper). Dani likes to skinny dip at the local pond, where she meets 17-year-old Court (Jason London), the son of the widow Marie (Gail Strickland). Dani develops a crush on Court, and while he is interested, he also knows she is too young. A series of unexpected mishaps then shape Dani's transition to adulthood.

What Works Well: This old-fashioned and well-crafted coming-of-age story (written by Jenny Wingfield) combines the nostalgic innocence of simpler times with the joyous dizziness of first love, the responsibility for unintended consequences, and the devastating pain of experiencing loss. Reese Witherspoon (aged 14 in real life) sparkles in her debut, deploying a range of emotions and clever expressions to reveal the first draft of Dani the woman emerging from the shell of a girl. She is surrounded by several other well-drawn characters, including her father Matt, sister Maureen, and first love Court, who also experience their own complex emotional journeys.

What Does Not Work As Well: The burgeoning relationship between Dani and Court goes through some repetitive hot-and-cold beats. A few promising sub-plots are dangled then abandoned, including Maureen's boyfriend and his lecherous father, while the widow Marie has a backstory with Matt and an off-screen tragedy that are only mentioned in passing.

Key Quote:

Dani: You know...sometimes...I think nothing's ever gonna make sense again.

Maureen: Maybe life's not supposed to make sense.

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Movie Review: Mud (2012)

Genre: Coming Of Age Drama  

Director: Jeff Nichols  

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Tye Sheridan, Sam Shepard, Reese Witherspoon, Michael Shannon, Ray McKinnon, Sarah Paulson, Joe Don Baker  

Running Time: 130 minutes  

Synopsis: In rural Arkansas, fourteen year-old friends Ellis and Neckbone (Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland) stumble upon Mud (Matthew McConaughey) on an isolated island in the Mississippi River. Ellis is intrigued by the stranger's story of a lifelong love for sweetheart Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), and starts bringing supplies to Mud and passing messages to Juniper. Ellis also experiences his first crush, get to know his mysterious neighbour Tom (Sam Shepard), and comes to terms with the painful separation of his parents (Ray McKinnon and Sarah Paulson). But Mud is a wanted fugitive, and his presence may unleash violence.

What Works Well: This coming-of-age drama combines lyricism with hard edges and tough truths. Director and writer Jeff Nichols finds a ramshackle section of river sustaining a simpler way of life, and populates it with characters harboring secrets. Within the stoic backwater isolation, Ellis' life is profoundly changing: his parents are splitting, the only home he knows might be dismantled, and he may have found a first girlfriend. But the revelations swirling around Mud are most potent, involving a deep love, easy lies, suspicions of murder generating a desire for violent revenge, and ultimately plans for an audacious escape. As the disruptions reach a climax, childhood is discarded and adulthood forged.

What Does Not Work As Well: Ten minutes could have been trimmed from the running length without dramatic loss, and Michael Shannon as Neckbone's river-diving uncle appears to be a character idea in search of a purpose.

Key Quote:

Mud (about Juniper): She is like a dream you don't want to wake up from.



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Movie Review: Your Place Or Mine (2023)

Genre: Romantic Comedy  

Director: Aline Brosh McKenna  

Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Ashton Kutcher, Zoë Chao 

Running Time: 111 minutes  

Synopsis: Debbie (Reese Witherspoon) and Peter (Ashton Kutcher) had a one-night fling 20 years ago, and remained close friends and confidants ever since. She married someone else, divorced, and is now raising 13-year-old Jack in Los Angeles. Peter moved to New York, remained single, and became a successful corporate management consultant. When Debbie has to travel to New York to attend a course, she stays at Peter's apartment while he offers to care for Jack back in LA. They both discover secrets about each other.

What Works Well: Director Aline Brosh McKenna deploys dynamic split screens to compensate for the central couple being separated by a continent. Zoë Chao as millennial Minka (Peter's neighbour and ex-girlfriend) gets the best lines as she bonds with Debbie in a friendly barrage of inter-generational barbs. The Cars contribute the soundtrack music.

What Does Not Work As Well: Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher are both in their mid-forties and well past the age of partaking in the immature behaviour on display here. In wanting to be a cool male role model, Peter blatantly ignores Debbie's wishes (related to Jack's hockey ambitions), while Debbie stumbles upon Peter's manuscript and promptly rushes off to a book publisher without consulting with her supposed best friend. It's all listless and contrived, and lives down to the genre's grating attributes on the way to the inevitable conclusion.

