BABEL (US/Mexico, Alejandro González Iñárritu)
The third feature by Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu closely follows the same theme and structure of his first two, Amores Perros and 21 Grams: A tragic accident has occured, and Iñárritu follows the various strangers whose lives have been affected by it. Amores Perros played with different characters who never meet; 21 Grams plays with time. Babel plays with both, and also throws a number of different languages into the mix. You might think the results would be hopelessly confusing, but Babel is far easier to follow than the adventurous (if poor, story-wise) 21 Grams, and all in all is much subtler, believable and watchable than either of the two earlier films. This is a good sign, for I think Iñárritu is a highly talented director with many strong films in his future. And if only he and cowriter Guillermo Arriaga could come up with stories and themes that actually don't fall apart upon examination, then his work would be as great as he wants people to think it is. Babel's story takes place in three continents, where a freak accident involving the shooting of an American tourist in Morroco (Cate Blanchett) affects her husband (Brad Pitt), her Mexican nanny back home (Adriana Barraza) and, somehow, a deaf-mute teenager in Japan (Rinko Kikuchi). With its polyglot soundtrack and obvious title, you'd think Babel would be about the tragedy of different languages, where mistakes in translation could lead to horrible consequences. But in fact everybody in Babel seems to have no problem communicating, as long as they're bilingual or have a translator about, which they all seem to do. So what then is the point of making this seemingly about language? Really, Babel is about broken families, and this is the other complaint I have with the film. It's become all too common for "independent" features to take a short cut to empathy by presenting us with characters who have just lost a child, a mother, or some other close relative. This is a cheap ploy if ever there was one. Even though the characters are still strangers to us, the screenwriters expect us to automatically care about them for the simple reason that they have endured a family loss. I don't buy it, mainly because we never see how these families functioned while the lost member was still alive. So we can't truly sympathize with their loss. Babel takes this short cut with nearly every character, and I think it is a presumptuous move on the part of Iñárritu and Arriaga, one that I can't ignore. However, I still think Babel is a good movie. The performances are all pretty strong, there are some incredibly tense scenes, and I loved Gustavo Santaolalla's acoustic guitar-laden score. (Santaolalla is quickly becoming quite a major film composer, thanks to his earlier work with Iñárritu and his memorable Oscar-winning score for Brokeback Mountain.) In fact, I wish that the work of Iñárritu, Arriga and the cast could have brought out the emotions in me that Santaolalla's music did. But alas, when all is said and done, I feel that Babel limped to a conclusion both flat and slightly rushed, and it failed to touch my heart.

BAD EDUCATION (Spain, Pedro Almodóvar)
I should learn a few publicity tips from Pedro Almodóvar: When a movie of mine comes out, I tend to downplay it, saying "I just hope you like it" and such. Comparatively, Almodóvar raves about Bad Education as "my darkest film since [1986's] Matador." This, after his last offering Talk to Her, about a male nurse who impregnates a comatose patient? I think not! Bad Education is "dark" in a purely obvious way, but it's nowhere near as disturbing as Talk to Her, even though the previous film was more romantic in tone (which was part of its perversity).

The story opens in 1980, when Enrique, a young film director whose career seems to mirror Almodóvar's at the time, is visited by someone who purports to be his childhood friend Ignacio. Now a struggling actor who wants to be called "Angel," he has a script for Enrique: a semi-autobiographical revenge drama based on their Catholic school experiences. If this scene is reminiscent of a 1940's detective story, it's supposed to be, with the director taking on the role of detective, the screenplay becoming the "case," and an ambitious, slightly unbalanced young actor portraying the femme fatale... in more ways than one. What follows is a triumph in film structure, with a movie-within-a-movie taking up the first chunk of the film, as Enrique reads his friend's script and flashes back to schoolboy days when the two first fell in love - and when an errant priest set his own eyes on young Ignacio. It's to Almodóvar's cheeky credit to acknowledge that, by now, we as a society have already borne witness to so many years of scandals involving Catholic priests molesting young boys that he can take such a seemingly hot-button topic and simply work it into a fairly standard film noir: the priest becomes the sap, the grown Ignacio - now a transsexual junky (welcome to Almodóvarland) - his blackmailer, and Ignacio's younger brother Juan the bait - or the double-crosser? To give away any more of the story's turns would ruin the fun. Although aside from the slightly challenging narrative structure and the supposedly incendiary inclusion of a pedophilic priest (at this point, it's hard not to look at the Catholic priesthood as being an ages-old milieu for repressed gay men who occasionally take out their sexual frustrations on altar boys - a scene where young Ignacio dutifully helps the priest out of his vestments reveals the clear homoeroticism of this Catholic tradition), there's not that much worth discussing about Bad Education. It's simply a servicable semi-thriller, a gay film noir if you will. Its main selling point is, not surprisingly, its star, Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal, the art house heartthrob of the year. Almodóvar is canny enough to know that, if there's one thing that will get more butts in seats than even his own name, it's Bernal - who in fact puts in a brave, no-nonsense performance in multiple roles.

BAD SANTA (US, Terry Zwigoff)
Billy Bob Thornton plays a mall Santa who, along with his "elf" (Tony Cox), robs department stores blind each Christmas Eve. Bad Santa! But if that weren't bad enough, this Santa is a severely alcoholic misanthropist who, beyond booze and anal sex, has nothing to live for. Enter a lonely little boy, the sort you usually see in these "sad sack needs redemption" films, only he's a stupid, fat, snot-nosed pantywaist. The gimmick is that the film takes a typical holiday schmaltzy setup and turns it on its ear. There's enough profanity, violence and gross misconduct to guarantee that.

Bad Santa has all the hallmarks of a cult classic. I'm sure it will be watched and chuckled over for years to come, especially at December parties held by hip cynics who are tired of syrupy Christmas films. Bad Santa's goal is to be the nastiest holiday movie ever made. At that, it succeeds. So critics are lining up to hail it as a "black comic masterpiece" while failing to notice that the film has no substance. It falls into that Todd Solondz trap of being mean without any passion, without any point. It's an empty kind of mean. The joke of a mall Santa who drinks, swears, leers after women and unabashedly hates the children who sit on his lap is an easy one, and one that wears thin quickly. Maybe it would have been more subversive if the actor cast in the role was a tubby old grandpa with rosy cheeks, instead of the wasted-away Thornton. But even aside from that, his character's alcoholism is so depressing that I'm not sure that Zwigoff and company agree with the film being marketed as a comedy. The only real laughs I got were from the late John Ritter's pinched expressions. As a side note, it's ugly to look at, edited haphazardly, and makes poor use of holiday and classical music. It's almost an amateur effort. So while I laud Dimension Films (aka Miramax, aka Disney) for releasing such a vicious holiday movie at Christmastime, it's still a big disappointment after Zwigoff's legitimately bittersweet and meaningful comic tragedies Crumb and Ghost World.

BATMAN BEGINS (US, Christopher Nolan)
At first, it seems surprising that this would be one of the few actual successes during Hollywood's worst box office summer on record. First of all, there hasn't been much interest in the Batman character after Joel Schumacher's horrible Batman Forever and Batman and Robin frittered away the goodwill that Tim Burton's first two Batman movies earned. (In retrospect, Burton's films weren't that good either.) Then you have Christian Bale in the lead - hardly an A-list star. And while director Christopher Nolan won a large cult following for Memento, his ho-hum Insomnia remake did little to strengthen his reputation. So why is Batman Begins a hit, in a summer filled with offerings so latently uncompelling that even hearing about them makes Joe Moviegoer want to stay home? (Herbie Fully Loaded, anyone?) The answer, I think, lies in good old fashioned storytelling craft, which drives Batman Begins and makes it by far the best film in the franchise. Nolan and his cowriter David S. Goyer simply know how to write for cinema: the dialogue is spare, the visuals tell the story, character is key. And, the unremarkable Katie Holmes aside, you can't beat that supporting cast (Michael Caine adding much warmth and humor as Bruce Wayne's faithful butler Alfred; Gary Oldman playing a good guy for once; Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson, Tom Wilkinson and the eerie, James Spader-ish Cillian Murphy all turning in flawless performances). As for Bale, he may not have starred in any blockbusters before, but he's been a leading man for years, so he has the chops to carry a feature. His Bruce Wayne is properly tormented, his Batman truly angry. And who doesn't like a superhero origin story? They're always more interesting than seeing an established hero fighting endless flamboyant villains. Nolan, of course, deserves credit for his visual sense, as well: his sweaty, claustrophobic camera style fits the story, and rather than aping Burton and Schumacher's phony-looking sets, his gritty, open-air Gotham is kind of a Manhattan with flourishes, grounding the storyline in reality like no other superhero movie has since 1979's Superman, creating a real sense of place, population, and stakes. A lesson can be learned here by comparing Batman Begins's strong use of locations to George Lucas's soulless computer-generated backgrounds for Star Wars Episode III: Not only do you get more of a feel for a place when you know that the glass, steel and stone you see is all real, but you realize why actors truly give better performances when they get to work in actual environments instead of just a big green room. All in all, despite a slightly disappointing explosion-filled denouement (a let-down perhaps only because the first two acts are so utterly original), Batman Begins is a fine achievement in dramatic filmmaking, and well worth seeing even for those who still haven't stopped cringing after witnessing the horror that was Batman and Robin.

