Capote and Freedomland

Philip Seymour Hoffman deserves an Oscar. That was evident after seeing Capote recently.
The movie follows Truman Capote as he insinuates himself into the lives of people in a small town in Kansas to report on the brutal murder of a family of four in 1959.
Capote has a whiny voice but a big ego, and he sees his literary breakthrough in telling this sordid tale.
Hoffman shows a man who ever so slowly builds a trust between him and one of the convicted murderers over a number of years and who grows to care about him. But he never lets that get in the way of his ultimate ambition. He's using this man as a way to catapult himself into the success he has always pursued.
It's this tension between ambition and compassion that drives the movie as Hoffman peels away the layers of Capote, making you cringe in one instance and sad in another.
The performance also make Freedomland, a searing mediation on race based on the critically-acclaimed novel by Richard Price.
The book is better but the movie does a good job of getting the book's message across.
Julianne Moore plays Brenda, a mother who stumbles into a hospital with bloody hands. She says she has been carjacked. Det. Lorenzo Council, played by Samuel Jackson, waltzes in to interview her.
Only then does she allow that her 4-year-old son is in the backseat of that car.
Brenda is white. The neighborhood she says her son was kidnapped in is black.
Those facts set off a chain reaction, as the largely white police force of Gannon, a neighboring town, descends onto the predominantly black neighborhood of Armstrong.
Residents there are mistreated. Anger grows. And Council becomes increasingly doubtful about Brenda's story.
The script could have been better, but the chemistry between Jackson and Moore is palpable, and Edie Falco, as a parent of a missing child, gives a solid performance.
And the final few scenes with Moore are amazing. It's a performance that keeps your allegiances at bay, for you don't know whether to care for her or to hate her. But you always feel her. What better compliment is there?