PREMIERE.COM'S MOVIE REVIEW (posted 12/27/06)

Director Alfonso Cuarón (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; Y Tu Mamá También) has never been one to hide his desire to move audiences, but Children of Men takes that point to an extreme. It's the rare sci-fi film that transcends its genre with its ideas, able to sweep one up in its not-too-distant future and yet remain remarkably prescient about the present day.

Based on the P.D. James novel of the same name, Children of Men paints a particularly bleak near-future in which the human race is all but unable to reproduce, a hopeless, polluted, violent childless 2027. A rugged Clive Owen races to guide the world's lone pregnant woman to safe harbor. From the moment Owen's Theodore accepts his activist ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore) challenge to protect the pregnant Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), Men navigates into a world where anti-immigration law has manifested itself into concentration camps and civilized society has edged into chaos. Cuarón seems to take his cues from the film's London setting, envisioning the world one generation from now with a grainy lens reminiscent of England's social realist auteurs like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. Cuarón makes Men's bitter pill of a plot easier to swallow by sweetening the heady concept with lots of action. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's camera also never stops moving, often to dazzling effect.

Cuaron elegantly toes the line between gritty drama and a sort of grace that could only be captured on film. As he and Lubezki glide through an England torn to shreds with the ease of a surfer, the horror of the situations Theodore and Kee are faced with are almost diffused by the spectacular way those images are captured. Yet these impressive images never overwhelm the viewer: Cuaron's script, co-written with Timothy J. Sexton, is incredibly tight, Owen is palpably comfortable in Theodore's skin, and the issues of immigration and cultural ambivalence that the film centers on are more than compelling. —Stephen Saito