Thumbsucker
dir. Mike Mills

Thumbsucker, Mike Mills's first feature film, is a sweet coming-of-age movie with a mildly Freudian catch—no more than that, but certainly no less. Justin Cobb (Lou Pucci, perfectly cast) is a high-school senior, and he still sucks his thumb. The movie smuggles us into his secret hideouts—his room, a bathroom stall at school—showing us how (and letting us infer why) he craves his comfort. It's a quiet habit for a quiet kid, but breaking it unleashes all kinds of static on his family and friends.

The screenplay, which Mills adapted from the Walter Kirn novel, bears its three-act structure somewhat heavily. Justin's many replacement obsessions have been trimmed to two: a Ritalin-fueled debate mania and an enervating dependence on pot (personally, I miss the book's Mormonism, but that's my own weird fetish). But there are enough understated moments to make you forgive the overall organization. And then there's Keanu Reeves as a self-parodying New Age orthodontist—I won't call his portrayal subtle, but the line "I was lost in a cloud of hippie psychobabble" probably couldn't have been done justice by anyone else.

Mills moved the action to Beaverton, Oregon, from the original setting of Minnesota, and the Portland suburb imparts a wonderfully subtle specificity to the film. Mills told me that the movie "isn't saying 'suburbia is this trap,' or 'suburbia is where people make dumb decisions,' or 'suburbia is some myth that doesn't exist'... Suburbs are hugely part of our life, whether you live there or not." For much of the film, the setting is simply incidental. But the series of construction sites in the opening scenes prepare us for the way everyone in the movie will think about the psyche of Justin Cobb. ANNIE WAGNER

A transcript of Annie Wagner's interview with Mike Mills and Lou Pucci can be found here.

Everything Is Illuminated
dir. Liev Schreiber

Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer's debut novel, was a brilliant, unwieldy mess, tacking between the tortured English of a Ukrainian translator in the late 1990s and the ancestral history of a mucus-glazed newborn retrieved from a river in 1791; touching upon Old World nostalgia and the global export of American culture; and packed with lists of dreams and types of sadness and the kind of things that must have been left behind when the entire population of a shtetl was wiped out—spools, figurines, watches, dust. This adaptation of Everything Is Illuminated, however, is just a road-trip buddy movie.

Perhaps it's unfair to ask this labor of love, with its obviously meager budget and dull cinematography, to try to match the fantastical dimensions of the novel. But without the shtetl narrative, which takes up at least half of the novel, the story is fatally unbalanced. In place of sex, there is only neurosis (Alex, the track suit-wearing translator, brags about "being carnal" with girls, but never gets laid). In place of imagination, we get literal compulsions (the main character is now a collector who can't stop and look at scenery without scooping up a pile of dirt and sealing it in a plastic baggie). Even the shabbiest pass at grandiosity would have been more exciting than this tale of a young man gathering scraps of his past while eccentric locals look on. Still, the film isn't worthless. Eugene Hutz, the frontman for Gogol Bordello, is a hilarious elaboration of Alex, overshadowing Elijah Wood's studiously self-effacing lead performance. Playing the dog named Sammy Davis Junior, Junior, the sibling border collies Mickey and Mouse are also great—for dogs, they have an admirable aversion to sentimentality, and they escape the cloying endings that bring down everyone else. ANNIE WAGNER

Proof
dir. John Madden

The long-delayed film adaptation of David Auburn's immensely popular play, Proof looks like just another movie about genius gone batty. Audiences are apparently transfixed by stories about powerful intellects broken by psychosis—the similarly themed biopic A Beautiful Mind swept the Oscars in 2002—but such archetypal myths can be dishonest. What's nice about Proof is that it doesn't dwell on the clichĂ©d paradox of mad genius. And while the detective mystery surrounding the authorship of the eponymous proof may be a neat hook, the film focuses less on clues and evidence and more on the sound of self-assertion ripping free from the moorings of loyalty.

