Category: Film/TV

Even after nearly 30 years in the entertainment spotlight, Steven Spielberg remains a conundrum. He has massive mainstream commercial success but is consistently ignored or snubbed at the Academy Awards; film critics who may despise his occasional soft-headedness and political simplicity will often admit his technical mastery. Throughout his career, he has been accused of compromising his darker visions of violence, childhood, family, and the future through multiple filters that take the forms of allusions to (and direct swipes from) other films, hollow happy endings, and the mind-control overtures of composer John Williams. While Spielberg’s latest film, Minority Report, still invokes and relies on these apparent escape hatches, it is also driven by the same horror and confusion surrounding the entertainment-technology complex that distinguished 1993’s harrowing and heartless Jurassic Park and last year’s haunting A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Strangely, Spielberg seems to be drawing power from these contradictions as he grows older: While far from perfect, both Jurassic Park and A.I. are among my favorite Spielberg films, and Minority Report belongs in their company. There probably won’t be a smarter, more frightening, or more richly imagined popular entertainment all year.

Set in Washington, D.C., in 2054, Minority Report stars Tom Cruise as Chief John Anderton, a skilled and dedicated detective who works for the U.S. Justice Department’s experimental Pre-Crime division founded by patrician-with-a-secret Lamar Burgess (the ageless Max von Sydow). Thanks to the efforts of Anderton, his colleagues, and three psychics (called Pre-Cogs) who have been drugged and conditioned to see murders before they occur, the nation’s capital has had no murders in the last six years. When Justice Department representative Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) comes in to inspect the Pre-Crime complex for possible flaws on the eve of a national referendum to create similar departments across the country, Anderton is suddenly fingered as the murderer of a man he has never met. As Anderton tries to clear his name, he discovers new information about the subtleties of the Pre-Cogs’ “hive mind” with help from dotty researcher Iris Hineman (Lois Smith), outwits and outruns his former teammates in the Pre-Crime division, and wrestles with the guilt he feels over his strained marriage to his wife Lara (Kathryn Morris) and the grief that comes from his conviction that he was responsible for their son’s abduction.

Within this futuristic framework, Spielberg quickly reestablishes himself as the poet of the chase scene. The opening sequence, which shows the Pre-Crime division racing against the clock to piece together the location of a nondescript suburban home (and thus prevent a man from stabbing his unfaithful wife with a pair of scissors) is the most carefully orchestrated suspense set-piece Spielberg’s ever created, invoking the best passages of both Alfred Hitchcock and D.W. Griffith but distinguishing itself through Spielberg’s brilliant sense of framing and camera placement. Other close calls and narrow escapes incorporate jet-packs, magnetized vertical freeways, and mechanized auto factories, but the technical achievements, special effects, and grimy cinematography by Janusz Kaminski never overwhelm the spatial logic of each scene. No other filmmaker has ever been able to make such a claim so often or do so with such seeming effortlessness.

In fact, Minority Report‘s chase sequences are so imaginative and suspenseful that much of the timely philosophical inquiries made about the compromises of freedom in the name of safety and the parallels between successful state-enforced security and organized religion can either be put aside for later contemplation or dismissed altogether. (In contrast, much of what may have alienated audiences about A.I.: Artificial Intelligence was its belligerent refusal to entertain on a purely sensory and spatial level, e.g., the wacky Saturday-matinee antics that surface throughout the Indiana Jones trilogy or the you-are-there carnage of Saving Private Ryan.) As Anderton discovers more and more troubling information about the system he believes in, fascinating questions about the Pre-Crime division are raised: Why is murder considered a metaphysical violation but suicide is perfectly acceptable? If Pre-Cogs occasionally disagree on accurate versions of certain events, then are they passive seers or active architects of the future? The second question is answered when Anderton abducts female Pre-Cog Agatha (Samantha Morton) and follows her instructions on eluding authorities in a giddy, frightening game of cat-and-mouse in a shopping mall. Frightened by the multiple futures she sees yet incapable of living in the present, Morton conceives her small role superbly: It’s by far the most intriguing human element in the film.

The most interesting aspects of the film as a whole are its depiction of an organic, intrusive advertising culture — billboards occupy the entire field of vision and are able to demand that you stop and enjoy a beer — and the original source of the screenplay. The events of Minority Report are taken from a short story of the same name written by Philip K. Dick. Dick was an erratic but frequently brilliant author whose provocative ideas about subjective realities and alternate universes often outpaced his ability to resolve them. Since Scott Frank and Jon Cohen’s script goes far beyond Dick’s short story in both plot and science-fiction elements, the film’s clumsy attempts to back away and tie up loose ends cannot be considered Dick’s fault. But the choice of inspiration is telling: Since 1974, Spielberg has moved from the trashy genre fiction of Peter Benchley (Jaws) to the trashy genre fiction of Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park) to the historical writings of Thomas Keneally (Schindler’s List) to the countercultural and postcultural speculations of a generally acknowledged literary genius.

And as he grows older, Spielberg’s visions grow darker and more complex. His two most recent films contain scenes as bleak and despairing as he’s ever created: The series of events leading up to the fulfillment of Anderton’s destiny in Minority Report have a terrible, inexorable power. However, the implications of Anderton’s fate in the world he helped create are deflated by excessive plot complications and a false-positive ending that undermines a lot of the humanity and ambiguity that Cruise brings to his role. But in spite of their flaws, Spielberg’s recent films show him evolving thematically, with a new emphasis on the breakdowns within social, political, and technological systems — a recurring theme of the works of the late Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick’s ghost looms larger in Spielberg’s works now than it ever has, and some of Kubrick’s famous chill and ambiguity are starting to rub off as well. The resulting work is indicative of an artistic future nobody could have predicted: Steven Spielberg fantasies capable of engaging the eye, mind, and heart all at once — in that order.

— Addison Engelking

Those coming into The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys expecting a coming-of-age action film about blossoming lads dodging the advances of ravenous priests will be mercifully disappointed. However, they might be intrigued by a glimpse into the mysteries of Catholic education that the film affords and may come away with just a little bit more insight into the modern complications that fundamentally trouble that faith.

I was raised Catholic and went to a private school through eighth grade. Nuns as teachers were all but extinct at my particular school, so I didn’t get to experience the Nunzilla character depicted in the film. However, when my sister Lucia and I would become frustrated by something at school, our mother would entertain us with stories from her own Catholic girlhood. This was before Vatican II, so masses were still in Latin. Mom was particularly fond of stories about “Sister Mary Hitler” (name withheld to protect the celibate), who, daily, would frighten her students with horror stories of communist plots. Commies were everywhere, she would contend, and out to destroy Christ and the American Way. These warnings were as constant in the classroom as the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer.

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys takes place in the 1970s, a time that is in-between the extremes of my mother’s indoctrination and today. The period was simpler. And director Peter Care has wisely chosen a gentle 1970s treatment to promote that point. Unlike most nostalgia films these days, the music of the day is used sparingly and judiciously. The cars, fashions, and haircuts are all we need to figure out just when and where we are.

Francis and Tim (Emile Hirsch and Kieran Culkin) are best friends whose creative and literary awakenings (comic books and William Blake, respectively) are discouraged by the prudishly stern, one-legged Sister Assumpta (a wasted Jodie Foster: all whispery bluster and no bang). Together with pals Wade and Joey, they band together to form the Atomic Trinity: a team of superheroes who battle — in their fantasies — the evil Peg Leg and her band of motorcycling hell-nuns. These fantasies are brought vividly to life in animation sequences chronicling the imagined battles and, as the movie gets more serious, their real struggles to become young men.

Along the way, Francis finds himself in a state of crush with classmate Margie (Jena Malone), who has a secret or two to hasten his growing up and understanding of how the world works in darker ways than we are raised to expect. Margie soon becomes a character in the Atomic Trinity adventure, since the black-and-white, good-and-evil world of comic book heroism is the only place where Francis can understand the real-life troubles that hurt Margie.

The young actors are great. Hirsch, in particular, is as real and complicated as adolescence requires, and his silences speak much louder than the words of most young actors. Culkin is a sly charmer here, showing some of the talent we might have seen from brother Macaulay had the elder’s teen years not been wasted on Richie Rich and divorcing his parents.

This movie really only works when it isn’t trying very hard. Scenes with the four boys just being boys are great. These scenes feature lots of hanging out, riding bikes, and talking about sex, about which none has a clue. These moments are the truest and most poignant in the film. The subplot with Margie is also honestly considered and never overplayed, showing Hirsch at his sensitive best.

