Kristin Scott Thomas

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.

CHICAGO – In the second HollywoodChicago.com Hookup: Film with our new social giveaway technology, we have 40 admit-two movie passes up for grabs to the advance screening of the highly anticipated new comedy/romance film “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen”!

CHICAGO – There have been a series of catalog releases so far this year (releases that aren’t exactly new but weren’t available in HD before) and there are many exciting ones still to come (Universal has an amazing slate of releases scheduled throughout the year). 2012 is going to be the year in which you complete your collection. You may want to include one of the three recently-released Lionsgate/Miramax movies to celebrate Oscar season. These were some of the Academy’s most beloved.

CHICAGO – Sometimes one performance can bolster the impact of an entire production. That’s certainly the case with Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s overlooked adaptation of Tatiana de Rosnay’s bestseller. Though the picture’s marquee name is Kristin Scott Thomas, her character merely provides a modern framework for the real story, set during the massive 1942 deportation of Jewish civilians from France.

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. It’s surprisingly generic, clichéd, and often dull, with only a few set pieces and dashes of French style to separate it. Far from a complete disaster, but forgettable in nearly every way.

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.

CHICAGO – For every instance of “monumental” history, there are a series of events surrounding it that gets swept under the rug, but have the same bearing as the bigger occurrence. Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner tells one of those background stories in “Sarah’s Key,” a sorrowful piece of French history during World War II.

CHICAGO – “Do you know what it means? Rock ‘n’ roll? Sex.” To a kid trying to both get laid as often as possible and break out of the numbing routine he sees most of his friends go through, a line like this can be life-changing. “Nowhere Boy” certainly implies that it was for John Lennon, as it came near the beginning of his love of music and we all know where that led.

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.”

Blu-Ray Rating: 4.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Guillaume Canet’s excellent “Tell No One” is perhaps the only 2008 thriller to truly deserve the often overused term, “Hitchockian”. The master would have enjoyed this twisting and turning ride that ironically had enough people talking to make it the most successful foreign language film in the United States last year with $6 million in domestic receipts (yes, I’m sad too that such a low total can claim that title).