Monday: Trauma
Not to be confused with Mercy, here comes Trauma. This new NBC series—which has the snazziest ad campaign of the fall (non-Man Men edition)—eschews whiny nurses for tough-as-nails EMT workers and hopes to give action junkies a boost of adrenaline. Of course, that all sounds perfectly generic, but remember: Peter Berg is an executive producer, and, in addition to shepherding Friday Night Lights, he’s also the man behind such films as The Kingdom. The guy knows how to blow stuff up real good. [NBC, 9 p.m.]

Tuesday: Choke
As a movie, Choke is scattered and messy, which given that it’s an adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s scattered and messy novel should be expected. But as a study of the genius that is Sam Rockwell, it’s focused and brilliant. Mr. Rockwell preens and mugs, all herky jerks and fits of motion. He’s a virtuoso here, every bit as mesmerizing as a Young Robert De Niro. (That he’s playing Mr. De Niro’s son in the upcoming Everything’s Fine is not an irony lost on us.) And, hey, if all of that doesn’t float your boat, at least stick around for the final scenes, which get underscored by Radiohead’s “Reckoner.” [More Max, 9 p.m.]

Wednesday: Modern Family
Frankly, we’re a little concerned that we didn’t go head-over-heels for the debut of Modern Family. The new ABC familial comedy—think: a castrated version of Arrested Development—received some of the best reviews of the fall (our esteemed colleague even loved it!) but when we sat down to watch it last Wednesday, our apartment was stricken with an infestation of crickets. What are we missing? The ratings were huge in week one, so we’ll give this one another shot, on the off chance that it becomes the kind of zeitgeist-y hit that we simply have to be watching. But we’re skeptical… [ABC, 8 p.m.]

Thursday: My Cousin Vinny
Many times, the movies you found hilarious as a kid, don’t hold up when you become an adult. That’s not the case here. My Cousin Vinny is just as funny now as it was—hold onto your butts—17 years ago. (Where has the time gone!) Joe Pesci won his Oscar for Goodfellas, but we’d call My Cousin Vinny his tour-de-force. As the titular cousin, he’s frantic, foul and utterly hilarious, blessed with brilliant comic timing and a streak of New York bitterness. It doesn’t hurt that he’s surrounded by a top-notch supporting cast: the late Fred Gwynne, the late Lane Smith, Ralph Macchio and Marissa Tomei, who, of course, actually did win her Oscar for My Cousin Vinny. Somewhere, Vanessa Redgrave is still smarting over that loss. [Encore, 3 a.m.]

Friday: Atonement
Occasionally, it’s hard to separate an actor from a role. Take Saoirse Ronan. The teenage starlet is so unctuous and horrible as the busybody sister, Briony, in Atonement, we can’t think of her doing anything else. This doesn’t bode well for Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, where she’ll play the murdered protagonist, but it works to her advantage here. The adaptation Ian McEwan’s novel is gorgeous—director Joe Wright and his cinematographer Seamus McGarvey make sure of that—but without Ms. Ronan, it wouldn’t have such a biting edge. [@Max, 5 p.m.]

For best film I am going out on a limb to predict Juno as the winner over Atonement, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood. My reasons for this selection are, as usual, very convoluted. I’d like to think that my choice had nothing to do with my own enthusiasm for this work, which I picked as the top English-language film of the year. I simply have a hunch that Juno is this year’s Little Miss Sunshine, which many people have regretted retroactively for its losing to The Departed last year, in a burst of unexpected redemption for Martin Scorsese, whom the Academy had denied repeatedly in the past. By the same token, since the noirish Departed won last year, the equally noirish Michael Clayton may have a harder time this year because of its genre, despite the Academy’s proven affection for George Clooney.

Atonement, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood have each won more than their share of critical superlatives and pre-Oscar awards, but the way I figure it, Atonement may be too British for this year’s Academy voters, and No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood may be competing with each other for the same elitist downbeat votes.