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys loses steam, however, when it tries to be an adult film. The world created by the boys is so complete and so charming that we lose interest immediately when the adults show up. Add to this an implausible prank subplot that goes awry and the contrived animated sequences (the boys’ real-life battles are more interesting) and we wish that the film had left the altar boys to themselves and not tried to make their world any more dangerous than it already is. Puberty is hard enough. — Bo List

While film culture in Memphis has improved dramatically over the last five years, there’s still a whole world of vital cinema out there that never shows up on local screens. For example, of the 126 films that received votes in The Village Voice‘s Take 3 national film critics’ poll last year, only 66 have been shown on local screens (and three of those — Cure, George Washington, and La-Lee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton — were one-time-only festival screenings). But most of the others are (or will be) available at local video stores, so instead of risking a sunburn while indulging in some of the summertime activities highlighted elsewhere in this issue, you could spend some leisure time in the comfort of air-conditioning and catching up with how the other half of the film world lives. Here are a few viewing suggestions, all available at your finer local video establishments:

The highest-ranking film in the Take 3 poll that never found a home on local screens is The Circle (ninth on the Voice list), a wrenching, harrowing film from Iranian director Jafar Panahi. Best known for the child-centered The White Balloon, Panahi takes aim here at the Islamic country’s “woman” problem. A maker, like many of his celebrated countrymen, of accessible art movies, Panahi here crafts a richly metaphoric yet concrete and graspable film. The film is structured the way Richard Linklater’s Slacker was — the camera follows one character (or set of characters) until he or she intersects with another then the camera picks up the new character to follow him or her, etc. This structure emphasizes a social problem rather than the plight of an individual, with the succession of women appearing in the film standing in for the country’s entire female population.

The Circle‘s women, most of them recently released from prison (their crimes unspecified), are trying desperately to find their place in a country depicted here as a patriarchal police state, a country where merely being a woman is portrayed as a crime. (The film, unsurprisingly, was a precariously made production that has been screened in Iran only once.) A long day’s journey into night –from a hospital nursery to a jail over the course of a single day —The Circle is framed by the plight of a single, unseen woman whose predicament attains intense power when seen in the context of all that comes in between. The film builds to an unbearable anxiety and is governed by a Kafkaesque nightmare logic — except this is basically a neorealist film.

But, for you subtitle-phobes, not all the movies that bypass Memphis are foreign-language films. The highest-ranked American film on the Voice list is Donnie Darko (16th), an idiosyncratic, iconoclastic teen film that deserves to be discussed alongside similar recent works such as Rushmore, Ghost World, and Gummo. The debut feature from twentysomething writer-director Richard Kelly, this muted, nostalgic film about the plight of a delusional teen in the 1980s carries echoes of The X-Files, David Lynch, and comic books. Downbeat and doleful on the surface yet with mysteriously hopeful undercurrents, this highly original, high school gothic defies easy description, but it is spiked with brilliantly filmed set pieces (a few applause-worthy slo-mo tracking shots and a great reverse montage at the film’s most crucial moment), genius stunt-casting (Drew Barrymore as a beatnik English teacher, Patrick Swayze as a sleazy New Age guru), and wonderful, small details (personal faves: Donnie Darko and his girlfriend watching The Evil Dead in an otherwise empty theater; Donnie’s little sister’s school-talent-show dance troupe, Sparkle Motion, almost as sublime a name as Ghost World‘s bar band Blues Hammer).

Released roughly concurrently with his Waking Life and no less an experiment, Richard Linklater’s Tape is definitely worth a look. Shot on digital video, containing only three actors, and taking place entirely within a single hotel room, the film is talky and theatrical (based, unsurprisingly, on a play) in a manner that may evoke David Mamet or Neil LaBute except it’s considerably more relaxed and philosophical than either. Linklater’s little experiment is essentially a film about subjectivity.

This compellingly tossed-off film depicts a 10-years-after reunion in a Lansing, Michigan, motel room between high school buddies Vince (Ethan Hawke) and John (Robert Sean Leonard) — the Dead Poets Society heartthrobs reunited! John is an aspiring filmmaker in town to screen his latest at a local festival. Vince shows up for moral support, armed with lots of drugs and a hidden agenda. The good times deteriorate quickly between belligerent Vince and condescending John, and when mutual ex-girlfriend Amy (Uma Thurman) shows up, the film’s vaguely Rashomon-like discussion of a high school date rape takes center stage in a reunion charged by ricocheting agendas and mind games.

Or if you want a good laugh, you might try Larry Clark’s Bully, in which the Kids director takes the same social concerns and visual style on a trip to suburban Florida. As with Kids, Bully forces viewers to question their own role as partial creators of the film: Is this a searing social commentary and cautionary tale or prurient sleazebag voyeurism? You decide! I choose the latter and say that it ranks pretty high on the Unintentional Comedy scale (unless Clark is sharper than I’m giving him credit for and you’re supposed to laugh at this “tragic” story). But, whatever your take, Bully clearly isn’t as accomplished as Kids — it’s missing the identification screenwriter Harmony Korine brought to that lightning rod of a film.

Bully is based on the true story of a group of emotionally blank Florida teens who murder one of their friends (a little River’s Edge here too), but Clark is less concerned with the crime than with finding an excuse for his young, hard-bodied cast to get naked. In other words, it’s classic teen exploitation — ogling decadence laced with a moral.

The plot is simple. Four twentysomethings and a Great Dane solve mysteries as Mystery Inc. They are: the beautiful damsel in distress Daphne, the brainy nerd Velma, handsome but vapid Fred (he wears an ascot), and the shaggy well, Shaggy. The Great Dane, as anyone alive in the last 20 or so years knows, is Scooby-Doo.

After foiling yet another sinister villain (whose supernatural powers are easily explained by Velma, as usual), Mystery Inc. disbands when Fred takes all the credit — everyone, that is, except for Shaggy and Scooby. Two years later, the eccentric Mondavarious (Rowan Atkinson, in a much more palatable comic turn than his Bean fare) separately summons the Mystery Inc.-ers to his Spooky Mountain theme park, hoping to reunite the gang to solve the mystery of why his patrons leave the island as zombies. What ensues is a parade of zany high jinks inspired by (if not directly borrowed from) the original Saturday morning cartoon.

This movie is weird. It isn’t quite adult enough for adults — albeit there is a pretty funny marijuana joke peppered in for anyone who rightly suspected Shaggy of partaking of more than Scooby Snacks. It’s a little too scary for kids — misery and woe to the preadolescent who is afraid of clowns and funhouses, ’cause there is some pretty messed-up stuff on Spooky Island. In fact, I was even a little creeped out myself by some of the monster gore and demonic occupants of the haunted castle. There is also some odd business involving a soul-stealing device — hence the zombies. If I were a child, I would come out of this experience with major questions about what a soul is, how it can be extracted from my body, and whether or not it can bounce about like a pinball. Also a bit frightening: the zombies, who talk in “true dat” street slang and listen to Sugar Ray.

But scariest of all: Someone at Warner Bros. thought this movie might be a good idea. Why bother producing a live-action version of a cartoon only to reproduce, to the smallest detail, the way cartoons work? That’s fun for about five minutes but then what? And the acting? This is no Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Real-life sweethearts Sarah Michelle Gellar as Daphne and Freddie Prinze Jr. as Fred are as flat as their pen-and-ink predecessors. Though Linda Cardellini makes a game Velma, this movie does nothing to support the lesbian rumors that are traditionally associated with the character. (A kiss between her and Daphne was excised from the film just before its release. Damn!) Only Matthew Lillard as Shaggy rises above as at least a human caricature. His delivery is nearly letter-perfect Casey Kasem (the cartoon’s original voice), with some actual pathos and charm the original Shaggy lacked — an improvement. Scooby is the cheapest-looking computer-generated work since Michael Keaton’s snowman in Jack Frost and the Scorpion Monster in The Mummy Returns. His vocabulary has improved, but his body should have stayed a cartoon. Even a Pete’s Dragon cartoon/live-action treatment might have looked snazzier.