Conclusion: Neither here nor there.



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Movie review: Freeway (1996)

A crime drama infused with dark humour, Freeway thrives on unexpected twists, but the surprises are blunted by cartoonish disorientation.

In Los Angeles, 15-year-old high school student Vanessa Lutz (Reese Witherspoon) comes from a white trash family and barely knows how to read. Her mother Ramona (Amanda Plummer) is a prostitute and her drug addicted step-father Larry (Michael T. Weiss) is sexually abusive. When both Ramona and Larry are arrested, Vanessa slips away from her social worker and starts driving north towards the home of a grandmother she has never met.

When her car breaks down on the freeway, Vanessa hitches a ride with the seemingly helpful Bob Wolverton (Kiefer Sutherland), who claims to be a counselor. On the long drive he starts asking increasingly awkward questions, then reveals himself to be a twisted psychopath and murderer of women. But when faced with a threat, the scrappy Vanessa is more than capable of fighting back.

A reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood with Oliver Stone as one of the executive producers, Freeway aims for an irreverent, anything goes vibe. A sun-drenched, vivid aesthetic enhances the fairytale-for-adults mood, and writer/director Matthew Bright rides the wave of his central character Vanessa all the way to extremes of cheeky violence. The wacky energy is unflagging and undoubtedly infectious, if often misdirected.

The plot intentionally toys with fundamentals but carries every intention of subverting the familiar. Vanessa is introduced as a survivor of a chaotic upbringing and the girlfriend of a drug dealer. In an early scene, she fends off Larry's latest sexual advances with impressive determination. Still, the extent to which this potential victim is willing and able to resort to physical harm is revealed only gradually, setting up a war of equals with Wolverton.

Bright does eventually carry this premise too far. Vanessa approaches indestructible status (as does Wolverton), robbing the movie of tension, and extreme bloodlust threatens her standing as a sympathy-deserving protagonist. The plot detours to a meandering women-in-prison stint, and a couple of detectives (Dan Hedaya and Wolfgang Bodison) are more inept than effective. Another shift finds Wolverton and his wife (Brooke Shields) playing the victims with no scrutiny. The final act hastily, and artificially, reverts back to Red Riding Hood origins.

At 20, Reese Witherspoon almost convinces as five years younger, and cuts through the increasingly wacky action by channeling a combination of Bugs Bunny and the Tasmanian Devil. When it comes to fairytales, Freeway is happy to explore the corkscrew off-ramps.



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Movie Review: Sweet Home Alabama (2002)

A romantic comedy, Sweet Home Alabama celebrates cultural differences but never overcomes a distinctly unlikeable protagonist.

In New York City, Melanie Carmichael (Reese Witherspoon) is carving a name for herself as a fashion designer, and after a successful show is designated the next big industry talent. Her love life is also thriving and she accepts a marriage proposal from Andrew Hennings (Patrick Dempsey), a most eligible bachelor, successful businessman, and the son of New York's Mayor Kate Hennings (Candice Bergen). Andrew ignores his mother's politically driven concerns about Melanie's southern roots.

In the meantime Melanie rushes back to her humble small Alabama hometown to look after unfinished business. She is technically still married to Jake Perry (Josh Lucas), her soulmate since childhood before she abandoned him and ran off to the big city seven years ago. Now Jake still refuses to sign the divorce papers, forcing Melanie to prolong her stay. She reconnects with her parents Earl and Pearl (Fred Ward and Mary Kay Place) and confronts her questionable past actions. But her life becomes even more complicated when first the media then Andrew chase her to Alabama.

Despite a valiant effort by Reese Witherspoon, Sweet Home Alabama crashes against a fairly despicable central character. Melanie abandons her husband, adopts a fake identity to cover up her actual hometown, accepts a marriage proposal while still married, and once back among her childhood friends, proceeds to degrade them. And when Jake does sign the divorce papers, she still fumbles the transaction and humiliates others.

Director Andy Tennant and writer C. Jay Cox are either hoping no one notices, or else believe Melanie's actions are somehow justified and she can undergo a miraculous transformation to a good person worth caring about. It's a nice try, but Andrew and Jake as the two men in her life should both aim higher, and Melanie most deserves to be on her own, at least for a while.

