It’s hard to say what’s more glaring: Al Pacino’s fake tan or the enormous plot holes in this inept thriller.

Pacino plays Jack Gramm, a cocksure forensic psychiatrist who specializes in the serial killers. The film starts with a bit of torture porn—a masked killer slowly slices up one scantily clad twin while the other watches in horror. Fast forward to Gramm taking the stand, confidently telling the court that they’ve got their killer...
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A couple of years ago when Frank Miller’s Sin City was released, Max said that she thought the mix of stylized sex and violence would make it your average 14-year-old boy’s all-time favorite movie.

I think that 300 will make all those 14-year-olds rethink their top-ten lists. It’s a defiantly adolescent mix of video-game-themed blood-and-guts action, windy speeches about glorious death and sacrifice and patriotism, a quick seasoning of kinky sex, and vividly grotesque villains. Precisely the kind of movie that a kid wants to sneak into at the multiplex.

The story has been filmed before in the similar 1962 The 300 Spartans. This version is based on Miller’s graphic novel. It’s about the defense of Greece in 480 BC against the invasion of Persians. In this corner, we have the Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and in that corner we have the Persian king—actually god-king to be completely accurate—Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), a giant, bejeweled, heavily-pierced, bare-chested, unambiguously gay and vaguely rapacious figure. He’s a sort of combination of Dennis Rodman, The Rock and Elizabeth Taylor. We’re talking seriously scary.

The Persians had millions and millions of slave-soldiers in their army. 300 Spartans, decked out in their Speedos and attractive red capes, tricked them into fighting at the narrow valley at Thermopylae where they could hold off the large force.

The film is told in the same comic book style we saw in Sin City. Virtually all of the backgrounds and settings are computer-generated and so the image never attempts to be “photo-realistic.” Perhaps that explains why the MPAA ratings board allowed so much graphic violence. The big action scenes are filled with rolling heads and impalements on assorted sharp objects, all placed front and center before a loving camera. This is probably the most violent film I’ve seen since Passion of the Christ.

The battle scenes owe something to the Lord of the Rings trilogy with their hordes of computer-created beasties and horrors.

Curiously, 300 has inspired a couple of heated political debates. Some say that it’s an allegory for the current Iraq war and those folks are divided into two camps. One group says that Leonidas is George Bush, who’s saving Western Civilization from the forces of barbarism and mysticism. Others say that Bush is actually Xerxes, the invader. I disagree. Miller published the graphic novel well before this war, in 1998-99. If the film has any politics, despite the blather about freedom vs. slavery, it comes down four-square in favor of military dictatorship but without the ironic winking of Starship Troopers. Elected officials are shown as dithering indecisive fools, and religious leaders are even worse. They’re foully diseased, corrupt sexual predators. Only the military figures (and their noble wives) are worthy of any admiration.

And now it turns out that the Iranians are all honked off, too, claiming that the movie defames their magnificent Persian heritage. Does that mean that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is actually Xerxes?

Nah, couldn’t be. He’s too short.

Ten minutes into Adam Sandler’s new comedy, you will have already endured walrus vomit jokes, crude sexual hijinx, and the never-pretty specter of SNL vet Rob Schneider (does this guy know where the bodies are buried or what?) as a vulgarian Hawaiian beach bum. At this point, your fight or flight reaction might kick in. But don’t flee.

Not a moment too soon, Drew Barrymore shows up playing the impossibly sunny Lucy. Ever since a car accident a year ago, Lucy has no short term memory. While she remembers everything up to the accident, she starts each subsequent day with a clean slate. To Sandler’s Henry Roth, a marine life veterinarian and island playboy, this should seem like an ideal scenario: All the benefits of a one night stand, without any of the commitment. But, of course, Henry has fallen in love with Lucy and now must re-woo her every single day.

To make matters worse, he must struggle with a moral dilemma: Should he keep Lucy cocooned in a bubble of blissful ignorance (as her doting father and brother have chosen to do) or tell her over and over about her malady? The film’s writer, George Wing, has managed to come up with all sorts of ingenious ways to dramatize this dilemma and add lightness to what is essentially a big bummer of a subject (woo-hoo! brain damage!). And, as they demonstrated in The Wedding Singer, Sandler and Barrymore have a sweet, easy chemistry. While 50 First Dates has its share of no-brow humor, at it’s core, it’s secretly a loveable, smartly conceived romantic comedy.

Commitment-averse single guy becomes reluctant father figure to lonely, misfit boy and learns to embrace love and responsibility along the way. Okay, before you think "chick flick from hell!" trust me here—About a Boy is no slobbering tear-jerker. Sure, the movie is touching. But in sneaky, smart, unexpected ways.

It all starts with the wonderfully witty and wise script, based on the book by British novelist Nick Hornby. Hornby was the man behind the equally witty (and, come to think of it, equally wise) High Fidelity and I'm beginning to think this is no coincidence. Once again, Hornby is blessed with an ideal leading man (in High Fidelity it was John Cusack; here it's Hugh Grant). In the hands of a lesser actor, the callow Will Freeman would be too obnoxious to take. But Grant plays him like the kind of effortlessly droll quipster you'd want to sit next to at a cocktail party (but would want to avoid like the clap in a serious relationship).

As for Marcus, the eponymous "boy"? Played by newcomer Nicholas Hoult, he is your basic junior high school disaster zone: he has a bowl haircut, mom-approved hippie threads, and the tendency to burst into song at inopportune times (is there ever an opportune time to burst into song when you're 13?). Will, by contrast, is all about being cool—having the right car, the right clothes, just the right attitude of world-weary irony. There are women here, too, of course: the letter-perfect Toni Colette as Marcus's depressed, new age mum; the luminous Rachel Weisz as the lucky woman who just may benefit from the new, improved version of Will. But this is the story of a boy. Two boys, in fact. One who needs a father and the other who, despite all appearances, just may need a son.

This fact-based story is almost one of the great gangster epics. Superbly acted and absorbing all the way through, it still falls just a bit short of The Godfather and Goodfellas. Why? It lacks the big finish—Michael sweeping away his enemies, Jimmy Conway’s stepping out of the witness box—to push it up to the very top level. Even so, it’s easily one of the best movies of the year.

It details the rise and fall of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), protégé of the famous Harlem mob boss Bumpy Johnson (Clarence Williams III) who takes over the heroin business in 1968 when his boss dies. Lucas revolutionizes the business by going straight to the source and importing the stuff directly from Thailand at the height of the Vietnam war, and then under pricing his competitors and bringing in family members from North Carolina to help him run things.

At the same time, Jewish cop Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) is having a tough time rising through the ranks of New Jersey law enforcement. His personal life is a mess and nobody on the force trusts him because he has a reputation for strict honesty. That’s how he winds up on a special drug task force that comes to focus on Lucas.

For almost three hours—three really fast-moving hours—they deal with other mobsters and crooked cops, as Roberts edges closer to Lucas’s organization.

Some reviews have accused the film of glamorizing Lucas. It does, but only to the extent that any Hollywood movie is built around an attractive protagonist. No one can say that the film glamorizes drug use. I found the depictions of people shooting up to be as stomach-churning and frightening as anything I’ve seen in a horror movie.

The real point of the film is Lucas’s all-consuming drive for respectability and commercial success. The key to that part is the brilliant Thanksgiving scene where Lucas first gathers his extended family for dinner. As director Ridley Scott sets it up, the shot is an unsubtle recreation of the famous Norman Rockwell “Freedom from Want” Saturday Evening Post cover.

But most of the film has a much grittier, dirtier ‘70s throwback feel that’s exactly right for a dirty gritty crime story. Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe deliver two Oscar-worthy performances and they’re surrounded by a fine supporting cast. In short, American Gangster delivers the goods. If the rest of the big serious winter releases are as complicated, engrossing and enjoyable, we’re in for a good year.

I keep getting asked the same question about new documentary, The Aristocrats: “Doesn’t it get tiresome to hear the same joke told over and over again?”

Okay, there seems to be some confusion out there. First of all, yes, The Aristocrats revolves around the telling of a joke (called the Aristocrats). In its own way, it’s a very corny and old-fashioned joke with a set beginning and end. It’s in the middle of the joke that the comedy magic (if you will) takes place—here, the comedian is encouraged to allow his or her id to rage, to say things that would make the French surrealists blush, to raise bad taste to an art form. So yes, it’s the same joke told over and over again, but each time the telling is different—it’s like an evil jazz rift, the devil is in the details.

Also, The Aristrocrats is about much more than a joke. It’s also about the telling of the joke. Various comedians, many of them extremely famous—George Carlin, Paul Reiser, Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Phyllis Diller, et al—deconstruct the joke; it’s like a master class in comedy. How far is too far? When do you pull back? What’s the most offensive thing you can say? What is the proper tone in which to say it? Should there be props? Hand gestures?

The film is also about the subculture of comics—an entrée into their secret world. You see, the Aristocrats is never told in front of a real audience (“No one tells jokes anymore,” one comic dryly points out). Instead, it’s told after hours, when inhibitions are lifted, drinks have flowed, and just a few comedians and the nightclub staff are still milling in the lounge. If you can impress other comedians with your version of the Aristocrats, then you have really arrived.

Which brings us to Gilbert Gottfried. Frankly, I’ve never been a fan of his: I find his nasal, staccato delivery more annoying than funny. But apparently, he is a god to other comics. The centerpiece of the film is his now- legendary telling of the joke at a Friar’s Club roast for Hugh Hefner. And it’s true, something about Gottfried’s manic, bug-eyed delivery is perfectly suited to this particular joke. And his audacity in telling the joke when he did—the Hefner roast came only days after the World Trade Center attacks—added to its sense of trangressive grandeur.

So, yes, The Aristrocrats is extremely profane. Some of the most unlikely people tell the dirtiest versions—Bob Saget (yes, of Full House) is completely uncorked; the deceptively demure looking Sarah Silverman does a profoundly inappropriate (and hilarious) rift on the material. But it’s funny and weirdly liberating all the way through. And no, it never gets tiresome. Not even close.

