PRISONERS : Official Reviews ( SPOILERS!!)

[jo]

What a reaction from this lady reviewer (MaryAnn Johanson)!

www.flickfilosopher.com/2013/09/prisoners-review-unbearable-darkness.html

Prisoners review: the unbearable darkness of being [premium]


Mon Sep 16 2013, 10:46pm | no comments yet: be the first!

Please see this movie. We need to let Hollywood know that there is, in fact, an audience for sophisticated drama for adults.


I’m “biast” (pro): love the cast; the trailer showed promise

I’m “biast” (con): nothing

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)


Ah, so this is what a grownup movie outta Hollywood feels like! They’re such rare beasts these days that my first instinct when I encounter one is to do a double-take and look for the foreign indie wizard behind the curtain.

And there he is: the acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, whose 2010 film Incendies was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, is making his English-language and studio debut with Prisoners. But fair play to Warner Bros. for granting the flick a budget generous enough to snag some of the most interesting big names working today, and for giving it a wide release that means mainstream audiences will have easy access to it.

Now: everyone go see it. Please. We need to let Hollywood know that there is, in fact, an audience for sophisticated drama for adults.

There’s nothing “alternative” about this movie except that it requires nothing fantastical or imaginary to ensure that it is thoroughly gripping and frequently unexpectedly ugly, in the most intriguing way possible. Quite the contrary: it is the depressing mundanity of the horrors on display that makes it so intense, so uncomfortable, and so brilliant. It’s unvarnished, dismal reality from the opening moments, when we are welcomed to a Thanksgiving day in Pennsylvania that is all foggy gray haze lingering around bare trees, pouring rain, and general outdoor misery — that’s what Thanksgiving typically is in the Northeast, not a fall-foliage wonderland (the leaves are dead and fallen by late November). I was particularly struck by this, and by the lack of prettifying pretense Villeneuve maintains throughout. This ain’t no story about tragedy striking out of the blue and shattering an idyll. It’s a story about tragedy revealing some just barely disguised other tragedies that have been ignored, forgotten, or never seen as tragedies at all.

It’s like this. Two families, good friends all around, have gathered together for the holiday: the Dovers, Keller (Hugh Jackman: The Wolverine, Movie 43) and Grace (Maria Bello: Grown Ups 2, Abduction), and the Birches, Franklin (Terrence Howard: Movie 43, On the Road) and Nancy (Viola Davis: Beautiful Creatures, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), and their kids. After the celebratory dinner, their two little girls, both around five or six years old, go play outside… and disappear without a trace. The police, led by Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal: End of Watch, Source Code), home in quickly on a suspect, Alex Jones (Paul Dano: Ruby Sparks, Cowboys & Aliens), who drives the creepy serial-killer RV that was seen in the Dover-Birch neighborhood and who exudes creepy serial-killer guilt. But the girls are nowhere to be found, Jones protests his innocence, and there’s no physical evidence in the RV. Loki has to let him go.

Keller, enraged and grief-stricken, takes matters into his own hands, harassing Jones even as Loki continues to search for the girls and their kidnapper.

And this is where it starts to get really interesting.

Prisoners is, of course, primarily a suspense thriller, the kind in which we’re invited to try to solve the case along with Loki… and also, in this instance, along with Keller’s parallel, er, investigation. But it challenges us to reexamine the appearance of guilt — and this is a fascinatingly trying experience. Shocking actions are committed here, some quick and out of the blue, some building slowly in their horror. We witness many of these actions along with other characters on the screen who are as horrified as we are, and who have as complex — and as sometimes as knee-jerk — reactions as we do. We know some characters are guilty of some things, and we make assumptions about others that we are forced to later reconsider.

The other superb movie Prisoners reminded me of, even though it’s not really very similar at all, is The Silence of the Lambs. Screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (Contraband) has taken a trope of movies about terrible crimes — the exploration of criminal psychology — and expanded it to look at the aberrant psychology that drives us all… except it’s not truly “aberrant” if it’s prompted by the ordinary awfulness of the world and the things that happen to us in our formative years. Everyone here is a prisoner of their past. The tragedy for some of them is that their past is an inescapable prison. The tragedy for others is that their prison is not inescapable, yet they stay there anyway.

This is a film that it’s probably best to know as little about going in as possible, and I don’t want to spoil. But I have to tell you that for all its other laudable aspects, Prisoners is worth seeing, too, for the brisk spectacle of no-fucks-given by Jackman and Gyllenhaal for whether we actually like their characters at all. Loki exudes something like a serial-killer vibe himself: he blinks too much, for one thing, which doesn’t necessarily sound weird until you see it. And the hints of his dark and complicated past remain nothing but tantalizing hints that leave us wondering precisely how dark and complicated his life has been. As for Jackman: Keller’s rages aren’t like anything we’ve seen the actor do before. If you thought his Wolverine was intense… Well, as with the entirety of Prisoners, we are reminded that reality has a much bigger capacity to terrify than fantasy.



see Prisoners (2013) at MaryAnn’s Movie Cheat Sheet

subscribe to Movie Cheat Sheet and you’ll be reminded when this film opens in the U.K. (free to FlickFilosopher.com subscribers, or purchase separately)

US/Canada release date: Sep 20 2013 | UK release date: Sep 27 2013

Flick Filosopher Real Rating: rated MBB (contains men behaving badly)
MPAA: rated R for disturbing violent content including torture, and language throughout
BBFC: rated 15 (contains child abduction theme, strong violence and strong language)

viewed in 2D
viewed at a private screening with an audience of critics

Villeneuve, Jackman, and the rest of the cast and creative team should read this!


Jo

[jo]

Brief but positive review from another lady critic ( Joanna Langfield) --

themovieminute.com/movies.html

WHAT'S NEW AT THE MOVIES?


Prisoners

This is one hell of a movie. And yes, you can interpret that in more than a few ways.

We first meet Hugh Jackman’s Keller Dover as he is teaching his son how to shoot a deer in the woods. Proud of the kill, he reminds the boy, as they ride back to the subdivision, carcass bleeding in the back of the truck, always be prepared. You never know what’s coming. Ain’t that the truth.

Aaron Guzikowski’s script takes a rather traditional Hollywood story line, vigilantism as revenge for a kidnapped child, and flushes it out with admirable depth. We watch, horrified, as the Dover family, along with their friends the Birches, discover their young daughters have disappeared during Thanksgiving dinner. Our anguish grows as theirs does, seeing Jake Gyllenhaal’s detective have to let a suspect go free, even as the clock ticks away, approaching the hours a starved, dehydrated child might die. Keller, desperate, takes action. The other father tries to swallow his conflicts and assist. And we are left with the obvious question. What would we do if that were us?

What’s most impressive here, though, is not that first reflective puzzle. It’s the ones that come around and after it. Keller, we discover, is a religious man, a loving husband and father, a contractor who’s having a tough time making ends meet. And what’s with the carefully organized supplies shelved up in the basement? The Birches, long time friends who are doing better in this economy, happen to be African American. Suspect Alex Jones appears a haunted young man, loyal to the aunt who took him in. And Detective Loki, quiet and determined, sports some serious looking body art for a play-it-by-the-books guy.

Director Denis Villeneuve delivers a masterfully made edge of your seat thriller that’s as potent as any drama out there. An all-star cast complements the ambitious intentions. Gyllenhaal gets better and better with each picture: he’s excellent here. Hugh Jackman, though, is sensational, giving the best dramatic performance of his career.

Understandably, this lengthy twister may prove tough going for some; it is still a true achievement in reimagining the popular idea that revenge is sweet.

[jo]

A third positive review ( from another lady critic) --


blogs.indiewire.com/carynjames/prisonersreview

Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal In Surprising 'Prisoners'

Reviews.
by Caryn James
September 16, 2013 9:02 AM


Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners sounds cookie-cutter conventional, and in fact there is nothing fresh in the concept: two little girls are abducted, and the father of one of them goes after a suspect the police have released. The clock is ticking ... and other cliches we've heard way too many times before. But the film is so sharply directed, tautly edited, so rich and believably acted -- Hugh Jackman is the fierce and desperate father, Jake Gyllenhaal the obsessed but coolly rational detective -- that you quickly forgive its tired story. Nothing else is tired in Prisoners, one of the most intense, satisfying thrillers to appear in years.

The setting is a cold, wet Pennsylvania town in November, a place isolated enough to be surrounded by woods yet populous enough to have bland suburban streets, where two neighboring families are having dinner together when their 6-year-old daughters disappear. Keller Dover (Jackman), a struggling carpenter, responds with the impatience you would except from any father -- until the spookily quiet suspect (Paul Dano) is set free. If you've seen any version of the trailer, you'll know that Keller then turns bloody vigilante, while his friend Franklin (Terrence Howard), the father of the other missing child, has qualms about Keller taking the case into his own hands.


The great Roger Deakins did the cinematography, and you can almost feel the kind of damp chill that sunlight rarely fights through. There are no wasted scenes, hardly any clunky exposition as we gradually learn more about the characters. Keller keeps stockpiles of supplies in the basement in case of emergencies, almost beyond reason. But even while Aaron Guzikowski's screenplay asks us to question Keller's grip on reason, Jackman makes him a passionately determined, rational hero.

