Category: Film Features

Like the French action film Brotherhood of the Wolf, another foreign import currently gracing local screens, Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s Spanish ghost tale The Devil’s Backbone gleefully eradicates genre barriers. But where Brotherhood of the Wolf is insanely (ineptly?) gonzo, del Toro’s film is sublimely elegant and controlled — a deft mix of ghost story, childhood adventure, and political history.

This carefully paced, sun-dappled thriller takes place during the latter stages of the Spanish Civil War at a rural school/orphanage that shelters the children of Republican militia members. The orphanage itself may well be the film’s most compelling character, with its cavernous sleeping quarters, creaky corridors, and creepy, secret-laden subregions all radiating from an unexploded bomb lodged in the school’s courtyard. We see the bomb fall in the film’s knockout opening shot and are later told that it has been defused, but the boys at the orphanage don’t believe it –they claim you can hear its heart ticking.

The film’s opening juxtaposes the bomb’s release from a plane with the sight of an injured boy at the orphanage seemingly dumped into a well by a friend. The film then flashes forward, though at first we’re not sure how far, to a new child, Carlos (Fernando Tielve), being deposited at the orphanage.

As Carlos struggles to fit in at the orphanage, we learn about some of the place’s secrets. There’s the ghost of the boy — Santi, whose bed Carlos inherits — who died the night of the bombing; there’s the bizarre Oedipal triangle that exists between the orphanage’s three primary adult residents — one-legged headmistress Carmen (Marisa Paredes), elderly doctor Cásares (Federico Luppi), and angry young caretaker (and orphanage graduate) Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega); and there’s a stash of gold, meant to help finance “the cause,” hidden in a kitchen safe.

Despite the historical setting, del Toro keeps the politics continually present but relatively subtle. There’s an air of dread surrounding the school as the leftist patrons feel the war slipping away. When Carmen decorates the school with religious iconography in an attempt to disguise it as a Catholic school, Cásares remarks, “Jesus Christ out there and John the Baptist in here. Are things that bad?” Later, Cásares makes a trip to town and witnesses the execution of members of the international brigade, a sight that leads to an attempt to flee the orphanage. And the film’s final confrontation, while not explicitly symbolic, pits individualistic greed against communal interaction in a manner that mimics the larger duel of fascist and Marxist foes.

The boys themselves — who do not know that their fathers have died on the front — show an unsure grasp of the larger historical forces around them, some thinking that the war is cool because of all the bright lights and big noises, even though an older kid counters angrily that “the war is shit.” And, in fact, some of the film’s most assured and compelling scenes concern the smaller world that the boys have created for themselves, such as a virtuoso hazing scene in which Carlos is sent out late at night to sneak water from the orphanage kitchen.

The Devil’s Backbone is del Toro’s third feature, following his well-regarded Mexican vampire flick Cronos and his stylish American horror film Mimic. Part Lars Von Trier (especially the Danish director’s hospital-set haunted house series The Kingdom), part Luis Bunuel (the black comedy and anti-religious gibes), and a lot Edgar Allen Poe, del Toro shows a remarkably sure hand at juggling different elements.

In the end, the film’s supernatural elements may not play out in the way one expects. “What is a ghost,” an opening voiceover asks before immediately providing an answer: “A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again?” As Spanish democracy crumbles around this group of orphaned children and aging and crippled protectors, the school itself seems as much a tragic ghost as the diminutive poltergeist that haunts its halls, and the real monsters turn out to be very alive and very human.

The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition may be a modest feat of filmmaking that would be just as at home on television, but the story it tells is so astonishing and the still photographs and 35-millimeter footage that miraculously survived is so fascinating, it more than earns its big-screen release. The Endurance is a 90-minute documentary about a 22-month odyssey; the film’s narrator (Liam Neeson) calls it “the last great journey during the heroic age of discovery.”

In 1914, after failing in two previous attempts to reach the South Pole (and finally seeing another explorer reach that goal), British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton began to assemble a crew for “the last great terrestrial prize”: crossing the entirety of the Antarctic on foot. Shackleton’s call for men read: “Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” According to the film, Shackleton drew his 27-man crew from over 5,000 respondents.

Among the crew was Australian photographer and cinematographer Frank Hurley, many of whose photographs and film footage survived the trip. It’s this incredible footage — released in 1919 and rereleased in 1994 (as the silent documentary South) –that makes the documentary special.

Shackleton and his crew (which included 69 Canadian sled dogs brought to help them cross the continent once they reached it) made their final departure from South Georgia Island in the Weddell Sea in December 1914. The expedition’s ship, The Endurance, had to negotiate a thousand-mile tangle of floes (chunks of ice) and leads (water paths between the floes) through the frozen sea, a distance of roughly 900 miles when the floes began to thicken and the pace slowed. The expedition found itself stuck in the ice only one day’s sail from the mainland.

The crew stayed aboard for seven months until shifting ice threatened the ship. Forced to abandon The Endurance, they set up “Ocean Camp” on a floe that was essentially a huge ice raft only 5 feet thick. Stranded for months on the floe, the men entertained themselves with a host of activities (all captured by Hurley either on film or still photograph), including soccer games on ice, putting on plays, haircutting tournaments, and “weekly gramophone concerts.” A month after abandoning ship, The Endurance sank and the mission changed from crossing the Antarctic to merely surviving. The next nine months — hauling 2,000-pound, supply-packed lifeboats over increasingly thin ice floes, negotiating a small boat though a hurricane, traversing unexplored glacial mountains by foot — was more harrowing and exciting than any fictional account you can imagine.

At one point, the food rations were down to one frozen biscuit per day per man, a meal described in one crew member’s diary as “You look at it for breakfast, you suck it for lunch, and you eat it for dinner.” Another man had his upper lip ripped off after attempting to drink from a frozen metal cup, but his fate was preferable to that of the expedition’s canine enlistees.

With such an enthralling story and with Hurley’s surviving footage, it would be hard for The Endurance not to be engaging, and director George Butler does a fine job organizing his storytelling resources, which also include selections from crew diaries, interviews with children, grandchildren, and other relatives of the crew, and new Antarctic footage that retraces the steps of Shackleton’s expedition. The film also does a subtle job placing the journey in historical context, reminding the audience that these men were lost for almost two years and returned to civilization in the midst of the Great War — and that many of them immediately joined the war effort.

If the film has a flaw it’s that it doesn’t properly explore Shackleton’s motivation for the trip beyond citing “because it was there” romanticism. The film hints that Winston Churchill was rather dismissive of the expedition, and though the story is indeed spectacular, the film offers no reason for the viewer to contest this view. The motivation seems especially odd when we learn, at the end of the film, that Shackleton set off for another attempt soon after. (He died of a heart attack on South Georgia Island before his departure in the great, icy sea.) Noble explorer or megalomaniacal madman worthy of a Werner Herzog film? Either way, Shackleton’s journey is one you won’t want to miss.

