Scott Z. Burns' riveting THE REPORT offers a long-term, tied-to-a-desk brand of heroism

Wow. Filmmaker Scott Z. Burns has finally done it -- giving us an actual adult "action" movie in which the action comes from a quiet, determined man who insists on getting the truth out to the public, as well as from the supporting folk who help (or sometimes hinder) his doing it. The result is one of the year's best films: suspenseful, exciting, provocative and about something important -- the torture that our nation's CIA engaged in during the early part of this new century (the excuse for which was of course 9/11) and the congressional report about that torture and how that report came close to never seeing the light of day.

In THE REPORT, Mr. Burns (shown at right) -- best-known till now for his writing and producing credits -- shows us the ins and outs of everything from the torture itself (via well-done flashbacks that conjure the horror, ugliness and, yes, stupidity and uselessness of it all) to the long, hard, detailed road to piecing together a case against the CIA and bringing it to fruition.

Burns' screenplay well crafts all of this (his choice of events, along with how much of each to offer us, is precise and telling), while his dialog is cogent, to the point, and smart without ever seeming overly witty or too clever. The style may be documentary-like but the movie has all the narrative drive it needs.

If Burns' filmmaking style is straight-ahead and no-frills, this seems fitting. And he draws spot-on performances from his entire cast, which is filled with big names in even the smaller roles. In the leading roles are Adam Driver (above) as the young desk man who leads the investigation and puts together the titular report, and Annette Bening (below) as the Senator -- Dianne Feinstein -- whose power drives the report. Both actors could not be bettered. Driver excels at making even the smallest detail come to bright life, while Bening tamps down any kind of excess so that we see a politician trying to do what's right, even as she must continually play the political game.

The starry supporting cast includes everyone from Corey Stoll and Jon Hamm (below) to Maura Tierney, Michael C. Hall and so many other noticeable names, all of whom excel in even the smallest roles. Along the way, we revisit some shameful situations, from Abu Ghraib and EIT (enhanced interrogation technique) to break-ins, cover-ups and more. By the finale, while you'll be galvanized and moved, you may also be prone to consider just how far we've devolved, over a decade or so, into a culture and political administration for which just about every action these days demands a cover-up.

From Amazon Studios and running two hours, The Report opens in theaters this Friday, November 15, and will be available via Amazon Prime Video at the end of this month.

VOD/Digital/DVDebut: CRAZY FAMOUS, Farkas /Jarrett's nitwit ode to gaining fame at all cost

In these current times of, rather than Warhol's famous "15 minutes of fame," we get 15 million hits on the Internet, before the crowd moves on to the next big thing, the idea of a movie comedy based around someone so obsessed with getting famous that he'll do anything to achieve it sounds like it could be fun.

For a very few minutes a new movie called CRAZY FAMOUS, written and produced by Bob Farkas and directed by Paul Jarrett, might have you thinking that it will be just that.

Soon however -- after the noticeable lack of talent, creativity or amusement in the screenplay and dialog kicks in -- the movie becomes progressively worse as it plods along. TrustMovies suspects that most of the blame must rest, not on director Jarrett (shown at right), who does a professional job technically and simply gives us what his writer/producer, Mr. Farkas (shown below) has handed him to serve up: an interesting premise that begins goofily enough before quickly descending into a swamp of tired cliches, cutesy caricatures and, yes, more fart jokes.

This is particularly too bad for the actors on board because they are, to a man and woman, pleasant enough and probably quite talented under other circumstances that would show them to their advantage rather than making them grate on us something fierce. The obviousness and stupidity of the screenplay and dialog forces most of the actors to simply serve what's on the page, which thoroughly undercuts any kind of performance they might deliver. The single exception to this comes via the surprisingly smart and thoroughly professional job done by an actor new to me, Richard Short (shown below and at bottom, right), playing a mental patient named "Smith" who doubles as a secret agent with a nifty British accent. (Mr. Short is British, so that was not difficult to achieve.) Whenever the camera and microphone remain on him, the movie grows bearable.

Otherwise, this silly film, with its bent-on-being-famous-for-no-good-reason hero, played by the affable-but-little-more Gregory Lay, below, goes from its cute beginning in which Mr. Lay, accompanied by a trampoline, does a strip-tease and then bounces into a forbidden area, to being institutionalized in an asylum in which, yes, every patient (two of them are seen further below) is a walking-talking cliche.

