'Indiana Jones' Is Back in Action; 'Chicago 10' Raises an Aged Fist

We may need oil cans to stop all the creaking -- after all, it's been nearly 20 years since Prof. Henry Jones Jr., a.k.a. Indiana, threw his whip over his shoulder and headed out for ". . . The Last Crusade." (And it's been 27 years since "Raiders of the Lost Ark.") But because "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" marks the reteaming of director Steven Spielberg, actor Harrison Ford and producer/idea man George Lucas, it promises to be one of the season's top box office attractions -- and the virtual Holy Grail for Indy fans. The project has been talked about for years, but Lucas's insistence on building the script (by David Koepp) around the titular objects -- models of human skulls cut from quartz -- kept his teammates at bay. Guess he wore 'em down, because here we are, in 1957, the bad guys are the Cold War Russkies, and the hero is a reality-based 64 years old. Not exactly what you'd call catering to the youth market. But they'll show up anyway on May 22.

It opened last year's Sundance Film Festival, but "Chicago 10," the raucous, passionate, partly animated, music-saturated documentary by Brett Morgen ("The Kid Stays in the Picture") was held back till '08 -- the 40th anniversary of the Democratic National Convention that led to the conspiracy trial of the Chicago Eight (later the Chicago Seven). The "10" of the title includes attorneys William Kunstler (voice of Liev Schreiber) and Leonard Weinglass (himself); the rest of the defendants and witnesses include some of the more famous names of the '60s -- Abbie Hoffman (Hank Azaria), Jerry Rubin (Mark Ruffalo), Allen Ginsberg (also Azaria), Bobby Seale (Jeffrey Wright) and Judge Julius Hoffman (Roy Scheider). Using archival footage and contemporary music (Eminem, Rage Against the Machine), Morgen sets out to restoke the fires of resistance and create a call to activism; at the Sundance screening I saw, the audience rose as one as the film came to an end. Because there were no cameras in courtrooms at the time, and hence no footage, the filmmakers used the transcripts as the basis for the animated sequences, which are puckish, and apt. It was a trial, after all, that was regularly referred to as a circus. It opens Feb. 29.

-- John Anderson