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In the wake of the assassination of President Lincoln, a boardinghouse keeper named Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) is charged with conspiracy to murder the president. John Wilkes Booth and his henchmen met at Surratt’s boarding house to plan their misdeeds, and Secretary of War Stanton (Kevin Kline, playing this despicable character with an understated zest) is determined to see her hang at the hands of a military court no matter the facts of the case. This is a courtroom drama with a great backstory, set in a time of fear and chaos, its plot driven by the power of the characters involved. James McAvory is the former Union captain-now-lawyer assigned to defend Surratt despite his conviction that she is guilty. He is torn between his personal beliefs and his desire to do his job to defend Surratt to the best of his ability, and it is this conflict that is central to The Conspirator . Having taken the case is already turning out to be ruinous to his career, but to win the case would mean m...

In 2009, director Duncan Jones brought his film Moon to the Seattle International Film Festival. The screening was sold out and very well received. After the screening and the Q&A I wondered what this talented, energetic director would do next. And here it is. Source Code is a tightly written, tautly directed thriller that surprised and delighted me as much as Moon did almost two years ago. The film finds an Army captain Jake Gyllenhaal repeatedly transported to a commuter train in Chicago in order to find out who is about to blow it up. He has eight minutes before detonation , and after the explosion he must return (in Groundhog Day fashion) to repeat the same eight minutes over and over again until his mission succeeds. I won’t try and explain the “science” of how this works. The film does a decent job of it, so I won't steal Jones's and writer Ben Ripley's thunder. But I will say that the film turns and twists its way to its satisfying and very unexpected conc...