BATTLE ROYALE (Japan, Kinji Fukasaku)
As it often takes over 2 years for a Japanese film to hit American shores, I was really excited to be able to catch the first non-Asia screening of Battle Royale while it was still #2 at the Japanese box office (and #1 in Hong Kong). Veteran crime director Fukasaku's sixtieth(!) feature has been met with great controversy back home for its subject matter, with good reason: The story takes place in an alternate-reality Japan where, as a response to growing teenage violence, the government has set up a system wherein high school students chosen at random are sent to a remote island with the instructions that they have three days to kill each other: the last one standing gets to go home alive. "Beat" Takeshi Kitano, one of Japan's national treasures, plays the teacher who gleefully pits 42 of his former students against each other in a battle to the death. Understandably, the idea of 15-year-old boys and girls in conservative school uniforms being forced to murder their friends and sweethearts in cold blood is not for all tastes. And the film is quite bloody. But as with so many other recent Japanese action films, the pacing shifts from furious mayhem to character-centered meditation, and back again, constantly. It's not violence for its own sake, either; in fact, that would be against the very point of the film, which worriedly satirizes teen apathy as well as adult irresponsibility, the questionable Japanese tradition of intense scholarly competition, and the lack of values lurking in its current Playstation-obsessed culture of today. That a definite sense of humanity and compassion arises amongst the students is as reassuring as the story is troubling. Though your chances of seeing this in America in the near future are extremely slim, there is some talk about taking it around to various cities, so I encourage fans of action films as well as of Japanese cinema to seek it out and make up their own minds.

A BEAUTIFUL MIND (US, Ron Howard)
This was one of those movies I wasn't excited about seeing, but I'd seen everything else, and it was a boring Sunday afternoon, so I thought "what the hey." I'd heard some critics call it lyrical and moving; others, mawkish and manipulative. I should have listened to that latter group! Oh, A Beautiful Mind isn't that bad, it's just more of the same ol' Oscar-hungry mediocrity we see every year around this time. Russell Crowe stars as John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician who came up with significant economic theories (brushed over in the film!) and then spent the rest of his life dealing with severe schizophrenia - which, for the record, has nothing to do with multiple personalities, and more to do with paranoia and delusional thinking. That crazy person on the street wearing the hat that will keep gamma rays from melting his brain: that's a shizophrenic.

Ron Howard must be tired of all the Opie Taylor/Ritchie Cunningham gags, but let's face it: he remains the All-American Boy. So his films are All-American Movies. Light even when they're being serious, rather obvious, sweet-natured but ultimately untroubled. Hard to expect much ground-breaking filmmaking from him, even when he tackles a subject as tricky as schizophrenia. So to show the workings of Nash's "beautiful mind," he resorts to the usual special effects wizardry as if anybody's brain actually sees little glowing lines around objects (Jodie Foster also did this with her film Little Man Tate - look, viewer, incredibly smart people see the world differently than we do! Literally!). Russell Crowe is pretty good as a character who, if put in a better film, would be fascinating: his Nash is arrogant, obsessive, self-loathing - not really very heroic at all. And at least it's to the movie's credit that his disease is never really "cured," just dealt with. Of course, that's a fact of Nash's life, and it's hard to fudge that - although Howard and screenwriter (hack) Akiva Goldsman mess with a lot of other real-life details. For instance, in the film, Nash hallucinates that Russian agents are pursuing him. In real life, he thought it was space aliens. The change is understandable from a dramatic standpoint: the film would have been unintentionally hilarious if Howard had actors dressed as little green men chasing Russell Crowe around. But still. Anyway, we still have the ageless Jennifer Connelly, sufficient as that Hollywood standby, the Long-Suffering But Unquestionably Devoted Wife. (In real life, Nash's wife divorced him - only to remarry him a few years later.) I don't get it. I can't even get a girl to put up with my own minor eccentricities. Yet Hollywood would have you believe that even complete nutballs like John Nash could score a woman who looks like Jennifer Connelly.

BEFORE NIGHT FALLS (US, Julian Schnabel)
Biopic about the life of dissident Cuban novelist Reynaldo Arenas (Javier Bardem), who alternately triumphed and suffered through Fidel Castro's revolution because of his homosexuality, Before Night Falls is fairly entertaining, if shapeless, with Spanish actor Bardem's convincing, low-key performance agreeably dominating the film. Of course there are a lot of problems: Schnabel is a jerk, for one. Though this film lacks the smugness of his debut Basquiat, in which he tried to rewrite 80's art history by making himself (played by Gary Oldman) into a friend and hero of the painters who hated his guts, it still has too much self-conscious camerawork and reeks of Schnabel's "artist-as-martyr" self-serving rhetoric. Also, a big thumbs down to Schnabel's decision to have his actors speak Spanish occasionally and Spanish-accented English mostly. If you're aiming for gritty realism, why not let the largely Latin cast just speak Spanish? It's okay, you're selling a movie to an art-house crowd, they're used to reading subtitles! (Can you imagine Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat speaking English in Crouching Tiger?) And it would have done Bardem a service, too: his accent is so thick that I could only make out about half of his English dialogue. Also, there's a really unnecessary cameo by Sean Penn as a dumb Cuban farmer, and a well-acted but obtuse dual role by Johnny Depp. Why a dual role? Who knows. I'll remind you, the film isn't that bad, in fact it's quite watchable, but if you miss it, you haven't missed much. See it for the richness of Arenas' post-revolution Cuba (Mexico substitutes adequately as a filming location - no way would Cuba let this film crew in) and Bardem's likeable performance.

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD (US, Sidney Lumet)
Pitch black family drama about two loser brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) who, both in desperate need of money, agree on Hoffman's plan to pull off a simple heist of a suburban jewelry store - a store owned and operated by their own parents. As we quickly find out, the robbery goes horribly wrong, and the brothers and their father (Albert Finney) deal with the gruesome consequences and the family wounds it opens up. This film has been getting a lot of praise mainly because its legendary director Sidney Lumet, at 83, has finally cranked out his first decent picture since - well, people disagree, but it could be 1997's Night Falls on Manhattan, 1988's Running on Empty or even 1982's The Verdict. In any case, it's been a long time since the veteran director - who helmed such classics as 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon and Network - had a critical or commercial hit. So people are treating him like a king for simply being able to make something fresh and good. Even so, there are parts of Before the Devil that feel a little outdated: Lumet uses the old zoom lens in creaky ways, and the device with which the story moves backwards and forwards in time - this is a highly nonchronological narrative - isn't exactly subtle, with its sound effects and fast edits. But some people might like it. Anyway, a small-scale movie like this depends strongly on its cast (just as most of Lumet's other features, which is why some are towering achievements and others are embarrassing misfires), and Lumet's chosen well, though their performances vary in quality. Hoffman is pretty great, if not revelatory. Same with Finney. Marisa Tomei is good but, as usual, underused. (She performs topless in seemingly half her scenes, however, as if mainly to show that her 42-year-old body is holding up really, really well.) The low point, for me, was Hawke. It's easy to bash the guy, but I usually like his onscreen work. But his decision to make his character excessively nervous and fidgety quickly wore out its welcome with me. I found his shtick distracting, even annoying. But while I will say that Before the Devil Knows Your Dead is probably overrated and won't stand up as one of Lumet's best-remembered works, it's still a decent B movie, with rich if unlikable characters and an engaging plot. (Credit is also due to debut screenwriter Kelly Masterson's fine script.)

THE BELIEVER (US, Henry Bean)
The Believer falls into that very small and very lucky category of films that, because nobody is interested in distributing them theatrically at first, wind up going straight to cable - and then, a year later, get that limited theatrical release after all. A hit at the 2001 Sundance Festival (which, if you ask me, never means anything), The Believer tells the story - allegedly based on fact - of Danny (Ryan Gosling, hot star of the near future), a young Jewish man who inexplicably becomes a Neo-Nazi. It's a high concept that gives away most of the dramatic tension in its own gimmick. What's left is an intriguing, if esoteric, feature-length examination of what it means to be Jewish. I'm not Jewish, so a lot of it went over my head - it's not confusing, per se, but it did make me think, "I think this is primarily made for a Jewish audience." Gosling puts in an impressive performance, however, even if the story ultimately falls flat. You never really know - nor is writer/director Bean interested in telling you - why Danny, a brilliant if difficult young student in his Hebrew classes, decides to turn his back on his culture and become a Jew-bashing skinhead, especially as his newfound identity has him more obsessed with his religion than ever. Self-loathing? If so, then why? Such extreme behavior can't just be left unexplained, and as Danny's identity crisis is at the core of the whole film, this lack of crucial exposition renders the film essentially useless except as devil's advocate in a long discussion about Judaism. But for those truly curious about the issue, it does offer some fascinating food for thought.