The script is nothing new. This plot has figured in bits and pieces in better movies and even better episodes of the series. Although, unlike the original series, there are human feelings on display, they are as one-dimensional as just about everything else. A superficial friendship-overcomes-everything theme does not redeem here. I had many of the same problems with The Flintstones. Colorful, amusing, but flat flat flat. But Hanna-Barbera didn’t exactly produce the most three-dimensional cartoons, did it? Bugs Bunny this isn’t. Hell, this isn’t even as involving as a (good) G.I. Joe. But this is the studio that brought you the Hair Bears, Snagglepuss, and the Shmoo. Be disappointed. Be very disappointed.

— Bo List

Weaponry seems to be the main focus of Hollywood’s summer-movie slate — from the threat of nuclear terrorism in The Sum Of All Fears to the possibility of an atomic bomb falling into the wrong hands in Bad Company to The Bourne Identity, which places its vision of armaments in the form of a human being. That human being is one Jason Bourne (played by a buffer-than-usual Matt Damon), a top-secret government agent who becomes the target of an intricate CIA hit after he loses his memory.

With its trans-European setting and cool casting, The Bourne Identity is sleeker than many of the early summer blockbusters. Unfortunately, Damon is the weakest link in a cast that includes Franka Potente (the fire-haired sprinter at the heart of Run Lola Run), Clive Owen (who made audiences take notice as the ultra-cool card dealer in Mike Hodges’ memorable Croupier), and American ingenue Julia Stiles. Beginning with Damon’s rescue at sea (his seemingly lifeless body is found adrift in the Mediterranean by a fishing boat), The Bourne Identity works on the same trajectory and schematic as Enemy Of the State. Like Will Smith, who’s targeted by a pervasive and fast-acting government organization for reasons unknown to him, Damon is the focal point of a massive witch-hunt by an equally diabolical U.S. agency. And, like Smith, Damon must unravel why he’s being chased while he’s running like hell.

Unable to remember his own name, Damon discovers he has a host of uncanny skills — he has the fighting abilities of Bruce Lee at warp speed; he speaks a multitude of languages; and he’s constantly mapping out escape routes in every room he enters — plus an unusual box of goodies at the local Swiss bank — a plethora of passports, a gun, and a hefty sum of money. So what’s an amnesiac to assume? Damon quickly figures out he was working for some high-profile folks and now is their main target.

Hoping to get from Zurich to Paris unnoticed, Damon recruits a comely German with a rickety old Mini (Franka Potente) to take him across the border. The two quickly become more than just friends, and, before you know it, the forgetful spy and footloose European are running scared from hired assassins and intricate wire-tappings.

Though Damon’s past is never fully revealed, the most disappointing element of The Bourne Identity is the fact that the film focuses most of its attention on the duo on the lam. Certainly more compelling is the assassination plot launched against Damon, in which said evil U.S. agency activates a circle of European spies (who were crafted similarly to Damon) to hunt down their loose cannon. Clive Owen plays the predominant assassin of this bunch, but his role is diminished too greatly as well.

With its Matrix-like fight scenes and intricate spy-gaming, The Bourne Identity teeters on the edge of boredom without ever toppling over. — Rachel Deahl

Remember The Monster At the End of This Book? It’s the Sesame Street tale starring Grover, who informs us early on that at the end of the book, a monster will appear. As the book proceeds, Grover becomes progressively more panicked about seeing this monster. On the last page, he realizes that the monster at the end of the book is himself — lovable Grover — and that there was nothing to fear but (ahem) fear itself. The trouble with Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is that the monster at the end of the movie is more like Grover than Godzilla.

The first scene shows four young girls in the ’30s creeping out late one night to perform a sacred ritual of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood — the bond that will keep them together as lifelong friends. Fast-forward “many moons.” We meet Sidda (Sandra Bullock) being interviewed by Time magazine in the Broadway theater where her newest play is in rehearsal. The interview emphasizes Sidda’s troubled Louisiana childhood and the colorful mother who troubled it. Next we meet mother Vivi (Ellen Burstyn), queen of the Ya-Yas, drinking coffee and reading Time. She reads the offending passages and is immediately upset, throwing her full coffee cup at the wall, narrowly missing husband Shep (James Garner, showing us with his nonreaction that this is just another day with Vivi). After a brief long-distance showdown of the wills between Vivi and Sidda, the Ya-Yas — now zesty, aged drama queens — fly to New York and kidnap Sidda (literally – they drug her) so that they can show her why Vivi is the way she is. What follows is a series of flashbacks showing the ups and downs of the Ya-Yas through World War II, children, death, and Gone With the Wind, meant to encourage Sidda to understand and forgive her mother.

The monster at the end is the series of incidents that led to Sidda’s childhood being such a wreck. Everyone talks about the Secret, and we spend a long movie getting to it. Perhaps I am spoiled by better Southern gothic like The Prince of Tides and Fried Green Tomatoes, which both provided suspense and charming quirkiness in appropriate, palatable amounts. Now, those films had secrets! Sex, murder, adultery, lesbians, and barbecue — all in grand Southern-fried style, played delicately through funny and serious moments alike. By the time Sisterhood wraps up, it is difficult to understand what Sidda is whining about. We are led to expect something truly horrible — even with the light, fun tone of most of the film. We don’t get it, and everyone in the film treats the Secret like some “divine” mystery. It isn’t. And Sidda, as a young girl, is present during all of the events that end up undoing her mother, so I guess we are to assume that this otherwise perceptive playwright has suffered some amnesia that prohibits her from remembering things we watch her see.

At the heart of the movie is Bullock, whose acting range is best suited to light dramas or light comedies. The twists and turns of the narrative derail her, and while she tries hard (she always does, God bless her), she never quite keeps up with the shifting gears of this film. The rest of the cast is great, high-caliber performers all. The Ya-Yas are a hoot: Shirley Knight, Fionnula Flanagan, and Maggie Smith, who by herself is a hoot. She has some of the best lines in the film, interrupted occasionally by her gasps for oxygen from the tank she wheels behind her. Magnificent, though, are Burstyn and Ashley Judd, who plays the young Vivi in her best performance to date. The movie shines when these two are onscreen and flails when they aren’t.

So the monster at the end of the book looks more like Grover than a velociraptor. That will be fine for the many fans of the popular book and for anyone who likes their laughs Southern-style.

The first time I saw Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest was several years ago at a tiny liberal arts college in a small town. The experience of the actors was, for the most part, very limited, and the production values left much to the imagination. Additionally, the two ambiguous actors playing Algernon and Jack were far more interested in each other than they were in generating convincing onstage chemistry with their female romantic leads. There was no good reason for this production to work, but it did. In fact, it sang. The script is just so perfect and the lines so genuinely funny that, truly, anyone can say them and generate some amount of laughter and respect. So it is all the more disappointing that the latest film version, with some of the brighter talents and wits of contemporary filmmaking, is just not very funny. As I sat in the theater, I longed for that college production, Algernon deadpanning all his wittiest lines to the audience and addressing his scene partners only when flippantly directing a barb at their expense. I missed how it was obvious that the cakes served in Jack’s countryside manor were Little Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls sliced into quarters.

The plot is simple — I suspect so that Wilde could hang as much fancy upon it as humanly possible without bogging it down in detail. Algernon (Rupert Everett) and Jack (Colin Firth) are friends in London at the turn of the last century. During the play, we learn that they both lead a life of tiny white lies: Jack lives roguishly as Earnest in the city and as the more respectable Jack in the country. “Earnest” is an invented older brother — the perfect nonexistent patsy for avoiding expensive restaurant bills and the like. Algernon has an invented friend too, Bunbury, an invalid who lives in constant discomfort and who conveniently “needs” Algernon’s attentions whenever an unattractive social commitment presses — particularly when Algernon’s aunt, Lady Bracknell (Judi Dench), is involved.

Jack is in love with Bracknell’s daughter Gwendolyn (Frances O’Connor) but is considered an unsuitable suitor, as he has no parentage to speak of. As an infant, he was found in a handbag in a Victoria Station cloakroom (“To lose one’s parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as misfortune,” Lady Bracknell snaps at the expectant Jack. “To lose both looks like carelessness.”), and he is advised to produce some relations quickly if he is to find a place on Bracknell’s list of potential husbands for Gwendolyn. Jack retreats to the country to look for any trace of lineage and to attend to his ward, the beautiful and intelligent young Cecily (Reese Witherspoon). Algernon, taken by Jack’s stories of his blossoming ward, travels to Jack’s estate under the guise of “Earnest,” thereby producing for the countryfolk the long-lost “brother” they had never met but have despised from Jack’s tales of his excesses. Algernon wastes no time in courting young Cecily, and soon Gwendolyn herself sneaks to the manor only to find two Earnests — and yet no Earnests. The rest of the play is dedicated to sorting out the mess.

