Review: Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Reviews

Dark matter

An astonishingly unpredictable ending

By GERALD PEARY | April 9, 2008

2.5 Stars

Dark Matter

Liu Xing (a likable Liu Ye) is an ambitious young astrophysicist from Beijing who’s frustrated that Communism doesn’t allow him to challenge his professors. So he’s psyched to arrive at an unnamed university in the American Southwest where he can study under his scientist hero, Jacob Reiser (a craven Aidan Quinn), who’s world-famous for his cosmic string theory. But Reiser’s informality barely hides his need to be worshipped by his graduate students. So when Liu comes up with his own cosmological theory about “dark matter” in the universe, Reiser turns on him and rejects his proposal for a PhD thesis. This first film by Chinese director Chen Shi-Zheng and American screenwriter Billy Shebar is an intelligent, well-acted TV-level movie (Meryl Streep scores, no surprise, as a do-gooder rich lady), but with an astonishingly unpredicted ending. 90 minutes | Kendall Square

Related: Nobel Son, Review: Knowing, Heaven and Hell, More

Nobel Son
On its surface, this quirky thriller from Randall Miller has indie-style appeal, with Alan Rickman in a delicious role as a gluttonous, philandering, narcissistic physics professor whose Nobel Prize win is deflated by the kidnapping of his rebellious philosophy-major son.
Review: Knowing
Although he's an MIT astrophysicist, John doesn't use science to go at the mystery so much as pints of whiskey and lunatic calls to the FBI.
Heaven and Hell
Tom Hanks is back as Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon, but the filmmakers have ditched the long hair and allowed Hanks to look like an early-fiftysomething (which he is) instead of The Da Vinci Code 's 40ish hipster wanna-be.
Puzzle Quest: Galactrix
It's appropriate that the new Puzzle Quest game should take place in space. Just like a black hole, it's impossible to resist; you wind up crushed into a subatomic particle.
Review: Goodbye Solo
So far in his brief career, North Carolina native Ramin Bahrani has tapped into the greatest naturalist filmmakers and come back the richer.
Review: The Sun
No sun is in sight in the beginning of Aleksandr Sokurov’s look at the last days of divinity for Emperor Hirohito.
War games
Wendy Wasserstein might have chosen a lesser light in whose shadow to cast a play than King Lear .
Review: In Search of Memory
Memory, like consciousness, eludes analysis. Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel, the subject of this subtly layered documentary by Petra Seeger, took the approach of reductionism to figure it out.
Review: Moon
Duncan Jones begins his first feature with an infomercial for "Lunar Industries, Ltd" that celebrates Lunar's solution to global warming: strip-mining the surface of the moon for "Helium 3," an isotope that can provide a limitless source of non-polluting fuel.
2009: The year in Phoenix blog posts
Our most popular blog posts from 2009
Dad’s Place
Sometimes it's hard to assess the quality of a small diner-like place, in a small tourist-type town, but when you notice the cook-owner, Jean Pion, snipping fresh herbs for his omelets from pots he grows behind the eatery three seasons of the year, then your curiosity is piqued. At least mine was.
Less

Topics: Reviews , Science and Technology, Sciences, Chen Shi-Zheng, More

| More

ARTICLES BY GERALD PEARY

REVIEW: I WISH | May 22, 2012
Two elementary school brothers living in southern Japan are forced to live in different cities due to the estrangement of their parents.

REVIEW: SURVIVING PROGRESS | May 15, 2012
Despite prestigious talking heads like Margaret Atwood, Jane Goodall, and Stephen Hawking, there is nothing new here beyond what every conscientious liberal already knows is wrong with the world.

REVIEW: HEADHUNTERS | May 08, 2012
Roger (Aksel Hennie) is an Oslo yuppie with a gorgeous, blonde wife, a top-drawer job as a corporate headhunter, and a lucrative side employment stealing fancy paintings.

REVIEW: ELLES | May 08, 2012
How did the Polish filmmaker Malgoska Szumowska dupe the classy Juliette Binoche to participate in such a dubious, exploitative film?

REVIEW: THIS IS NOT A FILM | May 01, 2012
It can't be a film, because the acclaimed director Jafar Panahi ( The Circle , etc.) has been ordered not to make any by the Iranian theocrats who have also sentenced the dissident filmmaker to an upcoming jail sentence.