Reign Over Me: Verb Preposition Me. Please.

I seriously love me some Cheadle. The m,an exudes class in everything he does. Every action he takes is a man of strength. He can't not play a likable character. Does that make him a limited actor? Maybe, but I bet if he read this review he'd be like "The FUCK I can't!" and BAM! He's LeStat and we're all like "Ohhhh!" the way a crowd does when a pretentous critic gets schooled in a fundamental way.

What I liked about this film is that it was often a big surprise to me. There was an entire sequence of scenes near the end when I was totally up in the air about what was next. And maybe I shouldn't have even been thinking about what the film was doing (as in a good film should cut me away from that umbilical and I should find myself floating free in the moment), but come on. We've all seen film, we've all been through the flips and bends of a thousand movies, and it doesn't take someone who is very interested in film to feel that a story playing before us is about to move in certain ways. And certainly, this film wasn't without that, here and there--it's an American film with very bankable stars--but it was close enough to the characters to use the structure of plot the way a master mechanic uses only muscle memory when reaching for a tool. It never looked up. Good or bad, that's honest. And pretty rare.

I like watching people scoot around New York. It has a tactile presence that wasn't there before I'd visited. And it really is like a crazy complicated jungle. Something you can have a great time in if you know not to fuck around. The concentration of people... it's dangerous like a fire. But it's still so beautiful. Like a person's face.

Reign Over Me gets extra points for it's brief inclusion of John de Lancie. Many points.