For best actress I am going out on an even longer limb in picking Ellen Page over the logical favorite, Julie Christie, whom I have admired and adored since Billy Liar (1963). But almost nobody has seen her vehicle, Away From Her, compared to all the people who have seen Juno. Ms. Page and Ms. Christie get their stiffest competition from Marion Cotillard for her ugly-makeup triumph as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. Laura Linney in The Savages provides an Oscar-worthy performance in an unfairly neglected film. Cate Blanchett, nominated for her lead performance in Elizabeth: The Golden Age and for her supporting turn in I’m Not There, becomes only the 11th performer in Oscar history to be nominated in both the lead and the supporting categories, joining such actors as Fay Bainter, nominated in 1938 for White Banners and Jezebel; Teresa Wright in 1942, for Pride of the Yankees and Mrs. Miniver; and, more recently, Al Pacino in 1992, for Scent of a Woman and Glengarry Glen Ross. Both Ms. Bainter and Ms. Wright won their Oscars in the supporting category and lost out to Bette Davis (for Jezebel) and Greer Garson (for Miniver), respectively, in the lead category. Actually, I think Ms. Blanchett has a better chance for her transvestite impersonation of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There over Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton, Amy Ryan in Gone Baby, Gone, Ruby Dee in American Gangster and Saoirse Ronan in Atonement—all excellent actresses giving exemplary performances in comparatively straight roles.

The tightest and most uncertain contest will be for best actor, between George Clooney in Michael Clayton and Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. It will be a battle between a Hollywood superstar with a public service résumé and an international maverick with a reputation for irascibility. It is also a battle between a sympathetic underdog character and an unsympathetic capitalist bully. It would be no contest in Oscar terms if it were not for the support Mr. Day-Lewis has received from the most influential critics. Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Tommy Lee Jones in The Valley of Elah and Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises give good performances in non-best-picture nominees, and are thus automatically handicapped in a race against Mr. Clooney and Mr. Day-Lewis, with their nominated film entries.

For best supporting actor I would have to go with Javier Bardem, who is something of a ringer in this category for his big, lead-size role in No Country for Old Men. The very strong performances of Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton, Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson’s War, Casey Affleck in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Hal Holbrook in Into the Wild would all have had more of a chance for serious consideration if it were not for the Academy’s miscategorization of Mr. Bardem. If anybody in the film world gave out awards for multiple virtuosity, this year it would go to Philip Seymour Hoffman for his brilliant portrayals in The Savages and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, in addition to being the best thing in Charlie Wilson’s War.

The ringer in the best director category is Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the odds-on favorite to win in the foreign-language category. Nonetheless, I will go out on a limb and choose Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men, as a way of compensating for the fact that they have never won an Oscar. It is also a way of balancing the awards in an unusually competitive year. That Joe Wright was not nominated as the director of Atonement is another indication that Atonement is not in the running for best picture. By my convoluted reasoning, Jason Reitman might win if there is a complete sweep for Juno, which I doubt. Tony Gilroy for Michael Clayton is not as well known as the other nominees. Paul Thomas Anderson will win if There Will Be Blood becomes a sweep film, which I also doubt.

For original screenplay, I would guess that the much publicized Diablo Cody has a slight edge for Juno, though I am wary of a surprise shift in the screenplay category to Brad Bird (with story by Jan Pinkava, Jim Capobianco and Mr. Bird) for, of all things, Ratatouille, the wittiest and sharpest piece of animation anyone has seen in ages. Needless to say, Ratatouille is a shoo-in for its own category. Tamara Jenkins for The Savages, Nancy Oliver for Lars and the Real Girl, and Tony Gilroy for Michael Clayton are all worthy runners-up unless Mr. Gilroy becomes
part of a Michael Clayton sweep, which, again, I very much doubt.

