July 5, 2008
Newsday's Movie Reviews
'Wanted'
You've heard of the wheel of fortune and the hammer of the gods. But how about the textile mill of fate?
'Beauty in Trouble'
Comedy and chemistry make for an intoxicating mix in this acerbic, knowing character study from Czech director Jan Hrebejk and screenwriter Petr Jarchovsky - in which a young mother embodies all the reasons women make men crazy. After floods sweep through Prague in the summer of 2002, Marcela (Anna Geislerova) and Jarda (Roman Luknar) are forced to take up residence in the upstairs of a garage in which Jarda, to make ends meet, deals in stolen cars. Although drunk on Jarda's love, Marcela is fed up with his criminal enterprises, so when Jarda is arrested, she moves in with her mother, Zdena (Jana Brejchova), and Zdena's comically gothic husband, Richard (Jiri Schmitzer, who is wonderful).
'Finding Amanda'
The broad message of director Peter Tolan's "Finding Amanda" is that a network TV producer could occupy the same moral plateau as a Las Vegas prostitute. While the likely response will be "duh," Matthew Broderick is understatedly funny as Taylor Peters, a writer-producer whose disastrous half-hour sitcom is driving him back to the things he loves best - drinking and playing the horses. When his wife (Maura Tierney) kicks him out, he attempts to redeem himself by finding and rescuing Amanda (Brittany Snow), their niece, who is said to have joined the ranks of the depraved in Vegas.
'Trumbo'
Given Hollywood's congenital negligence toward writers, Dalton Trumbo is far more famous for having been on the House Un-American Activities Committee's blacklist than he would have been for all the scripts he wrote, co-wrote or adapted (among them, "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" "Kitty Foyle" and, under pseudonyms, "Roman Holiday" and "Spartacus"). You might say being persecuted by Congress was a good career move for the screenwriter and novelist ("Johnny Got His Gun").
'The Last Mistress'
Variously described as an "ugly mutt," "the goddess of capriciousness" and a woman who can "outstare the sun," the Spanish firestorm known as La Vellini - the dark center of Catherine Breillat's enthralling period piece "The Last Mistress" - probably could have been played by no one but Asia Argento. Growling with hatred, chomping on a cigar and braying like a horse in heat, Argento turns what could have been a mannered French melodrama into a riveting, roiling, thoroughly entertaining film. Think "Dangerous Liaisons" with less foppery and more sloppy, sweaty sex.
'Kit Kittredge: An American Girl'
If you're the parent of a preteen girl, you already may be resisting constant entreaties to drive her to Manhattan's Ziegfeld Theatre for a showing of "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl," the first feature film based on Mattel's popular line of American Girl dolls. Take heart: It's a sugary drama but not without grit. And a grain or two might cause even your grown-up eyes to moisten. (If you're resisting traveling to Manhattan, the movie opens wide on July 2.)
'The Love Guru'
More than anything else, the sheer goodwill of Mike Myers has made him one of the most successful comedians in the movies. It's what helped him turn a skit like "Wayne's World" into two hit movies, and a limited character like Austin Powers into three. Often, what makes a Myers joke so funny is that Myers thinks it's so funny.
'Get Smart'
When Hollywood tackles a beloved old TV series, what you often see onscreen are the acrobatics of eager-to-please filmmakers. They bend over backward to honor the source material, yet strain to attract modern viewers. In "Get Smart," based on the iconic spy-spoof series of the 1960s, director Peter Segal and writers Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember execute some graceful pirouettes, but they also stumble.
'Brick Lane'
Based on the novel by Monica Ali, director Sarah Gavron's "Brick Lane" is about the global stew, upward mobility, 9/11, pulverized dreams and the idealization of one's homeland in the face of uncomfortable new realities.