Gyllenhaal takes the familiar role of the smart detective butting heads with his stupid superiors, and gives it new power. We never get an explanation for the tattoos on his hands, and don't need them. All we need to know is in his haunted eyes, his own driven urgency, and a single line about his childhood. (Maybe he didn't have to be named Loki, which today makes us think of Tom Hiddleston's character in The Avengers movies.)

The smaller roles are also beautifully acted, with Viola Davis as one of the mothers, and Melissa Leo as the suspect's aunt.

Villeneuve's last film, the exceptional Incendies, was set largely in the Middle East; it's an ambitious work, charged with politics and religion. Prisoners is an extraordinarily well-made popcorn movie. It doesn't carry the weight of its marketing tagline: "How far would you go to protect your family?" Like most thrillers, this one doesn't provoke us to take things so personally; that's why thrillers make for great escapism.

The film reaches for seriousness in a half-hearted way, and if the portentous opening scene is any indication, it's just as well the attempt was minor. The movie begins with Jackman reciting The Lord's Prayer in voiceover while Keller teaches his teenaged son to shoot a deer, which makes you fear that a heavy-handed pretentious movie is ahead. But the scene instantly gives way to a sleek, deft style. And later, the misguided religiosity that affects events comes from an unexpected direction.

So forget how provocative the marketers want the film to be. It's enough that Prisoners is a smart, brilliantly successful thriller.

[jo]

Always the fan of Hugh ( onstage or on film), Rex Reed of The New York Observer gushes over PRISONERS as a magnificent thriller and gives it a perfect 4 out of 4 stars rating --

observer.com/2013/09/pure-terror-denis-villeneuves-nail-biting-police-procedural-is-an-artistic-triumph-from-start-to-finish/

Pure Terror: Denis Villeneuve’s Nail-Biting Police Procedural Is an Artistic Triumph from Start to Finish

With an unforgettable performance by Hugh Jackman


By Rex Reed 9/17 6:55pm


Prepare to be electrified! When it comes to thrillers, Prisoners is the must-see sensation of the year. Grisly, gruesome and unnerving, this first-time English-speaking feature by French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve (Incendies) about the harrowing circumstances surrounding the kidnapping of two 7-year-old girls, is the most brilliant, nail-biting police procedural I have seen since David Fincher’s 1995 film, Seven. (And you can throw in the best highlights from Silence of the Lambs, too.) With Hugh Jackman as a distraught blue-collar father driven to the brink of madness when his daughter disappears in broad daylight and Jake Gyllenhaal as the seedy detective whose pokey sleuthing leads to unimagined horrors, you will be frozen to your seat with awe.

Thanksgiving Day, on a neat, inviting street with green lawns and white two-story Colonial homes in a suburban neighborhood that seems a long way away from the violence you read about in newspapers (the story is set in Pennsylvania, but the movie was filmed in Atlanta), two families of friends and neighbors are clearing away the pumpkin pie and settling down to watch the big game when Keller and Grace Dover (Mr. Jackman and Maria Bello) and their best friends, Franklin and Nancy Birch (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis), suddenly realize their daughters are not in the house. A frantic search for a van that was parked earlier that day in front of a vacant house leads to an emaciated, mentally challenged man named Alex (another loopy role for the creepy Paul Dano) who lives with his aunt (the great Melissa Leo). When Detective Loki (Mr. Gyllenhaal), the cop assigned to the case, lets the weird suspect go for lack of evidence, panic sets in and Mr. Keller, a hotheaded carpenter with a short fuse, flies into an uncontrollable rage and turns vigilante, taking Alex into his own lawless custody and applying a brand of torture that is hard to watch. Alex has the mind of a 10-year-old, and the terrible things that happen to him in the locked closet of a derelict house begin to turn the audience’s terror to sympathy. But this movie is just getting started, and, although the running time nearing three hours passes seamlessly, the shocks build with an intensity that is nothing short of unbearable.

The neighbors hold a candlelight vigil that leads to a priest with a corpse in his cellar. As you follow the cleverly attenuated minutiae of the investigation, clue by clue, your brain does double time putting the pieces together. Another wack job turns up the clothes the children wore at the time of their vanishing, hidden in trunks filled with poisonous snakes. But where are the bodies? A man rushes a dying child to the hospital in a blinding snowstorm with blood pouring into one eye. A toy whistle. A knitted bunny rabbit. The suspense mounts. And the ending is pure terror. From the masterful script by Aaron Guzikowski to the stunningly muted cinematography in snowy grays and midnight blues by the great Roger Deakins, it’s an artistic triumph from start to finish. None of the characters are saints, including the troubled cop, but the acting is magnificent. Mr. Gyllenhaal’s police officer is as conflicted as the frustrated citizens who get in his way. At last, Mr. Jackman has a role that proves why he is one of our most accomplished stars. He can do anything, and he finally gets to prove it in myriad ways, without the ridiculous comic book mask of Wolverine. Mr. Howard, Ms. Davis and Ms. Bello make every minute count as grieving parents who are willing to bend their principles to find justice outside the law. And Ms. Leo, as the mysterious aunt who adds up to more than meets the eye, eschews the usual campy pitfalls for a performance that is as haunting as it is austere.

Exquisitely paced, like currents on metal during an electric storm, Prisoners is unique. Unlike most lurid crime dramas, there is no link between the serial killer and the cops. You don’t know who the fiend is until the last dark and mordant scene unfolds, and even then there’s one more hair-raising revelation that will leave you shaking. When it comes to thrillers, this one is as good as it gets. Not for the squeamish, but for anyone who loves movies, it’s too exhilarating to miss.

PRISONERS

WRITTEN BY: Aaron Guzikowski

DIRECTED BY: Denis Villeneuve

STARRING: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis

RUNNING TIME: 153 min.

RATING: 4/4

[jo]

This other New Yorker ( TIME OUT - New York) is all cynicism, even if he rates the movie 3 out of 5 which appears as "Rotten" at RT --

He says the acting performances are all "showy" smiley-rolleyes010


www.timeout.com/us/film/prisoners-movie-review

Prisoners: movie review (R)

Time Out rating:

Rating: 3/5

Time Out says

Mon Sep 16

Something’s in the air: a spine-tingling chill, a foreboding aura, some gloomy sense that bad things are on the horizon. Actually, it’s just the severely solemn voice of Hugh Jackman, glumly reciting a Christian prayer over the austere opening shot of this frequently engrossing yet ultimately ludicrous kidnapping thriller directed by Incendies’s Denis Villeneuve.

The man who shall forever be Wolverine plays Keller Dover (a screenwriting-software moniker if ever there was one), somber patriarch of a suburban Pennsylvania family, whose peaceful Thanksgiving is shattered by tragedy. While he and his wife, Grace (Maria Bello), are visiting their neighbors, Franklin and Nancy Birch (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis), the youngest child of each clan goes missing. There’s a sizable clue (a mysterious RV was cruising the neighborhood just before the disappearances) and a detective, Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal)—no relation to the God of Thunder’s treacherous brother—is quickly assigned to the case. But Keller is less than satisfied with how the first days of the investigation go, especially after Loki is forced to release low-IQ prime suspect Alex Jones (Paul Dano) for lack of evidence.

From here things get really biblical, and we’re not just talking about the Virgin Mary statue that’s used for a semi-cheeky jump scare (one of the film’s few genuine laughs). Villeneuve and the great cinematographer Roger Deakins—once again proving he can lend a prestigious sheen to the silliest material—ensnare their ensemble in a funereal winter purgatory where driving rain, blinding snow and mocking gray skies are a constant. The weather seems like a projection of these characters’ damaged souls as well as a divine taunt; if God is in the details, he’s one cold-blooded mofo to allow this much unchecked pain and suffering.

All of the characters respond in kind: Keller orchestrates a kidnapping of his own that sorely tests his moral barometer, even as he committedly engages in torture tactics—beatings, scaldings and the use of a bloodied Abu Ghraibian blackout hood—that invite explicit parallels to the War on Terror. Elsewhere, Grace besmirches her pure name by self-medicating into near-catatonia, while both Franklin and Nancy become semi-willing accomplices to Keller’s self-righteous fury. (Davis gets another chance to indulge in one of those trembling, tears-flowing snot-takes that she’s been baiting Oscar voters with since 2008’s Doubt.) Even Melissa Leo shows up as a kind of backwoods Shelley Winters—something that turns out to be much more fun in theory than it is in execution.

What of Loki, you might ask? As played by Gyllenhaal, he’s slightly more haggard kin to the actor’s green investigator in Zodiac (2007), and much more ineffectually realized. The character is clearly supposed to have gone through the ringer long before this noirish adventure, what with his blinking-eye tic, some semi-visible tattoos and a cursorily acknowledged backstory about time spent in foster care. But Loki’s obsession with cracking the kidnapping case seems pro forma rather than impassioned; when he trashes his desk after hitting yet another dead end, it’s hardly a bellow at the void—more an actorly hissy fit.

The uniformly showy performances (Acting with a capital ‘A’) are what do in Prisoners more than anything. The film has several adeptly directed suspense scenes, such as a nighttime foot chase that makes you gasp at every motion-triggered backyard light, but for all the expertly realized atmosphere, you never sense that any of the players is inhabiting a character. Instead they seem to be dispiritedly reading lines off of an internal teleprompter, lending a mock-sense of gravity to a story whose increasingly risible signs and portents (from snakes in a box to a Lazarus-like cave that figures in a head-slappingly “ambiguous” finale) play like bloated insta-metaphors bolstering a dour, mostly tension-free enterprise.

