Crowe, Scott, reteam for solid adventure in stirring 'Robin Hood'
Forget about those men in tights. Ridley Scott puts a gritty, topical spin on the romantic folk tale of the merry men of the greenwood in Robin Hood. It's not exactly a revisionist look at the familiar story, which, after all, has gone through centuries of permutations and updates, from heroic ballad to kids' classic to Hollywood and TV. Rather, Scott and scriptwriter Brian Helgeland craft an origin story about how failed leadership, ruinous taxation, and everlasting foreign wars turn a decent man into a rebel outlaw crusading for justice.

Films This Week
Check out the movies playing around town.
With reviews and trailers.

In which we take stock of a few ambitious outings in the Santa Cruz Film Festival
Catch up on all the latest buzz at http://scfilmfest.org/

Abramoff exploits eroding democracy in trenchant ‘Casino Jack’
Just in case you’re not outraged enough over the stranglehold by which corporate interests have crippled the American political process, along comes Casino Jack And The United States Of Money to make it all perfectly clear. Alex Gibney’s new documentary is densely packed with information, but persuasive and eye-opening; it charts the course of “uber-lobbyist” Jack Abramoff, from ultra-conservative Young Republican with a James Bond complex in the Reagan ’80s to the most influential political power broker in America—and the disintegrating fabric of American democracy that permitted it to happen.

Films This Week
Check out the movies playing around town.
With reviews and trailers.

There’s plenty to go gaga over in ‘Babies’
It took director Thomas Balmès four years to give birth to Babies—talk about labor pains—so here’s hoping local audiences consider the new film a bundle of joy. Chance are they will.

The engaging documentary (HHH1/2 out of four), which opens Friday at The Nick, chronicles the offspring of four couples from different parts of the world, tracking a year of their baby’s life—from birth to first steps. There’s a boy from Mongolia, a girl from Namibia and a feisty gal from Tokyo. Best of all is San Francisco’s Hattie Bradshaw.

Naturally, her parents, Frazer Bradshaw and Susie Wise, couldn’t be more proud. Bradshaw is a cinematographer. He actually shot a good portion of Hattie’s footage whenever Balmès was in other parts of the globe filming the other babies. Wise teaches “design thinking” at Stanford.

Australian brothers craft a punchy noir debut
Film noir is alive and thriving in Australia. The proof is in The Square, an edgy thriller from the appropriately named Edgerton brothers, director Nash and co-writer/co-star Joel, whose raw, invigorating morality play captures the spirit of noir in all its gritty intensity—then ratchets the whole thing up that one outrageous step further. Twisty, smart, epic in its themes, but absolutely life-sized and credible in its characterizations, this is the kind of fast and furious thrill ride Quentin Tarantino can only dream of making.

Films This Week
Check out the movies playing around town.
With reviews and trailers.

Santa Cruz Film Festival
through May 15

Undersea kingdoms explored in poetic eco-doc 'Oceans'
A few years ago, French documentary filmmaker Jacques Perrin astonished the world with Winged Migration, an extraordinary you-are-there look at bird life in which cameras seemed to soar in the air alongside geese, gulls, and other migrating flocks. Perrin now sets the bar for wildlife documentaries, so it's no surprse it took him and his intrepid team some seven years to complete filming for his new release, Oceans. Although this time Perrin's cameras delve deep—often straight to the sandy bottom—of the world's seven seas, Oceans too soars in its own poetic way. Particularly when sea creatures huge and small are performing lazy aerial ballets in the vastness of blue aquatic space.