Late winter/early spring is traditionally the worst time of the year for movies. With most late-year Oscar hopefuls and staggered-release foreigns and indies finally having hit town, we’re left with the studio system’s lesser lights as the big companies clear out the detritus to make room for the summer blockbusters. In this context, Miramax’s Birthday Girl would seem to be a promising alternative. A low-budget British flick that admirably mixes genres (comedy, thriller, romance), cultures, and languages (English and Russian) and stars Nicole Kidman, Birthday Girl has been building its minor buzz through recent festival appearances in London and Toronto and at Sundance.

Promising though it may seem, Birthday Girl ultimately doesn’t offer much more than the typical born losers Hollywood dumps during this off-season. In fact, I can’t imagine the film getting much attention at all were it not for the presence of Kidman, a talented and adventurous actress who has become a major star in the past year.

Written and directed by the brother filmmaking team of Tom and Jez Butterworth, Birthday Girl opens with lonely Englishman John (Ben Chaplin, looking every bit the stereotypical “mild-mannered bank clerk”) offering a voice-over account of his romantic troubles. “When you think about it, England is just a small island,” John says. “I know that gives you about 20 million girls to choose from — but if you live in a small town and work long hours, you’re just not going to get a chance to meet them all.” This is a means of justifying the “bravery” of John’s decision to order a bride from a dubious Web site called “From Russia With Love.”

John’s new companion arrives soon after in the form of Nadia (Kidman), a tall, sexy, chain-smoking Russkie who speaks no English. After a few moderately interesting scenes of John and Nadia learning to co-exist — the understandable tension mitigated by a growing (mostly sexual) chemistry — the film takes a turn into thriller territory.

Birthday Girl consistently misses opportunities with this potentially compelling premise. For starters, the film establishes John’s “purchase” of Nadia in quick, credit-sequence narrative strokes rather than exploring in more detail what might lead a man to make such a provocative decision. The film does present a possible romantic partner at John’s workplace but doesn’t give enough information about the character’s interactions with other people to explain, outside of the opening narration, why he would resort to a mail-order bride. The film also does little, aside from the language barrier, with the obvious cultural issues that would arise when an Englishman and Russian woman, strangers to one another, attempt to force a romantic union. Instead, Birthday Girl bypasses these potentially fruitful subjects in favor of a “madcap” con-game-meets-screwball-romance whose plotting is ragtag and whose surprise “twists” are entirely familiar. Certainly there isn’t enough going on here in terms of story and dialogue to make up for the film’s entirely mundane visual style.

The attraction here is Kidman, who acquits herself perfectly well. But, ultimately, this feels like a stunt movie for Kidman, a breather between bigger projects that allows her the novelty and challenge of doing an accent when she’s not speaking her lines in Russian.

A respectable if middling genre pic whose quirkiness feels forced (and not all that quirky), Birthday Girl isn’t really a bad film, it’s just not a very interesting one. — Chris Herrington

In what can only be described as an abashedly good time, The Count of Monte Cristo delivers ripe, swashbuckling fun. The classic Dumas revenge tale comes to life with Guy Pearce (Memento) and Jim Caviezel (The Thin Red Line, Frequency) playing opposite one another as friends cum enemies in 19th-century France. Pearce plays the Machiavellian Mondego with fiery panache and Caviezel is surprisingly enjoyable as Edmund Dantes (aka the Count), capturing the character’s unusual transformation from kindly simpleton into vengeful playboy. Aside from the winning performances, The Count delights in having fun with its enjoyable subject matter. Considering the glut of wretched films that have recently been born out of Dumas’ work (The Man in the Iron Mask and The Musketeer), this is no small feat.

The story itself is rather simple, though the details are complicated slightly in the film. Dantes and Mondego are two best friends who’ve grown up together in Marseilles and now work as sailors on a local boat. Dantes is a kind but uneducated son of a local craftsman. Mondego, on the other hand, is the heir to a great family fortune — the son of privilege. Constantly jealous of his friend’s happiness, Mondego is particularly covetous of Dantes’ beautiful fiancÇe, Mercedes (Dagmara Dominczyk). When Dantes unknowingly involves himself in government affairs (he innocently agrees to deliver a letter from the quarantined general Napoleon), Mondego seizes the opportunity to frame him for treason. With the help of a crooked local politician, Villefort (James Frain), Mondego has Dantes sent off to prison.

Family and friends are told that Dantes is dead, and Mercedes weds Mondego. Meanwhile Dantes is in prison, clinging no longer to feelings of love and spirituality but solely to visions of vengeance. When a neighboring inmate accidentally tunnels into Dantes’ cell, a friendship is formed as the educated, elderly priest (Richard Harris) teaches the young man all he has to offer. The priest schools Dantes in literature, math, science, and, of course, swordsmanship. The priest also tells his pupil of a lost treasure which he is going to rescue once he tunnels out of the prison. In a daring escape (minus the priest), Dantes frees himself from the big house, finds the treasure, and crowns himself the Count of Monte Cristo, arriving in Paris as a mysterious young aristocrat, all the while plotting to exact his revenge on those who wronged him.

Although The Count of Monte Cristo is laughable at turns (Luis Guzman is ridiculous as the Count’s indebted manservant, failing to alter his accent from the same street-smart one he used for roles in Boogie Nights and Out of Sight), it’s also fast-paced, exciting, and hard not to enjoy. — Rachel Deahl

The hype Black Hawk Down has received is well-deserved. This is a film that hangs on, right at your gut.

Black Hawk Down is based on actual events that occurred in Somalia in 1993. A civil war has left the country’s citizens starved. Marines are brought in to see that humanitarian supplies reach the intended target. After the Marines depart, a Somali warlord resumes stealing the supplies. The remaining peacekeepers, a small group of Rangers and members of Delta Force, are sent on a mission to capture the warlord and his top lieutenant. The mission immediately devolves into the worst kind of chaos, so the soldiers’ aim changes from getting the warlord to getting themselves and everybody they brought with them out.

The tensions are set early: chest-beating among the Rangers and the Delta Force, squabbles between soldiers and their superiors, the question of American soldiers in Africa. And then all that dissolves in the melee of gunfire and the rush of angry Somalis after two Black Hawk helicopters (of the title) crash. None of that matters within the tangle of fear and blood and bullets.

