The 77-year-old Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell had his Hollywood moment in the 1970s, when his 1971 family saga The Emigrants was nominated for four Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture, a rare feat for a foreign-language movie. Its follow-up, The New Land, had to settle for a nomination for Best Foreign Film. Troell would end up burning off his good name in Hollywood by making two American films, the misconceived Zandy's Bride and the full-scale train wreck Hurricane; his movies haven't been especially well distributed in this country since, and neither The Emigrants nor The New Land nor his balloon-expedition film The Flight of the Eagle (which was nominated for Best Foreign Film in 1983) are available here on DVD. Troell's new picture Everlasting Moments probably won't do much to raise his profile in this country. It's stuck with a title that sounds like a Hallmark card, and that and the fact that it's another period family drama, set in the Swedish countryside in the early years of the twentieth century, will probably help to stigmatize it as something worthy and stone boring. (I've already heard one publicity flack--for a different movie, of course-- helpfully warn a critic on his way to a press screening that he should prepare to be bored stupid.) It's actually a terrific movie, a two hour-ten minute epic that takes its time but never feels dull.

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Now that we've established for you once and for all which are the greatest and which are the worst James Bond movies of all time, this is the moment to ask:  where does the latest 007 epic fit on that continuum?  Well, for one thing, we're predicting opinions will wildly vary.  In fact, as you probably noticed, even our Screengrab staff was more or less split, unable to decide if Daniel Craig's first crack at the venerable franchise was a long-overdue and genuinely successful reboot, or a failed attempt at breaking the mold that went nowhere.

I got a chance to see Quantum of Solace  this week, and I'll say for the record that I'd be much more inclined to put it in the 'best of' column than in the 'worst of'.  Then again, I thought Craig's Casino Royale was terrific, so it's not surprising that Quantum of Solace, which is quite solidly more of the same, hit home for me.  Those less charitable toward the first Craig reboot will likely find as much to dislike in the follow-up as I did to like.  As in Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace begins with a dynamite action sequence that the rest of the movie can't top, though it's not from lack of trying; and like its predecessor, it takes a more dark, 'realistic' approach to the concept of Bond as a superspy/assassin, flying in the face of the flippant, adventurous tone of previous incarnations.  The direction, by Oscar nominee Marc Forster, is tight and powerful, which gets it over the occasional rough patches in the script, and the cast is generally excellent; Judi Dench continues to excel as M, and Mathieu Amalric is gripping as lead villain Dominic Greene.  The biggest disappointment, though, is that the movie doesn't cast its nets any farther than it has to; it's content to be as good as Casino Royale, but fails to stretch to the degree that it would have been better.  Good as these movies have been, an unwillingness to press forward will result in them becoming as formulaic as the ones they were meant to replace.

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