'Expired'
While watching "Expired," a low-budget drama about two parking-meter cops in love, you may wonder: Why isn't Jason Patric a star? He has the fine bones and baby blues of a Pitt, plus the acting chops of a Hoffman (Philip Seymour, and maybe even Dustin). But Patric gravitates toward art-house fare like the 1990 noir "After Dark, My Sweet" (he played an addle-brained boxer) and Neil LaBute's 1998 drama "Your Friends and Neighbors" (a misogynistic creep). As usual, Patric is riveting and essentially flawless in "Expired," but the film is unlikely to rocket him to fame.
'The Incredible Hulk'
It opens with shots of lab equipment and squirming cells, and closes with a battle between two roaring behemoths.
'The Happening'
It's hard to discuss "The Happening" without giving too much away, which is surely how writer-director M. Night Shyamalan (he also produced) wants it. The title is purposefully vague, conveying a nameless dread. And by the film's end, there's still some wiggle room around what, exactly, is happening.
'Encounters at the end of the world'
One of the last grand philosophers of film, Werner Herzog can always be depended on for some mind-altering viewing. Even a somewhat slapdash diary like "Encounters at the End of the World," which chronicles his journey to Antarctica, yields results: Amid the odd tangents and half-incubated ideas lie some memorable nuggets of madness.
'Chris & Don: A Love Story'
Given the threat gay people pose to lasting relationships, it's positively astounding what directors Guido Santi and Tina Mascara reveal in their affectionate nonfiction, "Chris and Don: A Love Story."
'My Winnipeg'
The Canadian prairie city of Winnipeg is sleepy, precociously psychic and shamefully in need of an NHL team, all subjects that are addressed in Guy Maddin's supposed nonfiction portrait of his birthplace. But this rather unreliable documentary is merely a launchpad for yet another of Maddin's giddy, Gothic unguided missiles, a movie that is as happily warped and enthusiastically disturbed as the rest of Maddin's eccentric cinema.
'Quid Pro Quo'
It sounds like one of David Cronenberg's yucky fantasies: A wheelchair-bound reporter explores a subculture of able-bodied people who yearn to be paralyzed, crippled, even limbless. Cronenberg might have told this tale with lots of queasy gore, but first-time writer-director Carlos Brooks turns "Quid Pro Quo" into something else: a finely observed, compelling drama with the creepy tinge of a thriller.
'You Don't Mess With the Zohan'
PLOT An Israeli commando escapes to Manhattan with dreams of becoming a hairstylist. (PG-13)
'When Did You Last See Your Father?'
PLOT As a father lay dying, his son reviews their life together. (PG-13)
'Savage Grace'
Rarely have the rich looked so splendid while behaving so abominably as in "Savage Grace," based on a 1985 novel about the Baekeland family, heirs to a fortune built on the pioneering plastic called Bakelite. Spoiled by wealth and privilege, they're the rottenest of eggs - but boy, do they dress well.
'The Foot Fist Way'
More a resumé-builder than a bona fide feature, "The Foot Fist Way" has already served its purpose. This no-budget comedy found a fan in Will Ferrell, who liked its crude-dude humor so much he slated it as the first release through his newly formed production company. The movie has enough memorable moments to become a sleeper hit, or perhaps gain a second life on video, but no matter: Its star and co-writer, Danny McBride, is already on his way, appearing in Ben Stiller's upcoming spoof "Tropic Thunder" and now filming "Land of the Lost" with Ferrell.
'Bigger, Stronger, Faster'
The performance-enhancing quality behind this muscular movie is director Chris Bell's willingness to go far beyond the call of duty. It might have worked perfectly well as a family story - both of Bell's brothers are body builders who've wrestled with steroids - but Bell sees the issue of drugs and sports as a metaphor for the overachieving ethos of Americans at large (no kidding) and their ability to see exactly what they want to see: Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Review: 'Sex and the City'
One of the few things you may have heard in advance about the long-awaited, already-buzzed-over-to-death movie version of "Sex and the City" is that it runs roughly two hours longer than an average episode of the HBO series. This much, we're allowed to disclose, is true.
