ABOUT A BOY (US/UK, Chris & Paul Weitz)
I wasn't going to see this movie until I wound up in Portland, Oregon for a few days and it was playing at a classic old theatre (the "Bagdad" - check it out if you're ever in Portland) for three bucks. And you can even enjoy pizza and beer freshly made on the premises. It was enough to coax me into seeing the film, which I liked a lot more than I thought I would. Besides, I must confess to having a soft spot for Hugh Grant. I remember his earlier, less cutesy performances in such films as Lair of the White Worm and Remains of the Day and longed to see him doing something more interesting than the stuttering, lovable token Brit he usually plays. In About a Boy, he loses his cowlick, sharpens up his cynicism and self-loathing, and thus becomes a new and intriguing character - before, by story's end, rediscovering his own inner Hugh Grant and going all cutesy on us again.

About a Boy is another adaptation of a Nick Hornby novel - the first was the literally Americanized version of High Fidelity - and like its predecessor, it captures the soul of Hornby's contemporary urban bachelor pretty well while glossing over the more audience-limiting details of his stories. (In this case, the entire subplot of one of the characters being obsessed with Kurt Cobain - hence the story's title, a riff off of the Nirvana song "About a Girl" - is completely dropped, either because the filmmakers didn't want to set the story in 1993 or Courtney Love refused to give them the rights to Nirvana's music.) The Weitz brothers, who seem to be doing everything from writing (American Pie) to directing (the regrettable Down to Earth) to acting (the creepy indie Chuck & Buck) may not seem the right choice to helm this film, Yanks as they are, and their self-conscious visual style (spin that camera!) is a bit overblown for the quiet little story they're tackling, but they've chosen a great cast, and as it's said, half of a director's job is in finding the right actors. For those new to the story, Hugh Grant plays a shallow slacker who, living off the royalties of his late father's schlocky Christmas song, has led a life of leisure with no responsibilities. Proud of his womanizing, he infiltrates a single parents group in order to chat up horny single moms, and through a string of complications that I don't have the energy to relate, he ends up befriending a lonely 12-year-old boy (newcomer Nicholas Hoult, a natural) whose own single mom (the always interesting Toni Collette) is constantly on the verge of suicide. Slowly, reluctantly, man and boy bond. And amazingly, it's nowhere near as cloying as it sounds. Of course everything winds up mindlessly happy at the end, but in the meantime you will at least be treated to some perceptive wit, a London closer to the real thing than we usually see in movies, and performances that are genuinely fresh and thought-through. And the story is clear-eyed enough to even make you forgive its predictable denouement.

ABOUT SCHMIDT (US, Alexander Payne)
Longtime Omaha, Nebraska resident Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) is an ordinary old man who, finding himself retired and widowed, discovers that he had only defined himself by his job and his marriage. With them gone, he fears his life is meaningless. Eventually he decides on an impromptu road trip out to Denver, ostensibly to revisit the places of his past but actually to try to stop his only child (Hope Davis) from marrying a complete loser (Dermot Mulroney). A very simple story that is perhaps too blunt about the life of a retired Nebraskan widower to be thoroughly entertaining by itself, About Schmidt is a testament to Jack Nicholson's star power. He is practically a one-man show here, playing against type and succeeding. There's no way you can avoid chuckling at that famous smirk, those pointed eyebrows, but the movie plays with our expectations of the actor more than once, aware that it takes someone as larger-than-life as Nicholson to make us interested in, and love, an otherwise boring old man. Payne (with cowriter Jim Taylor, his collaborator on Citizen Ruth and Election) once again uses his hometown of Omaha as the standard model for bleakest Middle America, and his take on modern western life remains pointed, though it's far less savage and more bittersweet than its predecessors. For example, the wedding rehearsal dinner is held at a Tony Roma's franchise. It's a funny gag until you realize that a lot of American families who don't have much money (or much choice) probably have their wedding rehearsal dinners at Tony Roma's, and then it isn't funny anymore. The film is full of such quietly depressing moments that remind us, as they do Schmidt, that we live in a culture that's all too ready to provide us with meaninglessness. But About Schmidt does have a healthy share of laughs, and a marvelous ending that redeems the two hours that preceded it, although by the time credits rolled most audience members were walking out with "Is that it?" looks on their faces. But the film has stuck with me longer than I expected. It's always the quiet ones, isn't it?

ADAPTATION (US, Spike Jonze)
When I saw Being John Malkovich, I had to concede that the movie was just smarter than I was. I knew it was saying something about power, celebrity and identity, but I couldn't exactly say what. And usually when I don't get something, I suspect that there's genius at work. Well, here comes Adaptation, the second collaboration between director Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman, and... I got it. So it's very good, but not brilliant. The plot, at least part of it: Neurotic screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played rather tenderly by Nicolas Cage - it's one of his best performances) is hired to adapt New Yorker writer Susan Orlean's (Meryl Streep) nonfiction book The Orchid Thief, a look at John Laroche (Chris Cooper), an obsessive plant poacher in Florida. Crippled with writer's block, Charlie - with help from his goofy twin brother Donald (Cage again), tries to make sense of Orlean's unfilmable book, and winds up writing a script about his attempts to write a screen adaptation of The Orchid Thief. You follow?

Had this been literalized, Adaptation would have been a snooze, another tired look at a) The Hollywood Game or b) The Craft of Writing. But Kaufman, as expected, throws in lots of bizarre twists and turns, matched by Jonze's playful (if straightforward) direction and game performances by an obviously top-drawer cast. It's fun, but after a while I realized that, in its very unpredictability, the film became predictable. When Kaufman says at the beginning of the story that he doesn't want to write anything that has guns, car chases, sex or heroes having epiphanies, you know you're going to wind up seeing all of that. But the thing is, the film seems to know that. It's even in the trailer! So you can't win. I still encourage you to check out Adaptation because it's inventive, it's funny, it has one possibly life-changing line of dialogue. It's also fun to try to draw the line between fact and fiction (the real-life Kaufman really was hired to adapt the real-life Orlean's book about the real-life Laroche) while watching. But the film wobbles when Kaufman tries to inject genuine heart into it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't (especially at the end). The slight insincerity that comes when aiming for pathos in the middle of so much clever-cleverness keeps the film from greatness. But it doesn't keep it from being entertaining. By the way, writers will enjoy this film a lot more than non-writers will.

ADRENALINE DRIVE (Japan, Shinobu Yaguchi)
Imagine True Romance as directed by deadpan filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and starring an all-Japanese cast, and you'll have a good idea of what Adrenaline Drive is like. A shy, rather geeky young couple - a slacker rental car employee and a studious nurse - bump into each other and into about $2 million of stolen Yakuza money, which after a moment's deliberation they decide to take and have some fun with. Naturally, the Yakuza find out, and you've got your standard "two young lovers on the run from the mob" scenario, only in a very low-key Japanese vein. For better and for worse, it's cute, and kind of fun.