Not since Lost in Translation have Max and I been so divided on a movie.

I went into this one with high expectations. Iñárritu’s first feature, Amores Perros, is nothing short of brilliant, though after a second viewing, I’ve got to admit that the characters are generally unsympathetic and the plentiful violence against dogs make it difficult to watch. Still, the three interconnected stories are brilliantly told and they arrive at a strong conclusion. His second film, 21 Grams, seems to cover much of the same territory and simply isn’t as interesting.

And now we have Babel, the longest, slowest and weakest of the three.

As Max says, it is made up of three stories. Two of them are solidly connected. The third (and the most interesting) has virtually nothing to do with the others. When at the end, the tenuous link to the other two is finally revealed, it feels forced and strains credulity.

hen there’s the matter of the structure. Again, Iñárritu juggles the various plotlines. But here, there is really no reason for it. The action described in the film is actually linear. The plot follows a simple straightforward chronology. The stories are not taking place at the same time, as the technique suggests. Is that cheating or merely the director’s prerogative? Whatever, I came away from Babel disappointed.

Hope and Crosby. Abbott and Costello. Martin and Lewis. What do these comedy teams all have in common? Well, they’re all dudes, for one thing. In fact, I can’t think of a single all-female comedy duo for the ages. Until now.

Okay, so it may be a bit premature to suggest that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are the next Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, but so far, these funny ladies are two-for-two. They were, of course, brilliant together on the set of SNL’s Weekend Update—the two smartest girls in the back of the class, cracking wise, throwing verbal spitballs, and making the boys swoon. And now they’re at it again in Baby Mama, playing an odd couple thrust together under unlikely circumstances...
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It’s hip to like Borat. That’s what I was thinking as I perused the near unanimous huzzahs the film—a mockumentary about a cheerfully bigoted character sent to America from “Kazakhstan” to learn our customs—has received from critics. To not love Borat (or to even suggest that its creator, Sacha Baron Cohen, is not the second coming of Groucho Marx) is to be sour, dour, and oh-so-uncool. I guess that makes me uncool. Look, it’s not that I don’t think the film is funny—it is, stuff-coming-out-of-your-nose funny. And it’s not that I think the film is offensive (it’s only offensive if you don’t get the joke). It’s just that I don’t think the film truly exposes the ugly, intolerant underbelly of America that many critics are giving it credit for.

Ultimatum is a satisfying conclusion to the Bourne trilogy. It’s a legitimate ending to a three-part story, not a second sequel slapped together to milk a popular title for a few more dollars.

I’ve got to believe that the series has been so successful because everyone involved—star, cast, writers, directors—was committed to the characters and to this fresh approach to the action film. They made it work.

Things pick up where Supremacy left off. Bourne (Matt Damon) still doesn’t know how he came to be who and what he is, when he learns that a reporter for the Manchester Guardian has some information about his background and the CIA organization that he worked for. But a couple of shifty CIA guys (Scott Glenn and David Strathairn) have read the same articles.

That sets the stage for a series of dynamite set pieces. An extended cat and mouse game involving a sniper in Waterloo Station, London; a long chase and fight in Tangier and, finally, a big finish that contains the best New York car chase since The French Connection. If there was any CGI work in it, I couldn’t tell, and I can usually spot that. I can’t believe that they didn’t destroy a few cameras in the process. These are some of the most intense, visceral, kinetic action scenes you’ll ever see. Credit goes to director Paul Greengrass, editor Christopher Rouse, and the 61 stunt men, stunt women and stunt drivers listed in IMDb.

And some mention should be made of Joan Allen and Julia Stiles. They bring intelligence and attitude to supporting roles that would usually go to more conventionally glamorous starlets. Pay no attention to the slightly snarky comments that Meg and I made about Ms. Stiles on the Message Board. She’s fine.

Admittedly, all of this technical brilliance is used to tell what is at heart, a fairly conventional escapist melodrama, but that is all that these movies have ever tried to be.

Sometime early next year, this one’s going to be released on DVD. I hope it turns out to be cold and stormy then because I plan to get out all three movies and settle in for The Bourne Weekend. Can’t wait.

Rian Johnson, the writer/director of the teen noir Brick, might’ve done himself a service by watching re-runs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, I said Buffy the Vampire Slayer. What made Joss Whedon’s iconic TV series so brilliant was the way it managed to be both a trenchant look at high school and a darn good horror series. The horror wasn’t sacrificed for the high school plotlines, nor vice versa—indeed, the two genres were masterfully, inexorably linked. Which brings us to Brick. Yes, there’s lots to recommend about this sure-handed debut—a hyper-stylized, noir detective story set in a Southern California high school. Johnson perfectly captures the swaggering Dashiell Hammett patter and he’s constructed a fairly nifty (if convoluted) mystery to go with it. But it doesn’t pass the Joss Whedon test. In press notes, Johnson more or less admitted that the only reason he set the film in a high school was so that we’d view film noir with a fresh set of eyes. He’s not making an allegory here; just a hipster update on a favorite genre.

With that said, it’s a pretty neat trick. Brick focuses on a teen gumshoe, Brendan (the excellent Joseph Gordon Levitt) who is solving the disappearance of his ex girlfriend. Along the way, he gets involved with a mysterious drug kingpin named Pin (Lukas Haas—yes, the kid from Witness); his muscle, Tug (Noah Fleiss); a crew of burnouts; and at least two would-be femme fatales. In keeping with the rules of the genre, Brendan has a useful pal—in this case a hyper-observant loner named The Brain (Matt O’Leary)—and an authority figure he has to finesse (in a hipster casting alert, Shaft’s Richard Roundtree plays the high school vice principal). Brendan also has a surfeit of Sam Spade cool—he’s always a step ahead of the baddies and he’s willing to take a punch (or 12) to solve the crime. There are some good jokes along the way: The kingpin seems to work out of his parent’s basement, where upstairs, mom is cheerfully baking cookies (at one point, Tug lifts a kitschy rooster pitcher to use as a weapon); and—in the film’s one concession to the reality of high school life—Brendan gruffly tells one informant, “She knows where I eat lunch.” But Brendan is never shown in class, never shown to have parents; never shown fretting over the prom—high school is merely a novelty setting here. Which is a shame. Brick could have been great. Instead, it’s an extremely well-executed gimmick.

It starts, simply enough, with two young cowboys in 1960s Wyoming. They’ve been hired to do a crud job: watch over a herd of sheep in the mountains. One of the cowboys, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a bit rowdy and playful, he’s got a quick smile and flashing eyes; in the off-season, he rides rodeo bulls in Texas. The other one, named Ennis (Health Ledger) is taciturn and stoic; a true Marlboro man. Eventually, though, they become friends—sharing beans out of a can, swapping life stories, fighting off the boredom (not to mention the occasional coyote or bear.)

The director, Ang Lee—who, while born in Taiwan, is ironically one of the most vivid and insightful observers of American life—presents this dusty cowboy life with almost obsessive detail. (It helps that the screenplay, based on the Annie Proulx short story, was co-written by Mr. Lonesome Dove himself, Larry McMurtry.) You sense it all—the rugged beauty of the land, the stillness of the air, the rawness of the cold. It’s important that the film establishes the bond between the two young men painstakingly—because what forms between them will shape and haunt the entire film. When Jack and Ennis fall in love, it seems inexorable. But once this idyll passes, can their love survive?

That’s the heartbreaking premise of Brokeback Mountain. Sensible, wounded Ennis knows that their love would condemn them to a life in the shadows. Impetuous Jack thinks they should be together. Both men eventually move on, get married, have children. But their time together on Brokeback Mountain—a time of youth and simplicity and unfettered love—will be the defining event of their lives.

I can’t praise the work by the two leads enough. Both Ledger and Gyllenhaal are credible cowboys (they just look right on horses—apparently Ledger was actually raised on a ranch) and they don’t hold back on showing the passion and tenderness between the two men. Ledger has the harder part—his Ennis is repressed and self-denying, holding his true feelings deep within. But Gyllenhaal is also superb—early on, you sense that Jack’s intensity and ardor will ruin him. (The supporting cast is equally fine—especially Michelle Williams as Ennis’s too-smart-for-her-own-good wife and Randy Quaid as the nasty rancher who hires them.)

The Hollywood soundbite meisters have already dubbed this film “the gay cowboy movie” (another wag amusingly referred to it as “The Gay Gone With the Wind.”) Literally, I suppose that’s true. But such descriptions are truly reductive. Gay, straight, or otherwise, this is truly one of the best love stories ever filmed. When I hear just a snippet of the fabulous and evocative score (by Argentine composer Gustavo Santaollala), I start to well up, revisiting the profound effect the film had on me. It’s a masterpiece.

It’s a match made in art house heaven: Droll, deadpan director Jim Jarmusch paired with droll, deadpan actor Bill Murray. Yeah, Jarmusch has been doing his minimalist irony shtick a bit longer than Murray, who only recently evolved from winking hipster to wry leading man. But right now, these two guys clearly belong together (and they proved it, however fleetingly, in Jarmusch’s Cigarettes and Coffee). Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a long, fruitful partnership.

In Broken Flowers, Murray plays aging lothario Don Johnston (with a “t” as he wearily points out). A confirmed bachelor, he made his fortune in some vague computer business, and is now content to live in his perfectly manicured Connecticut home, watching his hi-def TV, and getting the occasional doses of humanity from his cheerful buttinsky of a neighbor, Winston (Jeffrey Wright). Don’s existence is about as flat as his TV, but it takes two possibly coincidental events to rise him from his torpor: First, his gorgeous girlfriend (Julie Delpy) leaves him—not just citing his lack of commitment but, it would seem, his total lack of human engagement. Then, he receives a letter from an ex lover telling him that he has a 19-year-old son who may or may not be on a journey looking for him. The letter is not signed.