Follow Keith Uhlich on Twitter: @keithuhlich

[jo]

Devin Faraci is one of the most articulate and well- respected film bloggers ( formerly of CHUD) - and I am awaiting his review of PRISONERS. In the meantime, he has tweeted this --

Devin Faraci‏@devincf1m
PRISONERS: Well made, twisty, gripping. Hugh Jackman definitely wants an Oscar. Gyllenhall is one film from a great procedural trifecta.

I can never forget the wonderful, wonderful review he wrote about THE FOUNTAIN! Nor how he wrote about Christian Bale's one-note method acting ( I thought I was the only one who entertained such thoughts) when he reviewed THE PRESTIGE.



Jo

[jo]

From another film critic from New York --

From: Harveycritic


Date: 12:45 AM


PRISONERS


Warner Bros
Reviewed for CompuServe by Harvey Karten. Data-based on RottenTomatoes.com
Grade: B+
Director: Denis Villenueve
Screenwriter: Aaron Guzikowski
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Melissa Leo, Paul Dano, Maria Bello, Viola Davis
Screened at: AMC Lincoln Square, NYC, 9/17/13
Opens: September 20, 2013


There is little doubt that the subject of kidnapping is ripe for filmed resonance. When prized family members are abducted, not only are the victims terrified: their families are likely to respond with extreme measures. One can imagine some people drugging themselves to sleep or oblivion while others take the opposite move of going ballistic.


There are three motives that kidnappers generally have. The more rational ones, e.g. the Somali pirates, simply want money and will release their charges as promised (see the Danish movie “A Hijacking” which takes us up close to the dangerous men and their terrified cargo). There are sexual predators seemingly compelled to capture generally underage children. Then there are those who abduct to fill a gap in their family structure. They don’t ask for ransom. They don’t even send notes to the families. Money is never the motif with “Prisoners.,” which has us believe that the other two motivations guide the criminals.


Denis Villenueve, whose résumé includes “Incendies,” a 139-minute look at twins who journey to the Middle East to find more about their family histories, now takes on the even longer “Prisoners.” Villenueve, who fills the screen with the usual twists common to police dramas, nonetheless breaks with the conventions of the genre to illustrate the ways that both kidnappers and concerned families share the need for violence, both prisoners of their own compulsions. He does so by using real violence which, despite its being used infrequently, is horrifying, all the more so because characters resort to physical means only now and then. There is nothing cartoonish or crazily edited, signs of similar films of a lesser quality. The pace is not overly swift, yet there are few moments that allow the audience to look away, to look at their watches, or to think about the latest messages on their iPhones.


What’s more the acting is terrific, particularly the give and take between police detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) and the aggrieved dad of a six-year-old daughter, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman). The ensemble are all spot-on providing top background for the movie’s moral center, which is that all of us under the proper circumstances could employ the violence of the criminals.


The characters are well developed, as they should be in a film that’s almost two and one-half hours long. Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and his wife Grace (Maria Bello) are being entertained by their friends Nancy Birch (Viola Davis) and Franklin (Terrence Howard) on Thanksgiving, feasting on the deer shot by the Dover’s son Ralph (Dylan Minnette). While the Dovers’ daughter Anna (Erin Gerasimovich) and the Birch’s young one Joy (Kyla Drew Simmons) are playing outside, they disappear, driving Keller particularly frantic. When the police bring in Alex Jones (Paul Dano), previously spotted in an RV near the Birch home, they fail to get a confession and must release him after forty-eight hours. This constitutional privilege does not gain Keller’s favor: he believes that the police are not up to doing the job and that he must take the law into his own hands.


Hugh Jackman, in perhaps his best role,performs as a survivalist, one whose basement is filled wall to wall with canned fruits and vegetables, water and propane, mirroring the view that many Americans form a paranoid society. He seems more in touch with the woodlands that with suburban Philadelphia, a trait that makes his physical actions against the alleged kidnapper credible. For his part, Franklin, though insisting that he is as concerned with getting his daughter back as is his best friend Keller, retreats from the kind of lawlessness that Keller believes is necessary to get a confession from Alex Jones. For his part Alex has been under the wing and in the household of his aunt, Holly Jones (Melissa Leo), allegedly because of an accident that deprived the brain-damaged Alex of his parents.


“Prisoners” was shot in the suburbs of Atlanta, with cinematographer Roger Deakins capturing the spirit of America’s Northeast on cloudy, dreary, winter days, some of which are inundated with rain. To show that violence has more effect on people than on Bugs Bunny or Tom from Tom and Jerry cartoons, the makeup team does a bang-up job on Paul Dano, closing both black eyes and covering his face and parts of his body in blood.


If you want to know what a family goes through when one of its own is taken away and presumed dead, you can’t get a better insight than by watching “Prisoners.”


Rated R. 146 minutes © 2013 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

[jo]

Another positive review, with a rating of B ( 3 out of 5 stars) --

www.colesmithey.com/reviews/2013/09/prisoners.html

PRISONERS

Shocks, and Surprises and Scares
High-Tension Mystery is a Doozy

While it lacks the oomph of a concrete true-crime drama like “Zodiac,” Denis Villeneuve’s taut innovative suspense-thriller keeps you guessing. Lauded for his deserving 2011 Oscar-nominated drama “Incendies,” Villeneuve keeps the narrative puzzle moving with a clinical precision, supported by Roger Deakins’s understated cinematography. The unnerving suspense that screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (“Contraband”) develops, shifts between characters on multiple sides of a kidnapping mystery regarding two little girls. Vigilante justice plays a key role in the film’s dark underbelly of interconnected crime.

Every parent’s worst nightmare comes to fruition on a cloudy Thanksgiving Day in suburban Pennsylvania where one God-fearing family visits another within walking distance of their traditional middle-class home. Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and his wife Grace (Maria Bello) take their kids, 15-year-old Ralph and eight-year-old Anna, to cook dinner at the home of Franklin (Terrence Howard) and Nancy Birch (Viola Davis). Anna plays with the Birch’s similarly aged daughter Joy. As the afternoon wears on, the parents realize that the girls are missing. The unseen driver of an RV that was parked in front of a nearby vacant house presents the most obvious suspect. Evidence of America’s failing economy is all around.

Keller discloses his survivalist mentality in an opening sequence where he coaches his son Ralph (Dylan Minnette) about “praying for the best but being prepared for the worst,” after Ralph shoots and kills his first deer. The patriarch’s cynicism resonates right up to the film’s closing shot. He’s not wrong, though ethically he’s on thin ice. Though not an obvious stretch for Hugh Jackman — a do-it-all-actor whose brawny presence more than fills the screen — his performance here as a man who loses all sense of propriety in order to locate his missing daughter, arrives with an authority of passion that galvanizes the film’s unsettling themes — the uselessness of torture being one.

Jake Gyllenhaal leads the story’s police-procedural element as Detective Loki, a personally committed detective whose constant state of sleep-deprivation causes him to forcefully blink his eyes. The scenes where Gyllenhaal and Jackman play off one another burn with a white-hot fury. Keller rightfully holds Loki accountable for a complicated investigation further hampered by Loki’s less than competent police chief. Loki works alone, but not by choice.

The determined detective captures the RV’s sketchy driver Alex (creepily played by Paul Dano), a mentally indigent man-child with the IQ of a 10-year-old. Without enough evidence to detain Alex more than a couple of days, the police chief releases the case’s primary suspect to the care of his white-trash aunt Holly (Melissa Leo). A police parking lot scuffle between Keller and Alex provides the distressed father with all the proof he needs to be convinced to Alex’s guilt. Taking matters into his own hands, Keller becomes a kidnapper in his own right.


“Prisoners” demonstrates an uncomfortable connection between criminals and their victims, whose lives take on dark aspects of their suf fering. There’s nothing morally comfortable. Good and evil don’t exist, only a cold gray indifference that might land heads-up with a nudge from someone like Loki, who cares too much for his own good. Caring is a good thing, so long as you keep a safe distance.

Rated R. 146 mins. (B) (Three Stars - out of five/no halves)

[jo]

Clayton Davis is usually connected with his film site which is prominent for awards forecasts, AwardsCircuit. But I found his review of PRISONERS among IMDB users --

He rated the movie 8 out of 10!

Author: Clayton Davis ([e-mail]) from New Jersey
17 September 2013


There is a sensitivity that Director Denis Villenueve and writer Aaron Guzikowski inhabit in bringing their newest film "Prisoners" from Warner Bros. to the screen. Starring an Academy Award nominated cast that includes Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Terence Howard, Maria Bello, Viola Davis, Oscar-winner Melissa Leo, and Paul Dano, this is a smartly constructed and emotionally resound mystery thriller that is thoroughly enjoyable.

The synopsis is fully in the trailer. When two young girls go missing, one belonging to Keller and Grace (Jackman and Bello), the other to Franklin and Nancy (Howard and Davis), a hot-shot detective (Gyllenhaal) is assigned to the case and relentlessly tries to find the clues that could lead to the whereabouts of the missing. When a mentally handicapped Alex Jones (Dano) is found near the scene of the disappearance with no hard evidence, Keller takes matters into his own hands.