Sentiment — though heroics and purpose are given lip service — is largely ignored for something more visceral — survival. These soldiers start out on an almost workaday assignment. They’re told what to do, and they do it. They’re scared, sure, but certainly not prepared for the horror that meets them. One man squeals, “They’re shooting at us!” His superior responds with irritation, “Well, shoot back.” In one scene, a helicopter hovers over a mob of Somalis making its way to a downed helicopter and its captive occupants. The Rangers are on their way, but no amount of good, American know-how can out-step the crowd, and no amount of wishing can save the injured pilot surrounded by those who see his value as an American.

Of the cast — Josh Hartnett, Sam Shepard, Ewan McGregor, among others — no single performance stands out. It all works toward the feel of teamwork. That these men are in this mess together, pride be damned. Director Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Hannibal), through little talk and a lot of action, has achieved something rather remarkable in films these days: honesty.

When the word is spoken in The Shipping News, you know it’s time to pack it up and go home. There’s nothing more to see here, except more of the same, and that same, while not flat-out awful, is tainted by that word — magic.

The film, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by E. Annie Proulx, is about a man who returns to his ancestral home to find what made him who he is. Kevin Spacey stars as Quoyle — no first name necessary — who has lived his life suffering from the disappointments of others. His father was cruel to him and his wife was crueler. They both die at approximately the same time, and with their demises comes the arrival of Aunt Agnis (Judi Dench). She’s moving back to Newfoundland and persuades her nephew and his young daughter to return with her. And so Quoyle, a man whose recurring dream is about drowning, moves to a place where everybody has a boat and into his forebears’ house that leaks and groans with the wind and the past.

Quoyle, a former inksetter, gets a job as a journalist at the local paper because the publisher has a “feeling” about him. The publisher turns out to be right. Quoyle has a nose for prose and one-ups the managing editor. Feeding his new self-esteem is his girlfriend, who is a little less sad than he is, a woman who goes by the name of Wavey (Julianne Moore). But Quoyle isn’t home free, as it were. He’s in Newfoundland by destiny to discover those deep, dark family secrets.

Those secrets, it turns out, are deeper and darker than most, but director Lasse Hallstrîm metes them out in a matter-of-fact way that is chillier than Newfoundland’s weather. Hallstrîm seems more interested in the setting than in the drama. His small town is filled with quirkier-than-thou sorts who believe in premonitions and karma and cut their words short and find some way to work a “d” sound into every syllable. Spacey plays it soft-spoken, a no-brainer performance for him. Moore, for her part, is way too physically elegant to play such a sad sack, while Dench is almost a non-presence, popping up from time to time to spit out a bit of angry wisdom.

Rebounding triumphantly from his recent stretch of solid but minor work
(Dr. T. and the Women, Cookie’s Fortune, The Gingerbread
Man), 76-year-old Robert Altman has produced in Gosford Park what
is clearly his best film since The Player and Short Cuts a
decade ago and likely his best since Nashville in 1975. Familiar yet
magnificently orchestrated, Gosford Park is also the first British
production by one of the most quintessentially American directors.

Altman’s main interest has always been to investigate the peculiarities
of subculture — the country-music industry in Nashville, behind-the-
scenes Hollywood in The Player, an Army medical camp in M*A*S*H,
modern-day Los Angeles in Short Cuts, upper-class society in post-boom
Dallas in Dr. T. and the Women. This focus, along with his unrivaled
touch for managing large, ensemble casts, makes Gosford Park a perfect
project for him. The film, set in 1932, examines the symbiotic worlds of the
aristocracy and their servants during a weekend hunting party at an English
countryside estate. Both the film’s upstairs and downstairs worlds are
populated by one of the most fabulous casts of British thespians ever
assembled, with many A-list actors taking roles that would be considered
extras in most films.

Gosford Park‘s credit sequence establishes the film’s vision of
the master-servant class system. Constance, the Countess of Trentham (Maggie
Smith), ventures from her house to a waiting car in the rain, a brief, mundane
event that requires the feverish work of three servants — butler, driver, and
attendant. Constance is traveling to the home of her niece, Lady Sylvia
McCordle (Kristin Scott Thomas), and her wealthy husband Sir William McCordle
(Michael Gambon). Other guests of the McCordles include Sylvia’s sisters and
their husbands, Sir William’s cousin, matinee idol Ivor Novello (Jeremy
Northam), and his companion, gauchely American film producer Morris Weissman
(Bob Balaban), who is researching his next project, Charlie Chan in
London. Each guest brings his or her own valet or maid, adding to the
already-teeming servants’ quarters at Gosford Park, which is run by butler
Jennings (Alan Bates), head housekeeper Mrs. Wilson (Helen Mirren), and head
cook Mrs. Croft (Eileen Atkins).

Altman’s handling of this cast and his visual depiction of these two
worlds, as they exist separately and as they interact, is bravura. Altman’s
trademark style — the use of large ensemble casts, overlapping dialogue, and
free-flowing narratives (or non-narratives) — allows viewers a lot of freedom
and a lot of options of what to see and what to hear. In Gosford Park,
the triumph is in how clearly this style shows the master and servant classes
inhabiting the same screen spaces yet operating in largely separate worlds. It
also cross-cuts beautifully between the two spaces, juxtaposing the ornate
drawing rooms upstairs with the spartan servants’ quarters downstairs, and
picks up on how the same social hierarchies and customs that govern upstairs
life are mimicked downstairs: Visiting servants are referred to by the name of
their employer and the servants’ dinner seating arrangements mirror that of
the upstairs guests. Servants even pick up their masters’ snobberies, one
servant remarking about a guest, “A woman who travels without a maid has given
in.”

But Altman privileges the servants: We learn about the lives of the
wealthy guests almost exclusively through the gossip heard downstairs, and
servants hover about in every scene, paying witness to the foibles of their
employers. Altman’s depiction of this world is so thorough that when the head
housemaid (Emily Watson as Elsie) rashly breaks the invisible plane separating
the two cultures by speaking up while serving dinner, the audience will likely
be as shocked as the upper crust on film.

With almost as many delicious performances as great actors and Altman in
rare directorial form, Gosford Park is a wonderful entertainment. It
doesn’t reach anywhere near the emotional depths of its obvious model, Jean
Renoir’s similarly plotted house-party masterpiece The Rules of the
Game, but how could it? Gosford Park is more light entertainment
than heavy-handed treatise on class issues, exposing the utter ridiculousness
of wealthy adults being dependent on a mass of servants with a very light
touch.

In the end the film morphs from The Rules of the Game into Agatha
Christie, but this isn’t really a whodunit. Rather, the resolution of
Gosford Park‘s mystery merely adds a touch of pathos to the film’s
pitch-perfect examination of these two worlds.

Though it was a big hit at Sundance prior to September 11th, In the
Bedroom must seem much more poignant now than it did then, seeing as how
it deals, seriously and movingly, with such themes as grief and
retribution.