Interestingly, this looks more like an American independent film than anything I've seen come out of Japan, recently or ever. The lighting is flat, the camera work unremarkable, the pacing languid, the theme familiar, the characters weak. But the story has lots of nice little twists and turns and there is plenty of good, dry humor throughout. This film will probably not be coming to a theatre near you, so if you see it on cable, you could do worse than turn the channel, but it's by no means a "must see."

ADVENTURELAND (US, Greg Mottola)
I went to see this middling, though not unlikable, seriocomic coming of age story for two reasons: First, it got surprisingly strong reviews from critics across the board, announcing it as something special. Second, I've been a fan of costar Martin Starr ever since seeing him as Bill Haverchuck in the lamented "Freaks and Geeks" TV series. He hasn't found the fame that many of the show's other young actors have, so I was happy to see him finally land a substantial role. He's fine, and so is the rest of the cast, but there's something missing in Adventureland, Mottola's semiautobiographical story about a recent college graduate (Jesse Eisenberg, the poor man's Michael Cera, who similarly played director Noah Baumbach's alter ego in the '80s-set The Squid and the Whale) whose parents' finances dwindle to the point where he has to take on a crappy job at a second-rate amusement park in Pittsburgh rather than spend the summer traveling through Europe with his rich buddy. Of course he finds friendship, love and heartache, namely with his colleague Em (Kristen Stewart, who is sort of like a perpetually stoned Evan Rachel Wood). Mottola should be lauded for a script devoid of cloying sentimentality. It seems honest and heartfelt. But like I said, there's something missing. Adventureland reaches but doesn't actually grab onto anything. More to the point, nobody, especially Mottola, is really trying very hard here. And so the whole film is like a shrug. It's purposefully set in 1987, yet it looks very much like 2009; only a couple of minor actors are in acid washed jeans, the movie's sexpot "Lisa P" is dressed like it's 1984 (you think three years didn't make a difference in '80s fashion?), and there isn't a mullet to be found. Maybe I'm being a stickler, but since the story would've worked just fine if it took place today, I say if you're going to set it 22 years in the past then at least make the people look like they're 22 years in the past. So many movies recently have been set in the 1980s, and I have yet to find one that truly gets the look right. 1987 barely even registers culturally in the film. Nobody even mentions U2's "The Joshua Tree" or The Untouchables, which were what the summer of '87 was all about. Yet nearly all the characters are knowledgable about Lou Reed? Right. Also, the film is set in Pittsburgh, but it could be Anywhere, USA, and I think there were some missed opportunities there. On top of that, although all the characters are around 22 years old, they act like they're 18. Perhaps that's Mottola's point, but it seems illogical that so many of them would be so naive, clueless and virginal even after graduating from college. The story would have lost nothing if Mottola had simply made them all fresh high school grads, and their behavior would have been a bit more believable. I could go on, but in short, while I didn't dislike the film, I just felt that it could have done so much more, or reminded me more clearly of the pains of young adulthood, or at least made me feel nostalgic.

A.I. (U.S., Steven Spielberg)
Much has already written about A.I.'s legendary past: it was a pet project of the late Stanley Kubrick, who for years tried to get it made, without luck. You'd think he would have been able to just call up Steven Spielberg while he was alive and say "Hey, could I have $100 million to do this?" but instead Spielberg waited for Kubrick to kick off so he could take over the project and call it his own. What we're left with is a truly weird blend of the two filmmakers' styles: Kubrick's icy, detached sheen and Spielberg's mainstream suburban warmth. There are elements from each director's best-known works here, a little bit of The Shining, 2001 and A Clockwork Orange on one hand, a little bit of E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind and even Schindler's List on the other. Add to that a sprinkling of The Abyss and a hefty dose of Blade Runner, and you have one big mess.

A.I. is essentially three different stories: the first is a domestic drama set in the distant future, where a Yuppie couple, grieving over their comatose son, decides to assuage their loneliness by "adopting" David, the world's first robot capable of human love. Haley Joel Osment plays David with his typical "to be a good actor means to play everything exceedingly seriously" approach. This section of the film comes closest to Kubrick's spooky, sterile style, and it's the most successful: A.I. is based on a 1960's short story called "Super Toys Last All Summer Long," which is what attracted Kubrick in the first place, but alas, that story is over by the end of the film's first hour. After that, David finds himself lost in a forest where he can't phone home but he can bond with a fellow robot, in this case a sex android called Gigolo Joe (Jude Law, perfectly cast as usual), who leads him on various adventures across an ultra-futuristic landscape. The story bogs down as David, having heard the story of Pinocchio, believes that he too can become a real boy, and desperately begins searching for the Blue Fairy. This tedious quest continues until the frankly wretched last act, which only out of courtesy I won't give away, but I will say that just as the film wears out its welcome, it tricks you into thinking it's all over with a satisfying, if sad, ending for our poor David - then picks up and continues for a sickeningly sweet 15-minute epilogue that brings to mind the pointless "special edition" finale of Close Encounters, which was nothing but tons of special effects. Here Spielberg goes for tons of effects and a completely unconvincing "happy ending," and it sinks the film.

Not that A.I. would have been perfect otherwise; it's too ambitious for its own good. Although its seamless visual splendor is impressive - every sci fi idea you ever had as a teenager is right up there on screen - it's also exhausting. And irrelevant: How ironic that Spielberg couldn't see the parallel between David's quest and his own, for just as a soulless robot boy convinces himself that his preprogrammed emotions are real, so does Spielberg believe the same of his film. When Jurassic Park came out in 1993, a critic said that the reason why Jaws worked, and why Jurassic Park did not, was that hungry sharks are a real threat but resuscitated dinosaurs aren't. A.I. falters in the same way: E.T. suggested that in your home town, a charming alien could come down and be your friend. But A.I. is set so far in a stylized future that it loses its connection with our own times. We could sympathize with E.T.'s Elliot. But for us poor David remains, well, artificial.

AILEEN: LIFE AND DEATH OF A SERIAL KILLER (UK, Nick Broomfield, Joan Churchill)
In the early nineties, Nick Broomfield set out to do a documentary on Aileen Wuornos, the first female serial killer on America's death row. He soon found that Aileen's murder trial was a circus of publicity, with greedy hangers-on, from police officers to her lover to her recently-adopted Christian "mother," all trying to sell her story to Hollywood. Broomfield instead made a movie about this circus, and that became Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. Ten years later, with Wuornos just months away from execution, Broomfield made the film he wanted to make in the first place: a biography on Wuornos, an indictment of the people who messed up her life (and her death), and a clear-headed argument that she was obviously insane, and not mentally competent to face execution (she died by lethal injection in October, 2002). It's ironic to see this movie now that the Hollywood version of Wuornos's story - Monster, starring Charlize Theron as Wuornos - has finally come out. Though apparently Monster is not the result of anybody selling their version of Aileen's sad story (so much so that, other than Wuornos herself, the rest of the characters are all fictional, even the victims), it's hard not to feel queasy that millionaire Theron may well be at the Academy Awards in her designer gown, clutching the Oscar given to her for impersonating a woman whose real life was pure hell and who wouldn't be allowed within a mile of the awards. Broomfield and Churchill's Aileen does much more to humanize Wuornos, making us feel genuinely sorry that she was put to death (by Florida governor Jeb Bush, who was using the death penalty as a campaign platform). Monster, in comparison, though it is a well-made film, has essentially nothing to say - it clearly exists for only one reason, and that is so that Charlize Theron could get this "plum role." Anybody with an interest in the real Aileen Wuornos should definitely catch this documentary, though they should be warned about Broomfield's tendencies to insert his snide British self into the action.

