Children of Men

Among the last of our crop of 2006 Oscar-nominated films, Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men was a definite catch-up entry. This one frankly had Queue Blocker written all over it: It takes place in a futuristic dystopia in which humanity has become entirely infertile. Fun! However, we have found one loophole for QBs: If a film stars actors we crush on, it'll probably find its way into the DVD player. Whitney has a Clive Owen cologne advertisement posted on our refrigerator, and I'm partial to Julianne Moore, so there we were.

The plot revolves around the miraculous discovery of a young refugee who has somehow become pregnant—the first person in nearly two decades to do so. Owen's character, a burned-out former activist who now works as a government bureaucrat, is recruited by his still-radical ex-wife (Moore) to help the young woman escape from war-torn, fascist-run Great Britain.

Children of Men is an outstanding film. Cuaron, as he's shown since his breakthrough with Y tu mámá también, has an amazing ability to make his movies feel hyper-real through attention to detail. By capping off a tender scene with a simple shot of a cat jumping up on a character's leg, or letting a tense one play out in very low light before a beautiful dusk sky, he grounds his science fiction in our reality, which has the effect of making this terrible future disturbingly present and plausible. And his handling of an extremely moving, almost religious scene near the end will make new parents in particular tear up (in a good way). Still, realism has its downside: Some of the scenes depicting war and its effects on the main characters are difficult to watch—not gory, just emotionally devastating.

The actors are also uniformly wonderful. Owen and Moore breathe life into what could have been stereotypical adventure-film characters, and Claire-Hope Ashitey is great as the frightened mother-to-be, while the brilliant Michael Caine gives the film much needed humor and joy as Owen's lighthearted but steadfast aging-hippie friend. A number of actors who'll be familiar to fans of British cinema turn up in key supporting roles, most notably the soulful Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things) as a conflicted underground leader.

I'm glad I've seen Children of Men, and I recommend it without reservation. I think Cuaron is among the best directors working today. But I have to admit that I came away from this movie feeling upset—thoughtful, too, but certainly upset—and that feeling lasted a couple of days.