Outside of a few odds and ends, the summer movie season pretty much concludes today. Throw the tarp over the pool, recondition the leaf blower, it’s done. If you’re willing to lay down cash for Death Race or Babylon A.D., you are in the grips of a cinephilia that in all likelihood requires treatment, and Godspeed to you. I sympathize: if I can beat it you can beat it, and maybe Joan Allen can join our support group, too. (Death Race, Joan? For the sake of our relationship I will believe that you mistook director Paul W.S. “Alien vs. Predator” Anderson for Paul Thomas “There Will Be Blood” Anderson and couldn’t wiggle free from your contract.)

The first of your 12 steps will be laying off the C-level action stuff in the run up to Labor Day—instead, take one Elegy and call me in the morning.

Elegy opened last week in New York and Los Angeles and is fanning across the art-house circuit. It’s based on a novella by Philip Roth, which I have not read. Back in time I read every book due for prestige moviemaking, and saw more than a few whose pages came unglued in the translation, like Angela’s Ashes (1999), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), and the last crack at Roth, the Nicholas Meyer-penned The Human Stain (2003). That Meyer, best known for adding to the mythos of Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes, also wrote Elegy raised a red flag. But my fears were allayed. Elegy is one of the best films of the summer, and very possibly of the year.

(more…)