'The Edge of Heaven'
Reaching our shores a year after its triumphant premiere at Cannes, Fatih Akin's latest drama is an intricately spun and soul-stirring meditation on fate, family and cultural bridge-building. Deploying a symmetrical triptych format whose events overlap and twist back on themselves like a pretzel, Akin traces the paths of a sextet of individuals variously conjoined by passion, DNA and unforeseeable mutual interests: a crusty Turkish-emigre widower living in Bremen, Germany (Tuncel Kurtiz), and the Turkish prostitute he takes in as his hausfrau-for-hire (Nursel K"se); the prostitute's longestranged political rebel daughter (Nurgül Yesilcay) and the German student who becomes her lover-abettor (Patrycia Ziolkowska); the student's bourgeois mother (Hanna Schygulla); and the Turkish widower's son (the handsomely brooding Baki Davrak), who has made the ultimate second-generation leap by becoming a professor of German studies in Hamburg.
'The Children of Huang Shi'
A drama drawn in very broad strokes, Roger Spottiswoode's "The Children of Huang Shi" is based on the real-life adventures of George Hogg, who arrived in 1938 Nanjing, China, as a reporter and ended up taking 60 orphan boys on a treacherous mountain journey to escape the approaching Japanese, setting up a school/orphanage on the edge of the Gobi Desert.
'War Inc.'
This John Cusack-driven exercise in scorched-earth political comedy is neither as dark nor as timely as intended, and certainly not as funny: Written by Cusack, Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser, it takes place in the fictional Turaqistan, where corporate assassin Brand Hauser (Cusack) has come to kill the oil minister.
'Postal'
POSTAL (R). It's a sad fact that movies don't get any better after the first five minutes, but Uwe ("BloodRayne") Boll has proved consistently that they can get a lot worse. This is a considerable accomplishment in the case of "Postal" (based on a video game, like all Boll's "work"), which begins with comedic Arabs hijackers arguing about the rewards of paradise in the cockpit of United 93, and then really kicks things off with a window-washer's-eye view of a jet crashing into the World Trade Center. Convinced that Arab terrorists are inherently hilarious, and that shooting fish in the leaky barrel of American pop culture takes marksmanship, Boll is a boor, and a symptom of something sad and dehumanizing. With Dave Foley, Zack Ward, Verne Troyer, Seymour Cassel. Written by Uwe Boll, Bryan C. Knight. Directed by Uwe Boll. 1:40. (adult content, vulgarity, violence). At the Cobble Hill Cinemas, Brooklyn.
'Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull'
There are two ways to manage a film franchise. One is to continually reinvent and update it, which has worked pretty well for James Bond. The other method is to simply stick with what worked the first time.
'Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian'
Yes, "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian" made me feel like a kid again - the kind of grimy, restless kid who keeps asking, "Are we there yet?" The kid has no idea where he's going, no particular desire to get there, and a sense that he's going to hate it when he does. A cookie would have helped. No such luck.
'Sangre de mi Sangre'
The grimy elegance of this Sundance award winner (under its old title, "Padre Nuestro") elevates it well above the standard-issue immigrant drama. So does its Shakespearean plotline: Smuggling himself to New York to meet the father he's never known, Pedro (Jorge Adrián Espíndola) befriends Juan (Armando Hernández), who steals the sleeping Mexican's bag, leaving him penniless and lost.
'Quantum Hoops'
The California Institute of Technology boasts 31 Nobel prize winners on its faculty and one of the saddest basketball records in NCAA history.
'My Father My Lord'
If you're going to take on fundamentalist religion, it's less wise to use a meat ax than a rapier. Which is exactly how writer-director David Volach engages ultra Orthodox Jews of his "My Father My Lord," a highly provocative, unmistakably critical drama set among Israel's Haredim (the director is himself the product of a Haredic community in Jerusalem).