This being a romantic comedy, the outcome is predetermined from the opening scene of Melanie and Jake as children witnessing lightning striking twice on the same spot of beach. To consume 109 minutes and actually arrive at the required ending, Tennant does manage to salute southern culture with a combination of affection and satire, although the frequently expressed local views on the Civil War fall somewhere between insensitive and crass.

Whenever a boost is needed on the soundtrack, Lynyrd Skynyrd's title song is cranked up at whatever event the characters happen to be attending. The movie rolls into a distasteful mess, but at least one song rocks.



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Movie Review: Legally Blonde (2001)

A comedy about looking past superficialities, Legally Blonde celebrates do-anything empowerment with gloss, humour, and old-fashioned kindness.

Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) is a fashion merchandising major at a California college, living the sorority lifestyle centred on shopping, make-up, and manicures. She is crushed when boyfriend Warner (Matthew Davis) dumps her because she is unsuitable for his senator-in-the-making lifestyle as he heads out to Harvard Law School. 

Stung into action, Elle applies herself and remarkably gets accepted into Harvard Law School, but upon arrival finds Warner already has a new girlfriend in Vivian Kensington (Selma Blair). Elle persists and makes a good impression in the class of Professor Callahan (Victor Garber). She earns an internship opportunity while catching the eye of Callahan's assistant Emmett (Luke Wilson), and still finds time to teach dowdy manicurist Paulette (Jennifer Coolidge) some sassy skills.

An adaptation of Amanda Brown's book based on her real-life experiences, Legally Blonde is fun, frivolous and wears its silliness with pride. The story of a smart woman deciding to ditch the ditzy lifestyle and focus on academics embraces concepts of self-belief and re-defined focus, but all themes are treated with feather touches. Director Robert Luketic keeps the mood bouncy, and pokes away with equal measures of playfulness at the vacuous sorority lifestyle and law school arrogance.

However, the air of dismissiveness sometimes borders on grating. Elle and her sorority sisters are treated as total airheads. The effort required to enter law school is reduced to Elle cramming for one exam and flaunting her bikini body in the application video. At Harvard the students are a combination of snarky and instinctively rude, and Elle's pathway to influencing a high-profile murder case is ridiculously short.

But this is a comedy, and Reese Witherspoon makes the most out of the role, ensuring Elle emits flashes of wit and a continuous stream of kindness, whether in her sorority or serious modes. Selma Blair is a suitable brunette nemesis, but Matthew Davis is an unfortunate non-entity, although his lack of presence underlines the futility of sorority women obsessing over useless men.

Within the final act of the brisk 96 minutes, Legally Blonde crams in courtroom antics featuring a murdered patriarch, his snooty daughter (Linda Cardellini), an accused step-mother (Ali Larter) and her alleged Latin lover, with no less than Raquel Welch making an appearance. It's a story-within-a-story, all to prove that understanding the latest shoe fashion trends and the fundamentals of a perm are essential legal skills.



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Movie Review: Fear (1996)

A thriller with romance, psychological tension and some straight-out horror, Fear struggles to click in any capacity.

In the Seattle area, 16 year old Nicole (Reese Witherspoon) lives with her dad Steven (William Petersen), step mom Laura (Amy Brenneman) and younger brother. One day Nicole and her best friend Margo (Alyssa Milano) skip school and go looking for adventure at the rough local bar, and find new friends in the form of David (Mark Wahlberg) and his buddy Logan (Tracy Fraim).

Nicole and David quickly get serious, and although he is not in school he seems like the ideal sensitive and caring boyfriend. But after they get sexually intimate, David displays tendencies for uncontrolled violence. Steven suspects David is bad news and warns Nicole to stay away from him, but Nicole believes she may be in love, and the potentially unstable and manipulative boyfriend burrows deeper into the family's life.

A derivation of Fatal Attraction reoriented towards teenagers, Fear has neither the quality nor the polish to deliver effective entertainment. It remains best known as an early career outing for both Reese Witherspoon and Mark Wahlberg.