The film, which appears to have captured this year’s standard critical
slot as the Realistic Indie Underdog for the year-end award circuit, much like
You Can Count On Me did last year, is directed by Todd Field, a
character actor probably best known, if at all, for his sharp turn in Victor
Nunez’s wonderful Ruby in Paradise. And In the Bedroom has a lot
of traits similar to Ruby: a strong feel for its rural/suburban locale,
an unhurried pace, a deep regard for actors, and an almost documentary-like
realism.

Set in a small community in coastal Maine, In the Bedroom
respectfully outlines the contours of its community: lobster boats, fish-
packing factories, backyard barbecues, and little-league baseball. It also
deftly sketches the friends and co-workers who make up the orbit around its
central characters.

At the center of the film is a middle-aged, well-educated couple, Matt
(Tom Wilkinson) and Ruth (Sissy Spacek) Fowler, a doctor and high school
teacher, respectively, and their bright son Frank (Nick Stahl), home for the
summer between college and grad school. Frank is having a fling with a
(slightly) older woman, the winsome Natalie (Marisa Tomei, rebuking everyone
who sees her as an Oscar punchline for her My Cousin Vinny win), who
has two kids and is separated from short-fused husband Richard (William
Mapother).

The relationship between Frank and Natalie forms the core tension in the
film. Ruth disapproves, seeing her son’s affair as a reckless dalliance that
could compromise his future; Matt is easier on Frank, perhaps because he gets
a vicarious thrill from having Natalie sashay around the family home. But
Ruth’s premonitions of disaster come true, leaving the couple to cope, without
giving away too much, with the unbearable loss of a child.

Talky and realistic and actor-driven, In the Bedroom can’t help
but be compared with You Can Count On Me, but Field’s directoral hand
is much surer than Kenneth Lonergan’s was in that film. Indeed, the film’s
most unbearable and moving portrait of grief doesn’t come from the inevitable
confrontation between Matt and Ruth, though Spacek and Wilkinson produce
plenty of Oscar-worthy fireworks, but during Field’s series of quiet,
carefully framed, staccato set pieces soon after Frank’s death: Ruth and Matt
staring into the dull glow of a television screen as a late-night comedian
makes irrelevant jokes; Matt mowing the yard.

With the court system unable to mollify his and Ruth’s grief, Matt
decides to seek vengeance for Frank’s death, and the triumph of Field’s film
is the way he drains the action of any satisfaction. There is a succession of
subtle moments during the film’s final act that questions many of the
assumptions leading to Matt’s action and make the film’s final image of
emotional numbness all the more moving.

This is God’s act. We’re just actors in it. If Jesus was here, everybody would want his autograph, and if films were around when he was around, they’d be filming him. I think Muhammad is a prophet. How you gonna beat God’s son? Anybody love poor people and little people got to be a prophet. He was champion of the world, had a long table full of food, had a house for his mother and for him. Told them to take it and shove it if he couldn’t love his God. What you think he is?”

This is Muhammad Ali cornerman Drew “Bundini” Brown, speaking in the fantastic 1996 documentary When We Were Kings, about Ali’s 1974 upset of then-world heavyweight champion George Foreman at the “Rumble in the Jungle.” No other moment in the film, or in Michael Mann’s new biopic Ali, quite captures the uniqueness of Ali’s story. Since the creation of the media celebrity in the post-WWII era, no other similar icon has lived a life of such mythic resonance. Other entertainers have been politically active and have suffered consequences — Paul Robeson particularly comes to mind. Others have had careers of novelistic richness — Elvis Presley, certainly. But Ali’s story has an air of the biblical — in pop culture terms he’s a little bit Samson (strength), a little bit Jesus (sacrifice), and a little bit Moses (political leadership). Mann’s ambitious if not entirely successful film taps into this aspect of Ali’s iconicity but loses its focus as it moves along and never really delves far beyond a surface appreciation of Ali’s legacy.

Ali focuses on a 10-year stretch of the fighter’s career, from 1964, when he first became the heavyweight champ by defeating the brutish Sonny Liston, through 1974, when an underdog Ali regained the title from a bigger, stronger Liston clone, George Foreman. Some have complained that this selective sample of Ali’s life neglects the more troubling later episodes of his career, when he fought too long and took too much punishment. But Mann’s decision to focus on the heart of Ali’s boxing career and political controversy frees the film, at least somewhat, from the overly familiar arc that “Great Man” movies tend to have and also allows him to focus on Ali’s political significance.

Mann’s film fits a three-act structure, with diminishing artistic returns. The film’s opening section is a beautifully orchestrated montage that gives young Cassius Clay’s mid-’60s rise proper context: that of a widespread infusion of African-American culture and confidence. The montage is set to the tune of an ecstatic Sam Cooke club performance and also outlines in brief, deft strokes Clay’s political awakening — as a child on the bus glimpsing a story of Emmet Till’s lynching and at another moment watching his father paint portraits of a blue-eyed, blond-haired Jesus; later as a young man listening to Malcolm X speak. Clay is wordless throughout this montage until it ends, abruptly, thrillingly, at the Liston weigh-in, Clay breaking the silence with a trademark harangue: “Sonny Liston, you ain’t no champ! You a chump! Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee! You want to lose your money, bet on Sonny! Rumble, young man, rumble!”

Mann spends a considerable amount of time on the first Liston fight and, as with the five other Ali bouts the film covers, the fight choreography is exquisite — exciting but understated. It’s neither the arty abstraction of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull nor the gonzo exaggeration of the Rocky movies but a tightly shot, realistically staged spectacle that respects and communicates the brutality and artistry of the “sport.”

The film remains exciting through Clay’s post-fight announcement of dedication to the Nation of Islam, his transformation into Muhammad Ali, and especially the initial scenes of Ali’s outspoken refusal to be inducted into the Army during the Vietnam War (including Ali’s famous explanation: “Ain’t no Vietcong ever called me nigger”). But Mann starts to lose his way during the film’s second act, Ali’s three-and-a-half-year exile from the sport, when the director fails to penetrate the surface of Ali’s brooding.

Ultimately, Ali is a succession of first-rate acting and exciting moments that don’t really add up to much. It’s hard to imagine anyone else matching Will Smith’s Ali — his physical transformation and imitation of the champ’s sing-songy vocal delivery fairly startling — but this has to be one of the rare occasions when the Hollywood star is actually less attractive and charismatic than the real-life figure he portrays. And the supporting performances are almost uniformly excellent, especially Jamie Foxx as cornerman Brown and an almost unrecognizable Jon Voight as sportscaster Howard Cosell. Mario Van Peebles also makes a very credible Malcolm X.

