'The East' poses difficult questions

Acting and intrigue help elevate this thriller about eco-terrorism.

The eco-thriller The East deals with the often-fraught relationship between conscience and action, inviting us to ponder whether the two ever can be brought into complete agreement.

The movie has the right team to consider such a question. Actress Brit Marling co-wrote The East with director Zal Batmanglij, who directed Marling in Sound of My Voice (2011), an effective and involving drama about life inside a cult.

Marling, who stars in The East and who also starred in the haunting Another Earth, is an unusual actress; she seems to play characters who are both doers and observers, projecting a divided sense of self that's full of puzzle-like complexity.

In The East -- a thriller that focuses on a committed band of eco-terrorists -- Marling portrays Sarah, a woman who works for a company that provides security services to corporations that are fearful of becoming targets for environmental extremists.

Headed by a no-nonsense boss (Patricia Clarkson), the firm seems as concerned about profits as it is about protecting lives and repuations. Not a client? In danger? Too bad.

Ambitious and calculating, Sarah leads a double life. She lives with a boyfriend who doesn't know exactly what she does. He believes she's on a business trip to Dubai while she's actually infiltrating The East, a band that conducts trageted anti-corporate operations called "jams."

Benji (Alexander Skarsgard), the quietly magnetic leader of the group, presides over sessions featuring lots of hugs, some of them dispensed during an oddball game of spin-the-bottle. The group lives in a burned-out shell of house in the protective seclusion of a forest.

Two members of The East stand out. Ellen Page proves entirely convincing as Izzy, an eco-ideologue who wrings all feeling out of her decisions. Toby Kebbell portrays Doc, a disillusioned physician with first-hand experience about the perils of Big Pharma.

The members of The East are smart and not entirely unsympathetic. When they're not "jamming," they attempt to live by authentic communal values, and they seem to care about one another.

They're also Freegans, part of the culture that lives on food discarded before it spoils. They seem to have the courage of their dumpster-diving convictions.

The screenplay pulls Sarah in and out of the group, occasionally returning her to corporate headquarters where she reports on activities of The East.

Predictably, Sarah begins to develop personal relationships within the group, attachments that further fragment her already divided life. We know that Sarah eventually will grapple with confounding moral questions: Where do her sympathies lie? Can she accept extreme measures in pursuit of morally defensible ends? Can harming people -- even obvious corporate villains -- ever be justified? Can there be "revolutionary" action without collateral damage?

Think of The East as a better-than-average political thriller, though not a perfect one. The "jams" conducted by The East aren't always credible, and it would have been interesting to know a little more about Marling's character. Still, The East qualifies as a drama with something important on its mind. That, strong performances and a fair measure of old-fashioned tension separate The East from a crowded thriller pack.

A tense, well-acted 'Arbitrage'

Robert Miller has a lovely wife and two grown children who work for him at his wildly successful hedge fund. As befits a man of great wealth, Miller and his wife give major money to charity, and he's regarded as a Wall Street wizard, a guy who hits way more than he misses.

But Robert -- Richard Gere in a performance that's smart and icy -- may not be anyone's idea of a role model. He has a mistress (Laetitia Casta), and he's in the midst of carrying out a fraud, a $412-million scheme designed to fool auditors who are evaluating his company for a possible merger.

Robert desperately wants the merger to succeed, which means he's walking a financial tightrope. He hopes he can close the deal before he faces exposure and ruin.

Despite the movie's initial appearance, writer/director Nicholas Jarecki isn't necessarily out to make a major statement about financial corruption, something, say, on the order of last year's Margin Call.

First and foremost, Jarekci cranks up a thriller that has Robert trying to cover up another crime, a task that involves him with a young black man (Nate Parker) who owes him a favor and helps carry out the deception.

This part of the movie introduces a determined cop (Tim Roth) who spends most of the movie trying to prove Robert's guilt. If things threaten to get dull, an amusing Roth's around to pose questions that seem to annoy everyone with whom he talks.

Adding a second criminal element to the financial deception has a dual effect: It keeps the movie from bogging down in complex wheeling and dealing (good), but it also prevents Jarecki from making a strong enough statement about a financial system in which unethical and illegal behavior seems to be tolerated -- so long as no one gets caught.

Jarecki has a lot on his plate, but he mostly weaves the movie's many threads into a brisk and coherent thriller that features a variety of strong performances. Among them: Susan Sarandon portrays Robert's wife, a woman who may know more than she lets on. Brit Marling plays the daughter who works for and idolizes her father, and who provides the movie with a character who experiences morally based doubt.