Don claims that he couldn’t care less about the letter, but Winston, a father of five (who also fancies himself an amateur sleuth) will have none of that—he researches the addresses of five of Don’s ex-lovers from that period (alas, one is currently residing in a cemetery), prepares an itinerary, and sends Don packing to find the mother of his son. Of course, Don is perfectly capable of rejecting Winston’s elaborate plan—but he convinces himself that the journey is somehow out of his control.

What follows is a roadtrip movie—and a nifty chance to see Murray and four great actresses chew on some really great writing. First, we meet a slightly road-weary but game-for-anything Sharon Stone and her Lolita of a daughter (named, aptly enough, Lolita). Then it’s onto real estate agent Frances Conroy, a former flower child, who gives Don furtive looks as she displays her joylessly sterile life with her cheese-whiz of a husband. Next we meet suspicious pet communicator Jessica Lange and her officious and protective office manager (Chloë Sevigny). Finally, an almost unrecognizable Tilda Swinton (sporting an unruly mane of dark brown hair) plays a ticked-off biker chick who wants nothing to do with Don or his visit.

Through it all, we sense a man who has sleepwalked through his own life but has more depth of feeling—more desire to love and be loved—than he cares to admit. By the end of the film, it’s quite clear just how much Don needs this son—and how much we want Don to find him.

On Second Thought, Pass Me the Bucket.

   Have you ever been out shopping with a pal and you tried on a sweater that looked like everything else in your wardrobe and your friend helpfully said, “Don’t you own that already?”
   Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson need to get better friends.
   It’s not just that the two actors are playing characters we’ve seen them play countless times before—Nicholson, an ornery and irascible billionaire; Freeman, a wise and sagacious good egg—they’re playing ersatz versions of these characters. This is a made for TV version of a Morgan Freeman/Jack Nicholson buddy film, except it actually stars Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. (And it’s directed by Rob Reiner. Oh, whither Meathead?)
   One critic suggested the film might be better if the two actors had switched parts, and I sort of agree. At the very least, it would have been more watchable. But in the end, nothing can save this cloying, shallow, disingenuous film from itself.
   Here’s the premise: Two old men meet in a hospital room. Edward Cole (Nicholson) actually owns the hospital (among others)—he only shares a room because his personal assistant/whipping boy (Sean Hayes) convinces him it’s a good PR move. His roomie Carter Chambers (Freeman) is a mechanic and trivia whiz who sacrificed a college degree to support his family. (How do we know Carter’s smart? Because he shouts out the answers to Jeopardy questions. Can we put a moratorium on this character device please?). Both men are dying of cancer but are conveniently “asymptomatic.”
   While Carter—who provides the film’s patient, doting voiceover narration (I know, it pains me to write this as much it pains you to read it)—has a loving family, lonely Edward has four ex wives and an estranged daughter. (Gee, wonder if Carter is going to facilitate some sort of father/daughter reunion? Oh, I don’t want to spoil the surprise). While at first the men dislike each other (so different from other buddy films I’ve seen!), they eventually become allies and friends.
   It is then that the concept of The Bucket List—a list of things both men want to do before they “kick the bucket”—is introduced and the two fogies embark on one last intercontinental adventure.
   Just take a guess as to what they might do.
   If you guessed skydiving, you’d be right!
   If you guessed race car driving, give yourself two more points!
   View the pyramids? Check and double check!
   Dine at the finest restaurant in Paris? Oui, oui, oui.
   And so on.
   The list also has some vague, treacly entries like, “See something truly majestic” and “Kiss the most beautiful girl in the world”—designed to wrench maximum tears from the audience.
   What else can I say? The film is one big fake, by-the-numbers buddy film crossed with some comforting Hallmark bits of faux-wisdom on death.
   You want to see a film that tackles death and love with sincerity and guts? Rent Sarah Polley’s Away From Her. But whatever you do, stay away from this stinker. Let Freeman and Nicholson know that even they can wear out their welcome.

Because his personality was so outrageously contrived—his mannerisms so extreme, his dress so dandified, his voice so mincing—it could be argued that playing Truman Capote is both an actor’s greatest gift and his worst nightmare. After all, anyone can do an impression (indeed, most people do). But to get to the soul of the man you have to get beyond the superficial, and see it all: Capote’s preternaturally alert mind; his all-consuming ambition and ego; and, yes, his deep reservoir of pain. In Bennett Miller’s haunting and intimate new biopic, Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman gives such a performance—and if he doesn’t win the Oscar for it, well hell, there’s simply no justice in Hollywood.

Hoffman depicts Truman Capote at the most significant artistic and personal juncture of his life—when this East Coast raconteur, born in Louisiana, went beyond Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the Manhattan smart set and wrote about the brutal slaughtering of a Kansas family. In Cold Blood would go on to be the most acclaimed book of Capote’s career; it created its own genre—the non-fiction novel. But the writing of the book—and the devil’s bargains that Capote had to make to complete it—took a lot out of the author. He never wrote another major work again.

From the moment Capote meets the sensitive, troubled murderer Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr. in his own star-making performance), he sees painful echoes of himself—a fellow misfit, neglected by his parents, and similarly misunderstood. “It’s like Perry and I grew up in the same house,” he muses at one point, talking to his friend, the novelist Harper Lee (ever-reliable Catherine Keener). “And I stood up and went out the front door and he went out the back.” His ability to empathize with Perry also gave Capote a unique opportunity to manipulate him. In many ways, Capote is about the irony that this famous bon vivant was, in fact, bogged down by his own demons. But it’s also about the kind of amoral selfishness of the artist. Did Capote actually care about the people he so masterfully finessed into sharing their most intimate and damning stories? (At one point, because it suits his deadline needs, he manages to get Perry and his accomplice a stay of execution.) And, more importantly, when one achieves a work as revolutionary as In Cold Blood, do the ends ultimately justify the means?

To read an interview with the film’s director, click here.

Far from purrfect, Catwoman could have been an outrageously campy, sexy romp—channeling the spirit of Bond sirens and the fabulous Eartha Kitt. Instead, it’s a misbegotten meow mix of chick flick, dark drama, mystical mumbo-jumbo, and—inevitably, it seems these days—high-wire action film. The fault doesn’t exclusively lie with Halle Berry, who looks fabulous in leather and captures Catwoman’s feline solipsism well enough. (Of course, some of the fault must lie with her—why does this Oscar-winner continue to associate herself with such drek?)

Instead, I’d lay blame on a pitifully bad script (our first glimpse of Catwoman’s super powers comes not in a death-defying escape, but in a tragically unsexy girl-against-boy basketball game) and horrible casting choices. Benjamin Bratt, for example, is supposed to be a good-hearted cop in love with Catwoman’s mild-mannered daytime persona. But Bratt is such a lean, angular figure—he appears to be chiseled out of some kind of indestructible, gleaming stone—that he hardly seems vulnerable, or even particularly human, next to this half-cat, half-woman figure.

Then there’s Sharon Stone, who plays that old misogynistic standby: the aging model who will do anything (anything, I say!) to stay young. Once a sexy, playful figure (in her prime, she could’ve been a mean Catwoman), Stone now comes across as brittle and caustic. Still, she fares better than Lambert Wilson—who, as Stone’s callous cad of a husband, gives what amounts to a master class in putrid film acting. Catwoman is essentially a schizophrenic, joyless mess. Then again, what are we to expect from a film directed by a guy named Pitof?

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I had never seen such a strange and captivating character—at once slightly mad and even a little sadistic; yet all-knowing, abundantly imaginative, and possessing a kind of deep-seated virtue. When, in the end of that 1971 musical, Wonka turns over the keys to his candy-coated kingdom to young Charlie Bucket, we feel the magical embrace a fantasy father figure.

But what are we to make of Johnny Depp’s relentlessly creepy and off-putting Wonka in Tim Burton’s retelling of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s novel? Yes, this new film is more faithful to the book, even using the book’s real title, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. But could Dahl have possibly had this demented cross between Vogue editor Anna Wintour, Michael Jackson, and Dana Carvey’s The Church Lady in mind? I had a nagging fear that Depp’s success in Pirates of the Caribbean might have a negative effect. In that film, he was campy, over-the-top—his performance bordered on caricature—but somehow it all came together brilliantly. Here, we sense Depp being egged on by his favorite collaborator/co-conspirator Burton: “No, weirder! No, weirder still!” It’s too bad, because it throws the whole film out of whack.

Visually, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is stunning, with Burton displaying more visually moxie and surrealist humor than he has in a decade. I loved the beautiful rendering of Charlie’s decrepit but love-filled home (the hunched shack almost seems to envelop the family in an embrace), and the various homes and lifestyles of the four brats who are to accompany Charlie on his tour of the chocolate factory. (I was especially amused by Violet Beauregarde’s mother—sporting a velour warm-up suit and a crisp blonde page-boy cut that perfectly matches her daughter’s, and with her Botoxed frozen grin—she is truly a stage mother from hell.) And bright-eyed Freddie Highmore (last seen alongside Depp in Finding Neverland) handles the role of Charlie quite ably.

Once inside the candy factory, however, Burton makes some other questionable choices. Staging the Oompa Loompa cautionary songs as elaborate, Busby Berkley style musical numbers was amusing (even if I miss the proletariat chants of the original), but the joke of having every Oompa Loompa played by the same actor (Deep Roy) got a little tiresome. And the ending, while again more faithful to the book, doesn’t have nearly the same payoff. How could it? When Wilder’s Wonka recognizes a kindred spirit in Charlie, we feel that he has been touched by greatness. When Depp’s Wonka does the same, we want to grab the young lad and scream, “Run for your life!”