'Speed Racer'
Somewhere between a Mario Bros. video game and Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Speed Racer" is one of the most visually audacious films to come along in years. With its supersaturated palette and slick surfaces, "Speed Racer" looks like a video-art installation at the Whitney, but it also wants to be an old-fashioned Hollywood family film. Against all odds it succeeds, making for a spectacular - and spectacularly strange - viewing experience.
'Battle for Haditha'
Nick Broomfield, the loose-cannon British documentarian, has never shied away from inflammatory subjects ("Biggie and Tupac," "Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer"), and for this fictionalized feature he's chosen a doozy: the U.S. Marines accused of murdering 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005.
'Turn the River'
Why has Chris Eigeman, the longtime member of Whit Stillman's acting ensemble ("Metropolitan," "The Last Days of Disco"), waited so long to get behind the camera? "Turn the River," his directing debut (he also wrote the script), is a small-scale but thoroughly engrossing drama full of strong performances and sharp dialogue. It's a noir with a female lead in Famke Janssen (the "X-Men" flicks), who hides her supermodel beauty behind the hardened, haunted face of a pool shark hoping to hustle up enough money to skip town with her young son, Gulley (Jaymie Dornan).
'Before the Rains'
Santosh Sivan's "The Terrorist" (1999) was as memorable for its lush imagery as for its nerve-racking immediacy, and he brings the same visual opulence to "Before the Rains." It's no surprise the veteran cinematographer's eighth film as a director - and his first in English - bears the Merchant-Ivory imprimatur: It takes place at the end of the Raj, among people in a colonial quandary.
'The Babysitters'
You didn't really need the Miley Cyrus photo "scandal" to be aware of the tart-ification of American girlhood. In pop culture, at least, it's endemic. As is exploitation. So we can blame writer-director David Ross for what? Being ahead of the curve? There are plenty in "The Babysitters" in which child-minding morphs into dad-tending: After the lanky, unsure Shirley (Katherine Waterston) has a romantic moment with suburban dad Michael ( John Leguizamo) - and gets a big tip - she parlays her newfound entrepreneurship into a schoolwide hooker ring.
'Tracey Fragments'
In this flawed but occasionally powerful short feature, Ellen Page ("Juno," "Smart People") doesn't exactly stretch herself playing a teenager with the snark and smarts of a 40-year-old. Here she's Tracey Berkowitz, one of those depressed, sensitive misfits destined to become a punk-rocker, a poet or both. (The script, by Maureen Medved, is based on her novel.)
'Made of Honor'
Patrick Dempsey has a lot going for him, including an interestingly distracted quality, as if he can't stop thinking about his patients even when he's not playing a doctor. Yet his success at this point remains slightly ahead of his skill set. Like a lot of medium-talented folks, he's primarily lucky. He's McDreamy on "Grey's Anatomy" and he offered solid backcourt assistance in last year's hit "Enchanted." Now Dempsey stars in a wedding-centric romantic comedy called "27 Dresses." Sorry, "My Best Friend's Wedding." Sorry, "Made of Honor."
'Redbelt'
It sounds like a great idea: David Mamet, the playwright famous for brutal dialogue ("Glengarry Glen Ross") and fiendish plot twists ("House of Games"), brings his formidable brain to the usually brainless genre of martial-arts action flicks. All the usual Mametian ingredients are here - con-men, magic tricks, the cauliflower-nosed actor Ricky Jay - but there's also the promise of the visual excitement that comes when men pummel each other on screen.
'Fugitive Pieces'
Hopscotching time on film is never an easy task, but Canadian writer-director Jeremy Podeswa handles it with skill and care in his lovely, absorbing adaptation of Anne Michaels' lauded novel about a circumspect writer haunted by his traumatic youth.
'Viva'
The sexploitation films of the 1960s and '70s are always ripe for satire, and filmmaker-actress Anna Biller takes her shot with "Viva," the story of a bored housewife who joins the sexual revolution by becoming a prostitute.