BEST (UK, Mary McGuckian)
I caught this drama at a film festival, which is probably the only place in America that one will see it, being as it is all about George Best, the Northern Irish soccer player whose rise and fall as Manchester United's superstar forward in the 1960's is hardly a household name to those outside the UK. In the title role, Irish actor John Lynch (best known for playing Gwyneth Paltrow's two-timing boyfriend in Sliding Doors) does a serviceable job, though his hangdog looks make him seem too old for the twentysomething Best. The rest of the cast, including British luminaries such as Linus Roach, Ian Hart and even Roger Daltrey, are also fine (though Patsy Kensit is pretty awful as Best's girlfriend). This film was clearly a labor of love for Lynch, who also cowrote the script and co-executive produced. Alas, he and his story are all but done in by McGuckian's absolutely irritating directorial style. She aims for a late-60's look, which is fine in theory but horrid in practice: wild camera zooms, odd cuts, and, worst of all, endless shots of characters speaking into the camera, as if we the viewer were poor drunk George Best. Nearly always an amateurish trick in my opinion, this POV silliness kills the seriousness of the story. And in the end all we're left with is a portrait of a guy who was really good at soccer, but drank too much and became a mess. Who cares?

BEST IN SHOW (US, Christopher Guest)
The folks who brought you Waiting for Guffman are back, here with another "mockumentary," this one on dog shows and the people who enter them. Nearly the entire cast from Guffman returns, mostly in fine form, and once again Christopher Guest directs from a script he wrote with costar Eugene Levy.

It's cute, but it's no Guffman, and it's certainly not in the same league as This Is Spinal Tap (cowritten by and costarring Guest), though Tap's Michael McKean does appear. Guest, who was so memorable as the flamboyant lead in Guffman, barely elicits a chuckle here as an earnest Southern dog owner with a yen to be a ventriloquist. The underemployed Fred Willard, however, steals the movie as a hilariously boorish play-by-play announcer. Levy and Catherine O'Hara come off well as a dorky suburban couple, while Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock fail to transcend their yuppie stereotypes (love the matching braces though). Best in Show is certainly likeable, and provides a few good laughs, but is so light and so about nothing that, alas, it's mostly forgotten by the time you walk back to your car.

BETTER LUCK TOMORROW (US, Justin Lin)
Much-hyped indie film about a group of affluent, college-bound Asian-American teenagers who get sucked into a life of crime plays out like a junior version of GoodFellas. It's still entertaining, especially for anybody (like me) who was mixed up in, or on the fringes of, the National Honor Society crowd back in high school. You know the type: Speech and debate team, Academic Decathlon, all that business. I was too lazy, and hated math and science, so I never made it into the honor roll, but I took classes with all the kids who did. Maybe it's a uniquely Californian experience (Better Luck Tomorrow takes place in the Southern California suburbs) but it seems 90% of the kids you'll find in this crowd are Asian-American, driven hard by their parents to succeed enough to get themselves into the country's top universities. Writer/director Lin must have been involved with these people too, because he displays this world expertly, with great and often hilarious attention to detail. Aside from that - which is not unimportant, a satirical and dark look at a group of people rarely (if ever) even mentioned in film - Better Luck Tomorrow is nothing spectacular. Lin does a lot with his budget (reportedly about $250,000) but it still feels rough around the edges, lacking the flashy stylistics that I feel Lin wishes he could have afforded. And the story points are all fairly familiar, even if the film moves just fast enough to avoid all predictability. The cast is great (though all are twentysomething actors portraying teens), which is very reassuring, because most young Asian-American actors I have seen in indie films and on the stage - and there have been many - were pretty awful. So I say support indie filmmaking, support the Asian-American point of view in cinema, and go see Better Luck Tomorrow. It won't make anybody's 10 Best lists, and the open-ended conclusion of the story is annoyingly mannered, but there's still lots of freshness here.

BIG EDEN (US, Thomas Bezucha)
I thought I was going to a free screening of Moulin Rouge, and got stuck watching Big Eden instead. I was a little apprehensive about sitting through a gay romantic comedy, but I had a free evening, so I thought, what the hell. And I wound up half-heartedly enjoying myself. Big Eden is the name of a small down in what seems to be the most beautiful (and most liberal-minded) corner of Montana. After 20 years away, Henry Hart (Arye Gross), a neurotic New York painter, is called back to his childhood home in order to take care of his ailing grandfather. Henry is torn up when macho Dean, the object of his teenage infatuations, also shows up in town and wants to pal around like old times. Meanwhile, Pike (Eric Schweig), a surly Native American who runs the local general store, finds himself attracted to Henry, but, unable to come to terms with his feelings (or, like Henry and Dean, his homosexuality), shows his affection for Henry by secretly cooking gourmet dishes that he is nominally delivering to the Hart household as offerings from the dodgy kitchen of the town spinster.

It's sweet, it's harmless, it's fluff. Writer/director Bezucha makes the standard indie mistake of populating his film with wonderful supporting characters (the film's joke is that everybody in this redneck cowboy town is completely aware - and supportive - of Henry and Pike's homosexuality, even while the two men desperately try to keep it hidden) while making his lead yet another dullard whom everybody apparently loves to death even though his personality registers as a big zero with the audience. Also, while you can't go wrong with that breathtaking Montana scenery, Rob Sweeney's cinematography is mostly by-the-books. Joseph Conlan contributes a decent score, though we really don't need to hear a "mystical Indian tune" whenever Pike appears onscreen. That said, if you can deal with a couple of scenes of men kissing each other (let's face it, the gay audience would have a fit of Bezucha kept his leading men's lips apart), you'll have a fine, if forgettable, time with this indie trifle. And Eric Schweig is quite impressive in a surprisingly complex role.

BIG FISH (US, Tim Burton)
A curious thing about Big Fish is that during its first three weeks of release, when it was playing in a small number of theatres, it was actually making more money per screen than Return of the King. Even twice as much! No small feat, given the massive popularity of King, as well as other critics' underwhelming reviews for Burton's so-called first "grown-up" film (a barrier he crossed, in my opinion, back with Ed Wood). He has a cult audience, but as visually impressive as his films are, I think most would agree that they're not often known for their good scripts. So if Big Fish were the dud critics said it was, word of mouth would not be strong enough to keep those theatres packed, especially up against the Lord of the Rings juggernaut. But I am often more swayed by a lukewarm review than by a scathing one, since most movies that aspire to greatness wind up merely mediocre, and so I saw Big Fish with a little skepticism.

This is one of those rare occasions where audiences are right and critics are wrong. Big Fish is a lovely film, sweet and inventive. Falling somewhere between Forrest Gump and Terry Gilliam's Baron Munchausen, it is the story of Ed Bloom (Ewan McGregor), a spinner of tall tales who, on his death bed (Albert Finney is terrific as the older Ed), is confronted by his bitter son (Billy Crudup) who is sickened by a lifetime of never knowing the truth behind his father's wild stories. Most of the film, then, is an anecdotal account of Ed's life as he told it, involving witches, giants, Siamese twins, et al. It builds to a conclusion that reconciles fantasy with reality beautifully. Big Fish is sentimental, and thus there may be some reading this review who might hate the film. I'll warrant that if I see it again in a less generous mood a few years down the road, it may not hold up. But it's a far truer and less pushy film than wretched Oscar-winner Forrest Gump, and the performances delicately balance out the visuals, which are certainly fantastical but never garish. A pleasant surprise to finish up a rather uncompelling year for cinema.

BIGGER, STRONGER, FASTER (US, Chris Bell)
I've seen a lot of documentaries lately - mostly through Netflix - and many have the same problem in that they pick an intriguing subject, but rarely go any deeper than that subject. So you get a portrait of something or someone, but you aren't shown the larger context surrounding the subject. Bigger, Stronger, Faster is that rare documentary that succeeds on this front. Ostensibly an expose on steroid abuse, the film plumbs much deeper, literally claiming that steroid use is merely a symptom of life in today's vain, hypercompetitive America, where people will go to any lengths to succeed. Director Bell pulls a Michael Moore by inserting himself in the narrative, making the film his own journey, but he gets away with it. A lifelong bodybuilder himself, Bell said no to steroids after brief experimentations when he was younger. His ambitious bodybuilding brothers, however, continue to pump themselves full of the drug as they pursue their own increasingly unrealistic dreams of fame and fortune. Bell's personal connection to steroids brings an honesty and an immediacy to his film. But as with Bowling for Columbine (and not many other Michael Moore docs), what resonates most about Bigger, Stronger, Faster is not what it says about steroids - one of the film's many surprises is that Bell goes rather easy on the drug - but what it says about our society. More startling than its insights into steroids is its tangential discussions of legal and almost completely unregulated "nutritional supplements", weight loss schemes, fudging of drug scores for U.S. athletes at the 1988 Olympics, and other scams. It's a funny, engaging and absolutely relevant documentary. It's the best new movie I've seen so far in 2008. And I'm not just saying that because my good friend Andy Zare, who was production coordinator on my first film Foreign Correspondents, served in the same capacity - and moreover was the archival footage producer - on this film.