For adapted screenplay Sarah Polley should be a lock for the Oscars with Away From Her, particularly if Julie Christie wins Best Actress. Joel and Ethan Coen are again strong contenders for No Country for Old Men, as are Ronald Harwood for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Paul Thomas Anderson for There Will Be Blood. The fifth nominee, Christopher Hampton, for Atonement, would seem to be out of it inasmuch as the director of Atonement, Joe Wright, did not make the final cut.

Update: The Screen Actors Guild Awards, sort of a cross between the Oscars and the Golden Globes (in also doing television), have just named Julie Christie as best actress, Ruby Dee as best supporting actress, Daniel Day-Lewis as best actor and Javier Bardem as best supporting actor, my only agreement with the guild. Since the Screen Actors Guild includes a large portion of the Academy voters, I am not going to butt my head against the wall in frustration. So I am changing one of my previous choices, though not the arcane reasoning behind it. I now pick Julie Christie to win best actress over Ellen Page, and stick to all of my other choices through thick and thin. Not only did Darling Julie look as divine as ever at the guild affair, in her very first sentence, she invoked the magic word, “unions,” as a positive force in these troubled times. With all the members of one guild or another voting in the Academy, it would be sheer folly to vote against her. Perhaps I am wrong about Juno too, but I have done enough backtracking for one column already. Besides, I simply refuse to believe that the Academy will vote for a downer like No Country for Old Men. There is always the chance that there will be an Academy backlash against the guild on this one issue.

The comedy starring Ellen Page and Michael Cera averaged an astronomical $63,000 on three screens, beating out Atonement—currently, according to buzz and conventional wisdom, the Oscar forerunner for best picture—which had an impressive $55,000 average on two screens and The Golden Compass, which managed a rather respectable $42,000 average on 10 screens. So, to recap, in a town where neither Atonement, nor The Golden Compass faltered, Juno shined brightest. A Reitman hasn’t been this popular in this city, since the first Ghost Busters in 1984.

Meanwhile, Enchanted (No. 3) dropped two spots, but maintained a healthy $13,000 average in its second week, staving off an especially robust No Country for Old Men (No. 4), with an equivalent average, but showing at one less theater in its fifth week. (Old men, maybe not. But, old movies? Sure!)

Savages (No. 6) expanded into four theaters but, with all the stellar competition, could only manage to move up two spots. Its average, which is hovering around $20,000, means this one should stick around in the top ten for at least a couple more weeks.

Beowulf (No. 9) took the steepest drop, hemorrhaging close to 50 percent of its business and sliding six spots in its fourth week. With another special effects laden fantasy film, Compass, debuting, this should come as no real surprise.

And if Grace Is Gone didn’t star John Cusack—in a role where the veteran actor is practically begging to be nominated for an Oscar—and wasn’t being distributed by the Weinsteins, it would be this week’s Straight-to-the-Netflix-Queue Award winner. Playing on four screens—two in the city—the film suffered a $3,500 average and couldn’t break into the Manhattan top ten. Hmmm … maybe it was the glasses?

List of theaters: Paris, Zeigfeld, Oprheum, East 85th St., 86th St. East, 84th St., Lincoln Plaza, 62nd and Broadway, Lincoln Square, Magic Johnson, 72nd St East, Cinemas 1, 2 &3rd Ave, 64th and 2nd , Imaginasian, Manhattan Twin, First and 62nd St., Angelika Film Center, Quad, IFC Center, Film Forum, Village East, Village Seven, Cinema Village, Union Square, Essex, Battery Park 11, Sunshine, 34th Street, Empire, E-Walk, Chelsea, 19th Street East, and Kips Bay.

Manhattan Weekend Box Office: How moviegoers in the multiplexes of middle America choose to spend their ten-spot is probably a big deal in Hollywood. But here in Manhattan, the hottest movies aren't always the ones making the big bucks nationwide. Using Nielsen numbers for Manhattan theaters alone and comparing them to the performance of the national weekend box office can tell you a lot about our Blue State sensibilities. Or nothing at all! Each Monday afternoon, we will bring you the results.