If you’ve ever seen great live musical theater, you know the dancing-in-the-street giddiness it can inspire. But, with a few exceptions (Singin’ in the Rain and West Side Story spring to mind), musicals on film have rarely been able to capture that spirit of exhilaration. They seem flat, bloodless. Not so with Chicago. Director Rob Marshall has taken Bob Fosse’s brilliant choreography and the timeless story of showgirl Roxie Hart’s media infamy and turned into a rip-roaringly sexy, sizzling delight.

His cast is great: Who knew that Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere could sing and dance? (And who knew that Queen Latifah could act?) But, more importantly, Marshall seems to really understand how to make a musical work filmically—the song and dance numbers never seem staged, they pop off the screen with fullness and vitality. Darned if you won’t be tapping your toes and attempting a high kick as you leave the theater.

Ron Howard (Cocoon, A Beautiful Mind, et al) never met a heartstring he didn’t want to yank. An undeniably skilled director, he nonetheless seems fundamentally incapable of letting his stories and actors simply be. (Why take a chance on genuine emotion when force-fed emotion is so much more reliable?) Lucky for him, Howard has recently paired with Russell Crowe, an actor of such substance, gravitas, and depth, he manages to single-handedly transcend Howard’s hammier tendencies. And boy oh boy, does Howard need every inch of Crowe’s presence to save Cinderella Man from drowning in a sea of slop.

This true story is tailor-made for maximum emotion wringing: Crowe plays Jim Braddock, a Depression-era boxer who had a shot at the title, lost it, found himself desperately trying to support his impoverished family, got an unlikely second chance at boxing glory, and became a national symbol of hope. In short, he’s Sea Biscuit with boxing gloves. We’ve got all of Howard’s trademarks here: Adorable, smudge-faced children, a preternaturally adoring wife (played by Renee Zellweger), a wise-cracking and loyal best pal (the great Paul Giamatti, who deserves better than this kind of supporting work but is just so darn good at it), and a grand finale with a swelling score and gratuitous reaction shots from all parties involved. But we also have Crowe: Always a convincing physical presence, he manages to convey Braddock’s simple, taciturn decency and his streak of useful obstinacy as well. (Kudos also to Craig Bierko who glowers with charismatic malevolence as the brutal heavyweight champ Max Baer.)

And let the Opie-bashing end: Truth is, if you want a good old-fashioned tearjerker, Ron Howard is your go-to guy. Despite its flaws (or maybe because of them?), Cinderella Man manages to be one of the most effective crowd-pleasers to come around in years.

Max gives this big-monster flick 2 ½ stars. I’ll raise her a ½ star simply because I love big-monster flicks, from the original King Kong to Them to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and even the silly remake of Godzilla. What can I say? I’m just a sucker for giant critters looming over the horizon.

I’ve been intrigued by this one ever since I saw the trailer last summer, but I was unsure about the whole Blair Witch hand-held camera thing for a full-length feature. I’m happy to report that while it is a bit off-putting at first, it is a legitimate way to tell this admirably succinct (84 min.) story. Actually writer Drew Goddard and director Matt Reeves are using the same technique that H.G. Wells used in his novel The War of the Worlds. He told the story from the point of view of an unnamed first-person observer who witnesses the important events of the invasion.

It’s not really giving anything away to say that the action here begins with a gigantic beastie rising out of the ocean near New York and attacking the city. (At least that’s what seems to happen. Many details are properly uncertain.) We see it all from the point of view of a guy named Hud who has been given a camcorder to document a going-away party for his friend Rob. When things get nasty, he keeps the camera running. That’s ridiculous, of course; in that situation any of us would either be in a stunned stupor or stampeding away as fast as we could run. But our boy Hud is also the source of the film’s dry humor. It’s established early on that he is not the brightest star in the sky, and even though many of his observations are hard to understand, they are funny. The thing is that we never see anything more than Hud and his friends see, and we do get to know them as individuals.

Some other reviewers have commented on the fact that the film is trading on our memories of the 9/11 attacks. They’re right. The early scenes in particular are clear echoes of the narrow New York streets filled with dust and smoke and paper. But to my mind, anyway, the film doesn’t exploit the material; it uses those images as the basis for a piece of well-crafted, inventive escapism.

In the end, it’s quickly paced and scary—just what a good big-monster flick ought to be.

Is the riveting documentary Crazy Love a love story, a horror film—or both? That’s what I asked myself as I walked out of the theater, shaking my head, somehow simultaneously charmed and repulsed by what I had just seen. If Crazy Love is a horror film, it certainly has its central monster—one Burt Pugach, a man who hired three hitmen to throw lye on the face of his former lover, Linda, leaving her permanently disfigured and blind. But, as monsters go, he is hardly a stock character—sort of a nebbishy type, whose charm, if you can call it that, only comes from his tenacity, his twisted and relentless pursuit of his own gratification. He was already a successful lawyer (actually, ambulance chaser), when he wooed Linda Piss—a naive beauty in her early 20s—with Cadillac convertibles, hot nightclubs, and impromptu flights in his airplane. This was the early 1950s; you can imagine how glamorous it all was to a nice Jewish girl from the Bronx. And while she didn’t love him, or even find him slightly attractive, she was, as one of her friends archly reports, “impressed.” What she didn’t know was that he was married, with a severely mentally  handicapped child (see? monster!). And when she found out, she dumped him, leading to the gruesome lye attack.

The story became a cause celebre in the New York media. While Burt went to jail—studying up on criminal law and getting many of his fellow inmates acquitted on technicalities in the process—he continued to pursue Linda, writing her long, ardent love letters. Of course she would never take him back, right? He was insane! He blinded her! He ruined her life! But, and here’s the truly unfathomable part—she does take him back. When Burt is released from prison 14 years later, he and Linda get married.

Okay, the repulsiveness is pretty easy to figure out here. But how could anything about this film actually charm me? Well, first of all, you have Linda: still glamorous, maybe even more so, with her large, ever-rotating pairs of Jackie O-style sunglasses and bouffant wigs; still brassy enough to tell off any doubters; and still able to enjoy Burt’s money and companionship. And then you have Burt himself, now something of a dutiful husband, a seeing eye dog for Linda, who still sees his wife as the most beautiful creature on earth. Crazy? Yes. Hilarious and disturbing? For sure. But touching? What can I say? See the film and decide for yourself.

The “Jennifer Hudson makes her debut in Dreamgirls” story may soon be told the way the “Lana Turner gets discovered Schwab’s” story is told—it will become oft-repeated Hollywood lore. The best part? It’s true.

Yes, Hudson was a contestant on American Idol. Yes, she came in seventh. Yes, director Bill Condon was reluctant to cast her in the pivotal role of Effie White, fearing that she wouldn’t hold her own next to her heavy-hitter castmates, including Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, and Beyoncé Knowles.

And yes, Hudson doesn’t just hold her own. She practically steals the show. In the previews across the country (and in the screening I attended), her solo numbers have inspired spontaneous ovations. This is in movie theaters, mind you.

It’s all so deliciously meta. If you don’t know the story of Dreamgirls (based on the Broadway musical), it’s rather conspicuously (but unofficially) based on Diana Ross and the Supremes. Deena Jones (Knowles) is the Diana Ross character, who sings backup in an R&B girl group called the Dreamettes that is led by the talented Effie White. But when ambitious producer Curtis Taylor, Jr. (Foxx) gets his hands on the group, he immediately moves the more photogenic Jones to the lead singing role, much to White’s profound dismay. (Of course, this also somewhat mirrors Beyoncé’s status with her own recently-disbanded R&B group Destiny’s Child, which was often referred to as “Beyoncé Knowles and those two other girls.”)

Dreamgirls was meant to be a breakthrough role for Knowles, who is, indeed, gorgeous and a fine singer. But she’s merely adequate as Jones—she plays the part too nice, never allowing any true flashes of ambition or vanity to register in her eyes. Foxx is better in his charming sleazeball role, and better still is Eddie Murphy as the reckless James “Thunder” Early, an R&B hip-shaker who resists Taylor ’s attempts to make him more palatable to a white audience. Danny Glover gives great supporting work as Early’s manager, who sees through Taylor’s smooth-talking wiles. But it is Hudson who emerges as the show’s real star. She is sad, she is righteous, she is filled with misplaced longing for Taylor, and damn, the woman can sing! The movie is great—energized, slick, and entertaining with a dream cast that really delivers. But Hudson remains the real story. My only objection? They should’ve found a role, even a cameo, for Jennifer Holliday who played Effie on Broadway.

Are romantic relationships—with all their headaches and heartaches and maddening contradictions—worth the trouble? That’s the central question posed by the gloriously mindbending new film from screenwriter/mad genius (he may as well just put that on his résumé) Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich).

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind starts out looking like a typical boy meets girl love story: Joel Barrish (a subdued and excellent Jim Carrey) is repressed and square; Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) is a free spirit—the kind of girl who dyes her hair a different color each week and starts up bold and frank conversations with complete strangers. Of course, they are destined to meet and fall in love. But please check your concepts of romantic comedy (and time and space, for that matter) at the door. You see, Joel and Clementine had already met and fell in love once before, a year ago. And after a tender but tempestuous relationship, the impulsive Clementine decided she wanted to wipe Joel out of her mind—literally. So she went to the clinic of Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) and arranged to have Joel’s memory snuffed out. It’s part of the genius of this film that the process of mind-wiping is explained so matter-of-factly: You simply share memories and objects from your relationship with the clinic; they go into your brain while you sleep and erase your romantic “map.”

The film’s main action occurs when Joel decides to get his mind wiped, too (the pain of Clementine not recognizing him is too much to bear), but he regrets it mid-procedure and tries to hide Clementine in places that are off his romantic map. What makes the film so uniquely engaging and poignant is that we get to watch Joel and Clementine’s relationship come to life (in Joel’s subconscious memories), even as it’s being erased.