BILLY ELLIOT (UK, Stephen Daldry)
Set against the backdrop of the 1984 coal miners' strike in England, Billy Elliot follows its titular character, an 11-year-old boy raised by his macho father and older brother in a depressed Northern town, as he discovers a talent - and a love - for ballet dancing. You can pretty much guess every plot point from there on out, which is the problem: though ostensibly an "independent" British film (the budget was around $12 million), its predictable storyline reeks of Hollywood formula. A pity, because Jamie Bell is so good, and so game, as the young Billy, and he is matched by Gary Lewis (a ringer for George C. Scott) as his tough-love father. Together their wonderful on-screen relationship almost elevates the story from the cliche. And to its credit, Billy Elliot does finally remember the grim political situation behind its miners' strike, but only in the last act. So while the movie barely redeems itself with several acts of grace and truth in its final 15 minutes, there's still that hour and a half of manipulative treacle that left a bad taste in my mouth. And Daldry relies far too much on blasting great, well-known British rock songs to breathe life, anger and urgency into what is really featherweight entertainment. Shameless.

THE BLACK DAHLIA (US, Brian De Palma)
I'm one of the few movie lovers who usually goes to bat for Brian De Palma. It's so unhip to like his films, but I think he's churned out a healthy number of underrated gems, including Casualities of War, Snake Eyes and Carlito's Way. That said, he's helmed some misfires too, and The Black Dahlia is one of them. While beautifully filmed by the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond and with flawless production design by the equally celebrated Dante Ferretti, its story - about two cops in 1947 Los Angeles investigating the infamous and still-unsolved murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, nicknamed The Black Dahlia - is muddled where it tries to be complicated, aimless where it tries to be character-driven, and, in its finale, stupid where it tries to be shocking. Chinatown it ain't, and the hopelessly wooden Josh Hartnett is a terrible choice for the lead. The rest of the cast sounds like a director's dream, but none put in their best work: Scarlett Johansson seems a bit lost; Hilary Swank tries hard but cannot overcome being miscast as a femme fatale with an accent somewhere in between Katharine Hepburn's and Faye Dunaway's in Chinatown; even the usually blameless Aaron Eckhardt struggles with a character motivation that seems to come from nowhere - his tough guy cop somehow becomes insanely obsessed with solving Short's murder, but I didn't buy it for a minute. Supposedly the film's conclusion, which packs in about a million revelations, explains everybody's motivation and connection to the titular murder case (which takes a back seat to smaller, less interesting side stories for much of the film), but it's so contrived and confused that it doesn't satisfy. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that this mess all comes from a novel by the great James Ellroy, who also penned the vastly superior L.A. Confidential. I haven't read his novel, so I don't know whether to blame him for writing something unfilmable or blame screenwriter Josh Friedman for adapting it so poorly. Or perhaps they both did great work and it was studio tinkering that ruined the story's flow. In any event, while De Palma has some good visual ideas on display as usual and while the movie itself is one fine piece of eye candy, The Black Dahlia remains a big disappointment.

BLACK SNAKE MOAN (US, Craig Brewer)
Inherently weird, unclassifiable movie, set in rural Tennessee, about a former blues musician (Samuel Jackson) who takes a bloody, beaten white girl (Christina Ricci) under his wing, only to find out that she suffers from some sort of nymphomania. So he chains her to his radiator in order to "cure" her. What follows is a unique, if awkward, blending of religion, music, sex, alcohol and soul-healing. I suppose Black Snake Moan is trying to suggest something about the redemptive power of the blues, but I think writer/director Brewer (who won accolades for his second feature Hustle & Flow) is trying to say more about life than he actually knows. I didn't dislike Black Snake Moan. It just didn't mean anything to me. I have a feeling that it will find both its fans - especially amongst those who are into Ricci - and its detractors. I'd even call it a "love or or hate it" movie if I myself didn't feel so indifferent to it. On the plus side, it drips with (admittedly stereotypical) Southern atmosphere, has a nicely untidy ending, and Brewer does develop some offbeat characters. It just didn't stick in my head for very long - with the exception of the old church tune "This Little Light of Mine," which Ricci sings in the film and which I hummed to myself for hours afterward.

BLINDNESS (Canada/Brazil/Japan, Fernando Meirelles)
It's a rare treat to like a movie that most critics hate. Usually I see eye to eye with a few of them, but in the case of Blindness, I ignored the mostly negative reviews the film was getting, and was excited to see it anyway. Why? Because I am fascinated with blindness, I think losing one's sight is second only to losing one's memory in terms of the worst things that could ever happen to a person (outside of death, of course), and so I could instantly identify with the horror of the story's setup: a mysterious virus makes seemingly everybody in the world lose their eyesight completely - except for one woman (Julianne Moore) who is thus put in a unique position of power and responsibility. I was also excited to see the film because I think Fernando Meirelles is one of the most talented directors in the world right now. His City of God, shot in his native Brazil, is justly celebrated as an incredible, action-packed document of crime and poverty. I found the script for his follow-up, The Constant Gardener, lacking, but his Africa-based drama was still powerfully directed with a rich eye for detail. Some critics wrote off Blindness because they didn't think Meirelles's strong visual sense was appropriate for the subject matter. This is an incredibly stupid criticism. What would they rather? The whole film be shot with no visual style whatsoever? Meirelles employs his camera to great effect in regards to the theme. He plays with light, shadow and framing to reflect the disorientation of the epidemic as well as to keep the viewer in both suspense and sympathy. He also applies his third world sensibilities to show how the most civilized of societies could quickly resemble the filthy shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro or Nairobi. (The film digs up our own fresh memories of Hurricane Katrina victims rounded up in the New Orleans Superdome.) Finally, while some people may see some rather obvious metaphors in the story, I took it at face value as simply a terrifying "what if?" scenario.

Apparently the film got negative reactions right out of the gate: after it premiered at Cannes, it was reportedly re-edited and a voiceover narration by costar Danny Glover was cut, among other things. If this is true, you can see the results: Glover's role feels as though it was once much bigger (you hardly see him at all during the film's first two-thirds), and his one bit of onscreen narration, despite the stunning visuals that go with it, is florid and out of place, as if the text from Saramago's novel was copied and pasted onto his tongue. Also, I'm guessing there were more scenes involving the government of this unnamed country (Meirelles shot exteriors in Sao Paulo and interiors in Canada); you briefly see Sandra Oh as the country's apparent leader, but she's quickly forgotten as the story focuses on the poor souls who were first rounded up and quarantined in a hellhole institution that soon turns into a blind Lord of the Flies. These awkward truncated scenes probably were detrimental to the film in their longer form, so were probably good cuts. What's left is, in my opinion, a harrowing and highly creative film just as good as the slightly similar Children of Men and far, far greater than the, yes, slightly similar The Happening. I have no doubt that once the negative press dies down, Blindness will find a devoted audience. I do urge you though, if the film sounds at all interesting to you, to see it while it's still in theaters (which won't be for much longer, given its weak reception). It will lose much on the small screen.

BLOW (US, Ted Demme)
Blow follows the rise and inevitable fall of real-life drug dealer George Jung (Johnny Depp), an easy-going schmo with variable luck who took a small marijuana-selling operation in late-60's Los Angeles and became one of the key players in the popularization of cocaine in the decades following. Stylistically and thematically, the film clearly falls somewhere between GoodFellas and Boogie Nights as another document of a sleazy industry's glory days and its downfall. Yet Blow still succeeds on its own terms, as it eschews most of the wanton violence in GoodFellas and, at two hours, doesn't wear out its welcome like the bloated, vastly overrated Boogie Nights. All the same, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson are thanked in the end credits, so Ted Demme at least acknowledges who he's borrowing from. But the film's insider's-view of the evolution of cocaine in the United States is fascinating, and shines light in corners of the drug trade that the film Traffic, I now realize, absolutely failed to do. Blow plays like a history lesson, in the best sense: One quick montage of hundreds of still photos tells the whole story of how big cocaine became in this country, how fast it happened, and how few people were actually involved.

Ultra-stylish and fast-paced, the film only loses its footing - and, for me, its interest - in its last half-hour, as George struggles to maintain his tenuous ties with his father (Ray Liotta) and his young daughter. It's too sentimental; I didn't quite buy it. There is also a lingering sense of misogyny in George's tale, as his cold-hearted mother (Rachel Griffiths) and harpy wife (Penelope Cruz) can attest. But the cast is excellent (Paul Reubens's scene-stealing performance as a drug-dealing hairdresser is worth the price of admission), the feel for the period is spot-on, and Depp comes through with yet another decent performance in an enviable role, that of a man who, by his own admission, had a lot of ambition but none of the talent to back it up.

BOILER ROOM (US, Ben Younger)
A crackling drama about a young New York hustler (Giovanni Ribisi) who's dropped out of college to make a small fortune running his own casino in his apartment, but, due to his father's (Ron Rifkin) consistent disappointment, decides to go "straight" by joining up with a hot shot stock brokerage on Long Island, where each broker (all male, all under 30) is either a millionaire or destined to get there soon.

Of course all that sudden wealth is very alluring, and of course there's something not quite on the up-and-up about the brokerage. However, writer/director Younger keeps it real, sidestepping the obvious, avoiding sentimentality and soaking his film in an honest-feeling atmosphere. It's eminently clear that he knows the world of these young macho stockbrokers very well. He's also a no-nonsense director and a good writer in the classic style. Nice to see somebody who's really investing suspense and drama in what a character chooses to do. It's also nice to see a very serious film where nobody dies (such a cliche: "it's not dramatic unless somebody gets killed!"). The acting is all fine, particularly from Ribisi and Rifkin. Ben Affleck's glorified cameo is tolerable, though one is reminded by watching him that he has no gift for acting; he's just an agreeable chump who got lucky and made it big. Ribisi, however, is the real thing.

