Arlington Road

Here's a new one: a movie that I actively disliked for almost its entire running time, then unexpectedly found myself admiring enormously in retrospect, both for its gripping, uncommonly pessimistic (for Hollywood) conclusion and for the way that said conclusion neatly dismantled virtually every criticism that I'd entertained over the preceding two hours. To elaborate would spoil the fun, so suffice to say that Arlington Road, in which Jeff Bridges plays an expert on terrorism who begins to suspect that new neighbor Tim Robbins is up to no good, is an Oliver Stone-like picture minus the self-important hectoring; a political allegory that camouflages its dissection of one American tragedy by invoking another, much more recent one; and a deeply cynical '70s-style cautionary tale craftily disguised as a textbook example of that most tired of '90s genres, the [whatever]-from-Hell thriller. Were its facade more than merely serviceable (and it is serviceable, delivering a handful of decent shocks and featuring a sublime jolly/creepy performance by Joan Cusack), we'd be talking about a masterpiece; instead, it's an intriguing exercise in retroactive appreciation: a film that absolutely must be seen a second time, whether on the screen or in the mind's eye, to be properly enjoyed. Recommended. (M. D'Angelo)