Ali‘s final section, a long, faithful recreation of the “Rumble in the Jungle” with Foreman, is respectable filmmaking that dutifully recounts all the aspects of that momentous event, from Ali’s heroic status among Africans to the dubious introduction of Don King to Ali’s famous rope-a-dope boxing strategy. But When We Were Kings, an Academy Award winner from only a half-decade ago, recounted all this with actual footage and more insight, and Mann’s film just doesn’t hold up next to that unavoidable comparison.

Like Brown says in When We Were Kings, “This is no Hollywood set, this is real. Hollywood would come in, take these types of scenes and set them up. Have somebody in the movies playing his life. This is real, we don’t pick up no script.” n

The odds were against the cinematic biography A Beautiful Mind, a fact-based account of Nobel Prize-winner John Forbes Nash Jr., the mathematician whose career and marriage were derailed by a decades-long bout with schizophrenia. Indeed, there seemed to be little dramatically compelling about Nash’s life, much of it set in a stuffed-shirt academic world punctuated by equations, digits, and economic theories. And it’s even more daunting to depict the vagaries of a personality disorder, which this film attempts to explain through such storytelling liberties as composite characters and flights of fiction that go against a true historical study. Yet director Ron Howard makes it all add up for this poignant tale of one man suffering from his peculiar burden of genius, as Nash dances on the precipice of madness for nearly 50 years.

Russell Crowe, a long way from his Academy Award-winning work in Gladiator‘s toga party, portrays West Virginia whiz kid Nash, and the film opens with the young man’s 1947 entry into Princeton. Handsome yet devoid of social skills encompassing basic human interaction (“I don’t like people, and they don’t like me,” he admits), he skips classes and mostly ignores his student peers in order to find “that original idea” which will separate his talents from the pack.

As A Beautiful Mind amusingly posits, however, Nash’s observations of his horny classmates as they ponder how to approach a blonde bombshell at a campus bar, combined with his own formula for such romantic strategizing, leads him to calculate new concepts regarding governing dynamics and the mathematics of competition that soon challenge the long-held theories of Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723-1790). So it figures that six years later Nash becomes a valued instructor at MIT’s Wheeler Labs, where he finds the love of his life: Alicia (Requiem for a Dream‘s Jennifer Connelly), a cutie-pie student from his calculus class. (“Against all probability,” he exults to a colleague, “she finds me attractive on a number of different levels!”) Nash is also hailed as an expert code-buster who gets summoned by the Pentagon to crack hidden messages buried under a slew of seemingly random integers.

Amid Nash’s staid, somewhat drab existence, two very colorful characters manage to stand out: Nash’s Princeton roommate Charles Herman (A Knight’s Tale‘s Paul Bettany), a go-for-the-gusto chap who in later scenes is toting along his motherless niece Marcee (Vivien Cardone), and Department of Defense head William Parcher (Ed Harris), who dragoons Nash into the shadowy world of Cold War espionage and hush-hush top secrets. Parcher convinces Nash that the Russians plan to nuke America and instructs him to divine covert information found in national magazines like Look and Time; the spy even implants a radioactive isotope into Nash’s arm with select access codes that will gain him entry into classified areas so he can drop off the need-to-know information.

The heightened paranoia proves too much for Nash, however. He’s almost to the point of thinking that the Commies are under his bed. And in a way, he’s right: The mathematician is eventually diagnosed as a schizophrenic, unable to distinguish reality from the imagined demons who are doing some nasty numbers on his life. Imagine being subjected to 72 hours straight of Oliver Stone’s JFK and you’ll get a rough idea of the heady conspiracy theories that contribute to Nash’s meltdown.

The script by Akiva Goldsman (Batman Forever, Practical Magic) is “inspired,” according to the press kit, by Sylvia Nasar’s biography A Beautiful Mind and the institutional background provided by his real-life parents (dad Goldsman is a therapist, his mom is a child psychologist). And since Mind isn’t a screen biography in the literal sense, a recent USA Today article cited some movie-industry wisdom that the drama may experience tough sledding for key nominations in upcoming movie competitions, a fate that befell the cliched rewrite of imprisoned boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s history for director Norman Jewison’s The Hurricane (1999).

Yet director Howard manages to finesse Nash’s perceived and imagined worlds with a straight-faced surrealism that competently recalls the stylish trickery of M. Night Shyamalan’s spooktacular The Sixth Sense (1999) and could indeed lure moviegoers back for a second viewing. It’s not all sober psychoanalysis, however. A heavily medicated Nash asks an old friend who’s visiting if he’s ever met his friend Harvey, the fantasy rabbit from the 1950 James Stewart comedy, then allows, “There’s no point in being nuts if I can’t have a little fun.” (A subtle inside joke also features Marcee clutching a Dr. Seuss book, a reference to Howard’s 2000 box-office blockbuster How the Grinch Stole Christmas.) As he did with his role as Big Tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand in director Michael Mann’s 1999 drama The Insider, Russell Crowe expertly keeps his hunkiness in hiding to etch Nash’s nerdy, little-boy-lost bravado in the early scenes, notably when he tells Charles, “I’m well-balanced: I have a chip on both shoulders.” The Aussie actor pulls off a stateside accent for his mathematician that’s as American as apple pi, while fleshing out Nash’s physical appearance with a shambling duck walk that negates his otherwise strapping presence. Crowe always captures the intensity of Nash’s introverted character, at times suggesting the pain of his own thought processes to solve math problems in the first half, then the torment that comes with attempting to rationalize the non-existence of his own delusions in the film’s later portions.

Crowe receives expressive support from actress Jennifer Connelly, whose Alicia becomes an elegant tower of strength who stands by her schizo, and Paul Bettany’s showy incarnation of pleasure-seeking Charles. And Ed Harris as the secret agent is intentionally larger than life, especially when his jet-black sedan is screeching through the streets, on the run from gun-toting foreign enemies. Sporting a wide-brimmed hat, Eisenhower-era business suit, and his usual chiseled face, Harris resembles a comic-book character drawn by Fantastic Four artist Jack Kirby. Skillfully guided by director Howard’s generous doses of humanity, A Beautiful Mind‘s sturdy drama probes the essence of madness with nary an emotional miscalculation. — Bill DeLapp

Let’s get the inevitable comparisons out of the way first: The Royal Tenenbaums, the third film from wunderkind director Wes Anderson, is not nearly as great as his second film, Rushmore. Startlingly original, dizzyingly funny, and utterly heartbreaking, Rushmore was a miracle movie Anderson’s not likely to top. But fans of that film (as well as Anderson’s singularly charming debut, Bottle Rocket) aren’t likely to be disappointed by The Royal Tenenbaums: It covers many of the same themes with the same unique visual style, zingy wordplay, inspired casting, and warmly humanistic worldview.

