FACTOTUM (Norway/US, Bent Hamer)
Merely announcing that this film is based rather faithfully on a Charles Bukowski novel probably says all that needs to be said about Factotum, but if you're unfamiliar with the late writer's work, the film concerns Bukowski stand-in Henry Chinaski (nicely played by Matt Dillon) as an unrepentant drunk who gets fired from job after job as he drinks, slacks, gambles, has sex, and writes his short stories. Like its protagonist, Factotum (the word means "one who has many activities") drifts along, aimlessly but amicably, and Dillon holds it all together, with a little help from Bukowski's carefully sculpted, mournful prose. Characters come and go, pursuits come and go, everything comes and goes, while Chinaski quietly observes and takes mental notes. This sort of film is tailor-made for art house audiences who think that reading (or watching) Bukowski makes them cooler people, but unlike other "Bukowski-esque" pictures about rough trade slackers and drunks, the humor in here isn't the freak show smirk of the indie insider but the dry wit of the hopeless romantic. Norwegian director Hamer, who also made the lovely Kitchen Stories in his home country, adapted the script with American producer Jim Stark, and both show a strong flair for finding the humanity in Bukowski's characters. Lili Taylor, as Chinaski's on-again, off-again girlfriend, is fine as usual, and Marisa Tomei is appropriately sultry in her few scenes. (She's that rare actress who becomes more appealing as she grows older.) Hamer further infuses the film with Scandinavian flavor by shooting it on location in the rarely-filmed Minneapolis. It lends a freshness and an unpretentiousness that I think would have, ironically, been missing had the film been shot in Los Angeles, where Bukowski's novel originally takes place. I must be careful not to overpraise Factotum: while I enjoyed it, it wasn't strong enough to have really stayed with me. Still, it's one of the better American independent features in a bleak 2006 (even if all the post production was done in Norway), and if you haven't been to your local art house cinema in some time and are looking for a reason to go, I submit this film as reason enough.

FAHRENHEIT 9/11 (US, Michael Moore)
Moore's entertaining, emotionally-charged indictment of the Bush administration and its handling of the events of September 11, 2001, as well as the ensuing invasion of Iraq, will hold no surprises for those who have harbored suspicions about the administration's actions over the last four years, i.e. Moore's regular left-leaning audience. Instead, the goal must be to convince those ordinary Americans who support Bush, or have let apathy keep them from voting, to reconsider. Whether it will reach these people is still unknown, but Fahrenheit 9/11's startling box office success (it quickly became the top-grossing nonfiction film ever made) at least shows that there is a great desire - even if much of it is from the American left - to investigate the corporate interests that influence the administration's international policy. It offers no bombshells, nothing we hadn't heard before, but it expertly consolidates all the accusations the left has lobbed over the past four years to make one solid argument that the United States is being run by oil men, more beholden to the interests of Saudi Arabian oil barons (including the bin Laden family) than to the American people. Moore wisely keeps himself more off-camera than in his previous documentaries, cannily giving much face time to the soldiers currently serving in Iraq, as well as their families, to convince naysayers that he really is on the side of those who are actually in the trenches, reminding us that many of them don't even believe in the war that they're fighting, and who are becoming increasingly demoralized. (There is no mention of the Abu Ghraib atrocities, but it does suggest they are a result of a trickle-down immorality inherent in the war itself.) Anybody who's followed Moore's work knows that his primary interest is the working class, and Fahrenheit 9/11 ultimately posits that the real war being waged is by the American rich against the American poor, who ironically, as victims of Republican economic policies, can only find employment in the armed forces, risking their lives for the financial interests of the elite. It's hard to imagine anybody walking away from this film not believing that our current leaders are a bunch of creeps, but whether this sentiment will hold by election time is, I suppose, mostly up to the effectiveness of Bush campaign tricks designed to defame John Kerry. By now it's too late for even the cleverest Republican spin doctors to make George W. Bush look like a great guy; the best they can hope for is to get those "swing voters" so distrustful of either candidate that they just don't vote at all.