There’s also a fabulous race-against-the-clock suspense: Will Joel be able to find a place to hide Clementine so the clinic can’t erase her? Eternal Sunshine does have its flaws—for one, it could be argued that Kaufman wears his cleverness a bit gaudily, like a too bright shirt. And the oh-so-kooky Clementine character, while played winningly by Winslet, is nonetheless a romantic projection and cliché (to the film’s credit, they essentially acknowledge that fact.) Still, the film is more than just an ingenious Rube Goldbergian puzzle. It’s beautiful to look it (in a kind of hazy, lo-fi way) and swooningly romantic (in a kind of dark, world-weary way.) It’s the ultimate date movie . . . for, uh, MIT grads.

The new, extravagantly beautiful film from Todd Haynes relishes its own contradictions. It is, at once, dreamlike and hyper-real; post-modern and straightforward; melodramatic and restrained. Cineastes will argue that it is an archly ironic take on the weepy “women’s films” of the 1950s (particularly those by Magnificent Obsession’s Douglas Sirk); populists will maintain that it’s a big ol’ soapy tearjerker. But the film truly works best when those contradictions are embraced.

The story focuses on Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), an affluent housewife living in the suburbs of Connecticut in the 1950s. Cathy is happy, in an uncomplicated way. She has her picture-perfect wardrobe and her picture-perfect house and her picture-perfect husband (Dennis Quaid). Hers is a Life magazine cover story come to life, and Haynes recreates her idealized, ’50s lifestyle with almost fetishistic precision, imbuing the lush colors and textures with their own secret allure. Of course, all is not as perfect as it seems—it turns out that Frank’s moodiness has its roots in a dark secret. Cathy discovers that secret one night while dutifully delivering her husband dinner at the office. There, she finds him in the arms of another man. As Frank struggles, futilely, of course, to “cure” his homosexuality, Cathy seeks solace in the company of the kind black gardener (Dennis Haysbert).

To watch how Cathy’s naivete, the town’s malicious gossip, racism, and sexual repression undo this family is, indeed, the stuff of melodrama. But it is melodrama earned (and it is melodrama re-examined—Douglas Sirk was never dealing with closeted husbands and casually cruel neighbors). Julianne Moore gives a performance so heartbreaking, you will want to yank her out off the screen and save her from the misery. And Dennis Quaid is a revelation: His Frank is a profile of coiled rage—and Quaid does not shy away from the more brutal sides of Frank’s turmoil. If Dennis Haysbert is perhaps too saintly as the hunky gardener, it only adds to the resonance of his (and Cathy’s) fate.

Ultimately, the question can be fairly asked: Is Far From Heaven a disciplined work from a major artist or a highly entertaining and cathartic piece of pop kitsch? The answer, of course, is yes.

Assorted couples break apart and re-form in "Feast of Love," a drama that's a bit too earnest and tidy.

It begins with troubled philosophy professor Harry Stevenson (Morgan Freeman) unable to sleep and going for a walk at 2:25 a.m. He passes a softball field and remembers what happened there 18 months before.

That's when Kathryn (Selma Blair) fell for Jenny (Stana Katic) and left her cluelessly innocent husband...

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The central message is that the men who fought World War II—and all other wars, probably—are simply normal guys who have been placed in a horrible situation. In battle, survival is mostly a matter of luck. To be photographed raising a flag is just another random event, but when that picture becomes an instant cultural icon, everything changes for the people involved.

The story is told in sometimes confusing flashbacks that focus on three time frames: the present where an old man is talking to his son; the fighting on Iwo Jima, and a war bond drive in America that took place right after the battle. Three of the men (Ryan Phillippe, Jesse Bradford and Adam Beach) who raised the flag were drafted into the bond drive. It was carefully calculated propaganda, and the government wasn’t shy about exploiting its newly minted celebrities, whether they wanted (or deserved) it or not.

Given the fractured dramatic structure and the dark unsaturated color that’s almost black and white, it’s often impossible to tell exactly which of them is involved in the action scenes. And that, I think, is part of Eastwood’s point. It’s not giving anything away to say that the film’s final statement is that these guys weren’t heroes. They never claimed to be and when others called them that, they hated it. The conclusion isn’t as downbeat as it might sound from that description, but it certainly hits a mixed emotional note, as did The Unforgiven, Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby.

Flash of Genius is probably better than any movie about the guy who invented intermittent windshield wipers deserves to be. That’s not to say it’s a great film—it’s far too earnest to be truly entertaining (it’s very excited about patent law)—but it does have a certain shaggy charm.

Greg Kinnear plays Bob Kearns, an engineer who notices the inadequacy of his car’s wipers on a rainy day and becomes obsessed with improving them. Kearns pitches his idea to the Ford Motor Company. At first they don’t believe he’s done it (their own team of crack inventors has come up empty), then they buy his invention. Then they promptly steal it...
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I can’t deny it. I love the Judd Apatow comedy revolution. About six years ago, we had the emergence of the so-called Frat Pack, which includes the likes of Vince Vaughn, Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson, and Jack Black. Those guys are all funny, to be sure, but there is always a slightly mocking, detached quality to their hipster humor. One could easily see them holding court over a kegger, surrounded by appreciative jocks (hence the Frat Pack designation).

By contrast, Apatow, who famously helmed a show called Freaks and Geeks, is dealing with the real (male) misfits of our society—the awkward teenage boys, the video game slackers, the knobby-kneed, the virginal, and tongue-tied. He has planted an extremely rich comedy tree...
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It’s hard to convince people that Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, a fictionalized account the historic interview between British chat show host David Frost and disgraced American president Richard Nixon, is as edge-of-your-seat riveting as any good sports movie. But it is. Of course, the dry title doesn’t help. Maybe, Smackdown! Frost/Nixon would’ve been better.
The beauty of the film, based on the Peter Morgan play of the same name, is that Frost (Michael Sheen)—who had some minor success in the United States but was ultimately sent back to the UK with his tail between his legs—sees his exclusive interview with Nixon as a way to get back his table at Sardi’s. He craves fame, status, a kind of professional redemption. He has no idea that he’s out of his depth—his obsession is scoring the interview, not actually conducting it.
As for Nixon (Frank Langella), well, we already know what he’s like—brilliant, twitchy, paranoid, and self-pitying....
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Since I saw The Dark Knight trailer right before this film, here’s a riddle for ya:
Q) What’s the only thing worse then making the film Funny Games?
A) Re-making the film Funny Games!

Admittedly, I never saw Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke’s 1997 film about two well-mannered young men who brutally torment a wealthy family in their vacation home. But I am assured that I don’t need to. This latest version is a frame by frame remake, with different actors and, of course, now conveniently in English! Maybe Haneke just didn’t want some American hack to get his hands on his film. (Fair enough. Have you seen City of Angels?). But more likely, he was so in love with his material, he just couldn’t resist bringing it to a larger audience.

Now, as a general rule, I hate films that are trying to do any of the combination of the following:
1. Disrupt the comfortable lives of the bourgeoisie. (Meaning, of course, both the characters and we, the oh-so-cozy audience.)
2. Blare punk rock music to prove how anti-establishment they are.
3. Scold us, the audience, for secretly craving violence on screen.

Funny Games hits the above trifecta while managing to not even get the details right. Maybe 10 years ago, a film about psychological torture with mostly off-screen violence would have flown, but today’s horror films are all about torture procedural, baby! The camera no longer discreetly turns away before the little boy is blown to bits—it lingers lovingly over the ensuing blood, the pulverized guts, and the gaping hole in his skull. (Hey, if you’re going to criticize our culture’s craven taste in entertainment, at least show us how truly disgusting we are.)

As for using punk rock as a sign of anarchy? They’re playing the Sex Pistols on the oldies station. Need I say more?

At least I understand why the actors got on board. It’s juicy, acting class stuff. Tim Roth is a model of emasculated self-loathing as the hapless husband. Naomi Watts suffers mightily as we watch her air of entitlement turn to one of feral desperation. And Michael Pitt is smug and droll as the smarter half of the preppie psycho duo (the disconnect between his good manners and his homicidal nature is where the film derives its sense of “humor.”)

But they all get demerits from me. Two years ago,  Haneke directed the genuinely intriguing Cache. It dealt with similar themes—how perspective shapes reality and how material wealth gives us a false sense of moral superiority. He’s regressed here, and it’s no wonder why. The film is 10 years old. It feels 10 years old. And it should have stayed on the shelf (next to Funny Face and Funny Girl?) where it belongs.

The Game Plan follows familiar formulas and characters, both brightened by a bit of wit and good performances from the two leads.

Joe Kingman (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) is the star quarterback of the Boston Rebels. (No NFL participation here.) He has such a swollen ego that he tries to be a one-man team. He has turned his ultra-cool bachelor pad into a shrine to himself and the other King, Elvis. Then, just as the Rebels are entering the playoffs, adorable 8-year-old Peyton Kelly (Madison Pettis) arrives on his highly polished doorstep. She claims to be the daughter he never knew...
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If Quentin Tarantino had stuck to the assignment, Grindhouse would be an unalloyed guilty-pleasure delight. But, alas, in his half of the double feature, with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, he indulges in his favorite Tartantinian excess not once but three times.

That excess, of course, is the extended conversation about nothing in particular. It’s true that the subject under discussion does turn out to be plot-related, but that’s no excuse, particularly when the point of these movies is action, not talk.

The whole film attempts to recreate the experience of a double feature of exploitation pictures that you might have seen in an old urban theater or drive-in in the early 1970s, complete with “coming attraction” trailers, on-screen ads, and deliberately distressed prints filled with scratches and missing reels. Rodriguez’s contribution is a straight ahead zombie flick with about half a dozen demented twists. It zooms along at a rocket-sled pace, and is filled with some of the nuttiest violence you’ve ever seen. I could not have loved it more.

Then, after previews for a few horror flicks, we get Tarantino’s Death Proof, about Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a psycho killer who preys on women with his muscle car. The driving scenes kick some serious butt, but to get to them, you’ve got to slog through those conversations which last about four hours each. The pay off makes the interminable wait worthwhile, but it’s a near thing.