BY REX REED

The genuinely talented Joe Wright has made a film to make us believe in movies again. MORE ...

Must I Atone for My Love of Atonement?

BY ANDREW SARRIS

From Keira Knightley to the hair and makeup lady, the people behind this adaptation of Ian McEwan’s WWII epic created a movie so good, it’s almost sinful. MORE ...

Kidman’s Face Is Perfect for Sci-Fi!

BY SARA VILKOMERSON

Last weekend, family fun ruled the box office as Enchanted, that Amy Adams-Patrick Dempsey Disney fairy-tale romp, was again No. 1, bringing in another $17 million, totalling more than $70 million overall (that’s a lot of Mcdollars). This might be good news for New Line, ready to unveil its big hitter for the season, the ambitious The Golden Compass. MORE ...

Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt think stripping for the camera—any camera—is poor form. But Keira Knightley sure doesn’t seem to mind. For Interview’s December/January issue, the Atonement star says sayonara to her fashionable frippery. (Never mind that she looks like actress Famke Janssen’s evil, thigh-clamping character in GoldenEye on the cover; at least the poor thing doesn’t have Tom Ford chewing on her ear.) But, hey—that’s okay! Human beings are deeper, more complex than just a two-dimensional photo or a clip of their bosoms-n-bums. “People are many different things at once,” Ms. Knightley told the floppy pub. “We can be complete wankers one minute and totally fantastic the next.”

Next! At just 22 years old, Ms. Knightley—who must by now have more magazine covers under her, um, garter than Cindy—thinks of her present self as enjoying a “Hollywood-glamour phase.” Gone are the days, the actress said, of her “girl next door” persona, and thank God for that! “I think it’s wonderful to have those aesthetic fantasies [of Hollywood-glamour]. Those films pretend that you can wake up in the morning with bright red lipstick and perfect false eyelashes and hair,” she said, seemingly forgetting about people like the singer Eve, who needn't pretend at all. “I have always loved being transported to another time and place, and I love to be carried away in a fantasy.” Yup, that is pretty fun.

Those who want to be hauled off to Lala Land by Ms. Knightley, can take a trip to director Joe Wright’s Atonement, which opens on Friday.

Despite all expectations, 2007 is turning out to be a sorry year for movies. That’s why Atonement has rejuvenated my flagging energy at the very last minute. Elegantly directed by Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice), meticulously acted by a perfect cast, immaculately adapted by the great British screenwriter Christopher Hampton and lavishly filmed with a respect for both intimate detail and sweeping narrative, Atonement is everything a true lover of literature and movies could possibly hope for. It is unquestionably, without any reservations, my favorite film of the year.

Based on the critically praised best seller by Ian McEwan, it’s a story of a youthful jealousy that leads to a monstrous falsehood that in turn ruins the lives of a disparate group of people, and ultimate retribution that comes decades too late. On the hottest day of the summer in 1935, just a few years before the war, the wealthy, vacationing Tallis family is expecting guests at their vast country estate. Precocious youngest daughter Briony, a fledgling writer of 13, played by the patrician and deeply sensitive newcomer Saoirse Ronan, is impressionable, sexually naïve and resentful of the attention older sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) receives from the boys, especially the hunky gardener Robbie (James McAvoy), the housekeeper’s son, who’s beneath their social station, and whose college education at Cambridge has been financed by their father.