FAIR GAME (US/UAE, Doug Liman)
Intriguing dramatization of the so-called "Valerie Plame Affair", in which covert CIA operative Plame (Naomi Watts) was publicly outed by forces in the George W. Bush Administration as a reaction to an article written by her husband, ex-diplomat Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), that declared that Wilson's government-sponsored trip to Niger turned up no evidence of any sales of uranium to Iraq - even though the White House falsely claimed that this "sale" justified our invasion of Iraq. The film takes the couple's point of view (it is based on two separate memoirs, one by Wilson, one by Plame) and fills in the details about how a routine investigative trip for Wilson became a rationale for an almost inarguably illegal war, as well as the toll the White House's vindictiveness took on the couple, particularly Plame, as she saw both her career and her credibility destroyed literally overnight. Director-cinematographer Liman keeps his camera loose and his pacing tight, Penn is terrific as usual, and Watts is fine if a bit too serious as the eternally stressed-out Plame. Ironically, what affected me most after watching Fair Game was not what was in the movie, but what wasn't: the reality that, just a few years after these events, not only have most Americans forgotten about the many truly disturbing abuses of power within the Bush Administration, but that we generally tend to ignore these serious issues because they are too complex and disheartening, so instead we focus on meaningless sex scandals and whatever laws might take our beer and Starbucks money out of our pockets. In a sense, we're doing exactly what, in Fair Game, members of the Bush Administration hoped the American public (and press) would do: forget the real story - which in this case was whether the invasion of Iraq was based on a lie - and focus on the tabloid side of things, e.g., the attractive blonde Plame and her sanctimonious husband. As for the film itself, it's engaging, but it bogs down in the third act when it shifts its focus to Plame and Wilson's marital problems, an ill-advised detour that takes the real story's key twist - when Lewis "Scooter" Libby, assistant to Vice President Cheney, took the fall for the administration's illegal outing of Plame - and shrugs it off.

FAITHLESS (Sweden, Liv Ullmann)
Lengthy, endlessly depressing saga of infidelity written by film god Ingmar Bergman. On a remote Swedish island, a lonely old writer named "Bergman" (Erland Josephson channeling you-know-who) is visited by Marianne (Lena Endre), a 40-year-old woman who is a mixture of artist's muse, wandering ghost and psychiatrist's patient. She proceeds to tell the old man the tragic tale of her own extramarital affair which wound up destroying her family. Excellently performed by all involved, and ably directed - mostly in close-up - by Ullmann (who had starred in many of Bergman's best-known films of the 60's and 70's), but, inevitably, it is Ingmar Bergman who permeates the entire film with his own legacy. It is a Bergman film, for better or for worse: I wondered for the first hour whether his work is as relevant to today's audiences as it was 30-40 years ago. (The key players in this love triangle are an actress, a director and an orchestra conductor, which smacks of European art house pretentiousness from times past.) But eventually the twists and revelations lead into a denouement of profound bitterness that transcends all film trends. Not happy stuff, but effective. A note to those for whom reading subtitles can be an exhausting experience: this is one talky movie! Your eyes will be looking at the bottom of the screen more than they will at the faces of the actors (unless you know Swedish). But if you're in the mood for high-quality anguish that will leave you drained but satisfied, Faithless is for you.