And while we’re talking about great guilty pleasures, check out Payback Straight Up: The Director’s Cut, due out on DVD April 10.

The first version of the film was released in 1999. It stars Mel Gibson as a thief named Porter who comes back for his $70,000, after his partner and his wife betray him during a job. You might remember the tagline: “Get ready to root for the bad guy.” Apparently, the star and the studio thought that Porter was too bad, and so they rewrote the second half of the film to lighten things up. Writer-director Brian Helgeland tried to make changes to accommodate them, but he couldn’t, and so another director came in to shoot additional scenes.

But Helgeland’s original still existed and now the studio has brought it out, complete with extra interviews (including one with Donald Westlake, author of the original novel), features and commentary track. Everyone who talks about the project, including Gibson, agrees that the changes were made strictly for economic reasons and there seems to be little ill will.

I thought that the theatrical version was o.k., entertaining enough but not even close to the real first version of the story, the 1968 film Point Blank with Lee Marvin. This new DVD is a tougher, darker film than the first Payback, and, surprisingly, a funnier film. As such, it’s a fine, sexy action picture that would fit right in stylistically with Grindhouse. Look for Freddy Rodriguez, the hero of Planet Terror, as the nose-ringed punk in Payback.

Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter is such an icon of popular culture, we almost forget what it was like when we first met the guy. But think back to The Silence of Lambs: Lecter was a monster—often photographed in extreme, distorted close-up, with his face occasionally shielded behind that freaky Medieval-style mask. He was fascinating, but scary as hell. It was only at the very end of the film, when the velvet-voiced Lecter told us he was “having an old friend for dinner,” that we realized, with growing horror at our own capacity for moral equivocation, that we actually liked this monster. And it was that paradox—a delicate balance between repulsion and attraction—which perfectly captured the tone of Jonathan Demme's brilliant film.

Oh, how far we’ve fallen. There’s no soul-searching to be done anymore. With Hannibal, the new movie based on Thomas Harris’s best-selling sequel, America has unabashedly embraced the epicurean beast. With his disdain for greed, pomposity, and, above all, bad taste, Hannibal has turned into a kind of avenging super-hero (Captain Cannibal!). And, as brought to life by director Ridley Scott (who took over the helm from Demme, who wisely abandoned ship), Hopkins’s Hannibal is the whole show. See Hannibal teach an art history class (ooh, he’s smart.) See, Hannibal go to the opera (ooh, he’s sensitive.) See him kill and disembowel the greedy police officer who dared to underestimate him (oooh, that guy deserved it).

Yes, Anthony Hopkins is as entertaining and convincing as ever. But why’d they even bother replacing Jodie Foster, another smart no-show, with the great Julianne Moore? While Clarice Starling went toe-to-toe with Lecter in the original (in scenes that were positively pregnant with loathing and longing), here she is little more than a feisty damsel in distress. Everything we know about Clarice—her wounded righteousness, her class insecurity, her lack of personal life—we know because we saw The Silence of the Lambs. In Hannibal, Clarice has no interior life. She’s just a foil character, the FBI hottie that Lecter has a crush on, mostly from afar. (She spends the better part of the film in the basement of the FBI while he’s living it up in Florence.) And without the wonderful duet between good and evil, beauty and beast, we’re lost. The film aims for gothic horror, but ends up being an extravagantly-mounted sick joke. As for the now-notorious penultimate scene, which shows Hannibal feasting on an enemy before our very eyes, your reaction to it will mostly likely mirror your reaction to the entire film: You will either find it extremely silly or extremely gross—probably both.

Right out the gate, you get a sense of the warped humor and artful use of tension and release in Happy Endings. A well-dressed woman (the reliably excellent Lisa Kudrow*) is shown running frantically through the streets of a bland, nameless suburb. This image is somewhat disconcerting: Is she being chased? Is she insane? When she does gets hit by a car, it’s shocking: we gasp as we hear the visceral “thwack” of body against machine and see her lying, bloody, on the concrete. At this point, a title card shows up on screen: “She’s not dead,” the card reads.

Exhale. Laugh.

The woman, as it turns out, is named Mamie and she’s just one of many characters that writer/director Don Roos (The Opposite of Sex) has woven into his complex story of Los Angelinos who unwittingly (and, in some cases, wittingly) create drama in their lives. Roos’s characters positively crave drama, they seek it out when it’s not there, and then wallow indulgently in the mess they’ve made. Take Mamie: When she was 16, she slept with her virginal step-brother out of spite. She told the family that she got an abortion, but she secretly put the child up for adoption. Now she’s a counselor at an abortion clinic, sleeping with a Mexican masseuse named Javier (the always welcome Bobby Cannavale) and being blackmailed by a scruffy would-be filmmaker (Jesse Bradford) who knows the whereabouts of her son and forces Mamie to help him make a documentary, a task she secretly relishes. Meanwhile, her step-brother Charley (Steve Coogan) is now gay; he has no idea that he has an 18-year-old son, but has becomes curiously obsessed with the baby son of a lesbian couple his boyfriend Gil is close with. Is the baby boy actually Gil’s son? Is it worth jeopardizing his relationship with Gil to pursue the truth? Does Charley’s pursuit of the baby boy actually reflect a secret regret that he never had any children of his own? (Ah, but wait, he did!) Sound complicated? It is. And I haven’t even told you about one of the more compelling stories of the bunch, concerning a sexy chanteuse with femme-fatalish leanings (an utterly captivating Maggie Gyllenhall) who seduces an earnest gay young man (Jason Ritter) and his sweetly clueless rich father (the surprisingly affecting Tom Arnold).

The old joke about needing a score card to keep up with the characters would apply here. But Roos has essentially provided one. His often witty (albeit sometimes overly cutesy) title cards help keep things orderly. Happy Endings is about secrets and lies and the messy connections and misconnections that is the stuff of life. It’s a big, tangly, overstuffed car wreck of a film. I loved it.

*Yes, in the spirit of full disclosure, Lisa Kudrow is my second cousin once-removed. So that means I’m not allowed to say she’s excellent? Sue me.

Hard Candy starts off with a tease. Two people are flirting in an online chat room. They agree to meet at a coffee house. We surmise, correctly, that one of the chatters is a grown man and the other is a 14-year-old girl. At the coffee house, Jeff (Patrick Wilson) shows up, handsome and slick and all-too conspicuously reluctant to be the aggressor. Hayley (Ellen Page) is a precocious tomboy—still testing the waters of her female wiles. The scene plays out beautifully. We actually believe that this is how an online predator could woo such a girl—make her come to him; make her think that she’s the seducer. And we queasily watch as she gets into his kid-approved car (a Mini Cooper, no less) and gets driven to his impeccable LA apartment. He’s a photographer, so it doesn’t seem overly disturbing that his walls are plastered with giant photos of nubile teen models. He offers her a drink, but Hayley is still smart enough to not accept a drink from a relative stranger. She goes to his kitchen and pours herself a too-large screwdriver. She makes him one, too. All along he protests and demurs, even as she drinks more and more and starts dancing on his couch and begging him to photograph her. Uh-oh, we think. I know where this is going. How wrong we are.

[ALERT! DON’T READ PAST THIS POINT IF YOU DON’T WANT THE FILM’S BIG PLOT TWIST SPOILED. HOWEVER, YOU’LL BE HARD-PRESSED TO FIND A REVIEW THAT DOESN’T MENTION THE TWIST.]

You see, Hard Candy is an exploitation flick, but not the kind we think it is. Jeff takes out his camera and begins photographing the dancing Lolita and suddenly, he starts to feel a little queasy. He collapses. The next thing you know, he’s tied to a chair and Hayley has moved from victim to executioner (or, to use the film’s explicit analogy: from Little Red Riding Hood to the Big Bad Wolf). This is a nice little reversal, and we experience a jolt of excitement over the prospect of what’s to come. But now that these new roles are established, the film doesn’t have any place to go. Hard Candy becomes two things: unspeakably gross (Hayley threatens, in graphic detail, to castrate our would-be pedophile) and unexpectedly tedious. It morphs into a kind of talky, one-act play (now with castration anxiety!), the kind of thing you’d see mounted on a bare stage with pretentious lighting and much gravitas in a college theater. When she isn’t sharpening her blades, Hayley is trying to coax out a confession from Jeff—you see, she’s a master torturer and a skilled psychotherapist! When the confession finally does come—and the big picture of Hayley’s revenge scheme is revealed—it’s way too contrived and ludicrous. A shame, because it’s nice to see the talented Patrick Wilson step out his usual romantic hero mode (he was Raoul in The Phantom of the Opera) and Ellen Page is nothing short of a revelation as Hayley. With her pixie-ish haircut and freckled nose, she’s adorable. But more than that, she projects a keen, wise-beyond-her-years intelligence and is impossible not to watch. Hard Candy announces the arrival of a major young star. Too bad it’s in such a sadistic and overly self-satisfied piece of exploitation hooey.

Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was really less of a stoner film and more of a clever sendup of cultural stereotypes (okay, and a stoner film). Throw in a now-legendary Neil Patrick Harris cameo, and you’ve got all the makings of a cult classic. (Indeed, while the film did middling box office, it cleaned up on DVD.)

Very much to the producers’ credit, they don’t stray far from the formula with the sequel, which has the boys being mistaken for terrorists and sent to (and escaping from) Guantanamo Bay...
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It's built on simple stuff-a frightening house with an even more frightening basement, dark menacing barely seen figures, whispery sounds, standing water, clots of hair-and it's told at a careful pace without a wasted frame.

We know from the beginning that George Walker (Vince Mola) has survived an automobile accident and suffers from terrible headaches. Five years earlier, his grandmother died. Her house has been condemned by the city until he returns and tells anyone who'll listen that he wants to restore it. But it's clear that George doesn't have the resources to do the job. He can't concentrate. He has trouble sleeping. He's plagued by visions or memories or something.

