"You gotta give ‘em hope" is Harvey Milk's mantra throughout Gus Van Sant's biopic of the San Francisco politician/gay rights activist.  Despite the film's tragic and looming ending, it is difficult not to walk away from the film filled with the hope that Sean Penn's character spreads to everyone he meets.  The film, of course, is timed perfectly with California's recent Proposition 8 vote, but it reaches beyond the scope of California's politics and gives us a vivid picture of a human spirit bursting at it seams with love and hope for everyone.  And while it is rooted in the reality of the civil rights of homosexuals, it transcends the Castro district of the 70s.

Shock value in art is generally something I frown upon because, if for no other reason, it is a cheap attempt to elicit a visceral response from the audience. There is superficial shock effect, as might be seen in a low budget horror movie or an absurdly avant-garde flick (see: "Vampiyaz"), which pale in comparison to subtle, unnerving aspects woven into works that effect long after leaving the museum, after pulling out of the theater parking lot, after closing the cover. Emily Dickinson claimed, "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know it is poetry." If her description holds true, then the movie "Revolutionary Road" is, no doubt, a lyric told from multiple perspectives, often without words.

Sam Mendes tells the story of an unrecognized, or unspoken, emptiness of the American dream in a way similar to his 1999 release "American Beauty," though this rendition lacks Kevin Spacey's lighthearted quips that assuage the bluntness of the broken lives exposed in the movie. Revolutionary Road pulls no punches while maintaining a certain calculated tact throughout, illustrating the nightmare that often haunts those stepping into adulthood: the perpetual routine of a dull existence. Mendes holds a magnifying glass to the deterioration of the Wheeler's, DeCaprio and Winslet, lives, crumbling within the suffocation and apathy that result from the dynamic of their relationship.

What if Conan O'Brien landed a series of interviews with former President George W. Bush?  And what if, towards the end of hours of slightly interesting political banter, the president admitted that there had been no real evidence to go to war with Iraq?  Such an implausible scenario is precisely the story of Ron Howard's Oscar-nominated film, Frost/Nixon.  Having resigned the presidency on the heals of Watergate, the disgraced Richard Nixon is shown plotting his redemption from his Californian ocean-side mansion.  Director Howard portrays the infamous president as a somewhat awkward man with little use for small talk who, despite his public disgrace, believes he will soon return to political power.  An opportunity for such a return presents itself in the unlikely form of British television personality David Frost.

Over the years, Hollywood has managed to condition the viewer with particular movie-going expectations.  We expect to be entertained.  We expect a good story.  And we expect that story to have resolution.  In the Oscar-nominated film Doubt, writer/director John Patrick Shanley goes against this notion of a nicely wrapped Hollywood story when he chooses to leave the film's central question unanswered.

Doubt centers itself around the tenuous working relationship between a free spirited Catholic priest, Father Flynn (Philips Seymour Hoffman), and the parish's austere Principal, Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep).  When Father Flynn begins to give both special recognition and time to the school's first black student, Sister Beauvier begins to suspect inappropriate sexual behavior between the two.  Sister Beauvier successfully rallies suspicion and the audience is left with... did anything happen?