Gwyneth Paltrow plays Catherine, the despondent daughter of a late mathematical genius. The role is clearly Oscar bait, but the plot has a built-in safeguard to keep your sympathies in line: Catherine's yuppie sister. As Claire, Hope Davis is appropriately excruciating, and when she immediately suspects Catherine is lying about having written the proof found in their father's desk, you know whom to trust. The male leads, playing characters that aren't supposed to be conflicted about their passion for mathematics, have a harder time of it.

Though it's not as grossly heavy-handed as A Beautiful Mind, this film suffers from a similar failure of specificity. Of course Jake Gyllenhaal isn't convincing as a math graduate student—but it's not because he's sexy. It's because his character never talks directly about math. Similarly, the mental illness the great mathematician had been suffering from is never named; it could be schizophrenia, but apparently his symptoms targeted his ability to do cogent math, leaving the rest of his personality intact. Proof resonates emotionally, but the real achievement would have been sneaking some real math into a math movie. And no, name-dropping Sophie Germain doesn't count. ANNIE WAGNER

A History of Violence
dir. David Cronenberg

Two men exit a motel room and mosey down to the office to check out. It's almost like any other sleepy morning, but instead of casually pushing aside a plate of stale croissants, they leave three people dead.

The men show up in the all-American town of Millbrook, Indiana, where impossibly good-looking couple Tom and Edie Stall (Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello) run a diner and have occasional tender and frisky sex when the kids are out on Saturday night. Hungry for cash, the duo enters Tom's diner, poised to rob the till, but surprise—Tom smashes one in the face with a coffee pot and shoots both men faster than you can say "order up." Soon Tom is swept into both a media frenzy and a fog of mistaken identity—as if his own weren't already enough to bear.

Structurally A History of Violence isn't your typical Cronenberg film, but thematically it is very much so. The duality of the psyche isn't represented by twin gynecologists (Dead Ringers), nor are the sins of the fathers visited upon their toddlers (The Brood); instead, the screenplay takes a subdued approach to the magnetic poles of honor and immorality within its lead character. In this way, A History of Violence is Cronenberg's most candid film to date. It looks like a straightforward mobster flick with ruminations on the nature/nurture motivations of behavior, but what keeps the film mesmerizing is Cronenberg's detached and tense style combined with the brutal beauty of Mortensen as the stoic Tom. There's a horrible splendor in his performance as a man in whom will and instinct merge into a simultaneously humane and amoral machine. SHANNON GEE

Corpse Bride
dir. Tim Burton

Tim Burton has made a number of films since the release of his passionately adored 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas (recent work includes Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Big Fish), but none of his post-Nightmare projects have been able to touch the quality and cult success of Nightmare—or Edward Scissorhands and Beetle Juice, for that matter. Not that it would be an easy task to match his early success. To call fans of The Nightmare Before Christmas devoted would be an enormous understatement. They dedicate their lives to everything and anything Jack Skellington, collecting clothing, toys, and even tattoos of the film's characters.

In their critical and darkly outlined eyes, Corpse Bride might come off a bit flash-in-the-pan, lacking the thoughtfulness and surprising heart of Nightmare, but even so, it's still a charming visit to a dark, familiar world where death and decay are celebrated via catchy musical numbers, vivid colors, and witty maggots.

In Corpse Bride, Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp) is about to marry a lovely (and living) young woman named Victoria (Emily Watson). Following a strange series of accidents, Victor instead finds himself hitched to Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter), a woman who died years ago on her wedding day. The parents are furious, Victoria is heartbroken, Victor is scared shitless, but Corpse Bride couldn't be happier, having finally found a husband.

The wicked characters aren't nearly as wicked as they could've been, and the songs aren't particularly memorable, but the animation is classic Burton (and absolutely stunning at moments—his use of shadow and light has vastly improved). Burton fans can finally take a deep breath. After years of waiting for a worthy follow-up, there's a good chance they'll be satisfied with Corpse Bride. MEGAN SELING