Horror fans will catch hints of Polanski's Repulsion and the better new Asian horrors, but the film isn't at all derivative. Compared to filmmaker Lance Weiler's first feature, the underrated Last Broadcast, Head Trauma is more focused and tighter. It was filmed on a few locations. Acting in the lead roles is excellent. Other reviewers have compared Vince Mola to Paul Giamatti and that's not inaccurate. He's a character who's alternately sympathetic and scary. The key scene where he shares a late-night snack with an old high school friend rings absolutely true.

The film works through a growing sense of dread and so the running time has been cut down to 84 minutes. If it were any longer, the atmosphere would simply become too oppressive. And, most important, where so many horror films these days arrive at murky endings that seem to have been created by a committee, this one is completely logical and satisfying.

The famous hillside “Hollywood” sign figures prominently in two nouveau noirs.

It provides the title for the concocted “mystery” around the death of George Reeves, Hollywoodland. The sign was built in 1923 as an ad for the Hollywoodland Real Estate Group. The last four letters were removed in 1949. By then the sign was falling apart. The original owners had gone bankrupt and the Chamber of Commerce had taken over. Why then, did the filmmakers decide to use that word as the title for a story set in 1959? Because, I guess, to have called it Hollywood would have made even less sense.

No matter, the movie has its moments, all provided by Ben Affleck as Reeves. With his recent career difficulties, he brings rueful believability to the role. Told in flashbacks, the story really begins on the night when Reeves meets Toni Mannix (Diane Lane), wife of a powerful studio executive. At that time, his single major screen credit was a small role in Gone with the Wind. He was desperate for a job, any job. She was looking for a fling.

She got her fling and he found a job as Superman on television. But the role was considered a joke by everyone else in the business. No matter that millions of kids were glued to the screen when it was on. He was running around in tights and a cape, and he got no respect from his peers or the men who controlled the industry.

That part of the film plays to perfection. As a guy who has to face a career in ruins, Affleck never strikes a false note. It helps that he has a natural resemblance to the real Reeves with a strong chin just beginning to soften around the edges. He picked up an acting award at the Venice Film Festival and, with a little luck, he might get an Oscar nomination, too.

Unfortunately, much of the action has to do with Adrian Brody as a sleazy (but not sleazy enough) private eye who’s trying to turn Reeves’ suicide into a murder. His investigation is half-hearted and tedious. The film presents three different versions of the death and never really brings it to a satisfactory conclusion.

Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia has even less to do with the real event that inspired it—the horrific 1947 murder Elizabeth Short. The film is based on James Ellroy’s novel. Like another Ellroy adaptation, L.A. Confidential, it tries to carve a thin slice of understandable plot from a dense narrative thicket. For about 90 minutes or so, it manages well enough. Alas, the movie is 121 minutes long and in that last act, it completely falls apart.

We follow two LAPD detectives, played by Aaron Eckhart and Josh Hartnett, as they become obsessed with Elizabeth Short and her death. It’s pretty much standard noir stuff with flashbacks and revelations about the woman’s past. But it all looks great—cool old cars; evocative sets; unsaturated color that mimics the black and white of the originals; hats for the guys, slinky sequins for femme fatale Hilary Swank and tight fuzzy sweaters for bombshell Scarlett Johansson; and cigarette smoke, massive flowing cumulus clouds of cigarette smoke in almost every shot.

But when it’s time to wrap things up, the wheels fall off. The various revelations were greeted with giggles and derisive laughter by the audience at my matinee.

I guess I’d give a qualified recommendation to both films but only to fans of postwar LA period pieces. For everyone else, wait for DVD.

A few critics have dismissed Hotel Rwanda as the Schindler’s List of the 1994 Rwandan civil war and genocide. Which begs a few responses: First, uh, last I checked Schindler’s List was a pretty good film, what with all the Oscars and such. Second, finding a hero in the midst of unspeakable tragedy may be cinematically convenient, but it also makes this film eminently watchable (something I may not have been able to say if Hotel Rwanda had only been about unrelenting death and despair). And finally, this tale of a resort hotel worker who found unexpected reserves of strength, wiliness, and courage is based on a TRUE story (also true of Schindler’s List, by the way). It’s not like the filmmakers conjured him up for our viewing pleasure, or, God forbid, focused on a white hero who swooped in to save the African people (see Cry Freedom, et al.).

Of course, none of this would work without Cheadle’s unforgettable lead performance (and excellent supporting work by Sophie Okonedo as his pillar of a wife): In the beginning, he’s a hustler, more Western than African, able to grease the palms and slap the backs of the right people to keep he and his family cozy. By the end of the film, he has discovered both his humanity and his sense of national identity. The film dares to ask: How could the UN and the United States stand by ineffectually during this genocide (over a million people were slaughtered)? Before he becomes proactive, Cheadle’s character has an almost blind faith that the Western world will swoop him and save him. It’s only when he realizes that no savior is coming, he becomes a savior himself.

Poor Macauley Culkin. At some point in Igby Goes Down, the movie that is going to make his kid brother, Kieran Culkin, a star, a character says: “I believe that certain people are meant to fall by the wayside to serve as warnings for the rest of us. Signposts along the way . . .”. Ironically, that character (a fabulously fatuous Jeff Goldblum) could have been talking about Macauley. Mac’s childhood career—with all of its cutesy mugging and ill-advised pee-wee star vehicles—seems to have served as a signpost for both his younger brothers, who pop up in increasingly edgy and interesting roles. Rory Culkin, who plays a younger version of Kieran’s character in this movie, was precociously effective in Signs and You Can Count on Me. And Kieran, apparently, was just warming up with his great work in The Cider House Rules and this year’s The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. Watching his Igby—a child of privilege who runs away from school and crashes on the floor of a bohemian NY loft—made me think, “So this is how it must’ve felt to be one of those critics who first caught a young Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.”

Igby is character who masks his child-like fragility with a potent (and often hilarious) sarcasm, and Kieran manages to depict these contradictions without ever seeming precious. Lord knows, the world has certainly given Igby reason to be confused: His social-climbing Mom (Susan Sarandon) has all the maternal instincts of Medea; Dad (Bill Pullman) is wasting away in a mental institution; his preppie brother (Ryan Phillipe) is on the fast track to corporate soullessness; and even his girlfriend (Claire Danes) is not quite as devoted as she seems. Igby Goes Down is exhilarating, dark, funny and audacious — all the more remarkable because it the debut film from writer/director Burr Steers. It’s a film that takes dead aim at hypocrisy, vanity, and self-delusion, and hits all of its targets with an almost ferocious precision. As for Macauley? Suffice it to say, he needs to hire a new agent (maybe Kieran’s is available.)

In The Illusionist, Edward Norton plays Eisenheim, a somber, self-serious magician who wows audiences in turn-of-the-Century Vienna with his David Blaine-style illusions. Is he a gifted entertainer, or a man truly bestowed with supernatural powers? Until its final scene, the film never lets on—creating a (somewhat) interesting mystery, but also creating a problematic lead character. You see, we’re supposed to believe that only a man this superior, this aloof, this disdainful of mere mortals could be truly touched by otherworldly powers. (Twice in the film Eisenheim is offered something to eat and both times he declines—somehow, eating is beneath the guy.) But by his very definition, the Eisenheim character is uninvolving, dramatically inert. Doubly problematic, since The Illusionist is in large parts a love story.

When he was growing up, Eisenheim fell in love with an aristocrat’s daughter—a girl far above his own social standing (his father was a cabinet maker). Unable to be with her, he fled his small village, and went on to fashion his career as the great Eisenheim, never forgetting his one true love. But one night, while performing for an audience that includes the deeply skeptical and nefarious Crown Prince Leopold (a hammy Rufus Sewell), Eisenheim asks for a volunteer and is presented with Leopold’s prospective bride-to-be Sophie (Jessica Biel). You guessed it, she’s Eisenheim’s childhood love and they spend much of the film conspiring a way to be together.

Since Norton’s character is so impenetrable, I think the best way to enjoy The Illusionist is to see it as a Paul Giamatti film. Giamatti plays Chief Inspector Uhl, Leopold’s ambitious and dutiful head of security, a man of his own limited social stature who has hitched his career future to the crown prince. While Prince Leopold is threatened by Eisenheim—he fears any man who possesses a wisdom that he can’t comprehend—Uhl, who fancies himself an amateur magician, is fascinated by him. As Uhl gradually realizes that his own boss is corrupt and possibly criminal, he is torn between ambition and integrity.

Is there any actor who plays weak-willed men with such compassion as Paul Giamatti? He’s superb, but The Illusionist is not. Handsomely mounted, reasonably diverting, and featuring a gorgeously dreamy score by Phillip Glass—it never manages to pull any true rabbits out of its hat.

What if they threw a war film, but no war showed up? That’s the vexing but intriguing premise of Sam Mendes’s new Gulf War film, Jarhead. Based on the autobiographical book of the same name, Jarhead tells the story of Anthony “Swoff” Swofford (a buff, but still puppy-like Jake Gyllenhaal) who sort of drifts into the marines in the midst of an existential crisis (he always has his copy of Albert Camus’s The Stranger at the ready), and almost by accident, becomes an expert sniper.

In many ways, Jarhead follows the traditional war film structure, particularly aping Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (which Mendes clearly worships). Swoff gets harassed by a stern drill sergeant, bonds roughly with his bunkmates, and finally gets sent to the Gulf. But that’s where Jarhead takes a turn for the absurd. Because, as we all know, marine snipers were not exactly the most useful commodities in Gulf 1, which was primarily a precision air bombing campaign.