The cast is great, though only Everett (the perfect Wilde-ian hero) and O’Connor have the requisite amount of fun with their parts. Dench, unfortunately, is directed with such a heavy hand that many of her funniest moments are played for sympathy rather than the ridiculous social frivolity she dispenses. Firth plays a stiff, unlikable cad not unlike his turn in Bridget Jones’s Diary, and while Jack is certainly the straight man of this story, it would have been nice to see him loosen up a little. He’s not helped by director Oliver Parker, who spends so much time trying to “open” the play up with lush vistas, chase scenes, and a truly gratuitous hot-air balloon that he ignores what makes this play so hilarious: wit and fun.

As the A-list, big-budget follow-up to his insta-cult classic Memento, Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia was rightly one of the year’s most anticipated films, and if Memento was a singular creation for its novel backward structure, Insomnia is unique for perhaps even more unlikely reasons.

Nolan’s accomplished return manages to be simultaneously a testament to what a talented filmmaker can still accomplish in Hollywood and an unusual case study in the pandering and calculation that now infects the mainstream American film industry.

But first, the goods. A remake of an excellent 1997 Norwegian film (which, incidentally, did play in Memphis) directed by Erik Skjoldbjaerg and starring Stellan Skarsgard, Nolan’s version skillfully adapts many of its model’s key elements and even improves on it in significant ways. The central mood and visual style of both films are that of sunlit noir. In the original, Skarsgard is a Swedish detective sent to Norway to help with a murder investigation during the summer, months when the sun never sets. A trail of moral questions follows him north, with the insomnia caused by his struggle to adapt to 24-hour daylight adding to his psychological unease. In an early scene, while attempting to apprehend the murderer on a fog-blanketed beach, the detective accidentally shoots and kills his partner then covers it up. Later, he’s contacted by the murderer (the original one, that is), who witnessed the shooting. The murderer proposes that the detective frame another suspect for his crime in exchange for not revealing the detective’s own complicity in his partner’s death.

Nolan’s film repeats this basic outline, with Al Pacino as an LAPD detective sent to Alaska partner (Martin Donovan) in tow, internal-affairs investigation hanging over his head, and perpetual sunlight slowly eating away at whatever mental stability he has left. And Nolan makes brilliant use of his locations. The opening landscape shots of a small plane transporting Pacino over the jagged Alaskan tundra are stunning, and the film’s restaging of the original’s foggy beach stakeout and accidental shooting conveys both the disorienting effects of the mist and the physicality of the rocky landscape. Nolan also adds a chase sequence over (and under) a river full of floating logs which adds action-movie energy while staying true to the film’s visual and psychological tone.

As straightforward storytelling, Nolan’s film is largely superior to its model (which, of course, emanates from a different sensibility). The acting outside of the Skarsgard/Pacino lead, which is a push is more directly engaging here, with nice supporting turns from Hilary Swank as an admiring local detective and Maura Tierney as the innkeeper at Pacino’s hotel. And most surprising of all is the frequently unwatchable Robin Williams as the area crime novelist who emerges as the murderer. I feared that Nolan would turn this character, who is creepy but pointedly mundane in the original, into a Hannibal Lecter/evil-genius type, thus playing into Williams’ penchant for grotesque overacting. Nolan does make the character a more active and menacing presence, but he mostly stays true to the original’s refreshingly realistic attitude, and Williams obliges with perhaps his most effectively understated performance. “You’re about as mysterious to me as a blocked toilet is to a fuckin’ plumber,” Pacino’s detective says to Williams’ killer, and in this movie, it’s not just bluster but the truth.

Yet however effective and engaging the film, it is also depressing not for what Nolan (or screenwriter Hillary Seitz) has changed from the original but why. In many ways, Nolan’s version is less a straight remake than a different film made from the same intriguing core materials, and that’s a good thing. But this American version also makes a series of key changes that all serve the same dubious purpose: to make the morally conflicted protagonist more sympathetic.

At the risk of giving away too many plot points, let’s look at those changes: In the original, the detective shoots a stray dog in order to extract a bullet for evidence tampering; in the remake, Pacino finds the dog already dead. In the original, the detective responds to the sexual come-ons of a teenage witness; in the remake, Pacino rebuffs these come-ons. In the original, the detective has a run-in with the innkeeper, which intimidates and frightens her; in the remake, Pacino and Tierney share a tender, somewhat comforting moment. In the original, the detective’s partner is shown to be a pretty decent guy; in the remake, Donovan is portrayed as more of a “bad cop” (in trouble for shaking down drug dealers) than Pacino. In the original, the detective is fleeing from trouble back home relating to an improper relationship (i.e., sexual relations) with a suspect; in the remake, Pacino’s tortured conscience and internal-affairs troubles spring from his falsifying evidence to ensure the conviction of a vicious child killer. In the original, the detective goes along with the murderer and tries to frame the teenage boyfriend of the murder victim; in the remake, it is Williams’ character who plants evidence on the teenager and Pacino who tries to stop him. And, finally, in the original, the detective gets off scot-free, leaving him, and by extension the audience, in a state of moral limbo; in the remake, per Hollywood convention, Pacino’s “crooked” cop dies but not before he redeems himself by preventing Swank’s doting junior detective from compromising her ideals.

That a film from such a well-respected, hotshot director and containing so many powerhouse actors (three Oscar winners), a film that, in so many ways, embodies the best that Hollywood is capable of, would nonetheless go to such outrageous lengths to ensure that its protagonist is palatable to audiences (and this in a film about moral ambiguity) might be a more troubling example of the marketing-driven dumbing-down of American film than computer-generated effects and product placements in lesser films. Nolan has been compared to Alfred Hitchcock as a result of this accomplished, intelligent thriller and with some justification. But Hitchcock never pandered to his audience, glossed over the darkest impulses in his films, or let his audience off the hook like this.

Chris Herrington

Named for a taunting Mexican epithet (“And [I *@#!ed] your mother too”) that figures casually in the film’s best scene, the south-of-the-border import Y Tu Mamá También is the kind of miracle movie that makes common cultural distinctions irrelevant. It’s raunchy and sensitive, freewheelingly instinctive and carefully analytical. The film works beautifully as a layered, complex, rigorous art movie and also as a simple, easily grasped, deeply pleasurable movie movie (the film has already set an all-time box-office record for the Mexican film industry, so it’s clearly seen as a mainstream entertainment in its homeland). At first blush, it’s something akin to a Jean-Luc Godard adaptation of “Penthouse Letters” or a new-wave deconstruction of the American teen-sex comedy (think Jules and Jim meets Bill and Ted).

The film opens with a bang (so to speak). New high school grads Tenoch (Diego Luna), the son of a prominent politician, and Julio (Amores Perros star Gael García Bernal), the son of a single secretary, bid adieu to their girlfriends and set out on a summer of shiftlessness and the idle pursuit of sex and other stimuli. At a wedding, the boys meet Luisa (Maribel Verdú), perhaps a decade older and a total dream babe. Luisa happens to be the wife of Tenoch’s cousin, a fact that doesn’t keep the horny boys from absurdly inviting Luisa to party with them on a made-up beach they call Heaven’s Mouth. After at first demurring, Luisa calls the boys a couple days later and accepts the offer, thus setting up a road trip that forms the bulk of the film. The boys’ motive for proposing the trip is readily apparent, but the reason for Luisa’s acceptance is a secret fully revealed only in the film’s final moments.

Y Tu Mamá También has garnered a lot of attention for its sex scenes or, rather, its sexual attitude, which is direct and frank in as healthy a way as imaginable. The film presents sex among the inexperienced as awkward and fumbling, and the (brief and less revealing than you’ve probably imagined) sex scenes in the film are likely to register with audiences, young and old, as recognizably true. The film is not rated, probably because the filmmakers (correctly) believed that the MPAA would slap the film with an NC-17 rating, thus making it harder to get shown here. The American film industry apparently feels that the snickeringly juvenile attitude toward sex in most R-rated domestic teen films is better for adolescents than the straightforward appraisal found here. And those fearing that the film will be nothing more than male wish-fulfillment can rest easy — Tenoch and Julio show more skin than Luisa, who is always in an appropriately dominant position, a wise mentor negotiating two overeager pups.

