Mark goes to the movies: Girl with a Pearl Earring (dir. Peter Webber) I'm coming to appreciate "period" movies in my old age--better a careful, loving recreation of a past era than today's CGI horrors, right? This movie does well by the late-1600s-Netherlands detail (including a--literal--meat market you can almost smell), and it's fairly subtle in its depction of servants and working people and their vulnerability to their employers' whims. But, as Robin said about Scarlett Johansson (who plays the titular Girl), she's made a career out of doing not much of anything on screen, and in this film she spends most of her time looking freaked out. (Colin Firth, as Johannes Vermeer, similarly works his patented splitting-headache expression to express various degrees of artistic seriousness.) There are nice supporting performances by Essie Davis (as Vermeer's mercurial, jealous wife), Judy Parfitt (as his stern-but-kindly mother-in-law), and Alakina Mann (as an angelic-looking monster-child), and the shot compositions are often really nice--but (except for the scenes in the artist's studio) everything seems bathed in overcast, greenish light, and I think that look contributed a lot to the film's slow, static feeling. John Woo this isn't. Mark's rating: **½