AKA (UK, Duncan Roy)
British oddity that finally won theatrical distribution after over a year on the festival circuit, AKA is a rather ordinary story about a young con artist pumped up by a novel visual style, in which the screen is divided into thirds, the entire film playing out across the three mini-screens. This gimmick is, happily, neither confusing or pointless. Your eyes adjust as they would at a three-ring circus. Roy makes it a little easier by usually shooting the same scene from three different angles, so you are rarely following three different actions as you might with typical split-screen use. The story follows Dean Page (Matthew Leitch, son of Donovan and brother of Ione Skye), a teenage hustler in the 1970's who falls in with a wealthy gay crowd as he pretends to be the son of a socialite. An interesting character, one whose experiences are supposedly based on Roy's own (a stunt which had landed the director in jail). But there are too many elements rehashed from a thousand British dramas: the monster dad who turns out to have molested Dean; the unattainable true love (another hustler who is, of all things, an American cowboy); the cruel upper class crowd who have no sympathy or interest in who he really is. Worth seeing for some cinephiles due to the unique visual workout; for others, wholly skippable.

ALI (US, Michael Mann)
An old teacher of mine once said that if you were to dramatize a famous person's life (i.e. make a "biopic"), it would be most effective to stage your story on one day - preferably a critical day of that person's life - rather than try to recount the entire cradle-to-grave scope of their existence. That's a bit extreme, but I agree to some extent. So, too, does Michael Mann, it seems, as instead of covering the whole first 60 years of Muhammad Ali's time on earth, he focuses on the former boxer's 10 most dramatic: from his victory over Sonny Liston in 1964, winning the heavyweight championship, through his conversion to Islam, his friendship with Malcolm X, his notorious refusal of the Vietnam draft, his first two wives and finally wrapping up in 1974 when, at 32, he reclaimed the heavyweight title against George Foreman in their legendary "Rumble in the Jungle" fight in Kinshasha, Zaire. A wise choice: subsequent bouts with the forgettable Leon Spinks and Ali's eventual slide into the heartbreak of Parkinson's disease are things we really don't need to relive. Still and all, Mann seems less interested in telling a story (after all, his hero is pretty much in the same place at the end of the film as he is in the beginning) or even painting a portrait of the man's soul than he is in showcasing the former Cassius Clay as a symbol for what is arguably the most turbulent time in America's history, from its ideological dawning in the mid-60's to its exhausted flop into the me-first mid-70's. Because of his race, because of his fame, because of his integrity, because of his attitude, Mann sees Ali as the embodiment of all the good and bad that happened in that era.

An ambitious goal. Too bad Ali isn't as ambitious as this notion, not to mention as ambitious as the man himself. Part of this might lie in Mann's last film, the excellent The Insider. Mann finally settled on a mature visual style with that film, and he uses it again here, note for note, in Ali. It's an exciting style, one of the most energetic around today: the tight focus, the off-center framing, the bold cuts, it's all there and it's all good. It's just that was all there in The Insider too, and there it served a tighter story that, for me anyway, had more immediacy (though Ali comes close). As for Will Smith in the title role, he more represents Muhammad Ali than impersonates him. His much-noted muscle gain is crucial to the part. But although he fast-talks it like the champ, he doesn't try to ape Ali's famous rasp or his bug-eyed glower. Which is an interesting choice, given that John Voight is rendered completely unrecognizable under pounds of make-up as sportscaster Howard Cosell. (He's terrific, by the way.) Though we may not learn much about Muhammad Ali that we hadn't already guessed - that he loved the limelight, that he was a ladies' man, that he was a great boxer - watching the film is an undeniably visceral and thought-provoking experience. And if nothing else, you'll get a real sense for how physically exhausting a few rounds in the ring can be, even for "the Greatest."

ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU (Japan, Shunji Iwai)
This film isn't really about Lily Chou-Chou (pronounced "Shoo-shoo"), a fictional Asian pop star with a rabid following to rival Björk's, but about two of her fans: a pair of junior high school boys in a depressed, semi-rural district in Japan. The story follows two years of the boys' lives and is divided into three sections: the first follows the growth of the boys' friendship as they bond over music, computers and their own loneliness. (Both are harassed by the school's predatory in-crowd.) The central section of the film is an extended home video-style document of the nightmarish vacation the boys take with their friends in Okinawa. The third part depicts the breakdown of their friendship during their second year in junior high, when the social order abruptly changes and one of the boys rises to the top, reinventing himself as a sadistic pimp. As with a lot of contemporary Japanese cinema, you've got enough rape, murder and suicide in the mix to balance the film very carefully on the fence between being a disturbing look at teen life in Japan and being an overly melodramatic examination of classroom politics. In the middle of it all, we are treated to random text messages on the screen, taken from online chatrooms in which the boys, and other fans, ramble on and on about their beloved Lily. A beautifully shot film, with wholly believable performances by its young cast, but so stone cold serious that even if you do accept it as an honest portrait of Japanese teenagers, it's point of view is too hopeless to fully admire. Still, it's affecting and worth a look.

ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (Spain, Pedro Almodóvar)
Though I disagree with reports that this is the best foreign film of the year, it is still quite a treat. A warning to sniggering hipsters: this is 100% pure, unironic melodrama. You get your shocking plot twists, your wild coincidences, your emotional outbursts. However, Almodóvar's tastes being what they are, it is a melodrama peopled by the likes of large-breasted transsexuals, lesbian actresses, a pregnant nun, prostitutes, heroin addicts... and in the middle of it all, a grieving mother (Cecilia Roth, extremely appealing) who has moved to Barcelona in search of the father of her recently deceased son.

The performances are all knock-outs. Non-Spanish actresses must be green with envy, for Almodóvar seems to be one of the few male filmmakers alive today who consistently creates rich, complex female characters. I must also mention Almodóvar's flair for filling the screen with bright, vibrant colors and patterns, as well as Alberto Iglesias's amazing score - my favorite score this year (barring Chris Farrell's score for Foreign Correspondents): lush, orchestral, dramatic, jazzy, and very Spanish.

