FILM REVIEWS

While most girls at Dancing Elk are updating their MySpace page or shopping at the mall, Juno is a whip-smart Minnesota teen living by her own rules. A typically boring afternoon becomes anything but when she decides to have sex with the charmingly unassuming Bleeker (Cera). Faced with an unplanned pregnancy, she and best friend Leah (Thirlby) hatch a plan to find her unborn baby the perfect set of parents. They set their sights on Mark and Vanessa Loring (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), an affluent suburban couple who are longing to adopt their first child. Luckily, Juno has the support of her dad and stepmother. After the initial shock at their daughter being sexually active, the family band together to help Juno. Dad Mac accompanies her to size up the prospective adoptive parents, while stepmother Bren provides emotional support as Juno fights the prejudices of underage pregnancy. As autumn becomes winter and winter turns to spring, Juno’s physical changes mirror her personal growth. And as she gets closer and closer to her due date, the veneer of Mark and Vanessa’s idyllic life starts to show cracks. With a fearless intellect and exuberance far removed from the usual teen angst, Juno conquers her problems head-on.

The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. The story begins when Llewelyn Moss (Brolin, PLANET TERROR) finds a pickup truck surrounded by dead sentry men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash sit in the back of the vehicle. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law – in the person of the aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell (Jones, THREE BURIALS) – can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers – in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins over human lives (Bardem, THE SEA INSIDE) – the film simultaneously strips down the American crime drama and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible, and as bloody and contemporary as this morning’s headlines.

A sprawling epic about family, faith, power and oil, There Will Be Blood is set on the incendiary frontier of California’s turn-of-the-century petroleum boom.

The story chronicles the life and times of one Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis), who transforms himself from a down-and-out silver miner raising a son on his own into a self-made oil tycoon. When Plainview receives a mysterious tip-off about a small town out west where an ocean of oil is oozing out of the ground, he goes with his son, H.W., to take a chance in dust-worn Little Boston. In this hardscrabble town, where the main excitement centres around the church of charismatic preacher Eli Sunday (Dano, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE), Plainview and H.W. make their lucky strike. But as the well raises all of their fortunes, nothing will remain the same; conflicts escalate and every human value – love, hope, community, belief, ambition and even the bond between father and son – is imperilled by corruption, deception and the flow of oil.

The fifth film from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia, Boogie Nights, Hard Eight), this phenomenal synthesis of GIANT, CITIZEN KANE and EUREKA is loosely based on the classic 1920s muck-raking novel, Oil! by Upton Sinclair. The throbbing score, courtesy of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, contributes immeasurably.