'The Favor'
It's been quite a month for middle-aged men whose stalled lives are jump-started by unexpected encounters. First came Dennis Quaid's cranky English professor in "Smart People" and Richard Jenkins' sad-sack economics prof in "The Visitor."
'Son of Rambow'
In this funny, eccentric kids' film, writer-director Garth Jennings ("The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") casts two terrific newcomers (Bill Milner and Will Poulter, 11 and 13, respectively) as Will Proudfoot, a sunny-faced kid bound to a restrictive religious order called The Brethren, and Lee Carter, the rebellious son of a rich, absent mother, who embark on the delightfully odd project of remaking a Sylvester Stallone flick. Armed with a VHS camcorder and homemade props, the two misfits inadvertently create a mini-Hollywood within their school and soon find themselves schmoozing with the popular kids. (One clever scene depicts a bunch of fashionably debauched youths snorting scented erasers.) The film occasionally loses its own plot but always retains its sense of magic by staying firmly rooted in the heads of its two young heroes, who view the outside world with wonder but retreat into inner worlds when necessary. Those worlds collide, blur and finally co-exist, which, when you think about it, is pretty much what it means to grow up.
'Mr. Lonely'
The late Stu Troup, Newsday's former jazz writer, once said of Wynton Marsalis that he'd never be great until someone broke his heart. With this in mind, you have to wonder about the emotional breadth and crazy beauty of "Mister Lonely" and how it now comes from the onetime poster child of abrasive transgression, Harmony Korine.
'Baby Mama'
What may be the first real outsourcing comedy, "Baby Mama" is like a pacifier: floppy, nourishment-free and may even keep your teeth from growing in straight. It stars the likable Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, as a wannabe mother and her trailer-trash surrogate, but it's mild to the point of pabulum, taking a pretty fertile topic - surrogate motherhood - and making it inoffensive to anyone. This is not an endorsement.
Review: 'Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay'
Greasy, hazy good fun, "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" (2004) got by on a 4 a.m. mixture of explosive-emission toilet jokes, gratuitous nudity and Neil Patrick Harris as himself. Everything took place in one night, hinging on a single quest rife with detours. Crass? Yes. But there was a merry spirit to it all.
'Standard Operating Procedure'
There's a reason that Errol Morris, after 30 years of filmmaking, isn't a celebrity or "brand" like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock. He doesn't mug for his own camera or force an agenda. Instead, he tells others' stories, nailing down facts while staying as objective as he can. It's an unfashionable approach. Folks used to call it journalism.
'Then She Found Me'
Gaunt, grim and wound as tight as a ukulele's string, April Epner (Helen Hunt), the elementary schoolteacher undergoing the mother of all midlife crises in "Then She Found Me," is a stern challenge to an audience's collective sympathy. We feel her pain, nonetheless, when, in swift succession, her adoptive mother dies, her Peter Pan husband (Matthew Broderick) abandons her for another woman and, out of the blue, her real mother (Bette Midler) turns out to be narcissistic talk-show queen Bernice Graves, who claims April is the fruit of a one-night stand with Steve McQueen.
'Deal'
In an industry built on someone getting a raw deal, few deals have been rawer than the post-"Boogie Nights" career of Burt Reynolds. He was marvelous as the patriarchal porn king in that film, and while the actor lined up plenty of work in the wake of his "Boogie Nights" Oscar nomination, none of it mattered as much.
'Deception'
It takes more than a middle-period- Hitler haircut and a pair of specs to render Ewan McGregor unto dweebdom. The actor may have undertaken one too many nude scenes in his career to convincingly inhabit the soul of a mouse, even one morphing into a rutting, wolfish Lothario.
'Roman de Gare'
ROMAN DE GARE (R). This fast-moving, brain-teasing mystery, the 49th film from the 70-year-old director Claude Lelouch ("A Man and a Woman"), begins by unraveling a skein of quintessentially French themes: identity, perception and, of course, sex. Dominique Pinon ("Amelie") plays a man loitering in a highway rest-stop who's either a serial killer, a ghostwriter for a bestselling author (the regal, vulnerable Fanny Ardant) or just another shlub having a midlife crisis.