I have to say that I've never been this hypnotized with the works of Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. Jackman, who is fresh of his inaugural nomination for Tom Hooper's "Les Miserables" has capitalized in a massive way. Approaching his character with the ferocity that made him a star in the "X-Men" franchises, he hammers his way into every scene, keeping the audience guessing about their own moral complexities. He tears into scenes in a way we've never seen him and layers his character with plenty of affection, empathy, grief, and rage. It's his best dramatic endeavor he's ever done.

When it comes to Jake Gyllenhaal, many, and probably for the right reasons, gravitate towards his work in Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" as his shining moment in film history. I believe he's gone deeper in works like "Jarhead" and "Zodiac" but those were just the surface of what he can do as an actor. As Detective Loki, Gyllenhaal stands firm and tall in one of the year's finest performances. Terrifically executed as a man disconnected from real emotion, he finds himself enamored by the mystery surrounding two missing girls. He also orchestrates character beats and ticks that's reminiscent of Joaquin Phoenix's towering work in "The Master" last year.

What is very refreshing in the film is it offers a great reminder of how brilliant an actor Terence Howard is. The Oscar-nominated actor seemed to fall by the wayside following his nomination for "Hustle and Flow" in 2006, coincidentally the same year Gyllenhaal snagged his first, and now has realized his capabilities when he chooses more dynamic and passionate characters. In a film that centers around his involvement, Paul Dano doesn't have too much to offer but is completely adequate in form.

The film however is not entirely perfect. Aaron Guzikowski's depth screenplay offers a great mystery story, full of twists and turns, all the bit a tad predictable, but that's not where he falters so much. His construction of the female counterparts, Maria Bello, Viola Davis, and Melissa Leo, are not as crisply or smoothly put together as I'd like them to be. They each have one "scene" that gives us their character's motivation and the look into their cinematic psyche however, some are thrown in quite lazily and manages to halt the story in spots.

The film's technical merits all rise to the abilities of its cast. Roger Deakins, the most overdue Cinematographer in the business, captures stunning portraits of conversations, weather, and scenes that continue to prove his brilliance in the film world. The film's score is masterfully placed by Jóhann Jóhannsson while Joel Cox and Gary Roach edit the film to an impeccable pace.

At 153 minutes, the film is detailed, precise, and engaging nearly throughout. I feel there's a shorter cut of the film that would surely be a Best Picture nominee for this year's Academy Awards if it existed. The film could still garner that support with what they have now, but I think there are aspects of the film members won't be able to get around. A high level of violence and torture scenes infused with a longer run time could keep people at a distance. One thing that can't be denied is the towering works of Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal. The two have offered plenty of memorable performances in their filmography, but their work in "Prisoners" is cut and clear their best they've offered.

"Prisoners" is a magnificent achievement for the film year. Thorough, enigmatic, and purely amazing. A must-see for the movie lovers.

The film opens in theaters this Friday, September 20.

[jo]

Only tweets but praise indeed!

@williamfriedkin Rarely have I seen a film that is so terrifying it ranks
With Psycho and Seven. PRISONERS is that strong.
One of the scariest ever.

William Friedkin‏@williamfriedkin16 Sep
Yes, I know, it's Villenueve...my iPad has a mind of its own.

William Friedkin‏@williamfriedkin16 Sep
Mr. Villanueva, I salute you.

William Friedkin‏@williamfriedkin16 Sep
My compliments to Aaron Guzikowski, the writer of
PRISONERS as well. And all the superb actors.

Friedkin is a very prominent director ( among his films are The French Connection and The Exorcist for which he won an Oscar ), film producer, and screenwriter! In this year's Venice Film Festival, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award!

The Exorcist was one of the scariest movies ever...and The French Connection was such a thriller!


I think I am getting very excited over this movie's awards prospects! I wonder how influential he is with AMPAS and the guilds!

Jo

[israruth]

www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2013/09/18/review-prisoners-doesnt-just-entertain-it-matters/

Very interesting review and discussion of Prisoners.

[jo]

Peter Travers of ROLLING STONE is added to the list of impressed critics --

3.5 out of 4 stars

www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/prisoners-20130919

Prisoners
Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Melissa Leo
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Rolling Stone: star rating
5 3.5

By Peter Travers
September 19, 2013

There are moments when Prisoners feels like the Zero Dark Thirty of child-kidnapping thrillers. Here's the deal: Hugh Jackman gives a powerhouse performance as Keller Dover, a Pennsylvania contractor, survivalist and recovering alcoholic whose six-year-old daughter goes missing on Thanksgiving Day. He's matched by Jake Gyllenhaal, who is exceptional, haunted and haunting, as Loki, the obsessive cop who isn't acting fast enough for Keller. Loki lacks the hard evidence to arrest Alex (Paul Dano), a mentally challenged suspect who's been hanging around the neighborhood in a camper. Pushed to the limit, Keller snatches Alex from the home of his aunt (a quietly devastating Melissa Leo), holding him prisoner for days in an abandoned building and torturing him for info in ways that would shame any interrogator, CIA or Al Qaeda.

What would you do in Keller's place: condemn him or support him? That's the question that eats at you as Prisoners holds you in its grip for an agonizing 153 minutes. Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, whose 2010 Incendies was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign-Language Film, isnot giving a sermon. Neither is Aaron Guzikowski, whose ever-tightening script keeps the suspense on high sizzle. Pulses will pound and nerves will be fried as Jackman and Gyllenhaal burn with white-hot intensity. Even without armies doing battle, this is war, which a Prussian general once defined as "an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will."

That's the plan for Keller, who leaves his grieving wife (Maria Bello) at home to carry out his persecution in secret. For help, he turns to Franklin Birch (Terrence Howard), a neighbor whose seven-year-old daughter has also been kidnapped. Franklin and his wife (the always superb Viola Davis) are appalled at Keller's vigilante justice. But if it gets their daughter back, so be it.

Some will write off Prisoners as shameless exploitation. But like Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, to which it's been compared, Prisoners is so artfully shaped and forcefully developed that objections fade. The great cinematographer Roger A. Deakins (No Country for Old Men) brings a classic rigor to the film as his camera finds the secret crevices of this blue-collar community and the ravaged faces of its lost children and damaged parents. Villeneuve takes his unflashy time building character and revealing troubled psyches in the most unlikely of places. His work with the exemplary actors results in a film of startling impact, packed with twists you don't see coming. You can't shake it.

[jo]

www.rottentomatoes.com/m/prisoners_2013/


On Opening Day, Rotten Tomatoes has certified PRISONERS as FRESH

With 67 reviews in, the rating is currently at 82% ( 55 fresh and 12 rotten)!

Ironically, The Wolverine, at 69%, has not been certified FRESH to-date, despite 204 reviews already in.


Jo

[jo]

It is also "thumbs-up" from A.O.Scott of THE NEW YORK TIMES.


movies.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/movies/prisoners-stars-hugh-jackman-and-jake-gyllenhaal.html?_r=0

Movie Review


After Two Children Vanish, Agony Begets Recklessness

‘Prisoners’ Stars Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: September 19, 2013


Violence against children strikes most people as a uniquely terrible phenomenon, which may be why filmmakers are so fond of it. Nothing sparks a revenge plot, or allows a director to trade intellectual nuance for visceral feeling, quite as efficiently as a child in peril. When dealing with people who gratuitously cause the innocent to suffer, no retribution seems too extreme, and the history of movies is full of good men (and a few women) driven to righteous brutality against predators, kidnappers and abusers.


Keller Dover, the enraged, grief-addled father played by Hugh Jackman in Denis Villeneuve’s “Prisoners,” seems like such a character. “He’s not a person,” Keller says of the man he believes is responsible for the abduction of his young daughter and her friend. And this conviction, that the apparent perpetrator has forfeited his humanity, allows an honorable family man to contemplate torture and murder. He beats his captive bloody and locks him in a makeshift cell in an abandoned building, hoping to extract the truth and perhaps also a measure of rough justice. When the other girl’s parents (Viola Davis and Terrence Howard) express doubts about what Keller is doing, their qualms strike him as evidence of weakness and irrationality.

But if “Prisoners,” written by Aaron Guzikowski, upholds some of the conventions of the angry-dad revenge drama, it also subverts them in surprising, at times devastating ways. The easy catharsis of righteous payback is complicated at every turn, and pain and uncertainty spread like spilled oil on an asphalt road.

When the girls, Anna and Joy, go missing late on Thanksgiving afternoon, suspicion focuses on the driver of a camper that had been parked in their small-town Pennsylvania neighborhood. An arrest is made of a young man (Paul Dano) who seems mentally disabled and shares no information about the girls’ whereabouts. Then a dead body is found in an elderly priest’s basement, and a second young man, with a nervous manner and a haunted look, shows up at a vigil for the missing children and runs away into the night. False leads and shadowy connections proliferate, and nobody knows if Anna and Joy are dead or alive.

It’s all very creepy and mysterious, and “Prisoners” is, among other things, a satisfying whodunit, with artfully deposited clues and twists that are surprising without entirely undermining the film’s naturalistic credibility.