BORAT (US, Larry Charles)
The funniest thing about Borat may be its full title: Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The movie's still pretty funny, if relentlessly over the top. Borat creator/alter ego Sacha Baron Cohen takes his character, a cluelessly racist and sexist reporter from Kazakhstan, out from the brief sketches on "Da Ali G Show" and into his own movie, a mockumentary about Borat's journey across the United States in search of the "virginal" Pamela Anderson, who Borat sees in a "Baywatch" rerun and falls hopelessly in love with. The movie exists, however, to showcase Baron Cohen's unrehearsed interactions with the witless American shills he comes across. Choosing to skewer Southern conservatives especially, his targets are rather obvious. But he is a gifted and daring improvisational actor, and there were several moments in Borat where I found myself in stitches. (My personal favorite is where Borat comes across a woman holding a garage sale and accuses her of being a gypsy.) At best Baron Cohen can be called a "provocateur;" at worst, he's just an obnoxious comic who likes to annoy people. In the end, I would best describe him as simply a clown: he puts on funny clothes and facial hair, adopts a silly voice and makes fun of strangers. The only difference is that a circus clown might use a bottle of seltzer water and Baron Cohen uses a plastic bag full of human excrement, or - in a sequence that will easily blot out any memories of "social commentary" - his own naked body. It is this nude wrestling scene that people will remember Borat for, and that's not necessarily a good thing. Instead of striking a chord with Americans who will then look at their own internalized racism and homophobia, this movie will - thanks to that one grotesque scene - mostly just win the hearts of the Jackass crowd. College students will openly adore (and quote from) Borat; the rest of us will at best call it a guilty pleasure.

BORN INTO BROTHELS (US, Zana Briski, Ross Kauffman)
A colorful, well-meaning documentary that comes to theatres after picking up nearly every single film festival award possible over the previous year, Born Into Brothels tells the story of a young photographer (co-director Zana Briski, with an indiscriminate Englishy accent) who spends several months in the red light district of Calcutta, teaching photography to a handful of children whose mothers are all prostitutes. The children - jolly, energetic, and often very talented with a camera - take pictures of street life in their abominable yet strangely beautiful surroundings, and Briski raises money for their education by selling their photos at auctions in New York and London. It sure is a great cause, and Briski is a highly admirable woman. But how is the movie? Well, it's... colorful and well-meaning. Appropriately, it's nicely shot, and the soundtrack is wonderful. All in all, not a bad moviegoing experience. But to be honest, it plays out more like a promotional video for Briski's charity, Kids With Cameras, and less like a movie in its own right. (It's quite telling that the official web site for the film is actually a site for Kids With Cameras - there is very little information about the film itself.) As a means of raising awareness of these talented kids and Briski's charity, it succeeds. But unlike, say, the amazing documentary Spellbound, there is a weird lack of drama about these children's futures. They live in dire poverty, their parents are negligent at best, but they seem content enough and indeed, for the filthy hole that Calcutta's red light district is, Briski and her codirector (and former boyfriend) Ross Kauffman still make it look exotic. Even when the film finally hones in on one especially gifted young boy and his struggle to get a passport to visit Amsterdam for a children's photo program, I never had the feeling that there was much at stake. There's no tension at all. So while it sounds strange to say, I actually wish Born Into Brothels was more manipulative in its storytelling. I would have had more of an emotional connection to these children. Instead, it offers only maddening glimpses of some of the - in my opinion - more interesting young subjects - which is perplexing, considering the film's relatively short length (85 minutes). One sensitive young boy in particular, who speaks very eloquently about the misery of his surroundings, is shamefully given only brief screen time, while the other kids, who are content to just giggle and play, hog Briski's camera. Again, it's an okay film, but I think you're better off just donating $10 to Kids With Cameras instead of buying a ticket to see Born Into Brothels.

BOTTLE SHOCK (US, Randall Miller)
In 1976, a struggling British wine seller in Paris named Steven Spurrier decided to publicize his business by hosting a blind taste test competition where the great wines of France would be up against wines produced in California's then-obscure Napa Valley. The small Napa wineries surprisingly won both the red and the white categories, and this soon became a classic underdog saga that forever changed the wine industry. Not only was French dominance toppled and Napa put on the map, but wine consumption became democratized, the market suddenly opened up to product from across the world, and the industry exploded. There's a great story here, but Bottle Shock tells it very poorly. Perhaps afraid that a movie about wine would be too prissy (for who? Art house moviegoers who flocked to Sideways?), writer/director Randall Miller and his screenwriters, including his wife Jody Savin and neophyte Ross Schwartz (son of "Brady Bunch" creator Lloyd Schwartz), dumb down the script to the point where it feels more like a beer commercial than a film about wine. Struggling vintner Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman), whose chardonnay won the Paris taste tests, is so combative with his surfer dude son Bo (Chris Pine, sporting decidedly non-1970s biceps and distracting hair extensions) that he actually boxes with him, not once but several times in the film, in violently staged fights with extra "pow!" sound effects. And if there was any friction between Bo and the real life Gustavo Brambila (Freddy Rodriguez), who later left the Barrett's operation to start his own winery, it's depicted in the movie as a trite love triangle involving an entirely invented hippie intern babe (Rachael Taylor), which also carries an uncomfortable undertone of racial superiority. Although Pullman is good, his character's motivations are laughably written. Only the great Alan Rickman is endurable as Spurrier, even though he too is part of the filmmakers' rampant fictionalizing, being about thirty years older and twenty times snootier than his real-life counterpart. In short, Bottle Shock is a big disappointment, a lunk-headed movie about one of the most refined cultures in the world. Pour it down the sink.

THE BOURNE IDENTITY (US, Doug Liman)
Fairly entertaining, but nothing to write home about, this espionage-centered actioner tries to capture the chill of all the so-called "paranoid thrillers" of the 1970's, such as The Parallax View, The Three Days of the Condor and The Day of the Jackal. It succeeds to a certain extent, but it doesn't have a compelling enough political context to drive the point home. We all know there's plenty of shady people in the government, especially in the CIA, so it's no surprise when we discover that Jason Bourne (Matt Damon, a fine actor but not charismatic enough to play an action hero), an amnesiac who is discovered nearly dead on the Mediterranean with a bullet in his body and a Swiss bank account number embedded in his hip, is himself a spy of some sort who is wanted dead by his own people. It could have something to do with his mastery of several languages, the various passports he owns in different names, and his expertise in martial arts (which looks sillier than it should). There's not much of a story beyond Bourne's search for his own identity and who's trying to set him up, or kill him, or whatever. All we're left to chew on is the action, which is serviceable though not heart-racing, a fine supporting cast that is mostly wasted (especially Clive Owen as a mysterious assassin and Julia Stiles in a completely throwaway role that should have been played by somebody older), and of course Run Lola Run's Franka Potente as an appealing love interest. I love Franka Potente. I love even saying the words "Franka Potente" out loud. It's nice to see that somebody trusted her to play the female lead in a Hollywood blockbuster. Unfortunately the script gives her little to do other than saying "Scheisse" a dozen times, and there isn't much chemistry between her and Damon. The Bourne Identity won't waste your time, but it won't be the best thing you've seen all summer, all month or even all week. I've already forgotten most of it; the most lingering memory is of a moron sitting two seats down from me who kept giggling every time something violent happened. I wanted something violent to happen to him.

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE (US, Michael Moore)
After his 1989 documentary Roger & Me (about his hometown of Flint, Michigan, and the undue suffering of its people after General Motors shut down their plant there) put Michael Moore on the map, he emerged as America's lone media-savvy liberal spokesman. Which is pretty discouraging in a nation of 260 million. (Of course, the best that conservatives could come up with was Rush Limbaugh.) I keep thinking there is somebody out there who can probe deeper and less divisively than Moore, but in the meantime I am thankful that he exists. He is smart enough to know that his I'm-just-a-regular-guy approach to his leftist political rants will take his message much further than the ivory tower intellectualism of a Noam Chomsky or even a Ralph Nader. He is also very funny. And since entertainment has become the best - possibly even the only - way of disseminating information and opinion these days, Moore is riding the crest of that wave with his TV series, his books, and his latest film Bowling for Columbine.