ALL THE REAL GIRLS (US, David Gordon Green)
Though I was no fan of Green's debut feature George Washington, finding it such a ripoff of Terrence Malick's style that Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line) could have sued, I decided to give All the Real Girls a chance, seeing some spark in Green's directorial abilities. Set in rural North Carolina, this is a romantic drama about a boy and a girl. The boy (Paul Schneider) is actually a twentysomething goof-off, a good-natured lunk with no ambition, famous mainly for sleeping with, and breaking the hearts of, every woman in town. The girl (Zooey Deschanel) is his best friend's little sister (uh oh!), an 18-year-old virgin (uh oh!) who falls madly in love with him despite the odds (uh oh!). That's an obvious recipe for disaster, but the nice thing about All the Real Girls is that, instead of plunging into melodrama, it takes a slice of life approach, collecting snippets of this young couple's tumultuous relationship - some scripted, some clearly improvised by the cast. Though the film constantly aims for "emotional truth," personally I found only a couple of scenes really affecting. But how affecting they were! One scene involving a phone call at a party (the girl silently flirts with some bozo while her unaware boyfriend prattles on, hundreds of miles away) is so real it's painful to watch. There are actually a lot of fine moments in All the Real Girls, and the acting is so natural as to be almost invisible, especially Deschanel's sweet, complicated performance. And Green's cinematographer Tim Orr is a real talent: the entire film is suffused in gorgeous late-autumn golds. In the end Green lays on the empathy a bit much; just about every character - and there are a lot of supporting roles - has a scene in which they get to cry, while gentle country-tinged guitars are plucked in the background. But I'll forgive his callow sentimentality, with the hope that his work continues to mature through subsequent projects.

ALMOST FAMOUS (US, Cameron Crowe)
After years of struggle, writer/director Crowe finally got studio money to make his dream project: His life story. Uh-oh! Now, most good writers tend to have autobiographical elements in their work; by drawing on their own experiences, they make their characters more real. So when somebody comes out and says "THIS IS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL," you know what to expect: Lies! Whitewashing! Blatant self-love! Here Crowe re-examines his one-of-a-kind youth, where he was paid by Rolling Stone to tour with rock bands and write magazine articles about his adventures. (Not bad for a teenager.) Crowe's 15-year-old alter ego is one William Miller (Patrick Fugit), a sensitive, brilliant, honest, likeable - you get the idea - San Diego rock fan who, in short order, befriends legendary rock critic Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), gets hired by Rolling Stone, and goes off galavanting around the U.S. with the fictional rock band Stillwater, where he befriends guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), learns some valuable life lessons, falls in love, bla bla bla.

So basically you have your usual Hollywood B.S. masquerading as truthful humanist storytelling - and people are buying it. The real crime is that Crowe does have a fascinating story to tell - in the tragic life of the late Lester Bangs. Hoffman brings a great deal of depth, wry humor and loneliness to the character, and would have completely stolen the film if Crowe weren't more interested in his own ho-hum life story. (Ironically, though Bangs is the one true nonfictional character, he is treated almost like a guardian angel that only our young protagonist can see or hear.) Oh well. Almost Famous is still an enjoyable romp, two hours of slightly-better-than-bland entertainment, though Crowe's consistently idealized vision of himself (William even gets to lose his virginity to three hot babes!) is impossible to ignore. Aside from that, the cast is all fine, with standout performances by Hoffman, a hilariously energetic Frances McDormand as William's concerned Mom, and Kate Hudson as a troubled groupie. I wish Crowe could have delved into darker territory with her; Hudson could have probably handled it. But Crowe is pure Hollywood, and you can't tear him away from his happy ending, his sentimentality, or his spoiled-brat amorality. After all, he once posed as a high school student in order to write a Rolling Stone expose on California teens that would become his script for Fast Times at Ridgemont High. When the teens he got to know found out that their "friend" had robbed their stories and humiliated them in print, then made a fortune off their misery with nary an apology, their betrayal was deeply felt. Too bad Crowe won't write a story where he questions his own morals: in Almost Famous, the best "ethical issue" he can come up with is whether William should write an article making Stillwater look like a cool rock band or like drunken, groupie-shagging party dudes. Is there a difference?

ALONG CAME A SPIDER (US, Lee Tamahori)
Morgan Freeman reprises his Kiss the Girls role as Alex Cross, police detective and criminal profiler. After losing his partner in a wild chase (which is loaded with bad special effects but is fun to watch), Cross goes into semi-retirement, emerging only after the young daughter of a state senator is kidnapped by a crazed teacher (Michael Wincott). Cross is, in fact, lured into the case directly by the kidnapper himself, who apparently wants to turn the case into the crime of the century. Cross teams up with a young secret service agent (Monica Potter) to track down the kidnapper before the girl dies, and blah blah blah.

I never saw Kiss the Girls, so I don't know if Freeman's character was once allowed more intelligence, but what's so astonishing with Along Came a Spider is that we are given a brilliant criminal detective... and we don't get to see him really figure anything out! One of the joys of a detective story is watching our hero put the pieces together using logic, elementary deduction and craftiness. (Akira Kurosawa's High and Low is an excellent example.) In this film, however, most of the big discoveries are made using imaginary high tech equipment or convenient guesswork. Worse still, almost none of it even matters to the story as a whole. Loose ends abound: they discover the kidnapper's real identity, and yet they refer to him by his assumed name throughout the rest of the story. The kidnapper worked as a teacher at the little girl's school for 2 years, and yet nobody knew anything about him, or where he lived. The filmmakers hope you will forget all this by throwing in one major shockeroo plot twist near the end. After you gasp, however, you quickly realize that even that has no basis in logic. It's just more silliness. Freeman (who for some reason loved the film enough to serve as executive producer) at least puts in a decent performance. The creepy Michael Wincott tries hard but is mostly wasted as the desperate kidnapper. And Monica Potter comes off as nothing more than a short, blonde Julia Roberts clone. Her voice and face even bear an eerie resemblance to our Miss R. But her delivery is flat; she registers as little more than someone you'd see in a Murder, She Wrote episode. As for director Lee Tamahori, he could be anybody. Hack work. Another worthless film brought to you by my employers, Paramount Pictures.

AMANDLA! (US, Lee Hirsch)
Ingratiating documentary about the protest songs that kept the dream alive for black South Africans as they slowly but successfully managed to topple the oppressive Apartheid regime. The music is great, of course, but director Hirsch spends too much time on the talking heads (all African musicians who were very active in the cause - thankfully, there are no white celebrities like Paul Simon or whoever putting in their token two cents), and I started wishing I could watch one of these wonderful performers just sing. The film's best moments are, in fact, two scenes inside a recording studio where the camera simply catches a singer belting out a soulful, moving tune. The entire film could have been this and it would have been just as effective. Instead we get the usual history lesson. This is also one of those "MTV-style" documentaries: lots of flashy cuts and camera work, some restaged scenes, saturated colors. Some purists find docs like this to be a bit phony; "all style and no substance," they cry. Others say hey, you're not going to reach a wide audience if your doc is dry and academic. My feelings lie somewhere in the middle. Amandla! would have felt more honest if it weren't so trapped by its own slickness, but it still teaches those of us who don't know a lot about the anti-Apartheid struggle. The film doesn't go much into this complicated political scenario aside from how it related to the music, which is shrewd, but in the end it feels more like a time capsule. Alas, one doesn't suppose that a bunch of protest songs is going to do anything to improve Africa's current political climate.