'88 Minutes'
A cheap thriller with an expensive star, "88 Minutes" is fast, sleazy and serviceable - in other words, totally watchable - and has one point in its favor: It never tries to pretend it's a class act.
'Forgetting Sarah Marshall'
Is there something inherently funny about naked men? Not men whose pride has been wounded. Or whose manhood has been impugned. Whose illusions have been stomped on with golf shoes. Who have been stripped of every shred of self-respect and decency. We mean men with no pants on.
'The Life Before Her Eyes'
Whether playing a virginal nymphet in "Dangerous Liaisons" or a sword-wielding vigilante in "Kill Bill," Uma Thurman has always seemed, despite her unearthly beauty, human and woundable. As Diana, the haunted woman at the center of "The Life Before Her Eyes," Thurman has never looked more heartbreakingly fragile.
'The Forbidden Kingdom'
For true fans of martial-arts flicks, the first-ever pairing of the genre's two biggest stars, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, might have generated more sparks in a tougher, meaner film. Instead, "The Forbidden Kingdom" is a family film, aimed at those who have probably never seen earlier chop-sockies like Chan's "Drunken Master" or Li's "Shaolin Temple." That means the action is slowed down for younger eyes, mostly bloodless and often played for laughs.
'Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed'
Ben Stein, the actor, lawyer, columnist and onetime speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford, is probably smarter than you. He's definitely smarter than I am. What's galling about his new documentary, "Expelled," is that he seems to think we're both slobbering idiots.
'Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?'
Morgan Spurlock's 2004 exposé of the fast-food industry, "Super Size Me," was a smart, funny, imaginative documentary that marked a turning point in the form. Along with Michael Moore, Spurlock ushered in the age of the documentarian as personality.
'Anamorph'
(3 STARS) ANAMORPH (R). There aren't many police-procedural/serial-killer thrillers that can claim painter Francis Bacon, camera obscura and Pope Innocent as plot devices, or for that matter anamorphosis - the technique of hiding one picture inside another, with it revealed only by the viewer's changed perspective.
'Dark Matter'
(2 STARS) DARK MATTER (R). A film almost impossible to review without giving everything away - especially everything that's wrong - "Dark Matter" is elegantly directed by the debuting Chen Shi-Zheng. It features several superb performances ( Meryl Streep, Liu Ye). And it concludes in a way that will have you asking whether the ending was misguided, or maybe it was just the rest of the movie.
'Smart People'
It's hard to say just how Dennis Quaid manages to make Lawrence Wetherhold, the sour, self-centered professor at the heart of "Smart People," anything close to likable. Wetherhold is not one of those stock Hollywood curmudgeons with gruff charm and a gooey center. He has no charm; he has no goo. Yet, Quaid finds what is funny and endearing and worthy in the character, and his performance holds this fine, if somewhat fragile, film together.
'Street Kings'
You can always count on James Ellroy for a night of feel-bad entertainment. In novels like "White Jazz" and "American Tabloid," his prose is blunt and brutal; the film adaptations of his books, like "L.A. Confidential" and "The Black Dahlia," mix the tough dialogue of old gangster flicks with modern, bloody action. The common threads are pervasive pessimism and cheerless violence.
'Prom Night'
There ought to be a rule, stashed in the Screen Actor's Guild bylaws, that every actor cast as a villain in a slasher film has to watch "Psycho" and write a paper on Anthony Perkins.
'Bra Boys'
BRA BOYS (R). The dashing young lords of California's Dogtown have nothing on the hard-core surf gangs of Australia, whose assaults on the world's scariest waves are matched, if not exceeded, by their full-contact battles with rivals, traitors and cops.