Centering his film around the April 20, 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado (the "bowling" of the title alludes to the report that killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attended their morning bowling class just before arming themselves for their attack), Moore sets out to answer the question "Why do so many Americans keep shooting each other?" His quest takes him to NRA meetings (cannily, Moore happens to be a card-carrying member), rifle ranges, outings with the Michigan militia, interviews with Marilyn Manson and Charlton Heston, and a poignant adventure with two of the surviving victims of the Columbine shootings. He comes up with something of an answer to his question, and it has nothing to do with the availability of guns, America's violent past, the second amendment, racial unrest or any of the usual suspects, but of a nationwide culture of fear. Manson himself brings it up, and Moore underscores this point time and again in different ways. Though he can't answer just why we became so fearful and distrustful of each other, or when, he makes it clear that this fear is why we kill each other hundreds of times more often than our surprisingly gun-happy Canadian neighbors. And although the saddest thing about this sad film is that the only people who will pay to see it are the people who already agree with everything Moore has to say - knee-jerk liberals like yours truly - Moore is wise enough (I think) to suggest that, by focusing on the fear of the individual as opposed to government policy or the big bad NRA, each of us can do something about removing our own suspicions and fearful tendencies, even if it's just leaving our front doors unlocked while we're having dinner, like they do in Toronto. Although Moore can't help but include a few asides about American foreign policy that, while important to know, have little to do with his central theme, Bowling for Columbine is funny, troubling, angry, touching and - most of all - eminently watchable.

BOYS DON'T CRY (US, Kimberly Peirce)
Based on the real-life case of Brandon Teena, a young Nebraska "man" who was born a girl named Teena Brandon, changed her sexual identity, fell in love with a local girl, and was raped and murdered by two friends when her real sex was discovered, this film is a thoughtful, honest look at a true American tragedy. There's no way that this film can't depress as it rockets towards its inevitable (and very horrific) conclusion; however, the ultra-realistic and sympathetic performances by the entire cast (led by, of course, Hilary Swank's award-laden turn as the doomed Brandon and Chloe Sevigny's fine, subtle performance as Brandon's girlfriend) make this film worthwhile watching. In many ways it's a genuinely important film to see, made with great integrity.

My only major complaint: the often terrible rock soundtrack. Peirce should have gotten another music supervisor. At times the music is cranked to a distractingly hokey "emotional" level, it frequently doesn't correspond to what white trash kids actually listen to, and most regrettably, yes, they do use the song "Boys Don't Cry" prominently in one scene - and it's not even the Cure's original version, but a cover!

BREACH (US, Billy Ray)
I really liked Billy Ray's first feature, the somewhat underrated Shattered Glass, a dramatization of the downfall of pathologically lying New Republic reporter Stephen Glass. Breach is the perfect follow-up: Like Shattered Glass, it explores a recent American scandal involving a corrupt, deluded and possibly insane individual placed in a high position of trust, who exploited that position to his own inscrutably evil ends. (In a nutshell, Breach is about FBI computer expert Robert Hanssen, who for years was selling highly confidential government secrets to Russian spies until his arrest in early 2001.) But Glass's subject matter seems slight compared to the costly and indirectly lethal deeds that Robert Hanssen dealt in. Thus, Breach is bigger than its predecessor in all the right ways. As Hanssen, the redoubtable Chris Cooper puts in what is perhaps his very best work. His Hanssen is eccentric, slippery, creepy, and infinitely complicated. (The real-life Hanssen, a religious zealot and "sexual deviant" whose arrest is revealed at the very beginning of Breach, has remained mum about his traitorous motivations, so Ray and screenwriters Adam Mazer and William Rotko wisely don't presume to tell us what they were.) As the aspiring FBI agent who winds up taking him down, Ryan Phillippe is, as always, a reliable straight man, if not particularly interesting. The always-good Laura Linney fares better as Phillippe's taskmaster in the shadows. Ray makes good use of wintery Washington, D.C. exteriors and his story is as gripping as any thriller, even when we know from the start that it won't end in a hail of gunfire or piles of bodies. Breach is as taut as its title, a smart, troubling, no-nonsense picture about a seriously disturbed individual who lurked in the very heart of American security. It may already be one of the best films of 2007.

BRICK (US, Rian Johnson)
This is one of those "better late than never" reviews, as Brick had been playing in LA for at least two months before I finally saw it. For some queer reason it was only showing at Hollywood's Arclight cinema, which I avoid on principle. (It's the place that introduced the $14 movie ticket.) But the film finally moved over to the cheap theatre and I am so glad I got to catch it before it left the big screen completely. Brick is a special film, a jazzy, surreal hybrid of high school drama and classic film noir. Writer/director Johnson's script is filled with a heavily stylized dialogue, influenced by 30's crime writer Dashiell Hammett (in fact the story reminds me of Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest), that is so baroque and poetic that it's hardly even English anymore. Some viewers may get confused (no way can one catch everything on first viewing), others may get turned off, but I found this language of invented slang and oddball patter quite invigorating, as did several other audience members: I've never seen so many people leaning forward as they watch a film, not only from being pulled into the story but also having to pay close attention so as not to miss any crucial plot elements amongst the dizzying wordplay. In lesser hands, this stylized speech would come across as pretentious. But Johnson and his cast commit to it so fully that one can only be impressed by its audacity. And everything in the film is consistent with it - Nathan Johnson's textured score, Steve Yedlin's eerie, fog-drenched cinematography, and of course the actors, who don't give a single knowing wink as they portray noir archetypes in teenage bodies. This isn't some Bugsy Malone kind of preciousness; Johnson and his cast are dead serious about telling a classic hard-boiled detective tale in a high school milieu, even though there is an obvious absurdity to it all. Or is there? In turning its nerds into private eyes, its football stars into fall guys and its theatre geek drama queens into femmes fatales, Brick really just romanticizes the traditional roles of high schoolers, while also suggesting a fantasy of murder and intrigue that many bored suburban teens (the film is shot in lovely seaside San Clemente, California) might prefer over the drab rigmarole of their real lives.

On a side note, I've noticed a new trend in the more offbeat high school movies of recent years. Brick takes place ostensibly in the present, but its time period is so vague that it could have happened at any point during the last two decades. (When a cell phone makes a single brief appearance, it feels like an anachronism.) Several other highly-acclaimed high school movies - Napoleon Dynamite, Donnie Darko, The Squid and the Whale, Ghost World, Thumbsucker - are either explicitly set in the 80's or during a vague present that feels like the 80's. It's as though these mostly thirtyish directors are recapturing the period either because today's abundance of information technology tends to screw up traditional film narratives (it's hard to imagine Brick with everybody IM'ing each other), or because pop culture over the last fifteen years has been so inundated with hip hop trends that by placing their mostly white characters in 80's or pseudo-80's environments (to be fair, Brick has a more multiethnic cast than most high school movies) these filmmakers can safely keep their teenage protagonists from using hip hop slang, wearing baggy pants or listening to 50 Cent. Because if you look at today's teens, with their tattoos and their thongs and their bling, you'll see that they are rarely found in today's independent cinema. But I can't blame the filmmakers: today's teens can just seem so shallow, oversexed and depressing when compared to their more innocent-seeming forebears. So in a way, Brick's ultra-noir fantasia is only an extension of these films' glamorized vision of high school life.

BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY (UK/US, Sharon Maguire)
Miramax has now officially given up any pretenses of distributing challenging films, and is now quite happy to serve up an endless array of trite romantic comedies set in foreign countries. After the worthless Chocolat, now we have Bridget Jones, a predictable bit of fluff with a terminal case of the cutes. There was apparently a bit of a "scandal" (in the People magazine sense) about the casting of skinny Texan Renee Zellweger as the chubby London singleton of the film's (and book's) title, and I'm a bit embarrassed for the British that they should even care. It's Bridget Jones, for crying out loud, not Virginia Woolf or Queen Elizabeth. If she is the modern icon for English femininity, then they really ought to start cranking out some better books.

Anyway, our poor Bridget is in a quandary: she's got the hots for her sexy boss (Hugh Grant) but also consistently bumps into her old childhood nemesis (Colin Firth), with whom there is some weird "He's such a jerk, I hate him!" attraction going on as well. What to do? Do we care? I guess not, but audiences seem to adore the movie anyway, just as they might a little puppy that jumps up and licks your face even as it pees on you. Director Maguire at least has pretty good comic timing, not so much with her cast as with her editor: the film's biggest laughs all come from well-cut sight gags. However, I will give her a black mark for her offensively obvious music choices: when a TV lothario romances Bridget's mom, Billy Paul's "Me and Mrs. Jones" plays on the soundtrack. (See, Bridget's mom is a Mrs. Jones, and the song's about a guy who makes the moves on a Mrs. Jones. Get it?); when Bridget struts away from her deadend job, we hear Aretha Franklin's "Respect," because - can you guess, kids? That's right: Bridget just wants a little respect.

The lead role was reportedly meant for Kate Winslet, who ducked out due to pregnancy. In her place is the uncontroversial Zellweger, who isn't unlikeable, but brings nothing to the film. She could have been anybody. She's one of those actresses that leaves me wondering just how she became a star. She doesn't have much screen presence, and her Bridget winds up just another mousy twerp. Hugh Grant plays it straight here, which is a waste of his talents. I will give slight kudos to the film for the Colin Firth character: it's refreshing to see an ultra-serious, even constipated, dork presented as something of a catch. Usually the "second choice boyfriend" is a super-cute sweetheart that any woman would be crazy to turn down. That Bridget should have feelings for such a joyless prig is, in my opinion, genuinely cool. There's someone for everybody, after all.