The film suffers from severe tonal shifts and jarring character transitions. While an undercurrent of typical father-daughter tension between pouty teenager Nicole and guilt-ridden dad Steven dominates the early proceedings, David as the main antagonist spends most of the first half of the film acting like the world's best boyfriend. His subsequent oscillation between raving maniac and apologetic nice guy fools no one, while his promising backstory involving a tough upbringing and hanging out with a group of thugs is severely underwritten.

Director James Foley, working from a Christopher Crowe script, jerks his film along with the characters. Fear spends far too long nurturing an idyllic young romance with a sensitive sexual awakening before jolting into violence and rushing into a horror climax featuring home invasions, shootings and animal cruelty imported from a whole other movie.

The acting is wooden, William Petersen a particularly plastic culprit, and most of the dialogue is at the sophomoric level. Witherspoon and Wahlberg are learning their trade, and their performances do not rise much above the material.

Ironically Fear works best during the romance scenes, with David doing everything right to ensure Nicole falls under his spell. Young love can be two-faced, but here it's a neck-snapper.

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Movie Review: The Whole Truth (2016)

A basic courtroom drama, The Whole Truth is shallow and fairly rudimentary.

In Louisiana, defence attorney Richard Ramsay (Keanu Reeves) is representing seventeen year old Mike Lassiter (Gabriel Basso), accused of stabbing his businessman father Boone (Jim Belushi) to death. Richard is a family friend of the Lassiters, including Boone's widow Loretta (Renée Zellweger), but Mike refused to say anything ahead of the trial, hampering defence preparations.

The trial starts and prosecutor Leblanc (Jim Klock) has a strong case, with Mike having been found over his father's dead body and all but admitting to the murder. But in surprise testimony by Loretta and Mike himself, a more complex picture of events starts to emerge. Richard's inexperienced but perceptive assistant Janelle Brady (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) starts to suspect there is more to the case than is being revealed in court.

It's only a better-than-average cast that keeps The Whole Truth away from television movie-of-the-week territory, and even then the film barely proves worthy of any other designation. Directed by Courtney Hunt and written by Nicholas Kazan, the first-draft level script sets up for one big revelation and another twist in the tail, but forgets all the basics along the way.

The courtroom proceedings are sloppy in the extreme, testimony is accepted without corroboration or evidence, both lawyers awful in representing their case. The script is more interested in placing first Loretta and then Mike on the witness stand with no foreknowledge as to what they will say, and the flashback recreations, as well as the dull narration by Ramsay, are of no help: they change according to each subsequent unreliable witness.

It all leads to a rushed and awkwardly explained final curve intended to shock but in reality and as presented, makes little sense.

Keanu Reeves is more bland and blank than usual, his narration exceptionally unsuitable, aiming and totally missing a noir vibe. Zellweger and Mbatha-Raw fare better, but both their roles are underwritten. Belushi boorishly trundles through the flashback scenery as Boone, amplifying the deserved-victim designation. The rest of the cast members struggle to step over the amateur bar.

The Whole Truth is courtroom light, and deserves to be cited for contempt due to under preparation.

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Movie Review: Walk The Line (2005)

A musical biography, Walk The Line chronicles the career and personal life of country singer Johnny Cash.

As a child growing up on a cotton farm in rural Arkansas, Johnny is traumatized by the accidental death of his older brother Jack, and never overcomes his strict father Ray (Robert Patrick) believing the wrong son died. After a stint in the army stationed in Germany, Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) marries his sweetheart Vivian (Ginnifer Goodwin). They settle in Memphis and start a family. He is useless as a salesperson and instead dreams of a music career.

With unpaid bills and eviction notices mounting, he records his first song, local success follows and he starts touring. On the road John meets vivacious country singer June Carter (Reese Witherspoon) and is immediately smitten. They are both married to others, but start a deep friendship that goes through ups and down as Cash's fame spreads with a succession of hits. June refuses to become romantically embroiled while Johnny is married. He is soon addicted to drugs and alcohol, and both his career and his health start to suffer.

Directed and co-written by James Mangold, Walk The Line is a satisfying mix of biography, romance and drama. The film covers Cash's life from childhood in the mid-1940s to the late 1960s, and Mangold finds some good anchors to hang the story on. The death of beloved older brother Jack is a childhood trauma that resonates throughout John's life, and the strained relationship with his father Ray is another long-running source of tension.

