Movie Reviews: Restrepo, Eyes Wide Open, The Sun Behind the Clouds

KNIGHT AND DAY You know and love Jason Bourne as an implacable killing machine. But what if he were instead a mouthy asshole? That's the provocative question posed by James Mangold's Knight and Day, which casts Tom Cruise as a Bourne wannabe who seriously can't shut up. As Roy Miller, an agent gone rogue from the FBI or the NSA or the CIA or whatever the fuck, Cruise never stops flapping his gums. He's just so irritating, Roy Miller. Or, really, it's Tom Cruise who's irritating. There's never been a particularly crisp line between intense, super-awesome Tom Cruise and the characters he plays. In Knight and Day, Cruise's age-old cool curdles into motormouthed neediness. Approaching 50, he suddenly seems desperate for our love. The love Roy Miller's angling for is that of June Havens, a plucky cipher played by Cameron Diaz, who Roy runs into — literally! — in the Wichita airport. He's handsome enough, she's apparently on the prowl, and their flight to Boston is filled with torrid flirting and enemy agents. One unconvincingly filmed plane crash later, the two are on the run, with the explosions, gunplay and spycraft provoking an awakening in June's soul. The plot, such as it is, revolves around the hunt for a precocious scientist (Paul Dano) who has invented a perpetual-energy battery. In the end, you may wonder if the makers of this hyperactive, joyless thriller didn't stumble upon a perpetual-energy battery themselves — and not for the good: Knight and Day keeps going, and going and going. (Dan Kois) (Citywide)

LET IT RAIN A specialist in choreographing talky scenes, Agnès Jaoui may also be the most aggressively middlebrow filmmaker working today. Her latest, which, like The Taste of Others (2000) and Look at Me (2004), she co-wrote with co-star (and former spouse) Jean-Pierre Bacri, dabbles in potentially provocative topics like racism and sexism — what one character keenly refers to as "ordinary humiliation" — only to quickly drop them for a Nina Simone–scored scene of gazing at old family photos. Solipsistic feminist writer and politician Agathe (Jaoui) returns to her childhood home in Provence to help her aggrieved younger sister sort through their dead mother's affairs; while there, she agrees to be interviewed for a documentary on successful women by Karim (Jamel Debbouze), the son of her family's housekeeper, and Michel (Bacri), a washed-up TV journo. Aiming to be a seriocomic movie of ideas but desperate not to offend or challenge, Let It Rain soon settles for being another smug comedy of bourgeois manners, with buzzing cell phones frequently deployed as exemplars of Our Modern Folly. Look at Me, with its consistent through line of how hard it is for fat girls, seems like the work of a Redstocking in comparison. (Melissa Anderson) (Fallbrook, Playhouse, Sunset 5, Town Center)

GO  RESTREPO Amid a glut of amped nonfiction films about the U.S. at war, journalists Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger's documentary about their 2007 stay with an American platoon in a Taliban-infested region of Afghanistan raises its voice by lowering it. Stripped almost bare of mood music, input from experts or Army poobahs, this hypervérité film belongs to the soldiers whose daily routines it follows as they hole up in a valley that turns them into "fish in a barrel" for Taliban snipers. The warrior drama unfolds organically, without artificial suspense. The film moves to the rhythms of a combat soldier's life in the field, which consists of long periods of unspeakable tedium interrupted by the confused mayhem of battle with an unseen enemy. Were it not punctuated with postdeployment testimony from the absurdly young surviving soldiers back at their base in Italy, the film would unfold almost without formal structure. If Restrepo shares the sympathy for its raw young subjects that marks most current films about the U.S. military abroad, it is neither romantic nor sentimental about the impossibly contradictory tasks with which these men have been charged, and the sometimes clueless ways in which they try to maintain good relations with local communities even as they bomb the crap out of their villages. Talk about the fog of war. (Ella Taylor) (Landmark)

RAAVAN The plight of a Western critic tackling the modern Bollywood blockbuster: Although a sea change has increased its appeal to international audiences (the standard three-hour-plus running times are suddenly truncated; the violence and sexual innuendos are more overt), the supersize melodrama inherent in populist Hindi cinema often feels strained and corny to our unadjusted senses. Nothing has changed there in director Mani Ratnam's epic reunion with his Guru leads (superstars Abhishek Bachchan and his real-life spouse, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan), a loose reboot of the ancient Sanskrit poem Ramayana as a cops-and-robbers thriller — with all the requisite romance, singing and dancing. Roguish bandit Beera (Bachchan), the protective leader of the oppressed Lal Maati have-nots, has kidnapped free-spirited classical dancer Ragini (Rai Bachchan) as part of a personal vendetta against her husband, aggressive police inspector Dev (Vikram). Feared, revered and said to have 10 heads while being everywhere at once, Beera bugs out his eyes and hides in shadows to appear brutish, yet Ragini falls for him anyway. The love triangle is as tediously underwhelming as the slo-mo action, but the actors, costumes and lush mountainsides are easy on the eye, and Slumdog Millionaire composer A.R. Rahman's bouncy, Sufi-tronic score is a real foot-tapper. (Aaron Hillis) (Culver Plaza, Fallbrook)