The Drop

A star-making performance by Tom Hardy highlights the week in film.

Enough Said

Nicole Holofcener made my top-ten list in 2010 with "Please Give," but her new film, "Enough Said," falls well short of that standard. Too often, the writer-director's insights into human nature and behavior are obscured by a plot barely above the level of "Three's Company" and an overly diffuse script populated by too many characters.

The Central Park Five, Killing Them Softly

The Central Park Five

Killing Them Softly

Ken Burns co-directed the documentary "The Central Park Five" with his daughter, Sarah, who had clerked at a law firm representing the five black boys wrongly convicted in 1989 of the rape and attempted murder of the Central Park Jogger, Trisha Mieli. Burns interviews the five men (four via video, one only on
audiotape), now free and in their late thirties, and their candor and strength of character are the film's greatest assets. Its weaknesses are overlength married with a lack of detail and specificity (it doesn't seem to understand exactly who was doing what where in the park that night any better than the trial jurors). What could have been a study in poor procedure à la Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line" remains vague and blurry. And the issues raised by the boys' confessions under duress were examined more rigorously and powerfully by a documentary from earlier this year entitled "Scenes of a Crime."