So mostly the boys sit around in the desert—hydrating, obsessing over their unfaithful wives and girlfriends, preparing for chemical warfare that never comes, roughhousing in a vaguely homoerotic way, and masturbating. Come to think of it, masturbation is a perfect—and perverse—analogy for this war and the film itself. All these boys—including soldier-for-life Sergeant Siek (an ever-charismatic Jamie Foxx) and the pragmatic fellow sniper Troy (Peter Sarsgaard)—want to do is kill Iraqis, not because of any strong political conviction on their part (the soldiers, like the movie, are fairly neutral about politics) but to alleviate the boredom and maybe get out some intrinsic blood lust. But they wait for action in vain. (There is a moment that we actually think Swoff and his platoon-mates are going to see some action, and it’s telling how much we, in the audience, also crave this violent release.)

Jarhead is about boredom, but it’s never exactly boring. Instead, it is a strangely beautiful, slightly frustrating, marvelously acted surrealist nightmare. It could be argued that Jarhead is the war film that this generation truly deserves.

Two stars are clearly born in Juno, the story of a subversive small town girl (named Juno) who gets pregnant and decides—much to everyone’s surprise (including her own)—to act as a surrogate mother to a Yuppie couple. The first is the young tomboyish actress Ellen Page (she had already caught my eye with last year’s indie Hard Candy), who not only wins us over with her snub-nosed beauty and droll way with a one-liner, but manages to bring a real emotional heft to her wiseacre young heroine. The other is first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody. I must confess that I was a bit put off by this extravagant nom de plume (her actual name is Brook Busey), but damned if she doesn’t live up to the legend in her own mind. Not only does Juno have a kind of language of its own—it’s teen speak, with a whole lot of cultural references, verbal shorthands, and ironic putdowns—but it manages to take every cliché of an “angry teen in a small town” story and turn it fabulously on its head. Whether Cody is intentionally trafficking in the flip side of clichés or whether that’s just the beautifully skewed way she views reality, I can’t say for sure, but it works famously.

Take, for example, Juno’s step mother (Allison Janney). At first we find out that she has a thing for dogs and likes to cross-stitch pictures of French bulldogs. Oh, we’ve seen this before: A homey, kitschy character who will be the source of ridicule. But no, in Cody’s script, the stepmother is salty and smart, with lots of fierce love for her weird step-daughter. Then there’s the couple that Juno is planning on giving her baby to. The husband (Jason Bateman) is an aging hipster with a music studio in the basement and a Sonic Youth obsession. The wife (Jennifer Garner) is a high strung over achiever, who frets that  Juno will change her mind. You think you know what’s going to happen to this couple—and how Juno will relate to both characters—but you’ll be wrong. Indeed, I loved all the characters in  this movie—from Juno’s exasperated but adoring dad (J.K. Simmons, shining in an against-type role), to her hot-for-teacher best friend (Olivia Thirlby), to her unlikely impregnator (Michael Cera), a shy, knobby-kneed colt of a lad that Juno is wise enough to recognize as the coolest guy in school. I loved this hilarious and sneakily touching movie for what it is and, yes, for what it promises: I can’t wait to see what comes from these two stars next.

Fans of Stu Pollard’s debut, Nice Guys Sleep Alone, will see a lot of similarities to his new film, Keep Your Distance. Both are set in Louisville . Both revolve around attractive couples who are involved with the wrong people. But where Nice Guys is essentially an indie romantic comedy, Distance is a thriller.

As it begins, radio talk show host David Dailey (Gil Bellows) seems to have it all. He loves his work. He and his wife Susan (Kim Raver) have just been voted “Kentuckians of the year” by the state magazine.

Things aren’t so sunny for Melody Carpenter (Jennifer Westfeldt). Her divorce isn’t quite final. She’s working way too many hours, and her new boyfriend Sean (Christian Kane) is just a little bit creepy. He’s rich but prone to inappropriate behavior. At the same time, David receives a series of strange anonymous notes.

The plot takes the right kinds of unexpected turns, but the film works through the characters. They’re well-drawn, original and interesting—particularly the bad guys.

The real spark though, is Jennifer Westfeldt. She’s probably familiar to most viewers from Kissing Jessica Stein, as both writer and star. Here she’s smart, sexy, funny and completely winning. She has a believably frazzled sort of glamour that’s really appealing. It’s something you tend not to find in women’s roles in big-budget studio pictures.

The acting is fine all the way through, with veterans Stacy Keach and Elizabeth Peña in support. Even though this is a modestly budgeted work, production values are first rate. The film has all the polish you expect from a theatrical release. It also has a raciness and a strong sense of place that you generally don’t find from the studios these days.

Most of the plot machinations work well, but some are a bit too fuzzy. Still, you understand enough. For mystery fans and for indie fans, this one’s a sleeper.

In this wickedly entertaining new documentary by filmmakers Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgan, we follow the meteoric rise and equally dizzying fall of Hollywood mogul Robert Evans—who, as a Paramount Pictures head of production, oversaw such groundbreaking films as Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather Part I and II, and Chinatown. Slickly goodlooking (imagine an unholy cross between Montgomery Clift and Dustin Hoffman), brazenly confident, and blessed, at least for a time, with a knack for anticipating the cinematic zeitgeist, Evans embodied showbiz excess and glamour. (He was married briefly to actress Ali McGraw who left him for Steve McQueen; in Evans’s mind, this was event that precipitated his fall).

The film—which is beautifully photographed in Evans’ decaying Hollywood Hills mansion (giving the whole film a kind of dissipated, Sunset Boulevard feel) and interspersed with news reels, documentary footage, TV and film clips, and still photography—plays like a fabulously gossipy and uniquely American tragedy (Evans went from toast of the town to persona non grata after he was busted for cocaine and linked to a scandalous Hollywood murder). But what makes the film really sing is Evans, himself, who narrates his own life story in a pulpy, bourbon-tinged, extravagantly lived-in voice. A must see.

Quentin Tarantino knew. He didn’t hope. He didn’t have a hunch. He knew that with Uma Thurman’s revenge-seeking, butt-kicking über-frau The Bride, he was creating an iconic character whose image would adorn the fantasies (and walls) of young men for generations to come. Of course, he picked the right actress—the giraffe-goddess Thurman, who deftly embodies The Bride’s many permutations: From besotted pupil to grieving victim to blood-seeking kung fu vengeance queen to . . . well, to give away her final incarnation would be to ruin the fun.

Like its predecessor, Vol. 2 is broken into episodic set pieces, each meticulously realized and infused with its own deep-rooted sense of place and mythology. But while Vol. 1 was a lightning-fast chop suey comic fantasy, Vol. 2 plays more like a dusty spaghetti Western. We flashback to The Bride’s past, find out about her love affair with the eponymous Bill (an effortlessly cool and craggy David Carradine), watch her kung fu apprenticeship at the hands of Pai Mei (Hong Kong action star Gordon Liu), get the satisfying showdown with the fabulously bitchy one-eyed Elle Driver (Darryl Hannah), and, in my favorite sequence, witness a hilarious moment of unlikely female bonding (suffice it to say, it involves a home pregnancy test).

Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is certainly as entertaining as Vol. 1 (if not as blood-splattered)—and it’s deeper, too. It’s about identity and sacrifice and, ultimately, love. Who knew? The once snot-nosed auteur Quentin Tarantino set out to create a legend, but the legend he continues to create is his own.

This tight little crime film is the year’s best sleeper. It’s a character-based story, and perhaps that explains why it didn’t catch on in theatrical release. Whatever the reason, don’t miss it on DVD.

Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a young man who still hasn’t completely recovered from a horrifying accident that he was responsible for. His situation is complicated and you really shouldn’t know much about it. The other main characters are Chris’s blind friend Lewis (Jeff Daniels); Gary Spargo (Matthew Goode), an older guy who seems a little too interested in Chris’s situation and Luvlee Lemons (Isla Fisher), a friend of Gary who is too quickly attracted to Chris.

At the center of the plot is a bank heist. It’s handled with the right amount of suspense, but the believably cool characters and the flat desolate Midwestern landscape (all right, the flat desolate Canadian landscape) are really more interesting. I have some quibbles with the conclusion but that’s all they are—quibbles. The casting throughout is letter perfect. Max says that young Gordon-Levitt reminds her of a svelte Keanu who can actually act.

Writer-director Scott Frank is also responsible for the scripts to Minority Report, Get Shorty and Out of Sight, and even though this film is a more modest undertaking compared to those, it is every bit as enjoyable. In fact, it’s so good that I’m going to do something that I almost never do and watch it again with the commentary track.

If you’re done with the summer’s big-budget special effects and are looking for an engrossing, involving mystery, find a copy of this one.

Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is one of the most hypnotic, funny, intimate, and satisfying love stories ever filmed—a pretty neat trick when you consider that the lovers in question are married (but not to each other) and that they never consummate their love. Bill Murray—who, having established himself as the coolest man in comedy, is now re-establishing himself as the coolest man in independent film—plays Bob Harris, an aging action star (think Burt Reynolds) who goes to Tokyo to shoot a whiskey commercial. It’s clear that Harris needs the quickie, $2-million payment as much as he needs the time away from his perpetually exasperated wife.

In Tokyo, Harris is bored, bemused, quizzical, languorously funny—in short, he’s all the things we’ve come to love about Bill Murray. (The scenes of him shooting the whiskey commercials—responding to increasingly idiotic demands from his would-be auteur directors—are among the funniest I’ve seen on film all year.) Then he meets Charlotte (an enchanting Scarlett Johannsen), a young American housewife who is staying in Tokyo with her celebrity shutterbug husband (Giovanni Ribisi). Bob and Charlotte are meant to mirror each other: While Bob is having a classic midlife crisis, Charlotte—a graduate of Yale with a philosophy degree, no less—is having a start-of-life crisis. Her husband isn’t a creep; he’s just a little self-involved and fatuous. Naturally, Charlotte and Bob discover each other, their friendship becoming increasingly intimate, tender, and rife with longing. Both of them are simply too decent, and maybe too much in love, to taint their feelings with adulterous and ephemeral sex. Offbeat, wise, and lyrical, Lost in Translation is the antidote to the usual Hollywood love pap—it’s Harold and Maude for the next generation.