From the asylum into a plot to assassinate an evidently still-alive Osama bin Laden, the movie lurches along, with all the characters piling on board to serve its nitwit cause.

Along the way there is a little would-be romance for our hero, a look at his younger days as a fame seeker (that's Ashton Woerz, below), a later visit to his parents for some worthless guilt-tripping,

and government bad guys, a car chase, bullets flying, and then Osama and his nurse -- all of this crammed into a mere 78 minutes that somehow seem much longer.

I hate to stomp on what was probably someone's labor of love. On the other hand, since I spent the time first watching and then writing about this film, I feel it might be worth warning others: Unless you've a very high tolerance for the ridiculous, maybe look elsewhere for your entertainment.

From Gravitas Ventures, Crazy Famous will hit VOD, Digital, and DVD this coming Tuesday, January 9 -- for purchase and/or rental.

Continued & unsettling 9/11 stuff: Eric Stacey's UNTHINKABLE: AN AIRLINE CAPTAIN'S STORY

To find the official version about Marshall Philips, a former airline pilot and 9/11 conspriacy theorist said to have murdered his two children and family dog before comitting suicide, if you Google the name, you'll need to go to Britain's Daily Mail, even though the event in question seems to have occurred in the Santa Barbara area of California. It's the unofficial version that writer/directed Eric Stacey is after in the new narrative-done-in-mostly-documentary-style movie, UNTHINKABLE: AN AIRLINE CAPTAN'S STORY.

No spring chicken, Mr. Stacey (shown at left) has directed half a dozen films over the past decade and written, produced and acted as cinematographer on five of these. He's clearly a hands-on filmmaker whose understanding of and work on both documen-taries and narrative films is put to use on Unthinkable -- but not, I have to say, to very good use. The movie is, first and last, a 9/11-themed conspiracy film, and it seems to me that when one is dealing with this sort of thing, one must go out of his way to dot one's i's and cross one's t's. Not only does this not get done, but there are times as you're watching this movie that you'll feel that the alphabet itself has been left out.

Evidently, from what we can gather from the film, ex-pilot Philips (played by Randall Paul, above) was concerned with the question of where the terrorist pilots of the 9/11 planes got the kind of flight training that would enable them to have done what they did (no easy feat), and further, how this connects to Saudi Arabian intelligence, our own government and the Bush administration.

According to the film, Philips was on the brink of getting (or maybe had just recevied) a photo and/or information that would prove his case. He's frightened for what this might mean to the security of himself and his children (that's Shannon Churchwell as his son, above).

Federal agents (above) pay a call, and later that day (or was it the next?) dad, kids and dog are dead, and the event is immediately declared a murder/suicide. Now, if even a couple of the things shown us in this film are true -- take your choice: it took 18 hours for the police to show up after calls were made to 911 (several of them), the police report got important details wrong, anything but normal proceedure was followed, the bodies were immediately cremated without permission, and on and on -- the whole thing reeks of lies and "cover-up."

Immediately after, dad's reputation is tarred and feathered with every-thing from his being paranoid and abusing drugs to being depressed because of family problems, none of which appears to have been true. The policeman involved (Drew Barrios, above) is so nasty you expect him to start twirling his mustache (except he's bald and clean shaven), while his deputy gives the dead son's schoolmates (below) a demonstration of pro-paganda that George Orwell would have understood but not appreciated.

It seems to me that all this would be fairly easy to document and build a case around. In the movie that case is made by Dad's best friend, a journalist named Madison Feeman (Dennis Fitzpatrick, below) who acts as our guide and hero, once Dad is no more. Also on board is the son of the family's best friend, Mike (played weakly by Shade Streeter) whose scene of biking away from the bad guys is the film's single attempt at action/suspense.

I wonder why all those involved did not simply choose to make a documentary about this case? Facts could have been marshaled and evidence built in a more convincing manner than is done here -- with mediocre writing and acting that moves from the acceptable range into the not so. Whatever the truth behind Philips' claims about the training of those pilots, the death of this man and his children deserve better investigation and memorial.

Unthinkable: An Airline Captain's Story -- from Movies on a Mission and running 85 minutes -- opens this Friday, April 11, in New York City at the Quad Cinema.