Two time-bending reviews at NRO

No, I can't wait till Thanksgiving either. But during today's wait, I've got a review of today's two new time-bending big-screen releases, Tony Scott's Déjà Vu and Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, over at NRO. Here's an appetizer to hold you over untill the meal:

In movies, one always feels the constant pull of time. Books can be read at different paces, skipping sections or reading them again, but movies, like life, march us inexorably forward. Existing eternally in the present moment, movies approximate our own experience with time. Yet they also provide us the ability to bend and dissect it, revisiting the past or taking a glimpse at the future, whether in the sliced up non-linear narratives of Quentin Tarantino or in era-hopping time-travel films like Back to the Future. This week, two new films — Tony Scott's Déjà Vu and Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain — deploy a smorgasbord of slick cinematic pyrotechnics in their attempts to reconcile the problems of human interaction with time. And in doing so, both films reveal that our true obsession isn't with the ticking of the clock, but with the mortality to which it inevitably leads.