THE FALL (India/UK/US, Tarsem Singh)
I have one regret about seeing The Fall: I waited too long, and so I caught it late in its run at the miserable Beverly Center (a once-proud shoebox multiplex from the 80s), and the morons who staff the place started the movie about ten minutes early - whereas I showed up on time. So I missed the first few minutes of this thing, which is a real bummer, because (as I found out later) these opening moments provide lots of information that never gets repeated, yet informs much of the film to follow. In case you yourself come in late, the film is set in a Los Angeles hospital in the 1920s. A stunt man (Lee Pace) has fallen off a horse while trying to impress his girlfriend, and is paralyzed from the waist down. The girlfriend has since broken his heart by running off with the film's leading man. Meanwhile, a poor Romanian 5-year-old (the adorable and hilarious Catinca Untaru) has entered the hospital with a broken arm she suffered while picking oranges nearby. The two become unlikely friends as the stunt man tells her wild stories about a group of heroes banding together to defeat an evil villain. What starts off as a combination of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The English Patient and The Princess Bride (though this film is actually based on an obscure 1981 feature from Bulgaria called Yo Ho Ho) turns darker as we learn about the stuntman's suicidal desires. What keeps the film alive is its remarkable surrealist imagery. Tarsem, best known for his music videos such as the award-winning "Losing My Religion" for R.E.M., as well as for his critically blasted (but still interesting) Jennifer Lopez thriller The Cell, lets his extravagant visual senses run free here. The results are spectacular sets filmed around the world (though mostly in India), Eiko Ishioka's eye-popping costumes, super saturated colors, more than a few lingering shots of muscular men, and the heartbreaking story between the hopeless stunt man and his plucky young friend. I know a lot of people don't like The Fall, and admittedly it's a strange bird: an R-rated, violence-filled art film that somehow still seems like it was made for children. But I found it a thrill, both visually and emotionally. And even if I can't quite connect the lovely epilogue with everything that preceded it (possibly because I missed those few crucial opening minutes), I still highly recommend this movie to anybody who loves Baraka, the aforementioned Munchausen, or even the paintings of Salvador Dali. (Tarsem's been known to steal his ideas, but as I've said before - he steals from the best.) The Fall will be an amazing experience for some (as it was for me), and it's surely destined to become a cult hit, but I advise you to see it on the big screen if you can.

THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX (US, Wes Anderson)
I've never been much of a fan of Wes Anderson's films; the more formalistic and stylized they got, the less they interested me. But I do enjoy stop-motion animation, and it seems to be a fine fit for Anderson's obsessively detailed visual sense, where he can finally have his characters do exactly as he pleases - because they are literally puppets. (Anderson is essentially applying a lo-fi approach to a trend that other control freak directors like Robert Zemeckis, Peter Jackson and James Cameron are indulging in, that of supplanting stubborn human actors with easily manipulated CG models.) And as we allow these animated figures a bit more silliness than we would endure from flesh-and-blood performers, the slapstick antics in Fantastic Mr. Fox - and there are many - are infinitely more charming than the lame exploits in Anderson's The Life Aquatic, the film that really turned me off of his work. (I didn't even bother seeing The Darjeeling Limited.) This movie retains Anderson's dry wit (with substantial help from his frequent cowriter Noah Baumbach) and quirkiness, but is far more lively and cohesive than his last few films. Part of this could be that he is working off a classic children's story by Roald Dahl. (Reportedly, Anderson went to the late Dahl's home and stayed there for a while for inspiration for the production design.) Or maybe the animators just enjoyed moving the litle characters more quickly than usual. All in all, this simple story about the titular fox (well-voiced by George Clooney) who starts a war with three nasty human farmers after a few clever heists is clever, funny and altogether satisfying. (Of special note is Alexandre Desplat's whimsical score.) It really is, as one critic has said, a toy box of a movie. Children should enjoy it very much, even as their hipster parents nod agreeably at the wry dialogue. I had a good time myself.