An adaptation of an epic and entirely fictional family novel that is checked out from a public library at the beginning of the film (imagine Orson Welles’ film of Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons as rewritten for the screen by J.D. Salinger, replete with gather-round-the-fireplace narration), The Royal Tenenbaums concerns a family of one-time geniuses — estranged litigator father Royal (Gene Hackman), archaeologist mother Etheline (Anjelica Huston), and their three child-prodigy offspring, financial wiz Chas (Ben Stiller), tennis champion Richie (Luke Wilson), and adopted playwright daughter Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) — reuniting after “two decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster.”

The film is droll where Rushmore was manic, and though the plot is motored by the same melancholy sense of loss, the emotions don’t run quite as deep as during Rushmore‘s countless quiet epiphanies. The film’s soaring opening montage sets the tone, as Paul McCartney’s eternal hymn to reconciliation, “Hey Jude” (this time in the hands of Elliot Smith), plays over a litany of advances and disappointments.

Etheline receives a marriage proposal from her accountant, the gentle, dignified Henry Sherman (Danny Glover), which sets the reunion of the Tenenbaums in motion. This development triggers desperation in Royal, who fakes a terminal illness in order to move back into the family home. Simultaneously, the Tenenbaum children return home in the order of their birth, with the intense Chas and his two young sons (Ari and Uzi) first, followed by the withdrawn Margot (her childishly appropriate reaction to hearing that Chas has moved home: “Why does he get to do that?”) and the self-exiled Richie. Each returning Tenenbaum is haunted by a regret or sense of loss that lends the reunion poignancy: Chas is repressing sorrow for his recently deceased wife, Margot has never come to grips with her status as an adopted child, Richie is plagued by his not exactly platonic infatuation with Margot, and Royal is tortured by his sense of having lived a wasted life.

Visually, The Royal Tenenbaums is even more precisely framed and its mise-en-scène even more tableau-like than Rushmore. The look of Anderson’s work has been favorably compared to the Sunday comics (and Rushmore reminded me more of Bloom County than anything else), its storybook feel heightened by the lovingly detailed art direction and visual design. One of the magnificent charms of Rushmore was how much information — narrative and emotional — was imparted by the film’s background bric-a-brac and how that information was left for the viewer to discover rather than focused on through close-ups or other showy camera-work. The Royal Tenenbaums is no different. The film’s nostalgic yearning for childhood is communicated by the family’s closet full of worn board games, seen in the background as two characters argue. In fact, all of the artifacts that surround the Tenenbaum siblings — as well as much of their physical accoutrements — seem permanently frozen in the moments of their initial decline.

And if Anderson’s ability to use the full scope of his frame to impart visual information is as “preternatural” as the childhood Chas’ understanding of international finance, his way with sound is no less assured. In an era when pop songs are lazily plastered over visual montages to cheaply provoke emotions or fill time, Anderson stands out for his brilliantly careful use of pop music. Sometimes it’s simple: Margot and Richie’s painfully slo-mo reunion to the tune of Nico’s “These Days” or Richie setting his pet falcon free toward the end as the Velvet Underground’s “Stephanie Says” plays in the background. Other times, the use of pop music is triumphantly showy: a visual dossier of Margot’s romantic indiscretions driven by the Ramones’ “Judy Is a Punk” or, best of all, Hackman’s deliriously entertaining kidnapping of Uzi and Ari for a day of boys-will-be-boys fun to Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard.” (Royal asks if their dad lets them have any fun, and when the kids make some reply about karate lessons, Royal responds, “I’m not talking about dance lessons, I’m talking about putting a brick through the other guy’s window.”)

Anderson’s ensemble cast is fantastic, and he employs many of the same actors from his previous films in bit parts (John Cassavetes veteran Seymour Cassel, who played Bert Fisher in Rushmore, again impersonates a surgeon, except this time of his own accord). But this is Hackman’s show, and he’s almost as extraordinary here as Bill Murray was in Rushmore. His Royal Tenenbaum is a scoundrel who hides his discomfort through gruff machoisms. (Upon meeting his motherless grandchildren for the first time, he says, “I’m sorry for your loss. Your mother was a terribly attractive woman.”) Late in the film, romantic rival Sherman says to him, “I don’t think you’re an asshole, I just think you’re a son of a bitch,” and that about sums it up. But it is Royal who is actually the film’s most acute character. While everyone else is consumed with their private agonies, Royal sees his family clearly, his insight revealed periodically throughout the film. When Chas returns home, Etheline seems caring but confused; Royal cuts through the decorum: “I think you’re having a breakdown. I don’t think you’ve recovered from [his wife] Rachel’s death.” And in the film’s most offhandedly moving moment, he says to Etheline, “I want to thank you for raising our children.”

With The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson may not have matched masterpiece with masterpiece, but he has confirmed himself as one of the most compelling and original filmmakers in America today. This kind of visionary mixture of deep kindness and inspired lunacy, of slapstick timing and emotional delicacy, hasn’t been a regular feature of Hollywood comedy since the days of Lubitsch and Sturges. It’s a cause to rejoice. — Chris Herrington

Opening on January 11th.

Every movie should have a good howl. Think A Streetcar Named Desire‘s “Stella!” Or, if you will, Jerry Maguire‘s “Show me the money.” Tom Cruise and director Cameron Crowe, both of the latter film, have reunited for Vanilla Sky, and it, too, has a cry: “Tech support!”

That you may want to scream after viewing this film was clearly an aim of the filmmaker. In one scene, Cruise, who plays incredibly favored publisher David Aames, describes a Monet painting with its “vanilla sky.” And like a Monet painting, up close this film appears to be nothing but a mess of dots. With distance, it becomes about image and reality, the meaning of happiness and consequences.

Tech support!

How odd and admirable then that Crowe, so known for his sweet films such as Say Anything, Almost Famous, and, of course, Jerry Maguire, should make Vanilla Sky, a decidedly different film with Stanley Kubrick pretensions and the casing of a Dallas episode (though it is, roughly, still sweet).

The plot revolves around David. He’s being charged with murder. But before, he was a man who was given everything and knew how to enjoy it. In flashback he remembers his best friend Brian (Jason Lee) counseling him that the sweet is that much sweeter after experiencing the bitter. But why go through that bitter nonsense when there is money to be spent and girls to get busy with? And so David dabbles with superfox Julie (Cameron Diaz) and then doesn’t invite her to his birthday party. She shows anyway, as does the beguiling Sophia (Penélope Cruz). David blows off Julie to spend a chaste, blissful evening with Sophia that sets them both firmly at the starting point of love.