'Chaos Theory'
If actor Ryan Reynolds isn't careful (see: "Definitely, Maybe"), he's going to parlay his good looks and engaging presence into a full-time job as a game-show host.
'The Visitor'
THE VISITOR (PG-13). The "homeless, tempest-tossed" yearning to breathe free don't have to be emigres from oppression in Tom McCarthy's "The Visitor": They can be emotional exiles like Walter Vale, the hero of McCarthy's first film since "The Station Agent," and the boring white man extraordinaire.
'Young@Heart'
The premise of the new documentary "Young@Heart" makes it sound like some sort of bizarro-world " American Idol."
'The Ruins'
It would have been too easy for the old-time grindhouse hucksters to hype "The Ruins" with such in-your-face admonitions as: "You'll Never Trust Your Houseplants Again After You See ... THE RUINS!" Even though that's probably true, this particular serving of Saturday night gore is garnished with more measured-than-usual doses of creative tension and metaphorical possibility. Make no mistake, though. You're going to cringe plenty before it's over.
'Nim's Island'
Over the past five years, Walden Media has become a reliable purveyor of big, bright family fantasies from "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" to "Charlotte's Web." But there have been missteps along the way. (Remember "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium?")
'Leatherheads'
Silver-haired, square-jawed and twinkly eyed, George Clooney doesn't just look like a product of the Hollywood studio system circa 1930. He can direct like one, too.
'Shine a Light'
As "Shine a Light" opens, it looks as if it will be an epic battle of wills - the chaos of a Rolling Stones concert against the precision of director Martin Scorsese, the irresistible force of rock and roll against the unmovable object of filmmaking.
'Flight of the Red Balloon'
Inspired by Albert Lamorisse's enchanted "Red Balloon" of 1956, Hou Hsiao-hsien's first French-language film shows why the Taiwanese master is considered one of the world's great filmmakers.
'Sex and Death 101'
When Roderick (Simon Baker) gets an e-mail list of all the women he's ever slept with, he thinks it's a prank. When he realizes it includes all the women he will ever sleep with, "Sex and Death 101" becomes a not-quite-successful something else, including a burlesque of male libido and a treatise on love.
'Stop-Loss'
Despite Jon Stewart's Oscar-night jokes about all the Iraq war movies that no one goes to see, the five-year-old war is still relatively underrepresented in commercial films. And yet, on the rare occasion one surfaces, we view it through a thick mist of déj ... vu. Is it that all wars are fundamentally the same or just all war movies?
'21'
"The best thing about Vegas," says a character in the new suspense lark "21," "is you can become anything you want."
'Run Fat Boy Run'
Sometimes, Simon Pegg betrays too much suppleness, physically and otherwise, to convince you that he's packing a paunch as Dennis the lovelorn, chain-smoking slacker in "Run Fat Boy Run." But he's such a good actor that he makes you believe anything - anything, that is, except the notion that any sentient male Earthling, no matter how stupid or scared, could leave a pregnant woman looking like Thandie Newton standing at the altar.
'Priceless'
Gad Elmaleh, the disarming French-Moroccan star of "The Valet," is the chief reason to see this slick comic truffle set along the Cote d'Azur. Elmaleh elevates the nettlesome role of Jean, a retiring hotel bartender mistakenly thought to be a wealthy guest by Irene (Audrey Tautou), a serial gold-digger bored with her sugar daddy of the moment.
'My brother is an only child'
This saga of Italian siblings taking divergent political paths during the turbulent 1960s and '70s is, itself, a smart-alecky little brother to the similarly themed, but far longer and richer 2003 epic, "The Best of Youth." Elio Germano is Accio, a disenchanted seminary student who finds an outlet for his volatile, contrarian passions with Fascists in his hometown.
'Alexandra'
A fascination with the physical has marked many of the films of the great Alexander Sokurov, whether it's youth and vigor ("Father and Son"), age and infirmity ("Mother and Son") or the stamina of his cameraman (the famously single-take "Russian Ark").