But Mr. Villeneuve, a French Canadian director whose previous movies include “Incendies” and “Polytechnique,” is more invested in mood and meaning than in plot. A connoisseur of grim tales — “Incendies” is about the endless trauma of a Middle Eastern civil war; “Polytechnique” is based on the true story of a shooting rampage at a Montreal university — he has an intense, almost philosophical interest in the nature of evil.

Like “Zodiac,” “Mystic River” and “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Prisoners” suggests that evil is not confined to a single person or set of actions. Crimes are specified, and criminals are discovered, but empirical solutions are not enough to dispel the feeling that an uncontained atmospheric menace broods over this wintry landscape. (Roger A. Deakins’s somber cinematography turns the Keystone State into a study of grays and browns, dead leaves and bare trees, under a sky like wet metal.)

Keller, a survivalist with a basement full of canned goods and batteries, seems to have been infected by it even before the disappearance of his daughter. His wife (Maria Bello) tips into a pool of despair. Other people, like the aunt of one of the suspects (Melissa Leo), are weighed down by bad luck and weary dread.

But the most tormented character may be Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose connection to the kidnapping is professional rather than personal. Like Keller, Loki is a familiar figure in a movie like this, and the contrast between them — the hotheaded, impulsive avenger and the cool, careful sleuth — is something we’ve seen before. Mr. Jackman is solid and persuasive, but it is Mr. Gyllenhaal, with his downturned mouth and twitchy eyes, who anchors the film. We know nothing of Loki’s off-duty life, if he even has one, but he is the sensitive, skeptical filter through which we try to imagine the fate that could have befallen two happy children playing on a November afternoon.

Nearly all of “Prisoners” takes place within a single week, but Mr. Villeneuve wisely — if also somewhat cruelly — refuses to speed up, or to spike the action with jolts of adrenaline. He captures, with impressive discipline, just how slowly time can move during a crisis, how the static condition of not knowing can press down on every moment. Panic can be paralyzing, as it is for Keller’s wife and Joy’s parents, but acting rashly, as Keller is inclined to, can have catastrophic effects.

“Prisoners” is the kind of movie that can quiet a room full of casual thrill-seekers. It absorbs and controls your attention with such assurance that you hold your breath for fear of distracting the people on screen, exhaling in relief or amazement at each new revelation. By the end, you may be a little worn out, and perhaps also slightly let down by the fussily clever revelations that wrap up the story, but in the meantime, you are a willing captive, unable tell the difference between dread and delight.

[jo]

The New York Daily News rates the movie 4 out of 5 --

www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/prisoners-movie-review-article-1.1461538

‘Prisoners,’ movie review

Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal team up in raw and compelling crime thriller co-starring Paul Dano and Maria Bello

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Thursday, September 19, 2013, 4:51 PM.



It’s easy to make a thriller. It’s hard to make one that says something about human nature and then, like the hauntingly compelling “Prisoners,” finds something inside the genre that validates tying your nerves up in knots.

On a gray Thanksgiving Day in Pennsylvania, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), his wife Grace (Maria Bello), their teenage son and 5-year-old daughter walk across a suburban road to the home of their friends, the Birches. Keller and his son spent the morning hunting deer, and their kill is being prepared for the table.

But after dinner, panic sets in when the Kellers’ girl and her friend, the daughter of Franklin and Nancy Birch (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis), disappear while playing outside.



A camper van was seen nearby. The frightened parents focus on that with a local police detective, Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal). He tracks it to the home of elderly Holly Jones (Melissa Leo) and her nephew, Alex (Paul Dano). Twentysomething Alex is mentally damaged, but was in the camper, so Keller is sure he knows where the girls are. When Alex is released by police due to lack of evidence, he becomes the target of an increasingly unhinged Keller.


Then this stealthily moralistic thriller gets deep, burrowing into the cycle of violence on a primal level. Wanting information on his daughter, Keller kidnaps Alex, keeps him in an abandoned building and beats and tortures him. The vicious behavior is not done without conscience, but, in a way, alongside it. This is the only way he knows how to save the children.

Yet Detective Loki has other leads. They include other neighborhood creeps and the discovery of a man’s corpse, and back around to a maze of violence that Keller, lost in his own fog, is now part of.


Villeneuve sets “Prisoners” to an aching grind of a score that sounds like it’s sampling sounds from inside a machine. There are themes of faith, lost and held. And there’s a murky morality that refuses to go for easy answers. All of the film’s characters are prisoners in some way, including Grace, who surrenders to prescription drugs to escape her sorrow.

It’s only when this edgy movie turns toward finally solving its mystery that it vaguely resembles “Seven” or “The Silence of the Lambs.” Yet if Aaron Guzikowski’s script uses genre blueprints for trickery’s sake, Villeneuve and the actors rise above.

Gyllenhaal, small and haunted, gives a performance full of twitches, his skin sallow, his eyes sunken. Jackman, big as an oak, makes Keller more powerless as his brutality increases. As in last year’s “Les Miserables,” he brings a human face to fear and ferocity.

Dano, Bello, Howard, Davis and Leo — the last nearly unrecognizable — are equally strong. Villeneuve, whose last film was the Oscar-nominated “Incendies,” uses them all perfectly, and “Prisoners” works best when it’s not what you thought it was going to be. But even on familiar ground, it’s hard to let go of.

[jo]

The Los Angeles Times registers its positive vote for the movie --

www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-prisoners-movie-review-20130920,0,5009243.story

Movie review: 'Prisoners' is captivating and relentless

Hugh Jackman gives the performance of his career as a father seeking two kidnapped girls in Denis Villeneuve's taut thriller.



By Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times Film Critic
September 19, 2013, 1:10 p.m.



Like the kidnapping at the tortured heart of "Prisoners," once this chilling thriller about a parent's worst nightmare grabs you, it refuses to let go.


Even if the film wasn't coming out just months after the May rescue of three kidnapped women in Cleveland, held for a decade by a madman, we know the real world has monsters far more frightening than any Hollywood can manufacture.

Reality informs "Prisoners" at every turn. French Canadian director Denis Villeneuve and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski keep the tightly constructed terror twisting by holding it close.

There are excellent performances from a well-seasoned cast including Viola Davis, Terrence Howard, Maria Bello and Melissa Leo. But the linchpins for the devastation wrought in the film are Hugh Jackman as an anguished father, Jake Gyllenhaal as the frustrated detective with whom he locks horns, and Paul Dano as the man suspected of snatching two young girls.

PHOTOS: Movie Sneaks 2013

"Prisoners" begins innocently enough on Thanksgiving Day. Keller Dover (Jackman) and Franklin Birch (Howard) are lifelong friends. Now married with children, they live just down the block from each other in a Pennsylvania suburb where kids play carefree. Dinner is at the Birches — good friends, good food, good times.

Savor it. This is the last good moment the filmmakers allow.

It is late afternoon. The teenagers, Ralph Dover (Dylan Minnette) and Eliza Birch (Zoe Soul) are collapsed in front of a TV. The adults, Keller and wife Grace (Bello), Franklin and wife Nancy (Davis), are in one of those conversations you imagine they pick up every time they're together.

Six-year-old Anna Dover (Erin Gerasimovich) and 7-year-old Joy Birch (Kyla-Drew Simmons) are bundles of energy, begging to make a toy run to the Dover's house.

And then they are gone.

It takes a while to realize the girls are missing. But panic and fear are fast in coming. That scene — where it first sinks in — has a very "there but for the grace of God" feel. These are watchful parents. Each eventually becomes a template for the ways a child in jeopardy can change you.

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A sliver of hope comes in the form of a tenacious detective named Loki (Gyllenhaal). There is also a suspect, Alex Jones (Dano), who is quickly in custody.

And then hope dies.

After 48 hours and no progress, Loki releases Alex over Keller's outraged protest. Jackman, who gives the performance of his career, spends the rest of the film as a desperate father going rogue to save his child.

This is no "Taken," where the dad is a black-ops specialist, schooled in the art of tracking and torturing to find a missing daughter. The people in "Prisoners" are salt-of-the-earth types, not equipped to find their girls and certainly not prepared to cope with the tragedy that is overwhelming them.

A very different sort of family drama first put the director on the map. "Incendies," with its cross-cultural intrigues and Muslim-Christian conflicts, earned an Oscar nomination for foreign language film in 2011. The polish and precision of "Prisoners" should keep Villeneuve there.

Shot under a cold gray sky by acclaimed cinematographer Roger A. Deakins, the mood of despair never lifts. Keller's decision to take matters into his own hands sets the course. He's become convinced Alex is the key.

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A strange, shy and nearly nonverbal young man still living with his aunt Holly (Leo), Alex is an easy mark when it comes to villains. So it's not all that hard to get behind Keller's idea to pick up the interrogation the cops dropped.

But things go badly almost from the start when Alex doesn't break as Keller thought he would. The larger question that begins to gather force as the action evolves is whether Keller is right to do what he is doing — even if Alex is involved, even with the children's lives at stake. Or worse, what if Keller is wrong about Alex entirely?

The filmmakers don't make it easy to stay on Keller's side. Horrific brutality and unrelenting torture become the state of play as the desperation rises and the days tick past.

At home, Grace slips into a permanent haze of pills, barely able to get out of bed, much less notice her husband's long absences. It is left to the Birches to stand as the conflicted conscience of the film. Screenwriter Guzikowski tucks endless moral dilemmas into very smart dialogue as they grapple with what Keller is doing and their role in it.

