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Despite the controversy Film Forum mentioned last week, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone enchanted audiences and soared at the box office again this week. The film has earned $187 million as of Tuesday, but will not fulfill projections that it will outdo The Phantom Menace's record-time leap to the $200 million mark. Critics continued to offer ho-hum summations. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, for example, calls it "a big and often sloppy Hollywood production with some bad computer graphics, a syrupy score from John Williams, and a focus on storybook adventure rather than Rowling's oddball characters."

Incidentally, there's an interesting feature in this week's Los Angeles Times regarding how some critics in the religious press, including Christianity Today's Douglas LeBlanc, were introduced to the film.

Meanwhile, an array of films with less hype opened this week, earning a similarly wide variety of 'bah humbugs' from critics.

Movies and television have rediscovered spies. On television, ABC's new series Alias places an admirable heroine undercover as a double agent for the CIA and a sinister "splinter group" called SD-6. The show is impressive in that Sidney (multi-talented newcomer Jennifer Garner) is placed in seemingly inescapable dilemmas, and she emerges with her secrets—and more importantly, a solid sense of right and wrong—intact.

Good and evil are not so clear in this week's slick new big screen thriller, Spy Game.

Tony Scott, director of blockbuster action films like Top Gun, Crimson Tide, and Enemy of the State, has crafted another intelligent popcorn flick, and this one boasts the strongest lead talents of any film he's made so far. Robert Redford stars as Nathan Muir, a seasoned CIA professional readying for retirement; and Brad Pitt plays his prodigy, Tom Bishop.

When Bishop gets caught and tortured by the Chinese on the eve of an important and volatile presidential visit to China, the CIA wants to find a politically convenient excuse to forget about him and leave him to his painful fate. But Muir is not that kind of mentor. He's not about to leave his man behind.

Critics in the religious media praised Scott's technique, but had mixed feelings about the story itself. Michael Elliott (Movie Parables) reports, "Spy Game is an intellectual thriller much more than it is an emotional roller coaster. Screenwriter Michael Frost Beckner … certainly has insight as to the workings of the CIA and some of the moral questions that arise from men who work as undercover agents in hostile territories." He found some of it perhaps too challenging: "The structure of the screenplay does lend to some difficulties in comprehension." He finds no challenges in watching Redford and Pitt work together, saying both are at the top of their game.

Bob Smithouser (Focus on the Family) calls Spy Game an "engagingly written, visually arresting thriller. It neither confuses, nor condescends." But he objects to hearing men under pressure resorting to profanity. "Had they taken the language down a notch, Spy Game would have been a worthwhile flick."

"Seeing Redford and Pitt on the screen together is all a story needs to give it passion and purpose," raves Holly McClure (The Orange County Register). "Scott goes well beyond both of those ingredients to deliver an exciting, well-written, edge-of-your-seat spy adventure that will satisfy any fan of the genre."

Ted Baehr (Movieguide) is relieved that the film is "not an anti-American diatribe, though it does not paint a pretty picture of the greedy contemporary CIA." He is most troubled by the portrayal of "moral" heroes whose "radical individualism" excuses them from certain moral responsibilities. "A little understanding of moral virtue by the filmmakers would have sharpened the distinction between good and evil in the story and improved the movie tremendously."

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November (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45