About three-quarters of the way through, I began to wonder how Jarecki would join the movie's many plot lines, and I can't say I found his resolution entirely satisfying, but there's enough crackle, intrigue and pleasure (smart guys trying to outsmart one another) in Arbitrage to keep it percolating nicely.

Is she savior or menace?

Losing our moorings inside a Los Angeles-based cult.

Brit Marling starred in and co-wrote last year's Another Earth, an emotionally devastating bit of sci-fi built around real human emotion, namely the guilt experienced by a young woman who caused a fatal automobile accident. With Sound of My Voice, Marling again appears in a movie in which a mild sci-fi hook jump-starts a story that's more focused on probing human behavior than on speculating about the future.

Sound of My Voice doesn't have nearly as much emotional heft as Another Earth, but it's constructed in ways that keep us guessing about where our sympathies rightly belong. Director Zal Batmanglij, who co-wrote the script with Marling, does a good job of creating a world that feels as if it has been cut off from the rest of life and put under intense scrutiny.

Broken into 10 sections, the story begins when a couple (Christopher Denham and Nicole Vicius) decides to go undercover to make a documentary aimed at exposing what they believe to be a dangerous cult.

In the movie's compelling opening scenes, Denham's Peter and Vicius's Lorna are blindfolded, bound and taken to a modest suburban Los Angeles home. There, they're asked to shower and put on hospital gowns. The vibe is borderline hostile, and if we didn't know that Peter and Lorna were acting of their own volition, we might think they'd been kidnapped.

Enter Maggie (Marling), an attractive blonde who's hooked up to an oxygen tank. Little by little, Maggie tells her story, which revolves around her claim that she has been transported from the future into our present.

With help from a bearded associate, Maggie has begun to gather a small group of devotees, pledging to prepare them to survive a time when the country will be torn apart by civil war, and scarcity will become the order of the day. No one discusses religion.

Scenes in which Maggie works on her charges can be gripping, particularly one in which she gradually peers into Peter's past. She tries to force Peter to purge his weaknesses and fears by literally vomiting them up.

A picture such as Sound of My Voice only can work if we entertain the possibility that Maggie is telling the truth about herself. Marling's performance makes that possible. Her Maggie is alluring, insightful and slightly ethereal. She has an obvious gift for looking into people's hearts, breaking them down and rebuilding them for the challenging new future they're supposedly going to face.

To its credit, the screenplay never bothers to dot every "i" and cross every "t," but it's clear from the start that Peter and Lorna -- like us -- must grapple with their sense of certitude.

You don't need to know much more to become caught up in the game that Batmanglij plays right up until an ending which -- if not exactly mind-blowing -- has a definite kick.

'Another Earth' is another kind of movie

Director Mike Cahill and actress Brit Marling takes a sobering journey into guilt, remorse and redemption.

Imagine waking up one day to discover another Earth hovering in the sky above the Earth you already inhabit. You'd check the papers and the TV, and you'd begin to learn something about this strange occurrence, but its mystery never entirely could be solved until someone sent a spaceship to inspect what appears to be a bizarre new addition to the solar system.

If all this sounds like the introduction to the review of a reasonably standard helping of science fiction, think again. Another Earth may have a sci-fi backdrop, but the movie is also a moving exploration of guilt, responsibility and redemption.

Another Earth begins with 17-year-old Rhoda (Brit Marling) celebrating her admittance to MIT. On the way home from a party, Rhoda -- a little tipsy from alcohol -- becomes involved in a fatal accident that kills a mother and her child, leaving her husband alive.

Four years pass, and Rhoda is released from prison, where she served time for her alcohol-influenced accident. Having apparently abandoned all ambition, Rhoda lands a job as a janitor at a school. She lives at home with her parents.

Without quite understanding why, Rhoda shows up to offer cleaning services to the husband (William Mapother) who survived the accident, a man who now lives a life of slovenly reclusion. Of course, he doesn't know who Rhoda is, and she doesn't tell him. Will she ever come clean?

As we wait for an answer, Rhoda and Mapother's John slowly develop a relationship. He starts to break down self-imposed walls of isolation and grief; she begins to allow herself to feel again -- and, oh yes, that other Earth still hangs in the sky, suggesting all sorts of metaphorical possibilities.

Eventually, we learn, this other Earth represents an alternate reality of some kind, which is about all I'll say about it here.

Director Mike Cahill, who wrote the screenplay with Marling, effectively unites two genres -- speculative sci-fi and sorrowful drama -- in ways that move the movie beyond gimmickry. Another Earth emerges as one of the year's more provocative achievements, a movie that realizes that the most difficult thing most of us ever will have to confront is ourselves.