From an upstairs window, Briony watches Cecilia strip off her clothes and lure Robbie into the fountain. Nothing happens beyond a kiss, but Briony’s scheming imagination sets into motion the mischief that will impact their lives forever. When the girls’ older brother Leon (Patrick Kennedy) arrives for the weekend with an arrogant friend who drunkenly assaults a female cousin, Briony falsely identifies the innocent Robbie as the rapist. Convicted and punished for a sex crime, Robbie’s life is ruined. Four years later, he leaves prison and joins the army, but the estranged Cecilia has remained true, and the unjustly separated lovers endure years of grief, desire and emotional tension in the Henry James tradition until they meet in a moving scene set in a terminal cafe right out of Brief Encounter. The repressed Briony, meanwhile, surmounts her own class boundaries by nursing the broken bodies of soldiers in a war-torn hospital, but making amends comes late. Decades later, when she turns the saga into a hugely successful novel for posterity, everyone is relieved that the story had a happy ending. Or did it? In an electrifying finale, offered almost as a postscript, Vanessa Redgrave appears as the dying Briony to publicize her book, still suffering guilt for the damage caused by the deluded fiction of her youth, and reveals the actual facts. Atonement at last? True or false, a writer always has the last word.

The genuinely talented Joe Wright does an engrossing job of turning literature into cinematic poetry. In one magnificently constructed scene after another, he transports us from the idyllic sunlight and chlorophyll of the British countryside darkened by the storm clouds of approaching war, to the blood and chloroform of the trenches in France, the terror in the streets and bomb shelters of London and the galvanizingly surreal nightmare on the beaches of Dunkirk, shot in the perpetual half-light of an abandoned carnival with a bombed carousel in the backdrop. The sets and costumes stagger the imagination. And a uniformly brilliant cast brings three-dimensional humanity to the pages of Christopher Hampton’s script. The impulsive Briony, who sends the wrong man to hell, is played at different stages in her life by two remarkable actresses—Ms. Ronan is a staggeringly assured youngster, and Romola Garai as the mature version of the same tortured character is haunting. They both outclass and upstage the lovely but serenely bland Keira Knightley, who is all cold angles without soft edges. As the wronged man, James McAvoy fulfills the promise he showed in The Last King of Scotland, easily emerging as the film’s star in an honest, heart-rending performance of strength and integrity that overcomes the romantic slush it might have been.

Atonement is both a lyrical adaptation of great fiction and a revelation of the potential power of cinema to twist, mould, convince and entertain. Cynics may dismiss it as a period weepie from the Merchant/Ivory school, but Atonement is so much more than that. The five-minute tracking shot of the carnage at Dunkirk, the rush of water surging through a tube station as people die seeking shelter from the blitz, nurses marching in formation around a hospital as the lights go off, one by one, above them—all indelible images that transform a great book many called “unfilmable” into an overwhelming experience that has revived my faith in motion pictures.

Joe Wright’s Atonement, from a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, based on the novel by Ian McEwan, transforms a misguided adolescent error of judgment with tragic consequences into an ironic epic of a heroic period in British history. This serves to illuminate how helpless we all are when we try to swim against the current of global forces, not to mention the inexorable tide of time itself. This film is also one of the most successful adaptations of a distinguished novel I have ever seen. It gives me renewed faith that good and great movies can still be made even under the present chaotic conditions in the world’s film industries, and in the proliferation of technological substitutes for old-fashioned habitual moviegoing.

I must confess at this point that, try as I may, I cannot explain why Atonement is so good without giving away its convoluted trick plot. So those of my readers who have either not read the book or read or heard anything about the twists in the film’s narrative are advised to read no further in this essentially rave review, if they are in the habit of feeling betrayed by the critic’s disclosure of the story’s details.

The fact is that I had not yet read the book when I saw its screen adaptation. Would I have liked the film less without the element of surprise if I had? I don’t think so, but I cannot be sure of what my hypothetically more informed reaction would have been in this particular instance. These days there are so many spillers of the beans, from the ever more copious coming attractions to the ever more uninhibited entertainment bloggers, that we reviewers are caught in a constant quandary. To tell or not to tell, that is the problem. Yet if I choose to tell on this occasion, it is because I genuinely feel that there is no other way to review it, particularly since I am notorious as a fanatical defender of narrative in the cinema as a sine qua non even against the most accomplished cinematic experiments in pure abstraction.

