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.

the wachowski brothers' SPEED RACER (2008)

bruce timm's BATMAN: MASK OF THE PHANTASM (1993)

i'm the first to put Batman: The Animated Series forth as the most faithful, accomplished superhero cartoon in memory (and up there with the best cartoons period) but its bigscreen foray doesn't completely live up to its legacy; Timm & co don't seem comfortable flexing their storytelling muscles at "feature" length, and even though the flashback structure provides passable padding, the story isn't sufficiently engaging (and, more critically, the action sequences aren't nearly numerous or spectacular enough) to make too much of an impression.

joss whedon's SERENITY (2005)

how embarrassing for George Lucas that the summer of Sith should come to an end with a piece of science fiction that succeeds so wildly on every level that his Star Wars prequels failed. with Serenity Whedon gives his nearly-perfect Firefly the grandest sendoff imaginable without skipping a beat; the finale is every bit as lively, inspired, and downright fun as the series' best, but it's also astonishingly comfortable as a feature, and as much as Whedon impresses as a first-time director, it's still his writing that steals the show. i'm not talking about the trademark banter (which, in another trademark, occasionally misfires), but rather the spotless transition of scope and structure from hourlong to feature length that shines a light on Whedon as a trully accomplished screenwriter; the bravura opening sequence alone is a graduate class in both construction and unobtrusive exposition, pulling the uninitiated into Firefly's universe with one hand and giving old fans a welcoming pat on the back with the other. whether it's television, film, or even comics, there's little excuse for people not to be constantly throwing money at Joss Whedon.