But, as directed by Alfonso Cuarón and shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Y Tu Mamá También is, more than anything, a triumph of pure filmmaking — every bit as ecstatic an experience for how it communicates as it is for what it communicates.

The film succeeds magnificently as a succession of individual scenes, moments, or gestures, as a sexed-up coming-of-age story, and, perhaps most of all, as a series of richly fleshed-out juxtapositions: modern Mexico City versus the third-world rural countryside, upper-class Tenoch versus middle-class Julio, immature boys Tenoch and Julio versus grown-up woman Luisa.

The film is startling both for the staging and execution of individual scenes and for their free-flowing yet carefully mapped-out, subtly dialectical linkage. Lubezki’s camera and Cuarón’s directorial audacity are frequently stunning: There’s the extraordinary timing of a tracking shot in which the camera shows Luisa leaving her apartment then slowly wanders through it to an open window through which we see Luisa arriving on the street to meet the boys; there’s the promiscuous moment when the trio have dinner at a roadside café and the camera spots a passerby and follows her into the kitchen, where a group of women are preparing food and washing dishes; and then, in simply one of the most bravura stretches of filmmaking I’ve ever seen, there’s the long (10 minutes, maybe) one-shot scene late in the film in which Luisa, Tenoch, and Julio sit at an outdoor restaurant getting drunk on tequila and healing recent emotional wounds. The scene is swooningly funny and joyously ribald, steadily picking up momentum and building bonhomie in a tour de force of uninterrupted acting until the moment the camera follows Luisa to a jukebox far in the background then tracks her as she dances back toward the table. Pure magic.

And Cuarón’s mapping of scenes is so sure in its ability to communicate multiple levels of information without detracting from the basic storyline that it blow-by-blow illustration. One scene, shortly after the boys meet Luisa, finds them lying atop adjacent diving boards at the country club Tenoch’s father belongs to and masturbating while calling out the names of various lust objects (“Salma Hayek! Ah, Salmita “). This segues into a wrenching scene in which Luisa receives a drunken, tearful call from her husband, who confesses to cheating on her. And this leads directly to a scene at Tenoch’s home in which he lies on the couch watching television and ignores the phone ringing beside him (Luisa calling to accept the beach invitation), and a maid scurries upstairs to deliver him food and answer it. And this scene leads into another series of scenes (from Tenoch’s mansion to Julio’s grubby apartment to a stoner friend’s flat to Luisa’s spare, tasteful apartment) that comments on the characters in terms of class, intellect, and temperament via their living spaces without getting in the way of the narrative.

Yet another juxtaposition in the film is that between the world Tenoch and Julio see and the one that actually exists. Cuarón communicates this by repeatedly and obsessively putting the brakes on his overheated narrative with an off-screen voice-over that chokes off the rest of the film’s sound. The voice doesn’t seem to come from the future — there’s no glow of nostalgia or sentimentality — and clearly is not the voice of any character in the film. Rather, it’s an omniscient voice that rockets the film into the future and balances against the youthful fervor of the film’s action a clear, even tone that emphasizes the transitory nature of the boys’ adventure. The voice-over reveals that there are things in this world that Tenoch and Julio don’t know — about each other or the country they live in or life itself — but which impact their lives nonetheless and which deepen our appreciation of the film’s primary story.

One example of this technique occurs early in the film when Julio and Tenoch are caught in a traffic jam they blame on left-wing demonstrations that have been going on (“Left-wing chicks are hot, dude,” Tenoch insists). But the voice-over explains that the actual cause of the traffic jam is the death of a migrant bricklayer, that the man had cut across the highway to save time on his journey to work and was hit by a car, and that his body will go unclaimed for four days.

Similarly, the film supplies, but rarely highlights, a wealth of background activity that the boys barely register, such as an arrest, a funeral procession, and other depictions of life in impoverished rural Mexico.

But however much the film underscores the callowness and naiveté of Tenoch and Julio (along with Tenoch’s class privileges), it doesn’t pass judgment. In fact, the film (as well as Luisa) takes great pleasure in the boys’ heedless exuberance. There’s a great scene (an unassumingly virtuosic one-shot, tracking the trio’s car along a curving road) in which the boys excitedly explain to a captivated Luisa the “manifesto” by which they and their friends profess to live (sample tenets: “whacking-off rules,” “pop beats poetry,” and “whoever roots for Team America is a faggot”). There is also a kinetic, gleeful scene in which the boys go on a pre-trip shopping spree, loading up on essentials (beer, potato chips, condoms) and riding shopping carts like surfboards.

And so much more: the way class differences between the boys are delineated without being dwelled upon; the brevity and deftness with which the film contextualizes the boys and their relationship within the socioeconomic framework of modern Mexico; the uniformly perfect acting; the great shot of a hurt and confused Julio dangling his feet in a hotel pool filled with leaves; the organic split-screen shot in which Luisa makes a final, painful goodbye call to her husband while the boys are seen playing foosball in the reflection of the adjacent telephone booth; the hilarious and somehow touching symphony of facial expressions Verdú unleashes during Luisa’s separate sexual encounters with Tenoch and Julio; the deliriously funny moment of borderline magical realism when a frank sexual comment made by a knowing Luisa so shocks the heretofore swaggering boys that their car literally overheats

After my first viewing, I liked Y Tu Mamá También a great deal, but I wasn’t sure exactly how much. By the end of my second viewing (this time surrounded by paying customers clearly as enthralled as I was), it left me with the feeling of overwhelming admiration I usually get at the movies only two or three times a year. It’s clear that this isn’t merely an engaging or compelling film but a full-blown great one. If you’re interested enough to have read this far, you owe it to yourself to go see it on the big screen while you still have the chance.

Unfaithful starts out making all the right decisions. It avoids the clichés of typical sexy thrillers by emphasizing character over moralizing (or demoralizing) and the psychological over the psychopathic.

Richard Gere and Diane Lane are Edward and Connie Sumner — the portrait of blissful American success, with lots of money, a gorgeous New York suburban home, a cute young son, Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan — Dewey from Malcolm in the Middle), and a good marriage. Edward runs a security company, and Connie takes care of Charlie and the house and shops a lot. On a particularly windy shopping day, Connie is literally blown on top of Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez), a younger, sexy French fellow. Connie skins her knee on Paul’s Soho stoop and Paul … well, Paul has Band-Aids in his apartment. Does Connie, bleeding, take a cab home or does she accept Paul’s invitation to his recklessly arty loft apartment for … medicine?

A lesser film would have the affair begin immediately. Paul makes all the right moves and says all the right sexy French things. So the seduction is all the more dangerous as she is lured gradually into adultery. She is married to Richard Gere, after all. Why would she stray? Some men in the audience may be perplexed by the idea of a woman who has everything but still wants more, but, hey, believe it or not, it happens. And for Connie, fantasizing leads to a phone call, which leads to another meeting, which leads to another, which leads to … well, you know.

Edward becomes suspicious, has Connie followed, and, unbeknownst to her, discovers the affair. Gere’s best moment is his visit to Paul’s apartment, where Edward meets the Other Man and tries desperately to understand how Connie could do this to him and her family. There is an uncomfortable familiarity between these two men who share the same woman. As Edward looks around at all the places in the dingy apartment he knows Connie has rolled around in, and all Paul knows to do is offer him a drink. Least he can do, right? This scene sensitively maps out the layers of Edward’s hurt and appalled surprise, and only thereafter do the true, menacing consequences of Connie’s betrayal come to fruition.

What follows is a mostly honest and patient cat-and-mouse game that has Connie slowly figuring out what Edward knows and to what extent he is willing to keep and protect her. Director Adrian Lyne is no stranger to compromised sexual morality and obsession, having helmed 9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and Indecent Proposal, giving credibility and style to what could have been, in the hands of a lesser director, soft-core trash. He shows us almost all of the right stuff here in lots of slow, deliberate shots of both spouses searching each other’s faces for answers, assurance, and safety.

Lane is terrific. Neither her abandon nor her disgrace is entire. While adultery never looked as good as it does with her and the exciting Martinez (in his American debut), we always see that she knows there is a family missing her. There is a fascinating scene on a subway when Connie, on her way home after the first indiscretion, stares pensively ahead, alternately laughing and crying as the delights of the encounter are mixed (in stylish flashback) with the pained gravity of her poor judgment. Lane shows us all we need to see — and holds back all that we don’t need to see — without a single word.

