One of Us Must Know

If Blanchett's Jude is the most recognizable Dylan — and the performance that even those who hate the film won't be able to stop talking about — then Gere's Billy the Kid is the most enigmatic, the one who seems at once the ghost of the musician's roots-music past and the spirit of his eternal present, the living phantom embarked on his self-proclaimed "never ending tour." "You've got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room. There's no telling what can happen," he muses late in the film, at once paraphrasing Dylan (from a 1978 interview about his songwriting style) and succinctly summarizing the Möbius-strip structure of Haynes' film. And so the most lasting image of I'm Not There may well be its last, in which the Kid picks up Woody Guthrie's guitar and hops yet another boxcar, as a train pulls down the line and a soulful harmonica blows its ageless tune. 

SHORT CUTS

The Mist: As one of what novelist Stephen King calls his Constant Readers, I was as jazzed when word came that filmmaker Frank Darabont — he of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile — was making a movie of King's classic novella, The Mist. How, then, did a straightforward little tale about prehistoric monsters gobbling down the hapless citizens of a modern-day town become such a lumbering and depressing movie? Man-eaters hide out in a weirdly thick fog that's settled over Castle Rock, Maine, after an unusually violent storm. With the power out, David Drayton (Thomas Jane) heads into town with his nine-year-old son to buy supplies. As they wait in a long checkout line, a bloodied man runs in, screaming, "There's something in the mist!" Soon, giant tentacles slip under the loading-dock door and drag away Norm the bag boy, a gruesome sight that only Drayton and three others witness. Neither King nor Darabont explains just why the dozens of other people inside the store can't hear the kid's bloodcurdling screams, but in any case, it falls to Drayton to convince the skeptical customers that there's danger in that there mist. What follows is a lot of crying and speechifying and not nearly enough people-eating. At just over two hours, The Mist is the shortest movie Darabont has made, and it's still too long. Less chatter, more monster, please.
— Chuck Wilson