jay roach's RECOUNT (2008)

if Recount's primary goal was to make me really mad all over again about something that happened eight years ago, then by all means it's a pretty wild success. as a film, though, there's not much more to it than important people (we know they are important because of the generously deployed name/position subtitles) calling each other on the telephone and saying "turn on CNN!"

alright, that's a touch unfair. but how does someone go about making a film about something like this? Roach does his damnedest, and for what it's worth some of it comes across as good drama, particularly where Laura Dern's alarmingly wonderful Katherine Harris caricature is concerned. (Spacey, on the other hand, continues that decade-long sleepwalk of his.) but short of the slumbering ire it wakes so clamorously, there's not much to Recount; we have here the cinematic (or rather televisional) incarnation of a tossed-off nonfiction pageturner, righteously indignant but skewed just enough to shirk definitiveness.

mike nichols' CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (2007)

most everyone has had the displeasure of seeing a favorite book neutered and mismanaged on the road to the silver screen, and George Crile’s superlative nonfiction yarn Charlie Wilson’s War shouldn’t be an exception to that rule: the story of Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson’s successful efforts to covertly arm Afghanis against their Soviet oppressors is terrific material, but the sequence of events is convoluted and tangled as only real life can tangle them. it’s that much more miraculous, then, that Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation is not only reverent but indeed a nearly perfect model of how such daunting material can play effortlessly onscreen. Sorkin (redeeming himself after the dreadful “Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip”) makes every choice with precision and wit, freely molding Crile’s details into a characteristically snappy, streamlined script that does the book’s larger-than-life characters and story full justice without bending under the weight of adaptation. it helps, of course, that Sorkin’s script attracted veteran subversive Mike Nichols (confidently continuing a career resurgence here) and the unexpected comedy team of Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman, all of whom are almost unfairly suited to the material. Charlie Wilson’s War could have easily been a misfire, but the talent and professionalism at hand make for one of the most satisfying (and refreshingly adult) mainstream efforts of the year.

(from the KNOXVILLE VOICE)