BROADWAY: THE GOLDEN AGE (US, Rick McKay)
When my girlfriend and I went to see this movie, our audience was neatly divided into two groups: elderly couples and middle-aged gay men. Such should be expected with a fawning documentary about the heydey of the Broadway stage, which filmmaker McKay declares lasted from the mid-40's to the mid-60's. This film consists mostly of talking-head reminiscences of many of the stars from that era (some of whom had already passed away by the time McKay was done), wistfully longing for the good ol' days. Okay, it is hard to deny that the American theatre was at its most vital during that time: from "A Streetcar Named Desire" to "Guys and Dolls" to "West Side Story" to "Bus Stop," it was all happening. But for me, having grown up too young, too straight, and on the wrong coast, although I am familiar with the titles of these plays, and most of the actors who starred in them, I have no nostalgia to be rekindled by this movie. All I could think was, gee, it sure would have been swell to have been in New York at the time - especially since, incredibly, the cost of a top show on Broadway was actually less than the cost of a movie down the street. (Imagine being able to see a Broadway play today for just $7 instead of $80, and you get the idea how integral and accessible live theatre was to the average Manhattanite of the day.) I wish that McKay had included more footage from the actual shows, so we could actually see what all these old farts were talking about. To be fair, he utilizes what he can, but since back then plays weren't all videotaped like they are now, there's little to go on besides the fading memories of the now-aged performers who were part of the scene. Broadway: The Golden Age is agreeable entertainment, but I only recommend it to those few who already have an intimate knowledge of, and love for, mid-20th century American theatre.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (US, Ang Lee)
While I wish I could avoid jumping on the Brokeback Mountain bandwagon - when everybody and their sister starts raving about how great some movie is, I become skeptical - this film is so well-made and contains such depth that it's hard not to. By now everybody knows about "The Gay Cowboy Movie," and you can't get much more high-concept than that. But Brokeback Mountain, for all its frankness about homosexuality, is subtle and restrained to a fault: at the end of the movie, as I walked out, I thought, Well, the acting was good, and the story bittersweet - but it was just too slow, too quiet, with almost zero emotional release. Yet my wife and I found ourselves talking about it even hours later. Ang Lee and his scenarists (famed Western novelist Larry McMurtry and writing partner Diana Ossana adapted Annie Proulx's short story) capture, in their hushed pacing, the spirit of their main character Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger), the barely verbal ranch hand who, during the summer of 1963, while tending sheep on the titular mountain, enters into a sexual relationship with his working partner, rodeo cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). The story follows these star-crossed lovers over the next two decades as they sneak off on "fishing trips" together every three months or so while raising families and putting on a heterosexual front in order to survive in the intensely conservative world of the cowboy. And although much of the film explores the complex self-loathing of the closeted homosexual, the lasting impression that it leaves is one of a timeless romantic yearning that almost everybody can relate to. (Call it Romeo and Julius, if you will.) It almost doesn't matter that Ennis and Jack are both men. The secret isn't so much that they are gay (at least Jack is; Ennis's actual sexual identity is one of the film's many wonderful ambiguities) but that they're merely in love with people they're not supposed to be with. If Jack were a black woman or a girl from the other side of the tracks, you'd have essentially the same story. Because of the universality of its themes, the film connects - pretty profoundly, to read some reviews - with anybody who has experienced the pain of falling in love with someone that, for whatever reason, they can never be with. After the bizarre misstep that was The Hulk, Ang Lee is back in strong form. The cast is excellent and the locations (Alberta, Canada subbing for Wyoming) are breathtaking. Gyllenhaal is fine as usual, but Ledger's performance is a revelation. Though I've always found him a serviceable actor, his work here (thanks in no small part to Lee's direction, I'm sure) reaches remarkable new levels. While Ennis may usually prefer to deal with his frustrations with his love and his sexuality by punching something, there is one extraordinary moment in which Ledger finally lets go emotionally and, rather than turning on the waterworks or howling in pain, he instead seals his eyes shut as though he has been blinded into helplessness. It's a unique acting choice that creates one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in American cinema that I can remember, and if it's one of only two or three times that the film releases itself from its coiled repression, it's still a transcendent few seconds.

BROKEN FLOWERS (US, Jim Jarmusch)
An aging womanizer (Bill Murray) receives a letter from an anonymous woman who claims that he had fathered her son twenty years earlier, and that the son would soon be looking for him. Reluctantly following the advice of his good-hearted but meddling Ethiopian neighbor (the always-welcome Jeffrey Wright), Don Johnston - Murray's character's name, a play on the "Don Juan" that he apparently has been all his life - sets off on a cross-country tour to meet the four women (five, actually) he had been sleeping with two decades earlier, in order to find out which was the writer of the letter. Despite the high-concept setup, this is Jim Jarmusch we're talking about; anybody expecting an easy answer or even an answer at all to Don's quest is in for a disappointment. For Broken Flowers is on the one hand yet another of Jarmusch's seriocomic portraits of a decaying, unhappy America - the homes where Murray's exes live are intentionally generic, from white trash rural shacks to pre-fabricated clones - and is on the other a look at a man adrift in a world full of women whom he supposedly "understands" but clearly does not. What I still can't figure out for myself is whether Broken Flowers is a misogynist film - and that's not a word I use often, or lightly. First of all, Jarmusch takes an all-star cast of some of the finest actresses around, then gives them little to do. (But then, few people do anything in most Jarmusch films.) And there are leering details that suggest a bafflement with and even dislike of women that feel like they are really the filmmaker's, not the character's. Just my opinion, of course. As usual, Jarmusch's style is not for everybody. Fans of Murray who expect more of a comedy may lose patience with the film's glacial pace and flair for the anti-climactic. Fans of Jarmusch, on the other hand, may be surprised at his somewhat mainstream camerawork and editing. Though the irony is, Broken Flowers feels more like his earlier wistful films and less like his more recent violent dramas Ghost Dog and Dead Man. And while I am always surprised by the depth of Jarmusch's superficially modest stories, and found much visual meaning in Broken Flowers's elegant shots, I became aware for the first time that, art house credibility aside, Jim Jarmusch is a man's filmmaker. Most of his previous films centered around men, and even while his latest is ostensibly about women, in the end it's just another story about a guy. However, the film is full of interesting ideas and graceful moments - given only the tiniest of clues, you can still imagine the sort of relationship Don had with each of the women he returns to see. And Murray turns in a typically humble, droll performance as an inscrutable nobody who has a mysterious animal magnetism that women somehow automatically respond to.

BROTHER (Japan/US, Takeshi Kitano)
Under his stage name "Beat" Takeshi, middle-aged Japanese superstar Kitano plays Yamamoto, one of his typical tough guy characters, a Yakuza warmonger who is forced to flee Japan after a Yakuza alliance decides he's better off dead. So where else should he go but Los Angeles, where his younger half-brother (Claude Maki) has adopted hiphop style and deals drugs with some black buddies (chief among them Omar Epps). No sooner does Yamamoto (whose nickname "Aniki" - Japanese for "Brother" - is often used as a term of respect for high-ranking Yakuza officers) arrive than he starts setting up his own gang, eager to spray bullets at whatever organized crime units get in his way.

It's pretty obvious that this film is meant to bring Kitano's work to a wider (read: American) audience, though whether the reticent Kitano, who is arguably Japan's top star (think Clint Eastwood times ten - he is also a novelist, composer, comedian, painter and TV panelist), actually has any interest in this himself is unknown. Probably more likely was Sony Pictures Classics' desire to make lots of money off a gangster film while capitalizing on Kitano's high-art credibility. Whichever - for the uninitiated it's a good introduction to his work, though hardly his best. (The shattering Fireworks holds that honor.) Kitano makes unsettlingly serene films about gangsters and crooked cops, with sudden bursts of extreme violence peppering his elegant, deliberately-paced narrative. Brother contains much more bloodshed - and a much weaker story - than his previous films, and the American actors, save Epps, aren't very good (Kitano doesn't speak English and admitted to "not really directing" the American cast). But the evocative, jazzy score is wonderful, and it is interesting to see such a distinctive Japanese filmmaker's take on the American landscape, especially working within the crime film genre. But if the strange lapses in story logic and uninteresting supporting characters put you off, don't judge Kitano's work by it: his other films are much richer and more nuanced. Still, a good effort.

BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF (France, Christophe Gans)
If you liked La Femme Nikita - which was junk - you will probably enjoy this silly, sadistic thriller, based on legend, about a ferocious wolf-like creature terrorizing the countryside in 18th-century France, and the two men (a Parisian libertine who looks like a young Bruce Willis with a blonde wig and a Native American who somehow has mastered Kung Fu) sent to destroy it. This is the Eurodisco of action cinema: slick, overdone, stupid, loud and empty. Director Gans throws in every trick in the book - the film speeds up and slows down like a movie trailer, the camera flies around and around, and there are a couple of ridiculous cross-dissolves (one between a woman's breasts and a pair of snow-covered hills!). But what does it all serve? The suspense is weak. The monster isn't even that scary. And anyone who's seen Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow will figure out early on who's really behind all these horrible murders. Also, the film loses big points for its weirdly misogynistic slant (though it tries to cover by having two "strong" female characters). The costumes and sets, however, are really nice.