Like everyone else, Det. Loki is a complex man with a lot on his mind. That he occupies any space on-screen is a credit to Gyllenhaal, who continues to power through the darker roles he's favored lately. The actor tempers Loki's confidence with a twinge of doubt — about Alex, about Keller, about himself — and in doing so keeps his cop interesting. Meanwhile, Dano seems born to play damaged souls, though he's never reached such animalistic levels before.

Jackman, though, is unforgettable as the father whose certainty never wavers. You feel Keller's resolve harden, his anguish deepen and his spine stiffen. Not even the actor's Oscar-nominated performance in "Les Misérables" is as compelling.

Exciting, terrifying, worrisome stuff saturates every second of "Prisoners," holding you captive, keeping you guessing until the bitter end.

[e-mail]

[jo]

Richard Roeper, in this video review, gives the movie an "A" rating and calls Hugh Jackman's portrayal as the best performance of his career!


www.richardroeper.com/reviews/prisoners.aspx


Yay!

[jo]

reelreactions.wordpress.com/2013/09/19/prisoners/

“Prisoners”
In Reviews on September 19, 2013 at 3:17 pm

Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners is the first must see film of the Fall Movie Season. It’s certainly not for everyone – the fact that it’s opening nationwide is quite ambitious – but those willing to endure 2 and ½ hours of dark, dense, and devastating material will be greatly rewarded. French director Villeneuve, Oscar nominated in 2011 for the foreign language drama Incendies, has crafted a morally complex studio film in the vein of Fincher’s Se7en and Zodiac, but the mystery here moves and unfolds more like a European art house film, taking its slow, slow time to break down its characters under an increasingly heavy, unsettling atmosphere. Warner Brothers is taking quite the chance opening this one wide but it’s a move that is as risky as it is commendable. The bottom line is that nationwide audiences need more movies like Prisoners – movies that don’t hold your hand, movies that challenge, movies that are moody, complex, and undeniably head spinning.



Hugh Jackman, soaring to new career highs after last year’s Oscar nomination for Les Miserables, stars as Keller Dover, a loving family man whose daughter, along with a neighborhood friend, goes missing on Thanksgiving. When a suspicious RV that was parked on the Dover’s street ends up crashed on the side of the highway, Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets pulled into the case, made all the more twisted by the appearance of a potential suspect in the RV – a nearly mute, mentally challenged boy, played with skin crawling creepiness by the great Paul Dano. Pre-release trailers alarmingly give what looks like most of the story away – particularly Keller’s decision to kidnap the suspect and torture him for answers – but there’s more to Prisoners than meets the eye. Even when the screenplay takes bumpy turns and part of the mystery begins to reveal itself, Villeneuve keeps the tension escalating by paying as much attention to the moral dynamics of the situation as he does to the “who-did-it” answer. Often, the question as to how Dover or Loki will emotionally survive this ordeal outweighs the question to who kidnapped the little girls.

Like the great French film The Vanishing, Prisoners expertly showcases different moral rationalizations that help turn the film into some kind of dizzying mindbender. Dover’s actions are quite gruesome and are obviously morally and legally wrong, but the will of a parent to do whatever it takes to protect his/her child adds deeper dimensions to the scenario. The same goes for Detective Loki, who’s trying his best to solve the case despite a police force that can only do so much when money and time are scarce. The way Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins (fresh off his Oscar nom for Skyfall) shoot and frame the picture only adds to its frustrating moral ambiguities. Deakins’ shots are not personably constructed, you’re never put inside a character’s shoes; instead, the film keeps changing perspectives and the immaculately framed still shots put you on the outside looking in and it’s uncomfortably perplexing. Luckily, the film is gorgeous looking and the way Deakins incorporates the theme of mazes into reflections, specifically car windows, is mesmerizing.

The ensemble is also sublime. As Dover’s wife, Mario Bello is tragically invalid, and the always reliable Terrence Howard and Viola Davis are quite strong as the parents of the other missing girl despite the fact that they are sidelined as the movie develops. Davis, unsurprisingly, knocks it out of the park with her humanity when she goes face to face with Dano, whose unreadable motives and slimy appearance will certainly drive some mad. Gyllenhaal is in fine form as Detective Loki, easily the film’s most intriguing character. With a nervous eye twitch and knuckle tattoos, Loki is clearly haunted, and though Gyllenhaal’s soft voice and puppy dog eyes seem too calm at first, the actor comes alive as the case takes its toll on the detective, erupting during a scene when the case seems all but closed. Ultimately this is Jackman’s show and he is unbelievably gripping here. Though he has expertly showed rage as Wolverine, the type of anger Jackman digs deep for reveals a shattered, tortured soul that becomes more gut wrenching as the film goes on. Jackman has never been more alive or broken on screen and he’s half the reason the film nails its psychological goals. You may not be able to agree with Dover’s decisions but Jackman makes you feel the justification of his actions with unshakeable force. Eventual Oscar nomination or not, this is the best work Jackson has done to date. He nails it.

I can’t say the film is perfect – an ill-advised flashback feels inorganic and forced, for instance – but Prisoners deserves praise for daring to go where most nationwide films never do. Like The Place Beyond The Pace, a specialty release earlier this spring, the film soaks in its moral questionings about human rationalizations, making its few bumps forgivable. The way characters are built but not spelled out – Gyllenhaal’s nervous ticks, Jackman’s over cautiousness (his basement has enough supplies to act a de facto bomb shelter) – makes you crave more information about them despite their unthinkable acts. And the expert editing, stark and sudden, only adds to the movie’s puzzle – many moments are drawn out for maximum tension only to cut before the climax of the scene, causing you to play catch up time and time again and making certain plot reveals suddenly potent. I think it’s safe to say that come the brilliantly ballsy ending many will be exhausted and angry but that’s the kind of movie Prisoners is – tedious, maddening, and unrelenting.

Now that’s the Fall for you. I’m so glad it’s here.

8/10

Review by Zack Sharf

[jo]

From top critic Claudia Puig of USA TODAY : 3.5 out of 4 --

www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2013/09/19/prisoners-review/2711889/

'Prisoners' is arresting but disturbing

Claudia Puig, USA TODAY 6:03 p.m. EDT September 19, 2013


This masterful, fascinating thriller probes the lengths one would go to protect a loved one and the lines that could be crossed in the process.


The ever-present grey skies in Prisoners mirror its murky shades of morality.

A somber, twisting and thoroughly engrossing police thriller (* * * 1/2 out of four; rated R; opens Friday nationwide), Prisoners focuses on a decent man who takes the law into his own hands and, in the process, loses his humanity.

Centered on a kidnapping, the plot raises complicated moral questions about how far an anguished person will go for the love of a child. At the same time, it sets up an intricate, horrifying mystery with breathtaking skill.

French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, who made 2010's captivating Oscar-nominated Incendies, has fashioned a film that is both mainstream and artful. Prisoners is infused with a poetic intensity that's rare in American thrillers. The closest cinematic comparisons would be Zodiac, In the Bedroom and Mystic River.

Rain-streaked visuals by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins intensify the ominous mood.

On a drizzly Thanksgiving Day in suburban Pennsylvania, two families meet for a holiday feast. Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and his wife Grace (Maria Bello) have two children, teenage son Ralph (Dylan Minnette) and 6-year-old Anna (Erin Gerasimovich).

The movie opens with a tense scene in which Ralph and his dad go hunting and Ralph shoots his first deer. On the drive home, he looks mildly stricken while his father congratulates him.

The Thanksgiving meal is being held at the home of neighbors Franklin and Nancy Birch (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis), who have two children about the same age as the Dovers, teenage Eliza (Zoe Soul) and 7-year-old Joy (Kyla Drew Simmons).

The teen siblings are put in charge of their little sisters, but the girls pop outside to play, and vanish. A festive occasion suddenly becomes a parent's worst nightmare. Suspicions focus on a rusty old RV parked nearby and a creepy-looking neighbor, Alex Jones (Paul Dano).

The taciturn Alex lives with his lonely aunt Holly (Melissa Leo). His haplessness, as well as a comment he mutters, make Alex the prime suspect for the distraught Keller.

Jackman tackles his role with steely ferocity, giving one of the best performances of his career. Full of moral certitude, he clashes with Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), who's put in charge of the case.

Gyllenhaal, who did a fine job as a cop in last year's End of Watch, taps into even deeper reserves of emotion here for the role of a tenacious and decent detective who blinks repeatedly when frustrated, as if trying to hold his personal demons at bay. Torn between his instincts and police procedure, he is nonetheless determined to solve the case.

Both men are single-minded. Keller does his statistical research on how long abducted kids survive and grows furious at the failure of authorities to act swiftly. Blinded by rage, grief and a sense that he has failed in his promise to protect his family, Keller plunges into a desperate search.

Despite some holes in the labyrinthine plot, the film concludes on a hauntingly powerful note. In its unflinching look at mutable morality, the implications extend beyond the personal to the political.

With its grisly realism, Prisoners is much more terrifying than any horror film, simultaneously grueling, spellbinding and contemplative.