Gere is surprisingly effective if somewhat cornered into the thankless role of the scorned Edward. The first half of the film belongs to Connie, the second to Edward, and Gere is quite good at playing normal and wounded. But the script lets him down in a key confrontation with Connie that, by giving Edward too little to say, steals the gathering momentum we’ve had to that point. Gere, a minimalist emotional performer, does best when he has time to work himself up, and he doesn’t get it here. That’s a shame, because it might have helped the audience buy into the film’s inevitable but ambiguous ending.

If Enough had premiered on the Lifetime channel, it would have starred Nancy McKeon or Melissa Gilbert or, I dunno, Annie Potts. The female protagonist would have squared off against an abusive Bruce Boxleitner or Ken Olin (or, conceivably, Billy Campbell, of the late TV series Once and Again, who does actually apear in Enough — good for you, Billy!), and the script would have probably been smarter and tighter than this tepid Hollywood release.

The story is straight out of a troubled-woman made-for-TV movie of the month, and the dialogue is so clichéd and the characters so two-dimensional that all the audience can do is turn off their brains and await (as promised in the movie trailer, so I am spoiling nothing) the inevitable confrontation and its jaw-crunching, ass-whupping rewards.

Jennifer Lopez plays Slim, an attractive blue-collar waitress. Her life changes when a handsome stranger, Mitch (Campbell), appears to protect her honor against a dubious suitor. Before you know it, we’re all seven years older and they are married with a daughter. Things seem perfect for Mitch and Slim until she discovers that Mitch has a mistress and a double life. When she confronts him, he punches her and transforms rather instantly into a hateful lout who says things (more or less) like “I’m a man and you’re a woman and I have all the power. That’s the way it will always be. What I say goes.” Mitch says this kind of stuff a lot in the movie, and it is disappointing that the audience is expected to believe his 180-degree personality change from Prince Charming into abusive monster.

Anyway, Slim’s friends conspire quickly to rescue her from her situation, but Mitch is rich and well-connected. He manages to have her credit cards canceled, her accounts frozen, and thugs with knives appear at her every new doorstep. Nobody can seem to help, and an out-of-character visit to a wizened attorney leads her to the following conclusion: She’s screwed. She didn’t go to the police when she had the chance and now nothing will stop Mitch from finding her and killing her. However, after weeks and months of running and hiding, Slim has had … ENOUGH!

I had never seen a Jennifer Lopez movie before Enough. She’s okay. The script allows her enough concern, protectiveness, and moxie for us to care about her, but there isn’t much character to get to know. Billy Campbell does a commendable job keeping Mitch interesting, but screenwriter Nicholas Kazan (Bicentennial Man) doesn’t allow him to have any dimension. He’s all leering, selfish animal here. Other good actors — Juliette Lewis, Noah Wyle, and Fred Ward — are pretty much wasted in thankless, dead-end roles and deserve to be in better movies. The real gem here is Tessa Allen as the daugher, Gracie. Allen is pleasantly unpolished but genuine and believable, and she’s spared the fate of most child characters — providing agonizing, cutesy-poo comic relief. There is some of that here, but it is kept to an endearing minimum.

Enough is basically a movie about a fight. If you have seen the trailer, you know that all scenes are designed to elicit cheers when that fight finally happens. And for this I will give the film credit: The fight looks terrific. But there is a very cheesy training montage (complete with 1970s Rocky-esque, swanky contender music underscoring — listen for it), and Slim really probably wouldn’t have time to go from frightened housewife/waitress to expert cat burglar/ninja in the few weeks we see her train. But at this point, we don’t care so much about reality as much as we just want to see Mitch get his.

Real abusers apologize, don’t they? They promise never to do it again. They are desperate in seeking forgiveness. That’s what makes it difficult to leave an abusing spouse. That’s what makes it heartbreaking. Enough is more of a thriller or action movie than a drama. A drama might have explored how difficult it is to leave someone you love but can’t be with anymore. Enough has no interest in the complexities of marriage, survival, or the law. My advice? Stay at home and watch Lifetime or Oxygen for the same quality material. Or, if you find your way to the theater, catch the infinitely more rewarding Unfaithful instead, which actually has something interesting to say about infidelity, relationships, and violence.

“Star Wars was the film that ate the heart and the soul of Hollywood. It created the big-budget comic book mentality.”

— Paul Schrader

“What happened with Star Wars was like when McDonald’s got a foothold, the taste for good food just disappeared. Now we’re in a period of devolution. Everything has gone backward toward a big sucking hole.”

— William Friedkin

“It’s just become one big amusement park. It’s the death of film.” — Robert Altman

How hard it must be for less-successful members of the film-brat generation to watch former comrade-in-arms George Lucas accumulate obscene amounts of wealth and power from his home at Skywalker Ranch while their own careers ebb. Taxi Driver scribe Schrader couldn’t even get distribution for his last film (the critically lauded Forever Mine), The French Connection director Friedkin has been relegated to director-for-hire projects such as Blue Chips and The Rules of Engagement, and Altman’s career, despite the success of Gosford Park, has been in precarious shape for two decades now. Meanwhile, Lucas, who has made his fortune with a series of effects-generated muppet movies, is about to garner yet more adulation and profit for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the latest installment in his billion-dollar fantasy saga.

But amid the sour grapes is at least a kernel of truth: At the time of its 1977 release, Star Wars was seen by some of Lucas’ coterie — the raging bulls and easy riders of the American new wave — as an allegory for their newly triumphant film movement, a tale of rebel film fighters infiltrating and destroying the Hollywood Death Star (Han Solo was reportedly modeled after Francis Ford Coppola, while Luke Skywalker was a stand-in for Lucas himself). Twenty-five years later, Lucas seems more Anakin than Luke, having gone over to the dark side, helping (along with his pal Steven Spielberg, whose Jaws actually instigated the blockbuster era) transform the fertile Republic of American cinema into an Empire of impersonal popcorn movies. And it was Star Wars, not Jaws, that created the new world in which a movie is often merely the center of a larger marketing and merchandising campaign, with the gaggle of ancillary products as important as the film itself (Clones‘ official Web site actually contains a “collecting” section).

Lucas’ nostalgia-generating, live-action toy catalogs are such cultural behemoths that they are not only critic-proof but audience-resistant. After all, Lucas’ initial return to the series, 1999’s The Phantom Menace, was a case study in everything wrong with American film culture in the present climate of corporate blitzkrieg marketing. The film was ubiquitous in the media weeks before its release and a massive financial success despite the unavoidable fact that virtually no one liked it. The hype for the film was so suffocating that, as The Village Voice‘s J. Hoberman wrote at the time, it would have taken a consumer equivalent of the Russian Revolution to keep it from the top of the box-office charts. Since the overwhelming hype was so out of whack with the dispiriting movie that followed, The Phantom Menace ended up being a film that climaxed the moment the opening credits rolled. And in the interim between Lucas’ bitterly disappointing return to his beloved series and this noticeably less anticipated second episode, there have been some rather daunting developments on the “event movie” front: The likes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring have proven that epic, escapist fantasies can also be first-rate filmmaking. Both films caused The Phantom Menace to look a little chintzy by comparison. And the last few years have also seen other, more cartoonish spectacles — The Matrix, X-Men, Spider-Man — end up better than expected. Arriving amid this landscape, Attack of the Clones is a pleasant surprise, its hype decreasing inversely to the quality of the product Lucas and his army of techies have marshaled to the screen. On its own terms — as a Star Wars movie — Attack of the Clones rises to the occasion: It’s a dramatically more satisfying film than The Phantom Menace, and diehard Star Wars fans, I think, will be very pleased.

In terms of both action pyrotechnics and narrative involvement, Attack of the Clones is also a more absorbing film than its biggest summer box-office competitor, Spider-Man, even if Lucas’ impersonal epic can’t match Sam Raimi’s uncommonly decent blockbuster in the human-interest department. Compared to the sweet, nuanced interaction of Spider-Man‘s Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst, Clones‘ teen-dream leads Natalie Portman (Padmé Amidala) and Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker) might as well be cardboard. Quality acting has never been a hallmark of the Star Wars series, and the two new films’ vast use of computer animation — and subsequent need for actors to perform in front of blue screens, speaking to often nonexistent co-stars — only exacerbates the problem. And as far as recognizable depictions of intelligent life (human or otherwise), the prequel series desperately misses the outlaw-hero bonhomie that Harrison Ford’s Han Solo brought to the first series, not to mention the physicality of Chewbacca and other non-digital creatures.