But it's the love story between Cash and June that emerges as the defining relationship in John's life, and Mangold is able to portray the aching longing between two performers meant for each other but held back by personal circumstances. June is the more thoughtful adult in this couple, doing the math and concluding that as long as John is married there is no payoff in yielding to his desperate appeals for deep commitment. Their journey towards finding each other is long, painful and convoluted, but Mangold nails the resolution in the film's emotional highlight (which takes place on stage, of course).

In terms of Cash's musical career, the film features many of his most famous hits, delivered with conviction by Phoenix in a series of performances in various venues, ranging from tiny school auditoriums to massive stadia. Folsom Prison Blues, I Walk The Line, Ring Of Fire, and Home Of The Blues all make an appearance. The film starts with Cash's legendary show inside Folsom Prison, and loops back much later to reveal the event's place in his legacy.

Joaquin Phoenix finds all the different facets of Cash, from fresh faced and eager to washed up and worn down by all the pills and alcohol. Reese Witherspoon won the Best Actress Academy Award as June Carter, an energetic entertainer with a remarkably firm grip on reality despite the craziness of life on the road as a mother of young kids.

At well over two hours the film does drag, and the scenes of moping and personal disintegration caused by substance abuse do soldier on long after the point is made. But overall Walk The Line is a heartfelt and worthy tribute, both to the man himself and the woman standing by his side through good songs and bad.

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Movie Review: Home Again (2017)

A lightweight drama, Home Again offers a slice of life triggered by a weird premise with nowhere to go.

Recently separated 40-year old Alice Kinney (Reese Witherspoon) relocates her life and two young daughters from New York back to Los Angeles, and settles in at the estate of her late father, celebrated independent filmmaker John Kinney. Up-and-coming young filmmakers and friends Harry (Pico Alexander), George (Jon Rudnitsky), and Teddy (Nat Wolff) are in town to negotiate a feature-length film deal after the breakout success of their short. Harry is the director, George the writer and Teddy (George's brother) is an actor, and all three are in their twenties.

The trio meet Alice while partying at a club, and thanks to Alice's mom Lillian (Candice Bergen) they end up staying at the Kinney guesthouse. Alice and Harry are drawn to each other and start an unlikely relationship despite the age difference. The three guys also make friends with Alice's daughters, writer George helping older daughter Isabel break out of her shell. Things appear to be going smoothly until Alice and Harry hit a big bump in their relationship, and Alice's husband Austen (Michael Sheen), a record producer, shows up and tries to reclaim her love.

Directed and written by Hallie Meyers-Shyer (daughter of  Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer), Home Again exists solely as a star vehicle of sorts for Reese Witherspoon. The concept of a mother entering middle age enjoying the attention of three hunky and remarkably well behaved young men appears to have been hatched over afternoon cocktails, and that's as far as the plot goes. Once Harry, George and Teddy move in with Alice and her daughters, the film is caught in the open somewhere between the fields of bland and the plains of predictable.

At least Meyers-Sheyer does not sell out to cheap laughs, nor does she veer towards melodrama. But a whole lot of vanilla nothingness is also not a good place to land. It proves difficult to create any sort of compelling viewing out of a situation where Alice secures free childcare, free sex and free handymen services. The romance elements are more of a fling, the intrusion of husband Austen as the mood disruptor is almost painfully awful and ends with an atrociously juvenile punch-up. At least the sub-plot about Harry and his friends navigating the Hollywood sharks who find a way to ruin every good idea offers some welcome wit and sarcasm.

Witherspoon saves as many scenes as she can and is never less than watchable. The two young actresses who play her daughters, Lola Flanery and Eden Grace Redfield, are cute and capable. Candice Bergen gets a couple of good moments but is generally wasted. The three actors who portray the young filmmakers have no opportunity to rise above the status of props.

Home Again seeks familiar comforts only to stumble into stale surroundings.

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Movie Review: How Do You Know (2010)

An insipid romance, How Do You Know is a torturous two hours of nothingness.

At 31 years old Lisa Jorgenson (Reese Witherspoon) is cut from the US national baseball team. She starts dating two men: professional baseball star Matty Reynolds (Owen Wilson) and businessman George Madison (Paul Rudd). Matty is rich, handsome and superficial, but starts to genuinely care about Lisa. George is head of a large corporation, but he is facing a serious fraud investigation related to falsifying tax records. George's pregnant personal assistant Annie (Kathryn Hahn) is loyal, but his domineering father Charles (Jack Nicholson) appears to be behind all that is bad in George's life.