[jo]

From Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal --

'Prisoners'
There's a near-sacred history in Hollywood of non-U.S.- born directors providing fresh perspectives on America. Miloš Forman. Alfred Hitchcock. Ang Lee. Ernst Lubitsch. Billy Wilder. For "Prisoners," a stress-inducing trip into child abduction, the director is Quebecois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, who gives us an American "hero" guaranteed to push many buttons, many times, and who might not have been allowed to be quite so awful, under a different director's lens.

.
That character, Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman), is a building contractor, survivalist and devout Christian who drives a pickup truck, sings "The Star-Spangled Banner" in the shower, and says an "Our Father" before helping his son shoot his first deer. He maintains a survivalist's philosophy ("Pray for the best, prepare for the worst") and a basement full of canned goods. When catastrophe strikes, he turns into a monster.
.
Mr. Villeneuve leans heavily on "Zodiac" and "Silence of the Lambs" for his mood, and on screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski for his nightmare story. While Keller and wife, Grace (Maria Bello), celebrate Thanksgiving with their neighbors, Nancy and Franklin Birch (Viola Davis, Terrence Howard), their young daughters go outside and immediately go missing. An RV had been parked outside; the older kids say there was someone in it. Panic ensues, as does rain, which under the circumstances—aberrant religion informs the entire story—seems vengeful and Old Testament.

The local police are on the case right away, chiefly the department's ace detective, Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), who tracks down the camper, arrests the driver, Alex Jones (Paul Dano) and decides he's got the wrong guy. Alex is too simple-minded to have abducted two preteen girls in broad daylight and hidden them away. Loki moves on. Keller can't.

In addition to the skin-crawling camera moves and the understated dread that bolsters the surface tensions of "Prisoners" there is a fascinating actor's duel going on. Mr. Jackman is all seething anger and righteous pain; his character clearly wants to be an avenging angel, as he kidnaps Alex and tries to torture the truth out of him.

Mr. Gyllenhaal's performance is different. He internalizes Loki's evident problems, which include an insubordinate contempt for his higher ups, a supreme confidence in his own investigative judgment and the kind of control over his passions that is very deliberate and fragile. Mr. Jackman may well get awards. Mr. Gyllenhaal gets our attention.

[jo]

A negative review ( 5 out of 10) but has high praise for Hugh Jackman's portrayal --

lylesmoviefiles.com/2013/09/20/review-prisoners/

He has interesting points on the movie and I am a little surprised that he grades it at only 50%

Review: Prisoners

September 20, 2013



“Prisoners” is too much of brilliantly good thing.

For fans of tense drama, award-worthy acting and confident, steady directing, the film is like a day at the carnival. But much like gorging on cotton candy, funnel cakes and ice cream, it leaves you wondering how much more you would have loved it if only you’d been able to take in a lot less.


Keller (Hugh Jackman, “The Wolverine”) and Grace Dover (Maria Bello, “Grown Ups 2”) and their children, Ralph (Dylan Minnette, “Lost”) and Anna (Erin Gerasimovich), celebrate another Thanksgiving with their close friends, Franklin (Terrence Howard, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler”) and Nancy Birch (Viola Davis, “Won’t Back Down”) and their children Eliza Birch (Zoe Borde) and Joy (Kyle Drew Simmons).

After an enjoyable evening, the families are ready to wind down, but Anna and Joy are nowhere to be found, prompting a frantic search for an RV the children spotted earlier.


Det. Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal playing a burnt out version of his “End of Watch” character) takes the case and quickly finds the RV and its childlike occupant, Alex Jones (Paul Dano in an appropriately eerie role).

Alex claims he doesn’t know anything about the girls’ disappearance and his aunt (a reserved Melissa Leo, “Oblivion”) backs his account, saying he has the mentality of a 10-year-old — hardly the mind of a ruthless kidnapper.

Keller isn’t convinced and starts questioning if there’s any limit he won’t cross to find the girls.

Director Denis Villeneuve establishes a tense, edge-of-your-seat mood thriller that peaks early and drags to a frustrating final act.

With a 153-minute run time, the tension is a bit overbearing. It’s like watching the director’s cut that goes a bit deeper into the character development and filled with scenes the filmmakers loved, but realized weren’t essential for the final cut. Screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (“Contraband”) includes two subplots that could easily have been ditched without affecting the story.


The length allows some logic gaps to seep through that you otherwise may not have noticed had Villeneuve been able to maintain that race against the clock pace such as Loki seemingly the only detective interested in solving the case or his ability to miss the potentially case-solving clues.

Villeneuve creates such a vivid atmosphere that he strips away that feeling you’re watching a movie.

The lack of accompanying score for most of the film also aids in making this more real and the excellent ensemble shows the numerous emotions a family endures through such a taxing ordeal.


Jackman puts in the first serious bid for 2013 award consideration with a searing, gut-wrenching performance that will have you sympathizing and questioning your own boundaries if it meant saving the person you love.

Every year it seems Jackman outdoes himself, but with this performance, he’s the man to beat for the Oscar. It’s going to take a phenomenal effort to surpass him and Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t have a movie coming out this fall.

Some audience members may take issue with the ambiguous ending, but it works in the context of the film. In the end, I was really torn with “Prisoners.” There’s so much to love early on, but the second half ruins a lot of it for me.

I’d recommend solely for the tremendous performances and Villeneuve’s impressive direction, but this is a heavy viewing experience for parents and those with short attention spans.

Rating: 5 out of 10

[jo]

Interesting review, with some sidelights --

lasvegas.informermg.com/2013/09/20/prisoners-movie-review/

By Victoria Alexander, Film Critic

Las Vegas Informer

After this, you will say: Jackman also plays Wolverine?

“PRISONERS” starts off with Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) and his son Ralph (Dylan Minnette) on a deer hunt for Thanksgiving dinner. Keller is a devout Christian and, preparing Ralph to shoot the deer, recites The Lord’s Prayer using – not only the words attributed to Jesus – but the version mandated for use by Henry VIII when he separated from the Catholic Church and created the Church of England.* What else would you expect from a bloated megalomaniac with absolute power?

Keller believes in being ready for anything and prepared. He’s got a basement of supplies just in case the apocalypse begins in rural Pennsylvania.

Keller, his wife Grace (Maria Bello), their good friends Franklin (Terrence Howard) and Nancy Birch (Viola Davis) and their children have finished dinner when the two youngest children, Anna Dover (Erin Gerasimovich) and Eliza Birch (Zoe Borde), go outside to play and do not come back.

The neighborhood is quiet with the only thing out of place is a beat-up RV parked on the street. Within hours, Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) is interviewing the parents and begins an investigation. Loki finds the driver of the RV, a young man, Alex Jones (Paul Dano), who has the mental ability of a child. Without any evidence linking Jones to the kidnapping, Loki must allow Jones to leave police custody after two days. Jones is looked after by his aunt Holly Jones (Melissa Leo).

Keller, a man who prides himself of being able to take care of his family, goes “medieval on Jones’s ass” and frankly, I can only recall one father who chose to do what I would do if someone in my family was murdered and I knew who did it. The father fatally shot a man suspected of kidnapping and sexually assaulting his 11-year-old son. The man had pleaded no contest to manslaughter in the death of Jeffrey Doucet, 25, who was shot in the head in the Baton Rouge airport in March 1984. He was given a suspended prison term and sentenced to five years of probation. The shooting occurred as deputies were returning Mr. Doucet in handcuffs from California, where he had been arrested on a charge of kidnapping.

The French-Canadian director, Denis Villeneuve, whose heartfelt letter was read to the pre-screening audience, brings a sensually dark aura to the film. It’s not a by-the-numbers kidnapping of a child caper, but an inside look at what really goes on when a tragedy like this hits a family.

In so many Hollywood films about child kidnapping, “RANSOM,” “MAN ON FIRE,” “TAKEN” and “THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS,” to name just a few, the mothers of the missing children are concerned – nothing more.

Grace is inconsolable. Drugged so she can sleep all day and night, when she is awake all she can do is grieve the loss of her little girl. When I see mothers of missing children being interviewed, I think: if that was me, I’d be in the hospital under medication with unwashed hair and teeth not brushed. When released I would be living in a tent in the parking lot of the police station.

Howard, playing the reasonable best friend, has a difficult role. Jackman’s Keller has only one way to go – forward with vengeance. Howard must straddle the fence of emotions. He wants her little girl back but he will only go so far.

Kathy Griffin, in her Bravo special “Tired Hooker,” did a set on seeing Jackman’s one-man show “Back on Broadway.” Griffin was surprised to see a very different side of the actor who portrays the very tough Wolverine in the The “X-MEN” movie franchise. She famously said Jackman was “fabulousness,” but she was taken aback “How gay his show is.”

A friend said he will always see Jackman as “Wolverine.” However, in “PRISONERS,” Jackman completely makes you forget “Wolverine” or that he is a fabulous song-and-dance man. Hugh Jackman is terrific. He keeps elevating Keller’s rage where you wonder if the star of Jackman’s caliber will actually play this crazy a guy to the end or will he be redeemed somehow so we know he was right all along?

Gyllenhaal, taking a break from working out, gives Loki a very strange tic. He gives a grave, conscientious performance as a detective dealing with out of control fathers. Both Jackman and Gyllenhaal look their ages and neither slips into Movie Acting 101.

