Interview. Alfonso Cuarón.

Children of Men conjures a world without children, which may seem a radical departure for the director films about young people: A Little Princess, Y tu mam� tambi�n, even a Harry Potter movie. But as Alfonso Cuar�n tells Sean Axmaker, there's a fundamental approach to telling these stories that connects them.

Related: "[T]his superbly crafted action thriller is being treated like a communicable disease," protests J Hoberman in the Voice, noting that it features "the year's most brilliantly choreographed action sequence" and calling it a "more resonant and gripping movie" than The Departed, Flags of Our Fathers, Blood Diamond, Apocalypto and The Last King of Scotland. The final two paragraphs of this rave are pullquotable to max, but I'll simply insist that you read this one top to bottom.

Updated through 12/26.

"Unlike so many directors making movies about the future, Alfonso Cuar�n (together with the immeasurable aid of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designers Jim Clay and Geoffrey Kirkland) doesn't offer us a radically new vision, but rather one distinctly rooted in the present, and he doesn't go out of his way to explain how we got there from here," writes Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly. "Indeed, the most terrifying thing about the coming dystopia proffered by Cuar�n's Children of Men is how familiar it seems." What's more, it's "one of the year's most imaginative and uniquely exciting pieces of cinema." Related: Jim Ridley on one terrific sequence.

J Robert Parks calls it "an intense, exceedingly intelligent thriller that mines present-day concerns and reminds us of the power of cinema."

"Children of Men is a great movie and I plan to see it again, soon and often. But nothing will compare to my first viewing, when I didn't quite know what to expect and didn't realize the raw power of the movie I was about to watch." Who knows, you might want to stop reading Matt Singer's rave for IFC News right there and come back to it after you've seen it, too.

"Hollywood stands rightly convicted of whitewashing previously published material, but Cuar�n and his Children of Men creative team are not ones to follow show business precedent," writes John Horn in a backgrounder for the Los Angeles Times. "The director didn't just want to make Children of Men more visceral, he also tried to make it additionally prophetic. And that's when Cuar�n and his collaborators found that the more suffering they invented, the more credible they believed their movie became."

Update, 12/22: Slate's Dana Stevens: "Alfonso Cuar�n's dense, dark, and layered meditation on fertility, technology, immigration, war, love, and life itself may be the movie of the still-young millennium. And I don't just mean it's one of the best movies of the past six years. Children of Men, based on the 1992 novel by PD James, is the movie of the millennium because it's about our millennium, with its fractured, fearful politics and random bursts of violence and terror."

Updates, 12/24: Michael Joshua Rowin for Stop Smiling: "Children of Men is almost too convincing in the loving (if that's the word) detail that it sketches about where we might be headed.... Cuar�n is implementing a verisimilitude that both matches the film's edge-of-your-seat escalations and demonstrates a new understanding of blockbuster realism."

Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat: "[T]he political aspects that reflect the current world - the immigration upheavals, the xenophobia, the instinct toward a repressive, fascist solution - constitute only one of the levels on which Children of Men operates. Even more interesting are the cultural/psychological aspects � the ways in which one simple but monumental change impinges on literally every aspect of our lives."

Elbert Ventura for Reverse Shot: "With its Biblical intimations and political trenchancy, Children of Men achieves an allegorical grandeur that obliterates misgivings about narrative plausibility - you can imagine its epic journey as a pop origin myth repeated to future generations (should they come, that is). Its twists and turns a tad convenient, the movie's symbolic narrative nonetheless gathers unstoppable velocity as Cuar�n takes us on a tour of infernal England. Teaming with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubeszki, whose work here can only be described as heroic, Cuar�n has given careful thought to the cinematic expression of his ideas."

Online viewing tip. Jeffrey Overstreet notes that you can watch Cuar�n, Guillermo Del Toro and Alejandro Gonzalez I��rritu on the Charlie Rose Show about their friendship, fantasy and reality, and of course, their movies.

Updates, 12/25: Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "Merry Christmas! Seriously. Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it�s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking."

It's "the bleakest movie I've ever wanted to see twice," writes Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "Cuar�n at first seems like an odd choice to direct a pessimistic meditation on a world without children. But Cuar�n is really the perfect choice: A filmmaker so responsive to joy and pleasure is our best guide to a world in which those essentials have gone missing. (If the picture had been made by, say, Lars von Trier, a filmmaker who fears for humankind but doesn't care much for people, a dystopia would just be business as usual.) Children of Men is a solemn, haunting picture, but it's also a thrilling one, partly because of the sheer bravado with which it's made. It left me feeling more fortified than drained. Cuar�n, the most openhearted of directors, prefers to give rather than take away."

Eric Kohn at the Reeler: "[T]he movie crams a fascinating sci-fi premise into acutely crafted action tropes without sacrificing its livid virtuosity. That it should receive such muted publicity goes beyond being an unfortunate fluke, or forgivable byproduct of end-of-the-year overload: It's a crime against art to suppress this accomplishment, a great work but also an important one."

Updates, 12/26: Kim Voynar interviews Cuar�n for Cinematical, where James Rocchi writes, "This is what you go to the movies for: A piece of filmmaking so majestically well-made, so unerringly committed to being what it is, so full of ideas and adrenaline that it makes your mind and heart race."

And Ray Pride talks with Cuar�n for the Reeler.

"The problem with Children of Men is that it's too much of a performance and not enough of a movie," argues Matt Zoller Seitz at the House Next Door. "It's a compelling pastiche, and that's not nothing, but I wanted it to be great rather than just proficient and gripping; it never quite gets there, and it suffers in comparison to earlier classics in the same vein."

Posted by dwhudson at December 21, 2006 3:54 PM