Lisa moves into Matty's swanky apartment, but he misbehaves just enough to push here away and into the waiting arms of George. Meanwhile, Charles is trying to find a way to stay out of trouble with regulators by pushing George deeper into the hole.

Written, directed and co-produced by James L. Brooks, How Do You Know may be the moment a once great filmmaker finally hit the wall with a dull thud. From the uninspired title to the stultifying pacing and abject lack of content, How Do You Know is devoid of laughs, drama or genuine emotion of any kind. The film rolls over and dies early, with neither Brooks nor the cast able to generate even the faintest of pulses.

The one interesting element in the plot would have been Lisa dealing with the rejection of being summarily cut from the sport she loved. Witherspoon tries hard in a couple of scenes to convey the trauma of dealing with the emptiness that resides on the other side of the dream, but Brooks soon loses interest and resumes the ping pong between Matty and George. Witherspoon is reduced to hauling her luggage back and forth between the two men, by buses and taxis, in an unbelievable display of bankrupt writing.

Meanwhile the two men stay at the most superficial level, Matty the playboy athlete and George the honest businessman. Neither progress an inch from their starting positions, and two hours into the movie Matty is still being a dork and George is still all innocent puppy admiration. In a desperate attempt to stretch the proceedings to two hours, Brooks introduces several scenes in which the characters agree to not talk, and then proceed to not communicate, thereby setting up more excruciating scenes to cover the same ground.

How Do You Know is sad late career misfire for Brooks as director and Nicholson as a film star, and they both took a long, possibly permanent hiatus after this debacle.

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Movie Review: Wild (2014)

One woman's literal and figurative journey to painful self-discovery, Wild is an exquisitely constructed drama, capturing the heart and intellect of a struggle to re-calibrate a life gone astray.

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) places her life on hold and embarks on a solo hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, a 1,000 mile journey from the deserts of California to the Oregon rain forest. Along the way, she confronts her demons, seen in flashback snippets. Cheryl and her brother Leif were raised by their mother Bobbi (Laura Dern), a victim of spousal abuse who had little to offer her children except plenty of love, nurturing and a sunny disposition. Cheryl marries Paul (Thomas Sadoski), but the marriage has fallen apart after she descended into a life of drugs and random sex with strangers. Along the trail Cheryl has brief encounters with a variety of other locals and strangers, some funny and others scary, and pushes through the pain barrier and her own fears and inexperience, seeking to come to terms with her life.

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée and written by Nick Hornby, Wild is an adaptation of Cheryl Straid's best-selling non-fiction book describing her 1995 hike. The film starts at the Mojave Desert trail head in southern California and ends 94 days later at the border between Oregon and Washington. And while there are plenty of on-trail experiences as the over-equipped but under-trained Cheryl grapples with what it means to live rough day and night, the important events are taking place in her head. Vallée and Hornby shine in opening up Cheryl's psyche, revealing her memories, thoughts, self-doubt and self-castigation through flashback fragments that slowly coalesce to create a picture of a life in need of a serious intervention.

Unlike the intolerably self-indulgent Elizabeth Gilbert in the saccharine Eat Pray Love, Cheryl knows she has messed up in the worst possible way. Her sex and drug addictions have destroyed her marriage and her remaining friends are pleading with her to get a grip. She embarks on the trail to find out what happened to the girl raised by Bobbi on nothing but love and optimism. The answers are not easy, but the film offers up moments of genuine and emotional discovery, driven by little surprises of achievement, fear and anxiety on the hiking trail.

Cheryl meets a gruff farmer who could have been menacing but who proves that looks and first impressions can be deceiving. Other encounters with an initially naked man, another solo woman, and a group of young men are just as enlightening. She encounters hunters who must be descendants of the Deliverance natives, and overcomes jagged rocks, exhaustion, dehydration, ill-fitting hiking boots and deep snow. She is happily stunned to learn that she has outlasted much more experienced hikers on the trail. All the while the memories are churning, the forces that defined her life become clear, and a path to salvation is charted.