While the biggest nitpicking is the lack of realism in the portrayal of the police just assigning one detective to investigate a kidnapping of two young girls, the emphasis is on the character of the fathers and the detective, not Pennsylvania’s police protocols.

And the denouement? It was slick and appreciated by the audience I saw the movie with.

*The last sentence of the Church of England’s Lord’s Prayer ends “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, now and forever, ” is technically termed a doxology. In the early Church, the Christians added the doxology to the text of the Our Father. It was practice of concluding prayers with a short, hymn-like verse which exalts the glory of God. Later in 1541 (after his official separation from the Holy Father), Henry VIII issued the edict adding the doxology when he created the Church of England. The Roman Catholic Church does not use this version.

[birchie]

A very positive review from a Catholic online magazine:
www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/2592/prisoners_of_sin.aspx#.UkGRghCPz8B

MPAA Rating, R

USCCB Rating, L (limited adult audience)

Reel Rating, (4 reels shown)

G.K. Chesterton famously remarked in Orthodoxy that there was more evidence for original sin than for any other Christian doctrine. It’s hard to deny this truth after seeing Prisoners, a sad and difficult meditation on the problem of evil disguised as a terrific thriller with mesmerizing performances. The central sin here is child abduction. This tragic event leads normally upstanding citizens to commit horrible crimes. Evil moves slowly and secretly around a small heartbroken community, moving from person to person because no one seems to know how else to respond.

Yet God is there. Anguished prayers do not go unanswered and hope comes from unlikely sources. Prisoners is one of the most beautiful films of the year, skillfully demonstrating that the Christian messages of forgiveness and love of enemies are the only things that can break the cycle of evil. It is also a film most people will only be able to sit through once.

Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) is the sort of father most people would want. He is loving, religious, and disciplined. His motto, “Pray for the best, prepare for the worse,” drives everything he does, from being an affectionate husband to stocking up ammo and bottled water in his basement. The film opens with him saying the “Our Father” immediately before his son shoots a deer for Thanksgiving dinner. It is a striking image that haunts the rest of the film.

The Dovers share the meal with their friends, the Birch family, but halfway through each family discovers that one of their daughters is missing. Keller is sure the culprit is Alex Jones (Paul Dano), a twenty-something neighbor with a sad past, low IQ, and glasses that certainly make him look like a creeper. Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), the lead investigator on the case, is not so sure. Keller is enraged when Jones is released, and assaults him on the way out of jail. While attacking him, Jones whispers something that convinces Keller he knows the girls’ location.

Dover has always provided for his family through good times and bad by hard work and sacrifice. But now he is powerless to help his daughter when she needs him most, and the clock is ticking. He makes a crucial error by taking matters into his own hands, kidnapping Jones and locking him in a small apartment. Under the pretense of searching for his daughter, he returns day after day to torture Jones, attempting to extract information. Justifying his actions, he says Jones “is not a man.”

The “Our Father” serves as a foil to Keller’s actions. The prayer tells men to depend on God for daily bread, but Keller is convinced it comes through sweat rather than grace. The prayer instructs the forgiveness of enemies, but forgiveness is not an option for Keller. There is only one graphic moment in the whole film: when we see the bloated, infected face of Jones after being pummeled by his kidnapper. In the final scenes, it becomes clear that Keller’s motives are not all that different from the villain’s, a perverted sense of justice that thwarts God’s will rather than following it.

Every character in Prisoners has a distinct theodicy and religious worldview. When everything is right with the world, it is easy to be thankful and know that God is control, but under the weight of terrible evil, true colors show. Keller, who proudly wears a cross on his neck and a fish on his truck bumper, doesn’t really believe in God; instead, he believes in himself. Loki is an agnostic modern who believes in science and forensics rather than God. A product of mid-century Catholic education (which he clearly did not enjoy), the detective now wears a masonic ring. Yet as his investigation deepens, he realizes that evil cannot be fought by only material means and divine help is necessary to save the innocent, a fact marked by the director zeroing in on a subtle cross tattoo.

Even the villain has a religious motivation, bluntly claiming a war on God. The villain wants parents and children to suffer and lose their faith as revenge for a perceived slight in the past. In a twisted way, this is the villain’s “justice.”

In a film so dark and grim, it is amazing to see how much hope there is in the end.

SPOILER: Click to show

Faced with the possibility of his own death, Keller utters a last prayer, not for his own life or revenge against his enemy, but for the safety of his daughter. His last prayer is one of love, and is clearly answered (in the most nerve-racking way possible).

Prisoners shows that God cares about humanity’s plight and will answer prayers, but in ways that will help the faithful grow in holiness. Sometimes, that means suffering.

There is no nightmare more horrible for parents than the abduction of their children. If this is true for humans, how much more would it be true for God, to have his Son abused, tortured, and executed by the very people he came to save. God knows our pain, not intellectually or through his cosmic powers, but personally, intimately. Prisoners sees this pain and invites the audience to forgive as Christ forgave.

Usually, Catholics have to endure what Jim Gaffigan despairingly called “family friendly” films in order to see good morals. It is so refreshing to see a movie that deals with the struggles of adult life directly and fearlessly, while at the same time respecting the dignity of the humans involved and ending with a positive affirmation of religious faith. This is one of the year’s best films.

Sue

[jo]

Sue,

In poring over many reviews ( sorry, there are just too many from RT to reproduce), I still have to come across a few which does not comment on the humanity aspect of this storytelling ( save of course those who simply want to show off their complete command of cynicism and sarcasm). Whether they refer to the religious aspect and matters of faith ( as discussed in the above review) or just human contemplation of trials and difficulties, they all strike a chord - because in our lives sometime, somewhere, some occurence will appear which gives us reason to pause, to doubt, to despair, and even to pray.

I wonder whether Aaron Guzikowski, Denis Villeneuve and the actors realise how much their work has touched upon so many people?

Jo

[jo]

This is the Associated Press review ( meaning it will be circularized nationwide with media outlets) written by a new film critic --

'Prisoners' Review: Suspsense Film Is A Gripping, Smart Revenge Saga


By JOCELYN NOVECK 09/18/13 04:05 PM ET EDT

Parenting involves countless mundane decisions – dozens a day. But as any parent knows, the potential for tragedy stemming from a wrong decision is never far from the surface of the mind. What if they go out and get hit by a car? What if I look away and they drown in the current? What if they get kidnapped?

No wonder the movies get so much mileage out of missing-children tales. But few – very few – handle it with the skill that director Denis Villeneuve and a terrific cast led by Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal bring to "Prisoners," a suspense thriller that will stay with you long after the credits roll.

Jackman, we all know, is not only talented but so darned likable that it's hard for him to break out of that ever-charming persona. But here, in some of his best work to date, he manages it – and surpasses last year's Oscar-nominated performance in "Les Miserables" – as a grief-stricken, panicked father who succumbs to his basest impulses in a race to find his young daughter's captors.

And Gyllenhaal, in a less flashy but just as compelling performance, brings new depth to the well-worn role of brooding, driven detective. To the film's credit, we don't get much backstory on this character. A few small hints are all we need; the actor's textured performance does the rest.

Jackman is Keller Dover, a carpenter in a Pennsylvania town, and a survivalist who believes diligent preparation is the key to avoiding disaster. His basement is packed with supplies. But that won't help him on the cold and gray Thanksgiving evening when his young daughter and her friend go missing.

It's one of those quick parenting decisions – OK girls, you can go outside. Later, when no one can find them, mild concern on the part of two happy families celebrating the holiday escalates into fear, then full-blown panic, as an older sibling recalls that an RV had been parked, creepily, on the street, and there was someone inside.

What ensues is two and a half hours of unrelenting tension, punctuated by clever twists in Aaron Guzikowski's first-rate script. Many movies this long don't earn their length; here, there's little flab.

It turns out the RV belongs to a troubled young man, Alex, with the IQ of a 10-year-old (an effective Paul Dano, making do with hardly any lines). Detective Loki (Gyllenhaal) arrests him, but in the absence of evidence, can't keep him beyond 48 hours.

That's simply untenable for Dover, who takes matters in his own hands – and in a gruesome way, capturing and torturing Alex to the horror of Dover's good friend, Franklin (a sensitive and pained Terrence Howard), father of the other missing girl.




As Dover and Detective Loki pursue their separate tracks, both know the odds of a happy outcome are fast dwindling. Meanwhile, two mothers grieve in their own way. Dover's wife Grace (an affecting Maria Bello) retreats into a medicated sleep; Nancy (Viola Davis, moving as ever) tries a more pragmatic approach. A third mother figure rounding out the cast is Alex's oddball elderly aunt, Holly (Melissa Leo, suitably quirky.)

In less talented hands, the story could lapse into the maudlin. But Villeneuve, director of the Oscar-nominated "Incendies," seems to know just how far to go; only one moment feels less than authentic, but it would be a spoiler to mention it.

Kudos to cinematographer Roger Deakins, whose evocation of a chilly late fall in Pennsylvania will leave you instinctively searching for a blanket.

Even the moody music by Icelandic composer Johan Johannsson will make you shiver. Just try getting it out of your head as you leave the theater.

"Prisoners," a Warner Bros. release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for "disturbing violent content including torture, and language throughout." Running time: 153 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.

MPAA definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.

Quite a contrast to what former AP critic Christy Lemire wrote in her film review, which was classified ROTTEN by RT!


Jo