AMÉLIE (France, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
Set in a romanticized Paris where nobody smokes, there is no dog doo on the sidewalks, and famous landmarks are devoid of obnoxious tourists, Amélie is nevertheless a delightful modern-day riff on Jane Austen's Emma, wherein the optimistic daughter (Audrey Tautou) of an eccentric widower takes it upon herself to better the lives of those around her, even while denying herself the romantic happiness that's just beyond her reach. But you can bet she'll eventually get her man, too. Director Jeunet is best remembered as half of the team behind the surreal French crowd-pleasers Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. After splitting with his filmmaking partner Marc Caro, he stumbled in Hollywood with Alien Resurrection but is back on track on his home turf, and if we no longer get Caro's inspired set designs or the fantastical visions of the earlier films, Jeunet's madcap camerawork, daft humor and watery, saturated colors are alive and well in Amélie. (You'd think all Paris was tinted a rich green-gold instead of its normal blah gray.) And it's got a far stronger story than Lost Children had, with lots of imaginative twists and tangents. Though I didn't find it gooey, it's probably not for those feeling cynical. I watched it in a packed theatre and everybody had such a positive vibe that I was reminded that a good audience can affect the way you watch a film. I might have found this film cloying if it was just me, a VCR, and a bad day. Either way, it's the best tourist brochure the city of Paris could have asked for. And a great date movie: take a hottie to Amélie and you will get laid, guaranteed. (Unfortunately I saw it with my dopey ex-roommate, not my girlfriend, so I can't vouch for this.)

THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT (US, Cory McAbee)
Wacky low-budget indie lucked out by obtaining brief theatrical distribution in the U.S.; writer/director/star McAbee must be on cloud nine. A black and white sci fi musical that some might describe as Eraserhead meets Flash Gordon (the old serial, not the campy 70's rehash), its closest relative is actually the execrable 80's cult film The Forbidden Zone, which my old friends implausibly adored. The American Astronaut is actually better than that, thanks to its fantastic cinematography, McAbee's almost-catchy (or at least not unlistenable) music hall-ish tunes, and great period faces in the cast: it really does look like some 1940's B movie. But the storyline is self-consciously "kooky" (a space cowboy, played by McAbee, has to deliver a handsome young man to the all-female planet of Venus, while eluding a mad scientist who vaporizes everybody he comes in contact with because they won't sing "Happy Birthday" to him), many limp scenes go on too long, and one gets the idea that only Cory McAbee gets most of the jokes. At least he doesn't strike me as an ordinary guy trying to be a weirdo; McAbee is probably a real-life weirdo, only the kind of weirdo who gets his film financed and distributed thanks to the Sundance Institute, and probably has tons of hot girlfriends too. I prefer my weirdos to live under sinks and rub peanut butter in their hair. But I guess some will find this film amusing. I saw it with a couple of friends and one of them went ape over it.

AMERICAN PSYCHO (US, Mary Harron)
You know the story: Based on Bret Easton Ellis' notorious 1991 novel, the film follows the life of rich, handsome and empty 27-year-old stockbroker Patrick Bateman (a perfectly cast Christian Bale) as he plays with his fellow Manhattan preppies during the greed-drenched late 80's (as opposed to the greed-drenched late 90's?) and then goes on endless murder and mutilation sprees when nobody's looking.

Director Harron and her coscenarist Guinevere Turner have gone on record as saying that their main task in adapting the novel for the screen was by removing most of its graphic violence (much of it against women) that sparked great protest from feminist groups back in '91. Turner inadvertantly revealed the error in doing this in a recent interview where she stated that she and Harron were plagued by nightmares after reading the sickening murder scenes and thus had to take them out. Well, like it or not, they're what made the novel so pointed and memorable in the first place, and by reducing them to a few off-camera splashes of blood, the audience is prevented from being shaken up by, well, anything the movie has to say.

A larger problem, though, in adapting the book comes from gutting its first-person narrative, where Bateman endlessly categorizes everything in his life from skin care products to designer wardrobes to the gory details of his crimes. The book is a hurricane of sex, drugs, anger, violence, paranoia and name-dropping; reading it is an exhausting experience, and it becomes easy to see how a serial killer could thrive in an environment of excess and soullessness: Patrick Bateman was both a product of and reaction to his times. (Remember that the novel was written a mere 3 years after its timeframe; hardly the "period piece" that Harron has given us.) Without the nonstop narration (as headache-inducing as it might be), the film can only show us Bateman's world - and what a slow-paced world it is, cinematically. The audience is overwhelmed by nothing. In the end, both assessments of the original book are wrong: it was neither misogynist nor feminist. By spending her time addressing these two non-issues, Harron makes a film that more or less wanders around with little to say. Which, in an age where young professionals are now perhaps even more in love with money, power and conformity, turns the film's irrelevance into an American tragedy.

AMERICAN SPLENDOR (US, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini)
(Sorry for the extremely tardy review - this film will be out on video soon enough.) In the 1970's, Harvey Pekar was an ordinary middle-aged file clerk in Cleveland who, inspired by the success of his friend, underground comics artist Robert Crumb, decided to turn his own life into a comic book. Soon the tales of his humdrum existence, enlivened by his freaky colleagues and his own cranky, though highly intelligent, world-view, made Pekar a cult figure. (His frequent appearances on "Late Night With David Letterman" didn't hurt either.) American Splendor is an amiable, often very funny docudrama, mixing contemporary interviews with Pekar with re-enactments of the key moments of his life played out by a fine Paul Giametti and Hope Davis (as Pekar's wife) and even a bit of animation. I was entertained throughout, but found myself longing for something that Pekar's own comics - which are revealing and poignant enough - don't give us. There's a tantalizing bit of painful truth when Pekar snarls about how his fame turned him and his friends into corporate entertainment's laughingstocks, but writer/directors Berman and Pulcini move on too quickly to make it sink in, being too busy cramming in all the facts of his biography. It was a cute choice to have the real Pekar narrate his own biopic, but that, coupled with clips of his actual Letterman appearances, made me think that a simple documentary would have been a better film.

AMORES PERROS (Mexico, Alejandro González Iñárritu)
I am slightly jealous of Amores Perros, because it has a story set-up very similar to one I have long thought of using: taking a tragic traffic accident, and then telling the stories of all the previously-unconnected lives affected by it. Here we have three victims: the first is a punky teenager who enters the world of dogfighting in order to raise the money to run away with his abusive brother's pretty wife; the second is a fashion model who must deal with the accident's physical aftermath on her once-perfect body, as she searches for her missing dog; the third is a homeless hitman who cares more for his stray dogs than for the people he encounters.