The Phantom Menace was a kids’ movie and a pretty mediocre one. (Lucas has said from the very beginning that the whole Star Wars concept was geared toward preadolescents, that he was making a “Disney movie.” Who knows if he intended to ensure continued success by infantilizing his audience and the American film industry.) Attack of the Clones moves the series into the teen years both in the age of its protagonist and in the content of the film — which is more sexed-up and violent (though still kid-friendly) than the first.

The much reviled Jar Jar Binks from The Phantom Menace has been banished to a glorified cameo (though the few moments he appears on screen are so grating it makes one wish he’d been left dead on the battlefields of Naboo in the previous film) and cherubic Jake Lloyd has been replaced by Christensen, who, as a teenaged Anakin Skywalker/future Darth Vader, does a fine job of brooding, which seems to have been the primary job requirement. And as a love interest this time rather than a big sis figure, Portman’s Padmé gets to loosen up with back-baring, navel-revealing costumes.

Set 10 years after The Phantom Menace, the familiar opening scroll tells us that there’s still “unrest in the Galactic Senate,” but rather than obscure talk of trade disputes, the political intrigue in Attack of the Clones is actually relatively intriguing. And this is where Lucas finally dives into the character arc of Anakin, resulting in a narrative drive more compelling than any in the series. Clones also has better action scenes — including a bravura early sequence in which Anakin and his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), chase a would-be assassin through the galactic capital Coruscant and an asteroid-field sequence that has Obi-Wan pursuing mysterious hired gun Jango Fett (Temuera Morrison). Along the way, in moments sure to thrill Star Wars fanatics, several characters and elements from the original three episodes are introduced.

Lucas may have done irrevocable damage to American film culture with Star Wars, but, much like the oft-imitated and highly influential Pulp Fiction a couple of decades later, his films rise above the culture they’ve created.

The Star Wars series endures and provokes pleasure even among audiences consciously wary of it for two basic reasons — visual imagination and narrative depth. Viewers are understandably fascinated by the vastness of the imaginary galaxy Lucas has created — its self-contained bevy of planets, creatures, and gadgets. And while Lucas’ space opera is certainly no Citizen Kane, the saga is still predicated on its epic story line, with reams of back story and acknowledged off-screen action. Star Wars may be pretty silly when you distance yourself from it, but, by contrast, most of the bubble-gum blockbusters that followed it could be mapped out on a matchbook cover.

Of course, Lucas’ galaxy is a melting pot of preexisting cultural myths — mixing and matching Joseph Campbell and Carlos Castaneda, B-movie westerns and Samurai flicks, Disney and DeMille, World War II combat films and earlier sci-fi spectacles. And in Attack of the Clones, this style of wholesale appropriation gets a modern update. The film’s first action sequence begins on a crowded, skyscraper-laden air highway a la The Fifth Element before concluding on steamy city streets that could have come from Blade Runner. And the film’s penultimate action set piece, a coliseum battle replete with grotesque, cheering digital masses and baddies in the booth gleefully watching our heroes in peril, seems a conscious nod to Gladiator.

The series’ status as big-scale homage to and conscious evocation of the B-movie serials and DeMille spectacles of the Hollywood golden age is confirmed by Lucas’ insistence on using irises and wipes to segue between scenes and by the epic crosscutting between the parallel adventures of Anakin and Obi-Wan. With this in mind, elements that might otherwise be seen as flaws — the heavy-handed foreshadowing, the color-coded costumes (Obi-Wan wears white, while young Anakin is already the man in black), and dialogue so purple and clunky that it reminds us of silent-movie intertitles — actually conform to the matinee-style charm that Lucas is trying to duplicate and improve on.

But one disconcerting aspect of having the prequel series appear 20 years after the first series yet be set 30 years earlier (got all that?) is a certain disconnect from moving forward and backward at the same time. Obviously in response to complaints about The Phantom Menace‘s rampant ethnic stereotyping, Attack of the Clones contains some calculated multicultural casting, leading the viewer to wonder if all the non-white humans (save Billy Dee Williams’ Lando Calrissian) get wiped out in the Clone Wars, not to mention the android armies, sleek spaceships, and other contraptions that seem more advanced than those in the later episodes.

If it isn’t already obvious, I should acknowledge that, unlike apparently every other straight white male of my generation, I never drank the Star Wars Kool-Aid. I like the movies (Episode I excepted) just fine, even though I regret what they’ve done to film culture in this country. But I could draw up a list of my 500 favorite films without finding a space for Star Wars (or, more likely, The Empire Strikes Back) on it. Attack of the Clones tapped into my inner kid, whereas The Phantom Menace just put me to sleep. I enjoyed the trip, but I have no desire to live there.

It long last, Marvel Comics impresarios Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s modern myth has made it to the movies: Spider-Man luckily arrives at a time when filmmakers can do justice to its impossible and iconic imagery. Recent advancements in computer animation were obviously necessary to create a believable — or, at least, not laughable — model of the original comic book’s action. Spider-Man first appeared in Amazing Fantasy in 1962, and the intervening 40 years were needed in order for Hollywood’s special-effects wizards to catch up with Ditko’s imagination, making 2002 the earliest possible time to make this movie right. Or try to make it right.

One thing Spider-Man has going for it is impeccable casting. Director Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead, Darkman, A Simple Plan) did well to fight for his choices for the central characters. Tobey Maguire is indeed a surprisingly good fit for Peter Parker aka Spider-Man, the unassuming teenager who gets bitten by a genetically engineered “superspider” (a Noughts twist on the comic’s irradiated spider). Kirsten Dunst is sexy and sweetly sincere as Peter’s longtime crush and girl next door Mary Jane Watson. And Willem Dafoe is positively perfectly sinister as Norman Osborn aka the Green Goblin. The chemistry between Maguire and Dunst, the spot-on Jekyll-and-Hyde performance by Dafoe, and James Franco’s turn as Peter’s best friend and Osborn’s son Harry serve to fill out the somewhat wanting script.

A retrofitted amalgamation of several story lines from the Silver Age Amazing Spider-Man comics of the ’60s, David Koepp’s screenplay provides a souped-up origin and maturation for Peter: Within two days of gaining his powers (great strength, the ability to adhere to most surfaces, a sixth sense, natural webs — unlike the comic’s chemical contraptions — spun from the wrists, of all places) and figuring them out, Peter loses his Uncle Ben, who is murdered by a thief whom Peter allows to escape. This is, of course, before Spider-Man’s crime-fighting conscience comes into being. It is also the impetus for that change. But the thief just happens to rob a wrestling promoter who has just swindled Peter out of $3,000, which he was to win for defeating pro wrestler Bone Saw McGraw (hilariously played by ex-Memphian “Macho Man” Randy Savage), and Peter gladly lets him pass, unwittingly dooming his uncle to die.

Soon Spider-Man appears in full regalia, dropping from the skies to thwart injustice time and time again. Thankfully, Raimi has honored and hewn closely to the panels of the comic for the film’s general mise-en-scène. We see the first unforgettable images of Spider-Man jump from the panels of the comic book. Imaginative camera angles abound, though not to the point of inducing nausea. In the great scene in which Peter discovers his wall-crawling ability in a shadowy alley, we watch him through a spider’s web spun high between the coils of a razor-wire fence. Missing, though, are some of the more iconic web-swinging acrobatics for which Spidey is known; what with the superhuman strength and all, he’s supposed to be able to easily defy gravity and contort himself into any and all the stylized positions dreamed up by his illustrators over the years. Oh, well, I guess computer animation can only do so much.

As for the plot, much of the pleasure derived from it is in the simple discourse between Peter and Mary Jane, whom he so shyly pines for. The story is straightforward and a little comic-book campy at times. Maguire falters in his voice-over at the film’s beginning, rendering his lines somewhat apprehensively and with odd inflection. Dunst shines throughout. But it is Dafoe who steals the show. In possibly the film’s greatest moment, he grapples with his dual nature in a mirror, shifting seamlessly from the dark madness of the Goblin to the stammering, uncomprehending scientist and father Osborn, his expressive face in the end twisting into the dominant visage of the Goblin.