As David exits Sophia’s apartment, Julie shows up. She begs for his attention, and he gets into her car, and then she drives the car off a bridge. She winds up dead; he winds up disfigured, confused, and alone. Then, like magic, David gets Sophia back, along with his pre-accident face. But what about the murder? Who did he kill? Did he do it?

The answers are shot out, and Vanilla Sky suddenly appears to be deep where it was particularly artificial. That’s all part of the plan, and it works to a degree. But the kicker isn’t mixed up in the body of the film to offer tantalizing details. It’s tacked on as splendidly composed Post-it note. — Susan Ellis

If Steven Soderbergh has proven anything as a director, it’s that he can give even the most regular vehicles a dash of artistry. A one-time darling of the indie circuit with his stunning debut (and unquestionably his finest film to date), sex, lies and videotape, Soderbergh has since gone Hollywood. Having found little to no success with his follow-ups (the little-seen Kafka and the moderately stirring King of the Hill), Soderbergh made audiences take notice with his stylish crime caper, Out of Sight. A neat heist flick distinguished by Soderbergh’s innovative direction (the story unravels through an intricate series of flashbacks and flash-forwards), Out of Sight announced the director as someone who could make likable films with a hint of intelligence. And that’s exactly what Soderbergh has been doing ever since. With Erin Brockovich and Traffic Soderbergh proved that while you can take the director out of the art house, you can’t take the art house out of the director. But now, with Ocean’s Eleven, it seems the exorcism is complete. There are no signs of Soderbergh’s roots as an indie auteur in this glossy flick.

A remake of the 1960 Rat Pack film, Ocean’s Eleven is obsessed with its own coolness. The tale involves an ex-con, Daniel Ocean (George Clooney), who endeavors to knock over three Vegas casinos for a hefty paycheck ($150 million) and the woman he loves (his ex-wife, who just happens to be dating the owner of said casinos). In order to pull off this impossible job (they need to by-pass a system relying on fingerprints, motion detectors, guards with submachine guns, and the most elaborate safe ever constructed), Ocean and his friend Russ (Brad Pitt) round up a crew of misfits from all over the country that includes a former casino owner (Elliot Gould), two Mormon brothers (Scott Caan and Casey Affleck), a British explosions expert (Don Cheadle), a Chinese acrobat (Shaobo Qin), a retired con man (Carl Reiner), a nervous surveillance expert (Scott L. Schwartz), a crooked card-dealer (Bernie Mac), and a young thief (Matt Damon).

Like the flawlessly elaborate robbery which it depicts, Ocean’s Eleven is cold but fun. Aside from the jaw-dropping “they’re really getting away with it” sensation it ultimately delivers, the film is a fairly standard hold-up flick that prides itself on the virtue of its leading man: It always keeps its cool.

An amalgam of potshots, gross-out humor, and cheap knockoffs, Not Another Teen Movie spoofs teen flicks with middling success, pulling off some zingers and adroit gags amid a barrage of misfired imitations. With almost no high school flick spared, part of the fun is simply identifying the base material (pokes are made at everything from ’80s teen projects like The Breakfast Club to the resurgent wave of pubescent Hollywood fare like Can’t Hardly Wait).

The action appropriately takes place at John Hughes High School (Hughes having written and directed some of the most beloved teen movies, including Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink) where characters like “The Popular Jock” (Chris Evans), “The Nasty Cheerleader” (Jaime Pressly), “The Pretty Ugly Girl” (Chyler Leigh), “The Token Black Guy” (Deon Richmond), and “The Stupid Fat Guy” (Ron Lester, who in some ways is reprising his role, since he actually played the stupid fat guy in Varsity Blues) enact various scenarios stolen from a smattering of teen films. The bulk of the narrative is hung from the plot of She’s All That: The Popular Jock makes a bet with “The Cocky Blond Guy” that he can turn the Pretty Ugly Girl into the prom queen. Along the way homage is paid to Cruel Intentions (the Popular Jock’s horny sister tries to sleep with him and just about everything and everyone that isn’t nailed down), Pretty in Pink (the Pretty Ugly Girl has an obsessed best friend a la Ducky), Bring It On (the white cheerleaders do a number with the line “We’re black and we know it” in their routine which they didn’t steal), American Pie (there’s an awkward masturbating scene, a hot foreign exchange student who walks around naked, and a pact among three losers who want to lose their virginity), and Never Been Kissed (there’s a 90-year-old woman posing as a high school student), to name just a few.

Although Not Another Teen Movie has an array of downright inappropriate gags (the scene where the toilet caves through the ceiling of a classroom and sprays the entire room with feces is particularly unfortunate), it’s not without its funny moments (the abusive football coach whose every other word is “goddamn” is particularly enjoyable). And even though many of the film’s best bits have been “given away” by its trailer, fans of the genre will still get a kick out of seeing their favorite films cut down to size. After all, imitation is the highest form of flattery.

If Steven Soderbergh has proven anything as a director, it’s that he can give even the most regular vehicles a dash of artistry. A one-time darling of the indie circuit with his stunning debut (and unquestionably his finest film to date), sex, lies and videotape, Soderbergh has since gone Hollywood. Having found little to no success with his follow-ups (the little-seen Kafka and the moderately stirring King of the Hill), Soderbergh made audiences take notice with his stylish crime caper, Out of Sight. A neat heist flick distinguished by Soderbergh’s innovative direction (the story unravels through an intricate series of flashbacks and flash-forwards), Out of Sight announced the director as someone who could make likable films with a hint of intelligence. And that’s exactly what Soderbergh has been doing ever since. With Erin Brockovich and Traffic Soderbergh proved that while you can take the director out of the art house, you can’t take the art house out of the director. But now, with Ocean’s Eleven, it seems the exorcism is complete. There are no signs of Soderbergh’s roots as an indie auteur in this glossy flick.

A remake of the 1960 Rat Pack film, Ocean’s Eleven is obsessed with its own coolness. The tale involves an ex-con, Daniel Ocean (George Clooney), who endeavors to knock over three Vegas casinos for a hefty paycheck ($150 million) and the woman he loves (his ex-wife, who just happens to be dating the owner of said casinos). In order to pull off this impossible job (they need to by-pass a system relying on fingerprints, motion detectors, guards with submachine guns, and the most elaborate safe ever constructed), Ocean and his friend Russ (Brad Pitt) round up a crew of misfits from all over the country that includes a former casino owner (Elliot Gould), two Mormon brothers (Scott Caan and Casey Affleck), a British explosions expert (Don Cheadle), a Chinese acrobat (Shaobo Qin), a retired con man (Carl Reiner), a nervous surveillance expert (Scott L. Schwartz), a crooked card-dealer (Bernie Mac), and a young thief (Matt Damon).