The first part of Atonement begins and ends on a fateful summer day and night in 1935 on the wealthy Tallis family’s luxurious English estate in Surrey. (Actually, this sequence was filmed on location in and around a privately owned mansion in Shropshire.) It is there that we first encounter Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), a precocious writer of plays, of which her mother, Emily Tallis (Harriet Walter) enthusiastically approves. We encounter also Briony’s older sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), who has become romantically attracted to Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the Cambridge-educated son of the Tallis family housekeeper, Grace Turner (Brenda Blethyn). Robbie has always been treated as part of the Tallis family, and Briony has also developed a crush on him, but then she spots him embracing Cecilia, and is outraged by his betrayal. Hence, when a young female guest of the Tallis family is criminally molested in the night and cannot identify her assailant, Briony steps forward to accuse Robbie of the crime out of pure spite. Indeed, Briony goes so far as to convince an initially skeptical police inspector that she had seen Robbie furtively leaving the scene of the offense. The sequence ends with Robbie being taken away by the police as his mother bangs angrily on the police car windows. We learn later that Robbie is promptly convicted and imprisoned for a brief time until he is persuaded by the authorities to join the army and thus get his sentence reduced on the eve of World War II.

From that fateful day and night in 1935, the second part of Atonement flashes-forward to 1940, on the eve of the British evacuation of its expeditionary force from Dunkirk. Briony, now 18, and now played by Romola Garai, and Cecilia (still played by Ms. Knightley) are serving as nurses in two different military hospitals in London. We learn that Cecilia has never stopped loving Robbie, and she makes him promise to return to her when the war is over. By now, Briony has deeply regretted her action, and seeks to make amends in any way she can, particularly when, in a flash of memory, she recalls another male dinner guest as having been the real culprit.

Meanwhile, Robbie is wandering with two comrades in arms across empty poppy fields in the general retreat of the British and French from Hitler’s victorious Nazi legions.

All the book’s locations in both Britain and France were replicated entirely on British soil, at times with masses of extras. A great deal of stylization is employed in the creation of the historical spectacles, but we do not realize until almost the very end of the film how much of the story has been invented in Briony’s fertile but now novelistic imagination to atone for the actually irrevocable wrong she inflicted on Robbie and Cecilia.

What is most remarkable about the film, and most deserving of praise and admiration, is the astounding continuity of Briony’s character, sustained by three different actresses: Ms. Ronan as Briony at 13, Ms. Garai as Briony at 18, and the ineffable Vanessa Redgrave, one of the great actresses of the 20th and 21st centuries, as Briony in her climactically repentant 70’s, confessing her fictions in her self-proclaimed final novel, which makes up most of what we have been credulously looking at as real in the second part of the film. Her readers, the elderly Briony tells her interviewer, would never appreciate the bitter, brutal finality of the truth. Despite the consoling images she provides in her novel, and reenacted in the film, of Robbie and Cecilia being reunited after Dunkirk, and walking hand-in-hand on the beach, with the White Cliffs of Dover in the background, both Robbie and Cecilia, in fact, die from enemy action in Dunkirk and London respectively, in 1940. It hurts me even now to report this discordance between a hopeful fiction and a hopeless dose of reality, for which there is not adequate atonement in Briony’s lifetime.

Mr. Wright and Mr. Hampton have fashioned an enduring cinematic masterpiece out of a very difficult and diffuse novel, albeit one written with a very precise brilliance. I would extend my kudos to the three actresses who reportedly worked very hard to coordinate their distinctive bodies to correspond to the single character of Briony. Ms. Knightley and Mr. McAvoy make a very complex and charismatic loving couple as Cecilia and Robbie. Finally, for the first time ever, I am going to single out a hair and makeup designer: Ivana Primorac, for her work on the Three Brionys in One.