If you're sensing a "dog" theme across the three stories, you are correct, and indeed the film's title translates into "Love's a Dog" (or the smirkier "Love's a Bitch," which is the film's official English title). Iñárritu seems to be after some metaphor with his dogs, but it never quite becomes clear just what they are meant to symbolize. Well-acted, and extremely stylish (with that now-common "documentary look:" handheld camera, washed-out colors, frenetic editing), but ultimately rather shallow. Iñárritu believes that a grim film is an "important" film. But life - even among the downtrodden - is filled with more hope and humor than this bleak melodrama suggests. Also, there is a sense that Iñárritu - a successful DJ and music video director - finds it necessary to maintain his street cred, and so he paints his middle-class characters as vain, honorless creatures who deserve their comeuppance, while he displays a Tarantino-like sympathy for his thieves and hitmen. (Note to my fellow indie filmmakers: can we please take a break from filling every freaking movie with hitmen?) But I'll bet Iñárritu has a lot more fashion model friends than dogfighter friends. Speaking of which, though there is a disclaimer at the start of the film that states that none of the dogs used were hurt in any way, animal lovers may want to avoid Amores Perros for its sheer number of bleeding and dead dogs. Well-made, and with a fine soundtrack, I just wish this film actually had something meaningful to say.

ANGELA'S ASHES (US/Ireland, Alan Parker)
Evocative adaptation of Frank McCourt's Pulitzer-prize winning memoir of growing up dirt-poor in 1930's Limerick, Ireland. Uniformly fine acting, a beautiful score by John Williams (his best since Schindler's List and a far cry better than his unforgiveably mediocre score for Phantom Menace), and Alan Parker's typical attention to (obsession with?) gritty, grimy detail add to the film's distinctive atmosphere. That said, the film basically adheres to the formula of the "Young European Boy Coming of Age" film. The cliches are all in place: first love, first job, first transcendant trip to the local cinema, tragic death of a loved one, struggling mother, no-good father, anonymous siblings, valuable life lessons learned.

However, this being the story of a human being's actual life, and actual life rarely following a set dramatic storyline, the film has more of a free-form, "slice of life" pacing to it. Watch Frank trudge through his days. Watch him get into trouble and then out of it. Watch people enter his life and then leave it. This is all very realistic but can't, by its own nature, build up any sort of momentum. Parker and coscenarist Laura Jones try to weave an actual story in there: Frank dreams of going to America - will he make it? - but that is (rightly) secondary to scenes from his day-to-day life, and in the end I was left thinking, "Well, that was Frank McCourt's childhood. But is his story worth telling any more than anybody else's? Not really." The movie serves to remind that the real popularity of the book was in McCourt's prose, not in his experiences.

Strangest scene: the fastest lunar eclipse in the history of time - maybe 30 seconds long!

THE ANNIVERSARY PARTY (US, Jennifer Jason Leigh & Alan Cumming)
The idea behind The Anniversary Party sounds scary: two well-known character actors decide to write, direct and star in their own film, with an improvised script and many of their Hollywood friends co-starring. Yikes! Can you say "self-serving?" That was why I avoided it until it wound up at the local cheap theatre - but I'm glad I caught it. The Anniversay Party is one night in the life of hotshot writer Joe Therrian (Cumming) and fading movie star Sally Nash (Leigh), a married couple only recently reconciling after six months apart. In order to celebrate their six year anniversary (and their reconciliation), they throw a party and invite all their artsy friends. It all sounds peachy - but they also have invited their uptight neighbors, who have been theatening them with lawsuits over their noisy dog. (This sounds incredibly lame, but this is a very real issue in the Hollywood Hills.) So there is an undercurrent of uneasiness throughout the evening, slowly bubbling to the surface as the cracks in Joe and Sally's relationship start showing: Joe is about to direct the film adaptation of his novel, casting hot young actress Skye Davidson (Gwyneth Paltrow, bearable for once) in the lead role that was based on Sally herself; there are also some issues involving their inability to have children, and Joe's drug addict sister back in England.

With dark notes like that, unhappiness is bound to ensue, but first we are treated to an honest you-are-there look at a Hollywood party, where yes there are drugs, there is sex, there are half-naked people jumping in the pool, but there is more than that. Hollywood insiders for years, Leigh and Cumming know their inner circle well: these aren't obnoxious film executives skewered in movies like The Player, these are the creative people at the heart of show business - actors, musicians, photographers, writers, directors - all presented as undeniably talented if unstoppably neurotic. (I have yet to meet any successful artist that doesn't fit that general description.) Adding to the voyeuristic realism is the fact that many of the cast members are playing slightly fictional variations of themselves, particularly Kevin Kline and real-life wife Phoebe Cates, as well as Leigh (at whose actual home the film was shot). Believe me, it's very difficult for many actors to play themselves so honestly; they're better at faking it. There's a lot of laudable bravery on display here, and the cast is perfect. However, oddly the least believable aspect of the story is Joe and Sally's relationship. There is something about the chemistry between Cumming and Leigh where you just can't buy them as a married couple. Which sadly lessens the impact of their ultimate confrontation scene - I was wishing they would cut back to their more interesting guests instead, the most intriguing of whom is relatively unknown actress Mina Badie as the hesitant neighbor who discovers herself over the course of the evening. Shot on digital video, the film looks remarkably good. It also has an unbelievably hip soundtrack. I recommend it.

ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL (US, Sacha Gervasi)
Crowd-pleasing documentary about the obscure Canadian heavy metal band Anvil, who seemed on the brink of stardom in 1984 and then, due to bad management and a few wrongheaded decisions, never made it. Yet a quarter century later, the two dudes who started the band, Steve "Lips" Kudlow and Robb Reiner, are still at it, playing small clubs and hoping for fame. Anvil! is both a little depressing and a little heartwarming. It's great to see these two dreamers and their fellow bandmates refusing to give up long after most people would. And as the documentary (by Hollywood insider and onetime teenage Anvil fan Sacha Gervasi) follows the band on a disappointing tour of Europe and the struggle to make their thirteenth(!) album, one is reminded of how hard it is to keep going when the rest of the world seems to have moved on. But Anvil's determination to make music is inspiring, not only to aging rockers but also to independent filmmakers like yours truly and anybody else in the creative field who wants to share their work but may feel disheartened by the apathy of the world and the fear of becoming simply too old for that big break. The irony is that this documentary has given Anvil the exposure they've craved for more than twenty years, and the band's doing better than ever. I hope Kudlow and Reiner are fattening up their savings accounts, though, because the spotlight is just as likely to move on in a few months as it did in 1984. Anyway, this isn't a fantastic documentary - Kudlow can be a little much after a while - but it's a fun ride with a great finale. Heavy metal fans might enjoy it even more than I did.

ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL (US, Terry Zwigoff)
In the late 80's, cartoonist Daniel Clowes included a short piece called "Art School Confidential" in an issue of his Eightball comics. It was a storyless expose of the corrupt side of art schools which I found extremely funny and definitely right on the mark, as I read it while I myself was in art school. Almost two decades later, Clowes - as screenwriter and co-producer - teamed up with his Ghost World director Terry Zwigoff to bring to the screen an adaptation so loose that it's become a entirely new work (I counted only three or four passing references to the comic in the film). But as Clowes adds characters and a story arc, what started as a viciously witty poison pen comic has become an interesting if confused live action feature. In the process, some of the nasty art school secrets that Clowes held up before the light have been diluted. But I may be too close to the subject; I admit that I spent much of the first hour watching this movie comparing the authenticity of its art school reference points to my own experiences at CalArts. It wasn't until a particularly painful moment in the life of its young protagonist Jerome (Max Minghella, son of director Anthony) that I realized that this is a very angry story about loneliness, jealousy and disillusionment. Yet whereas Clowes and Zwigoff made that sentiment work in the bittersweet Ghost World in 2000, it's more muddled and less memorable this time around. There is an unwelcome hint of misogyny during the film's first half, some strained comedy in a few misguided scenes, and many problems with the character of Jerome, who as an aspiring artist is such a blank slate (no pun intended) that he's frankly unrealistic. He is shy and virginal, yet sincerely hopes to become the greatest artist of the 21st century. He has real talent, but is clueless about what kind of art he wants to make. He apparently knows a great deal about contemporary art, then naively tells people that his favorite artist is Picasso. When his character feels most terribly real - especially to anybody who themselves went through that awkward period of finding their creative "voice" - is in the scenes where, in an increasingly desperate bid for the affections of the prettiest girl in school (Sophia Myles), he starts stealing ideas from those around him who he believes are onto something.

Clowes went to art school and is now in his third decade as a well-respected comics artist. When he writes about the negative aspects of the art world - its competitiveness, its shallowness, its conformity - he knows exactly what he's talking about. He's been there. Thus, when his script takes forays into the discussion of the worth and meaning of art, and the genuine frustrations and pains of those who make it, the film becomes something real. But these revealing moments get lost in the shuffle of a murder mystery (yes really, though somehow it works), an uninteresting romance, annoying supporting characters and throwaway gags. So on the one hand, while it retains the ambiguity and creepiness of one of Clowes's long-form comics, it's Zwigoff's typically flat direction that left me cold. As usual, I got the sense that many of the scenes had to be trimmed by editors because Zwigoff routinely caves in to most actors' bad habit of dragging scenes out. As a result, he's got a bad dilemma: truncate scenes, killing some great moments in the story? Or let them play out in full, killing the momentum of the picture? Either way, we lose. But there are lots of shining moments in the film: Jim Broadbent's bitter drunk artist stands out especially. It's a surprise to see him here in a scruffy satire aimed at young hipsters, but he is most welcome. If only the film around him could match his level of focus and intensity, then Art School Confidential would be something special. As it stands, it may be of passing interest only to those who themselves went to art school, or who like to pretend that they did.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (US, Andrew Dominik)
With a title that accurately hints at the length of the film itself, this will, depending on your mood, hypnotize you or bore you to death. Writer/director Dominik, adapting Ron Hansen's historical novel, takes his cues from the work of Terrence Malick and creates a meditative look at the uncertain relationship between famed Western outlaw Jesse James and a young member of his gang named Robert Ford, whose hero worship of James slowly transforms into something not clearly specified. As Jesse James, Brad Pitt has the showier role, but the film really belongs to Casey Affleck and his subtly cracked performance as Ford. There is great meaning in Dominik's casting (or, rather, in producer Pitt's casting of himself): Pitt's iconic Hollywood hunk status is echoed in the mythical fame that James enjoyed both in life and death; Affleck's struggling underdog is made all the more poignant by the actor's own career overshadowed by his less talented brother Ben. (Ford's similarly goofy brother Charley is played in the film by the redoubtable Sam Rockwell.) And Dominik himself has chosen the perfect follow-up to his first film, the Australian crime movie Chopper, which also examined a violent nutjob whose notoriety masked a hollow persona. Roger Deakins' stunning cinematography and a distinctive soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis add to the film's evocative Midwest atmosphere.

The pacing does take its own sweet time, with Pitt especially eager to stretch out every pregnant pause until its snapping point. And yet my interest never flagged. James is such an unpredictable character that somehow, even though you know by the title what ultimately happens, much of the film holds a quiet suspense, especially in scenes between the paranoid James and the stewing Ford. The story leaves much to be desired, however. Of course we all know that Jesse James is a legendary figure of the Old West. But why, exactly? How did people see him while he lived - was he the Charles Manson of his time, or the Robin Hood? Was he hated, loved, feared, envied? The film only touches on his fame in the form of some Jesse James dime novels that Ford keeps in a box under his bed (in one of several allusions to Ford having a homoerotic fascination with James) and after his death - which, in my opinion, is the most interesting part of the film - but any good story needs to convince its audience, no matter how familiar they may be with the main character, of who that character is, and why he's important. The Assassination of Jesse James doesn't quite deliver on that level - nor does it really explain Robert Ford's arc from twisted fan to resentful assassin. Dominik seems assured enough in what he's doing for me to accept that it was a conscious choice to keep the souls of James and Ford shrouded in mystery. But that leaves it up to the two actors playing the men to tell us who they were. Affleck gives us a glimpse, but Pitt - who isn't bad - makes do with a few evil stares and psychotic giggling. If Jesse James was merely a cold-hearted murderer and Ford a lonely loser with delusions of grandeur, it could well be argued that we didn't need to sit through three hours of movie to understand that. Still, I liked this film. But then I like Terrence Malick's films too.

ASSISTED LIVING (US, Elliot Greenebaum)
Ultra-low-budget slice of life that takes place in an assisted living facility (read: old folks home) in Kentucky. Todd (Michael Bonsignore, quite good) is a slackerish orderly who doesn't seem to care one whit about the often-senile "clientele" he works with until one lonely woman (Maggie Riley) comes to depend on him to contact her long-lost son in Australia, who may have simply abandoned her or who may not even exist (we're never told). What works about this film is its verisimilitude - and there's a word I don't get to use very often. Shot in an actual senior center, with most of the real-life clients/patients/prisoners serving as background talent, Assisted Living can either be called a documentary with a fictional story weaved through it, or a dramatic feature with documentary elements. In either case, Greenebaum succeeds at making this milieu look like hell on earth. His film is, in some ways, a variation on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Todd's heroics - if you can even call them that - are meager at best, but the intent is the same. Assisted Living makes a strong argument against banishing the elderly to these kinds of facilities, where they are basically sent to die, alone in a sterilized environment where the word "care" is very loosely defined. The film's only drawbacks are Marcel Cabrera's inconsistent cinematography - many shots are lovely, even poetic, while others are out of focus or poorly lit - and its short length (a mere 78 minutes). Greenebaum needs no more time to tell the story that he decided to tell, but surely he could have made good use of an extra half-hour to develop his characters further and create something more substantial. But maybe it's better that he didn't: 78 minutes was more than enough time spent in this depressing environment, and if nothing else, this film has swayed me against growing old anywhere besides my own home.