The plot, though, seems merely a means to exhibit the cool costumes (though Spidey’s is vintage, the Goblin’s is not) and sometimes delirious action sequences, but Raimi has worked very hard to bring the characters to life, and the film is much better for it. Fleshing out characters is more important in the long run, though the plot could have used some tricks to break up the A-B-C story line. Viewers may want more than the origin of both Spider-Man and the Green Goblin and the battle to the end between them, but this time around, it’s what you get.

The most troubling aspect of the film is in its translation from the comic book. In the comics, there is always an informative inner monologue floating above each character’s head, yet the film does little to fill in the gaps. In the comics, people are flabbergasted and talk excitedly about the amazing, otherworldly things they see: superhumans in colorful tights, close calls with death, etc. The film treats it all like a walk in the park in a world where anything can happen and does quite frequently. And Spider-Man, as he goes about his heroic deeds, comes off as omniscient, whereas the comic always makes a logical progression from tingling spider sense to a good idea of what’s happening to intervention. Is it Raimi’s idea of a new, improved spider sense, or is it sloppy scripting?

As with most films, missteps of detail and inconsistencies in logic are revealed upon repeated viewing. But this is a comic book. So who really cares? Well, not me, not really. I complain as a fan who wants it perfect. It ain’t, but I still loved every minute of it.

An intelligent and tender film that might be classified as a male weepie, the Italian film The Son’s Room won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last summer, one of the most prestigious prizes in all of film (previous winners include Pulp Fiction and Dancer in the Dark). But, that said, director Nanni Moretti’s film might be the least impressive Palme d’Or winner I’ve ever seen and is almost certainly the least heralded winner in recent years.

One American critic, reporting from Cannes, suggested that the film — as a sort of heartwarming tragedy — might have an American crossover success of “near Benigni proportions,” in reference to Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, which was the highest-grossing foreign-language film in U.S. history until Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon came along. That hasn’t happened, and won’t, and this at least is a compliment to the film. For better or worse, The Son’s Room is too naturalistic and serious and quiet to provoke that kind of audience response in the U.S.

At first blush, Moretti and Benigni have a lot in common: Both are Italian auteurs of the same generation who star in, direct, and write their films, but where Benigni is zany and manic, Moretti is deadpan and reserved, where Benigni directs so as to draw attention to himself (cutting to reaction shots to reinforce his own “charm”), Moretti is much more modest. I haven’t seen any of Moretti’s previous films — he was heretofore a major figure in Italy and France but nowhere else — but his filmic biography reads as a cross between Jean-Luc Godard and Woody Allen, starring as variations of himself in comic, nonfiction films undergirded with radical politics. The Son’s Room is Moretti’s first standard narrative-fiction film.

Moretti plays Giovanni, a successful psychiatrist living in a small Italian city. The first half of the film leisurely establishes Giovanni’s family and career normalcy. He admirably treats a series of patients (whose comic litany of ailments is familiar but well done) then retires to the sun-dappled apartment he shares with his beautiful wife Paola (Laura Morante), a publisher of art books, and their two extremely normal teenage children, Irene (Jasmine Trinca) and Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice). But Giovanni’s happy home life and satisfying career are irrevocably upset by a family tragedy when Andrea is killed in a diving accident and the remaining members of the family are thrown into separate spirals of grief.

This sounds a lot like recent Oscar nominee In the Bedroom by Todd Field, and the comparison between the two films is unavoidable. The Son’s Room is more purposefully therapeutic. Where In the Bedroom left the viewer in the abyss (or in the bedroom) of grief after an impotent attempt at closure through retribution, The Son’s Room plots a more plausible way out of trauma. As respectable and liberal-middle-class as Giovanni himself, the film is tranquil and wistful, pulling its left-behind trio through grief to recovery. When an ex-girlfriend of Andrea’s shows up, she gives the family a glimpse into Andrea’s life outside of the family and provides the opportunity for a bit of parental care-giving in his memory, along with help from Brian Eno and a French beach.

But however tasteful and laudable the film is, it simply isn’t as powerful as In the Bedroom, which makes more memorable and more moving use of the son’s room and provides heart-numbing glimpses at post-loss emptiness (in staccato flashes of the grieving parents doing absolutely nothing) more searing than anything in Moretti’s film. And, as cinematic meditations on parental loss go, The Son’s Room is certainly no match for the simultaneous intellectual detachment and deep sadness and mystery of Atom Egoyan’s great The Sweet Hereafter.

There are some great scenes here: The moment when Giovanni’s and Irene’s eyes meet in the middle of Irene’s basketball game is a stunner, and the depiction of the family watching Andrea’s coffin being sealed (any reliance on religion here is pointedly absent) has a bone-chilling finality. And, despite the way its appealing naturalness is undercut by narrative and visual blandness, The Son’s Room is still preferable to what Hollywood would do with the same material. When Andrea’s former girlfriend materializes, she’s no angel of reconciliation but a regular kid who already has a new boyfriend. When the two kids finally depart from Giovanni and family, they seem relieved. And when Giovanni, Paola, and Irene are left on the beach, there’s no teary embrace or big speech, just a tranquil, wistful blast of ocean air and the sense that, for these three people walking apart yet together, life will go on and get better.

— Chris Herrington

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If you took Waiting To Exhale and crossed it with How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Four Weddings and a Funeral, you would probably get something very close to Crush, a quietly quirky chick drama set against the wistfully magical landscape of the rural English countryside.

Meet Kate (Andie MacDowell), a prim and proper school headmistress in her early 40s. Never married, she divides her time equally — working, looking for Mr. Right, and sharing gin, caramels, and cigarettes with her two best friends: the thrice-divorced Molly (Anna Chancellor) and the feisty single mom Janine (Imelda Staunton). Molly is a physician ravenously man-hungry but picky; unlike Kate, she is looking for Mr. Exactly Right right now. Janine, a police inspector, has a milder appetite for men but is no less on the prowl.

Set in the quaint and gorgeous Cotswolds, Crush follows our three heroines in a strictly observed ritual of indulgence and man-talk. Then the trio’s world is turned decisively off its axis when a new man enters Kate’s life — 25-year-old Jed (Kenny Doughty), Kate’s former pupil and the new church organist. The fact that Jed is good with his organ is not lost on Kate or anybody, and so it is not long at all before he and Kate are having sex in just about every possible place (including the church! and the graveyard! egad!).

Of course, Molly and Janine do not approve. Jed is just not up to the standard of classy, wealthy men this trio of fabulously 40-ish ladies have grown accustomed to. He doesn’t fit anywhere in their grand scheme of things — except with Kate — and she is all but lost to them while he is in her life. When marriage plans are drawn, Molly and Janine turn from frowns and distractions to an all-out plot to break them up — for Kate’s own good, of course.

This is where Crush takes a turn. In this movie all about the triumphs and trials of lifelong friends, Molly and Janine execute a plan with such disastrous results that the film doesn’t quite recover. Without spoiling the end (or middle, rather), let me just say that it becomes very difficult to follow the ups and downs of the friendship after what turns out to be a truly terrible betrayal. But while Crush eventually comes around full circle to its mildly oddball sentiments, I’m not quite able to forgive the results of a “plot” that tests the bounds of these three old friends. Part of me wants to think that it is because first-time director and writer John McKay romanticizes the mysterious and seemingly impenetrable bonds between girlfriends, while the other part of me selfishly wants the easy answers without the tough questions.

Andie MacDowell is cast just right in this film. Crush almost feels like a fairy tale, with its mix of romance and gentle nuttiness, and MacDowell has always served films best that do not require great leaps of comedy or tragedy but have just enough of both: Groundhog Day, Green Card, and Four Weddings and a Funeral. She also exudes a sexy unlikelihood in all of her films: a Valley Girl Southerner wherever she goes, which one can either ignore or despise. I choose to accept it most of the time, and she really is good here.

MacDowell is supported by a fine duo: Imelda Staunton (the funny Nurse in Shakespeare in Love) and Anna Chancellor (Duckface from Four Weddings and a Funeral), who take themselves wonderfully seriously and won’t let dignity stand in the way of securing a man. Newcomer Kenny Doughty is the surprise here, though. His Jed is all the right kinds of sexy: young, intense but not at all serious, sincere, and most of all (pay attention to this, Hollywood hunks) unconcerned with being sexy. He just is. And from his first to last moments of casual, gum-chewing sensuality, we have no trouble understanding the attraction and ultimately the love that surprises and bewitches both Jed and Kate. — Bo List