Reese Witherspoon delivers a raw, honest performance, finding Cheryl's trauma and staying true to the reality of a woman stoically charting a new course in the company of herself. Laura Dern has a relatively short but pivotal role as her mother Bobbi. With a free and airy performance, Dern conveys what it means to be a perpetual idealist in the service of her children. Both women received Academy Award nominations.

Wild ends with unnecessary and rushed narration that appears too eager to package up Cheryl's story in a neat box. It's an unfortunate tone to conclude her adventure on, because Wild is about the universal human instinct to strike out in anger, in depression and in a mad search for recovery. Good or bad, wild instincts contribute to life, but rarely in an orderly manner.

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Movie Review: Devil's Knot (2013)

A triple murder mystery drama based on real events, Devil's Knot wades into well-worn territory, and offers neither anything new nor any sort of resolution.

In the rural community of West Memphis, Arkansas, three eight-year-old boys go out for a bike ride into a wooded area and never come back. After a mammoth search, the dead and naked bodies of Stevie, Christopher and Michael are found at the bottom of a creek, tied up and seemingly brutally assaulted. Stevie's mother Pamela Hobbs (Reese Witherspoon) is distraught, not helped by her coarse husband Terry (Alessandro Nivola). The national media descends on West Memphis, the local police force is overwhelmed, and rumours start to swirl that the boys were victims of a satanic death cult. Soon, three teenagers are arrested and charged with the murders. The dark and brooding Damien Echols is designated the ring leader, with his friends Jason Baldwin and the borderline retarded Jessie Misskelley as active accomplices.

Christopher's father John Mark Byers (Kevin Durand) regales the media with tirades about satanic forces at play. Meanwhile, private investigator Ron Lax (Colin Firth) notices plenty of holes in the case against the three teens, and offers his services to the defence team. The muddled police investigation includes botched questioning, missing evidence, dubious confessions, and improbable witness testimony. The case goes to court with Judge David Burnett (Bruce Greenwood) presiding, and the community witnesses a trial circus that compounds the tragedy of the murders.

The West Memphis murders occurred in May 1993, and in subsequent years, the crime and subsequent trial have been the subject of several in-depth documentaries and books. The arrest and trial of Damien, Jason and Jessie are considered an injustice piled onto to a calamity, and every aspect of the story has been poured over in detail, on film and in print.

It is not clear what director Atom Egoyan thought could be gained from dramatizing the story, using the non-fiction book by Mara Leveritt as source material. The production has undoubted quality and polish, and Egoyan succeeds in recreating a small town consumed by unimaginable events, invaded by the media, and obsessed by fear-based wild stories of satanic rituals. Devil's Knot also takes an unblinking look at a small town police force simply not equipped to deal with a brutal triple murder, and a trial judge who redefines the rules of objectivity.

But none of this is new material, and the film flounders in search of a purpose. It does not offer anything new to the story, and neither does it work as compelling drama. Egoyan adopts a documentary style to chronicle and annotate events on the screen, a puzzling case of a non-documentary positioning itself in bewildering competition with actual documentaries that already delved into the same story.

Colin Firth sleepwalks through the film, an Englishman trying to conjure up a southern accent but unable to latch onto a dramatic lifeline. Amy Ryan as Lax's ex-wife is wasted in a couple of throwaway scenes. Reese Witherspoon does a bit better and gets a few moments to infuse some emotion, but Pamela Hobbs mostly exchanges meaningful glances with Ron Lax across the courtroom, only for all meaning to seep out of the film as it fizzles into an non-conclusion and more documentary-style postscripts.

Devil's Knot suffers from that most insidious of flaws: a film that works its way to irrelevance.

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The Movies Of Reese Witherspoon

All movies starring Reese Witherspoon and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The Man In The Moon (1991)

Fear (1996)

Freeway (1996)

Twilight (1998)

Cruel Intentions (1999)

American Psycho (2000)

Legally Blonde (2001)

Sweet Home Alabama (2002)

Walk The Line (2005)

Rendition (2007)

Four Christmases (2008)

How Do You Know (2010)

Water For Elephants (2011)

Mud (2012)

Devil's Knot (2013)

Wild (2014)

Inherent Vice (2014)

Home Again (2017)

Your Place Or Mine (2023)

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The Movie Star Index is here.