AUDITION (Japan, Takashi Miike)
It's hard to talk about this film without revealing its big "twist," ala the sudden change-of-direction that Hitchcock's Psycho was so famous for, but I'll try to be discreet. For its first third, Audition plays like a dry romantic comedy, as a lonely widower (Ryo Ishibashi), goaded by his teenage son to find a new woman seven years after the death of his wife, enlists the aid of a friend to help him find the right girl. His friend, who works in the film industry, suggests that they pretend to be casting a film, and start holding phony auditions for the female lead. And let's just say that the sweet, shy young woman whom Ishibashi chooses for his new love turns out to be absolutely, undeniably Miss Wrong. Because at this point, Audition takes a sharp left turn into horrific territory that makes Fatal Attraction look like a frothy Julia Roberts vehicle. Whether this girl (played by model Eihi Shiina) is a psychotic murderess seeking revenge on men after a traumatic childhood, or if her acts of extreme violence and torture are merely the paranoid musings of Ishibashi's character, is never made clear, but the reality isn't the point. With a freaky director like Miike (whose previous work included a hermaphroditic teenager who shoots poison darts from her vagina and cute little children playing soccer with a man's severed head), you don't expect everything to make logical sense. Audition is all about emotion, even if that emotion is squeamishness. You depraved souls will get to see some seriously sick stuff going on during the film's last third, but it isn't gratutitous - there is a definite sense that Ishibashi deserves his comeuppance for the ultimately sleazy and exploitative way in which he casually seeks a new wife. Not a great film, but definitely an unforgettable one, if only for its gut-wrenching brutality. Another clear sign that contemporary Japanese cinema is amongst the most interesting the world has to offer right now.

THE AURA (Argentina/Spain, Fabián Bielinsky)
Subtle but consistently compelling thriller about a glum, epileptic taxidermist (Ricardo Darín) who, during a freak accident while hunting that brings to mind Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, forges a new identity for himself: that of an assistant to a hunting lodge owner who, it turns out, is also something of a professional thief. The plot - in which the taxidermist finds himself in the company of a group of tough crooks setting out to rob a casino - is deliberately paced, but moves seamlessly, like precision clockwork, with nary a wasted moment or plot point. Writer/director Bielinsky is a major talent, or I should say "was": he died, unexpectedly, in 2006 at the age of 47, shortly after completing The Aura. His only other feature as director was the widely acclaimed art house hit Nine Queens, which most critics seem to prefer to its well-received successor. Not having seen Nine Queens yet, I can only review The Aura on its own merits, which are many. An existentialist caper film with a fascinatingly opaque protagonist (played very well by the poker-faced Darín; the rest of the cast is great too), a gripping story and a slick but never overbearing visual style, The Aura is definitely worth seeking out - even if its U.S. theatrical run may be brief.

AUTO FOCUS (US, Paul Schrader)
Curiously flat biopic about Bob Crane, the disc jockey-turned actor who is best remembered for three things: starring in the hit TV series "Hogan's Heroes;" videotaping himself having sex with scores of women; and being murdered in 1979, days before his fiftieth birthday. Auto Focus mostly examines the underreported relationship Crane had with John Carpenter (not the film director), who introduced him to the swinging lifestyle as well as the burgeoning home video technology that Crane took to like a moth to a flame. Greg Kinnear, who has cornered the market on playing glib narcissists, finds his Hamlet in Bob Crane, and does a fine job. Equally good - as usual - is Willem Dafoe as the creepy, troubled Carpenter. But what's the point of the film? Crane is such a historical footnote that it's ridiculous to make a serious picture about him. And though his kinky obsessions make for potentially incendiary material, Schrader depicts him as nothing more than a shallow sleazebag. And the definitely weird friendship between Crane and Carpenter is played out all rather ordinarily, with little suspense leading up to Crane's inevitable murder (which, though still unsolved in the real world, seems to be a cut-and-dried case in this film - think American Beauty). And as with all biopics, important facts are ignored and truths are bent, so we can't even pretend we're seeing the truth. All we're left with is the theme of a man's sexual addiction. Here Schrader (with screenwriter Michael Gerbosi) makes a big mistake: since we never get to like Crane as a person even in the beginning, we don't feel anything as he downwardly spirals into addiction. And since we're not shown that there could be something fun or sexy about Crane's kink in the first place (it just looks pathetic), we can't sympathize with his descent. Kinnear-as-Crane often defends his actions with a "What's the problem? It's just sex," and he has a point. Though he cheated on his wife, it's otherwise hard to get all huffy about what was done between consensual adults who were just having a good time. Crane did get addicted, and the fun obviously drained out when it became an obsessive act for him and his cameraman/pimp/hero-worshipper Carpenter (the film reflects this rather sophomorically by altering its visual style from clean, candy-colored static shots during Crane's golden days to dark, gritty, hand-held camerawork at the end), but Schrader's sexual politics remain suspiciously reactionary (he even inserts a scene in which one of Crane's lovers doesn't know he's taping her, so we can really think he's a creep) and anyway, it's all so insignificant that, unless you are a huge "Hogan's Heroes" fan, there's nothing unmissable about Auto Focus.

AVENUE MONTAIGNE (France, Daniele Thompson)
Light-hearted concoction from France is nevertheless smart and uncondescending. A perky young lady named Jessica (an actress with the ridiculous name of Cecile De France) takes a job as a waitress at a bustling cafe in Paris that just happens to be across the street from an enormous performing arts complex. Thus she winds up insinuating herself into the lives of three people who are each having their own "opening night jitters" for the same upcoming evening: A classical pianist who is tiring of the stuffy crowds that come to his concerts, an insanely insecure television soap actress appearing in a stage comedy, and an aging millionaire who has decided to auction off his precious art collection. Sort of an Amelie without the visual razzle-dazzle, Avenue Montaigne (the direct translation of its original French title, Orchestra Seats, is far more evocative) charms and amuses without asking for much in return. It's nice to see so many fresh faces (at least to these American eyes; the cast is made up of seasoned professionals from French TV and cinema, with the sole exception of U.S. director Sydney Pollack, playing a fictional American director seeking a star for his biopic of Simone de Beauvoir) and Paris is Paris, neither glorified nor demystified. Predictable perhaps only to someone familiar with mainstream contemporary French cinema, but at a time when most of the foreign and independent films being released in American theatres are sadistic, depressing experiences, Avenue Montaigne offers a pleasant break.