Like the flawlessly elaborate robbery which it depicts, Ocean’s Eleven is cold but fun. Aside from the jaw-dropping “they’re really getting away with it” sensation it ultimately delivers, the film is a fairly standard hold-up flick that prides itself on the virtue of its leading man: It always keeps its cool.

An amalgam of potshots, gross-out humor, and cheap knockoffs, Not Another Teen Movie spoofs teen flicks with middling success, pulling off some zingers and adroit gags amid a barrage of misfired imitations. With almost no high school flick spared, part of the fun is simply identifying the base material (pokes are made at everything from ’80s teen projects like The Breakfast Club to the resurgent wave of pubescent Hollywood fare like Can’t Hardly Wait).

The action appropriately takes place at John Hughes High School (Hughes having written and directed some of the most beloved teen movies, including Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Pretty in Pink) where characters like “The Popular Jock” (Chris Evans), “The Nasty Cheerleader” (Jaime Pressly), “The Pretty Ugly Girl” (Chyler Leigh), “The Token Black Guy” (Deon Richmond), and “The Stupid Fat Guy” (Ron Lester, who in some ways is reprising his role, since he actually played the stupid fat guy in Varsity Blues) enact various scenarios stolen from a smattering of teen films. The bulk of the narrative is hung from the plot of She’s All That: The Popular Jock makes a bet with “The Cocky Blond Guy” that he can turn the Pretty Ugly Girl into the prom queen. Along the way homage is paid to Cruel Intentions (the Popular Jock’s horny sister tries to sleep with him and just about everything and everyone that isn’t nailed down), Pretty in Pink (the Pretty Ugly Girl has an obsessed best friend a la Ducky), Bring It On (the white cheerleaders do a number with the line “We’re black and we know it” in their routine which they didn’t steal), American Pie (there’s an awkward masturbating scene, a hot foreign exchange student who walks around naked, and a pact among three losers who want to lose their virginity), and Never Been Kissed (there’s a 90-year-old woman posing as a high school student), to name just a few.

Although Not Another Teen Movie has an array of downright inappropriate gags (the scene where the toilet caves through the ceiling of a classroom and sprays the entire room with feces is particularly unfortunate), it’s not without its funny moments (the abusive football coach whose every other word is “goddamn” is particularly enjoyable). And even though many of the film’s best bits have been “given away” by its trailer, fans of the genre will still get a kick out of seeing their favorite films cut down to size. After all, imitation is the highest form of flattery.

One ticket to Behind Enemy Lines entitles the holder to 1) an ordinary war movie and 2) the need of a barf bag.

Owen Wilson stars as Chris Burnett, a Navy pilot bored out of his skull doing next to nothing on an aircraft carrier during the Bosnian conflict. Burnett is like a kid too smart for school, unchallenged and idle enough to get into trouble. Bad behavior brings him before Admiral Leslie Reigart (Gene Hackman), who slaps his hand and tells him to shape up. Burnett responds with the least amount of respect possible, repeating his desire to leave the military ASAP.

But first First, Reigart sends Burnett and another pilot on a reconnaissance mission on Christmas Day, a yank on Burnett’s chain to let him know who’s in charge. Burnett and pilot fly off-course, taking photos of something they aren’t supposed to see. They get shot down, and while Burnett climbs a hill for better radio response, his partner is discovered and executed. A rescue of Burnett is arranged and then canceled when another admiral from the U.N. mission nixes Reigart’s plan, worried that it will ruin an already shaky peace agreement. Burnett is told to make his way to a safer pick-up point. When he fusses, Reigart says, “You’ve been shot down; life is tough.” And about to get a whole lot tougher when Burnett has to dodge a particularly determined sniper and Reigart’s efforts to get his soldier out are undermined.

Snipers and weak admirals aside, Behind Enemy Lines feels nearly tension-free and peculiarly clean for a war movie. The players issue goddammits as things get thick, and when it really gets nasty, they pull out the F-word. And Burnett, too, is wholesome, not a military roughneck gung-ho to spill blood. Wilson fills the role with a good-natured charm, and the film is better for it. You root for Burnett because he’s a remarkable guy for being so unremarkable. But even the movie’s simple message about bravery and good vs. evil gets a little garbled in the telling. The pacing of the film, the way its elements are laid out ultimately make it more about Burnett saving his own ass.

(As for the timing of Behind Enemy Lines‘ release, the film gains a tiny bit more resonance: The limited violence, which would have been practically unnoticeable pre-September, now seems more horrible — a man melted away in slo-mo by a land mine, the viscera of a crashing plane wrecking the landscape, the ruined lives of those who remain.)

The “punch” was clearly saved for the visuals. Director John Moore was picked for the gig on the strength of a commercial he did for a video game, and his background shows like panty lines. Burnett must make it from point A to point B without getting squashed, and the audience views him as a 2-D figure manipulated to go up a hill and down a hill and into a building and onto a speeding truck and so on. And while the episode in which Burnett’s plane is being chased by two heat-seeking missiles is exciting, the jarring camerawork at other points is just nausea-inducing. There’s nothing thrilling in needing to boot.

Though Gene Hackman appears to be in every movie made these days, he is not in Ed Burns’ latest, Sidewalks of New York, the director/writer’s rather bleak ode to love in the big city.

The film begins with various characters telling us how they lost their virginity. Each sounds off a tale of bad decision-making involving too much alcohol or a partner much too old or a partner much too paid to do the deed. The one sweet “losing it” story we hear has a confidence-shattering caveat. And so it goes.

The characters are: Maria (Rosario Dawson), a divorced schoolteacher squeamish about getting involved again; Ben (David Krumholtz), Maria’s ex-husband, a musician and doorman desperate for affection; Ashley (Brittany Murphy), a 19-year-old college student with a self-defeating thing for married men; Griffin (Stanley Tucci), dentist, Ashley’s lover, and all-round cheat; Annie (Heather Graham), Griffin’s wife, who doesn’t like to talk about it; and Tommy (Ed Burns), a recently dumped and available TV producer. Bringing up the rear is Carpo (Dennis Farina), Tommy’s over-tanned boss and dispenser of obnoxious advice, such as cutting out “the wife and kids crap” and putting cologne where the sun doesn’t shine.

As the characters enter and exit each others’ lives and beds, they consult the camera to offer their philosophies on topics varying from sex on the first date to the separation of love and sex. This mockumentary set-up doesn’t entirely make sense, however, given that the characters separately interviewed at the beginning of the movie meet each other later by chance. But that is neither here nor there.

Where it is is the state of love and emotion today and being decent enough to be loyal. The film is rather pessimistic, but Burns does show enough faith in human nature to give those their due, whether it’s bliss or loneliness.