Kristin Scott Thomas

Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – Often when novels with quirky titles get made into films, all that is left of the quirk is the name on the cover. That is exactly what has happened to “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen,” a tome authored by Paul Torday, and reduced to torpid blandness by director Lasse Hallstrøm.

Rating: 2.5/5.0

CHICAGO – From what I understand, the name Largo Winch is a household one in Europe. While it may mean nothing here, a French spy thriller with a name like “The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch,” based on a European comic book, might sound like the perfect alternative for arthouse movie goers looking for something different this holiday weekend. Sadly, from the very beginning, “Largo Winch” feels like nothing different at all.

Rating: 3.5/5.0

CHICAGO – The old saying, “those who cannot remember the past is doomed to repeat it” applies succinctly in “Sarah’s Key,” a Holocaust film with a French twist. Kristin Scott Thomas plays an American journalist who uncovers the facts in a less-remembered incident that reverberates to now.

Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – The great John Lennon would have been 70 years old on October 9th, but never got to expand upon the journey that started in a small British port town called Liverpool, where a young Lennon was shuffled from home-to-home between his Aunt Mimi and his mother Julia. Aaron Johnson plays the teenage rock icon in a crucial point in his life in the poignant “Nowhere Boy.”

Rating: 3.5/5.0

CHICAGO – The most perfect description for the new French suspense film “Tell No One” comes from the most unlikely source: a 1957 American film called “Sweet Smell of Success”.

Describing one of the characters in that film, one line observes that he has “more twists than a barrel of pretzels”. Take that barrel and put it through the zigzag of a taffy-pulling machine and those results might be able to straighten out the labyrinth of circumstances in “Tell No One”.