BROTHERS (Denmark, Susanne Bier)
I took so long to get around to seeing this film that I'm not sure if it's even in theatres as I write this review; I was in Atlanta for a couple of days and it was the only film in town that I hadn't seen yet and wasn't trying to avoid. Anyway, let me start my review of Brothers by giving praise to the Danish film industry - no other nation on this earth exports, per capita, as many movies to the U.S. as Denmark does. (Indeed, while perhaps there are more titles from France or Japan that make it here, the Danes could very well be the third top exporter, especially if you count Lars von Trier's English-language films.) This is due in no small part to the buzz that Trier's "Dogme" movement generated; Brothers director Susanne Bier, in fact, presented her Dogme film, Open Hearts, just two years before releasing her Dogme-influenced Brothers. Some critics have remarked on the similarity of the two stories - both involving married women who start falling for the wrong guy - but as I missed her earlier film, I'll just say that Brothers has strong direction, fine performances (the thing about Danish cinema is that the acting pool is so small, you wind up seeing the same faces showing up in every film), some terrific music - but it doesn't add up to enough to recommend it. The setup involves a career soldier who is whisked off to Afghanistan, reportedly dies in an accident, and winds up being held prisoner by Afghan warlords. Back in Denmark, his wife and children start growing closer to the soldier's ne'er-do-well brother. The wife's complicated relationship with the brother - which heads towards romance, but doesn't quite get there - is the best part of the film. The worst part is a plot twist with the soldier in Afghanistan that sets the stage for the emotionally intense second half of the film. It's a violent moment that comes out of nowhere and involves an act true to neither the main character nor the story. While Bier and her actors try their hardest, they can't make it - or its aftermath - work. But Brothers is still solid evidence that the growth of Danish cinema remains worth following.

BULLY (US, Larry Clark)
If you hated Larry Clark's first film Kids then you will hate Bully for those exact same reasons, and you can stop reading now. I happened to like Kids and am glad to see Clark return with his usual hot button items - sweaty sex, naked teenagers, pornographic language, physical brutality, acres of drugs. Bully puts violence at the forefront, as it is based on actual recent events in which a group of suburban Florida teens murdered one of their own, one Bobby Kent (Nick Stahl), the film's eponymous bully. Though the murder doesn't occur until late in the film, I'm not giving any plot points away - I think the idea is that you do know that this sadistic little creep is going to get killed, and as you wait for that dreadful moment, you have time to examine his character and wonder if he really deserves it. On the one hand, he takes delight in beating and humiliating his "best friend" Marty (Brad Renfro), as well as raping whichever girl crosses his path. On the other hand, he's the only one of his peers who is staying in school and doing his homework, has ambitions to go to college and start a career, and is respectful and courteous to his family. The film also hints that the source of Bobby's cruelty may be repressed homosexuality - he likes to show off his "sick" gay porno tapes to disgusted friends, has an uncomfortable controlling influence over Marty, and fosters an intense dislike for women. Frankly, Bobby is the only character in the story with any depth! The rest of the teens are, frankly, apathetic morons. One may wonder if his hatred of them, and theirs of him, is class-related: these slackers seem to resent Bobby's promising future as much as they do his abuse.

Unlike Kids, which boasted a cast of talented amateurs, the actors here are mostly Hollywood pros, and with their polished performances you lose some of the immediacy found in Clark's debut. That said, the cast is mostly excellent (except for Rachel Miner, who bares all for the camera repeatedly but is only so-so in the difficult role of Marty's Lady Macbeth-like girlfriend), and Clark, who is a professional photographer, has a strong eye for depth and light. Though the film is frustratingly slack much of the time (it's hard to dramatize teens smoking pot and humping each other), as the screws tighten around the impending crime, the teenagers unravel awfully and the film's focus becomes clear: it's about the horror of murder, nothing more.

Some critics may argue that Clark is being too moralistic - one could interpret Bully as a "Kids today! They're savages!" exploitation film - but I believe Clark and his writers remain objective with the material, and aren't trying to explain why the murder happened. That these kids love Eminem and violent videogames is not presented as a source of their so-called anguish; they kill not because they are angry, lost or heartless, but merely because they are just too young and stupid to understand what death really means.

BURN AFTER READING (US, Joel and Ethan Coen)
This good but not great Coen Brothers outing has been underrated by many in the wake of their Oscar-winning No County for Old Men, but diehard fans of the Coens will probably enjoy this non-flashy dramedy, as the brothers serve up yet another tale of lunk-headed ordinary joes who turn to petty crime in order to score a little bit of "easy money," with catastrophic results. This time, the story is set in Washington, D.C. (which I always appreciate; it's an iconic town filled with great locations, but is underserved by the filmmaking community), where an ousted CIA analyst (John Malkovich) bitterly writes his tell-all memoirs about the agency, only to have them unwittingly copied onto a CD-ROM with his financial records, thanks to his ready-for-divorce wife (Tilda Swinton). The disc is accidentally left at a local gym called Hardbodies, where two employees, played by the wonderfully dimwitted team of Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, believe they've stumbled upon major state secrets and hope to sell the disc to pay for McDormand's upcoming cosmetic surgery. Throw in George Clooney as a leering U.S. Marshall sleeping with Swinton, as well a few major surprises, and you've got the stuff of great farce. Only Burn After Reading is not really funny. I don't think it's even trying to be. Pitt and McDormand are brilliant - Pitt's character suggests what Pitt's life might be like today if he'd never found stardom - and Clooney playfully lampoons his own political thriller roles, but I get a sense that the Coens find Capitol life lonely and depressing, and there is little joy to be found in this outing. All the same, I liked the film; I liked its look (longtime Coen Bros. DP Roger Deakins has been replaced by Emmanuel Lubezki and as a result the cinematography has a sleeker, less saturated style) and I found the story very engaging. Few will consider it a classic, but it's a far cry better than the wretched Intolerable Cruelty, if nowhere in the same league as Fargo.

BUSH'S BRAIN (US, Joseph Mealey, Michael Shoob)
For the uninitiated, Karl Rove, the subject of the documentary Bush's Brain, is George W. Bush's shadowy advisor whom many, including the authors of the eponymous book on which this film is based, consider to be nothing less than a co-president: a brilliant, devious man who makes all the decisions for his allegedly clueless boss. Look, I'm as liberal as you can get, folks, but in a year packed with anti-right-wing documentaries, I wasn't enthusiastic about plunking down more money on seeing yet another one. However, a friend invited me to see it at the last minute and, with nothing else to do, I went. I had hoped that Bush's Brain might stand out from the pack by providing insight into contemporary politics as well as shedding light on the mysterious Rove. It does neither. The film is essentially a litany of Rove's dirty dealings, following his rise from head of the Young Republicans as a college student to his current stature today. Without much footage other than the usual stills of Bush and Rove we've all seen, and a collection of talking head interviews, all the filmmakers do is give us the impression that Karl Rove is a real creep, out to win at all costs. Is anybody surprised? The only thing of real interest is that many of the interviewees are not the usual pundits from the left, but Republicans, even Republican campaign managers, who have been burned by Rove in the past (one even gave an interview on the sole condition that the words "Karl Rove" would not be mentioned). They come across as smart, soft-spoken, genuinely decent people - reminding us that there is such a thing as a good Republican, and that Rove has made plenty of enemies on both sides of the political fence. Unfortunately the filmmakers seem to have panicked halfway through editing, fearing their film might be kind of emotionless and dull (which it is), and so they awkwardly insert a mawkish "family of the nice kid who died in Iraq" sequence, trying to force tears by showing the human consequences of Rove's political decisions (even though it barely touches on Rove's involvement in the decision to go to war against Iraq). It's an overly calculated gesture, an insidious attempt at manipulation that, in a documentary about someone like Karl Rove, is ironic, to say the least.

BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER (US, Jamie Babbit)
It's hard for me to be objective about this teenage lesbian comedy as one of its cast members, Melanie Lynskey, starred in my films Foreign Correspondents and Claustrophobia; in fact she gave me this film's script (by Brian Wayne Peterson) to read the night before she started work on it. I didn't care for it. As Mel's friend, my primary complaint was that her character wasn't given enough to do. As a filmmaker, however, my primary complaint was that the script sucked! It was smug, shallow, preached to the choir and was not pointed enough in its satire, even though it had an easy target ("heterosexual rehabilitation" camps for gay teens). Mel promised that the colorful cast would breathe life into the material. I hoped she was right... then I saw the film, whereupon I was reassured of my belief that no cast or director, no matter how talented, can make a decent film out of a lousy script.

In short, while I hope you all rush out to see But I'm a Cheerleader to support Melanie Lynskey's career, I didn't enjoy it personally. Natasha Lyonne is quite good as the church-going cheerleader whose paranoid parents believe is a lesbian, and the rest of the actors (including fellow ForCor star Richard Moll) seem to be having fun with their showy roles, but Jamie Babbit's direction is flat. She aims for both high camp and earnest love story, and as a result achieves neither. The silly Casio keyboard score grates, the sets are colorful but too self-consciously jokey, and in any event all efforts are overwhelmed by a trite, uninspired and rather amateurish script. So there you have it. Mel, if you're reading this, please don't hate me. If it means anything, the (mostly gay) audience I saw it with enjoyed it, and my movie-going partners both found it charming and very funny. Maybe I'm just a square. But I'm a square with good taste.