FAR FROM HEAVEN (US, Todd Haynes)
Heartfelt re-creation of 1950's "women's pictures," those Technicolor melodramas made famous by the likes of Douglas Sirk, Far from Heaven delves deeper than the surface crises of those earlier films' well-to-do heroines, exploring racial and sexual issues that would have been unheard of in Hollywood films of the time. Set in 1957 Connecticut, the story centers around emotionally torn housewife Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore, playing a less clueless ancestor to her character in Haynes's Safe) who discovers that her macho husband (Dennis Quaid) is gay, and that she finds unexpected comfort in - and unspoken attraction to - her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert). Of course, this is 1950's suburbia, so you can imagine the implications of both revelations. Though handled with incredible restraint, this broken triangle still packs a wallop, both undermining and underscoring the story's lovingly kitschy setting. Haynes is a master at recreating a bygone era. Sometimes his attention to detail works against him - Velvet Goldmine was a gorgeously overworked mess - but here it serves his themes beautifully. It's exciting to see a filmmaker like him around these days, somebody who can effortlessly blend style, story and mood and come up with something so moving - even transcendent - in the process. Moore is great in whatever she does, but she truly shines here. Haysbert invests his role with dignity and tenderness, and Quaid gives easily the bravest performance of his career. Cripes, I sound like a freaking press release! Well, I like the film that much. From its saturated, autumnal cinematography to its spot-on 50's dialogue (which manages to be corny without sounding campy) to its real sense of pain and longing, Far From Heaven is one of the best films of the year. I'm surprised that I don't have more to say about it. This could be because, frankly, Owen Gleiberman's Entertainment Weekly review has already said everything. I can't add much more. (Look at me, I'm even praising the reviews of this film!) Just go.

FEMME FATALE (US, Brian De Palma)
For the past few years I've been convinced that the next generation of film geeks will revere the work of Brian De Palma just as their counterparts of today do that of Sam Fuller. De Palma is one of the only people making studio films that feel like true "B movies." Though his films have big (well, semi-big) stars and multi-million dollar budgets, there still seems something unapologetically trashy and guilty-pleasure-ish about them. I even found stuff to like in Snake Eyes. And here comes Femme Fatale, more twisted, kinky, stupidly entertaining silliness from De Palma. All his usual trademarks are here: the voyeurism, the violence against women, the incredible soundtrack (this time composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto), the deft camerawork, the obsession with Hitchcock's Vertigo (its theme of "doubles" suggested here in the casting of Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in two roles). There's almost something endearing, actually, about De Palma's tireless Hitchcock ripoff, where his successors have found new cliches to mine (fast cuts, handheld camera, etc.). It still seems like he's in film school, and I mean that in the best sense.

Oh, the plot. It has something to do with a jewel thief (Stamos) who poses as a dead woman and winds up in Paris dealing with Antonio Banderas, playing a paparazzo down on his luck. As with many of the other films that De Palma writes, there are plenty of wacky plot twists and double-crosses. With an opening scene that involves a diamond heist, the Cannes Film Festival, a riff of Ravel's "Bolero" (which is so close that I wonder why the original wasn't just used) and Hot Lesbian Action - all at the same time! - you pretty much know right off the bat whether you're going to like or hate this film. Either way, it's just harmless pulp from a sleazy filmmaker. But Sakamoto's rich score is amazing, the Paris locations are nice, and the story's final twist is so remarkably bizarre that it changes the whole tone of the film from just another thriller to some sort of Kieslowski-esque existentialism. No kidding! My only real critique is that Stamos, who makes a so-so leading lady, is way too skinny. Get some pork on that fork, girl.

THE FIGHTER (US, David O. Russell)
Hollywood's love affair with Massachusetts continues with what is at least the fifth 2010 drama set in the Bay State, joining other prestige pictures such as The Social Network, The Town, The Company Men and Shutter Island. The energetic Fighter heads upstate from Boston, unfolding mostly in the town of Lowell, home of boxer Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and his brother/trainer, former pugilist Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale, once again displaying his uncanny ability to lose a drastic amount of weight and look like hell). Much of the story involves Ward's struggle to make something of his career and wrest himself free of his crazy family, namely his crack addict brother and overbearing mother (a nice turn by Melissa Leo). Lots of rich local color in this working class drama, with Amy Adams rounding out the principal cast as Ward's girlfriend, who sees great success for him as long as he distances himself from his poisonous family. The final act almost unfortunately ends up in standard boxing movie territory, with Ward facing his big make-it-or-break-it bout, whereas the meat of the film lies in his ongoing conflict with his bullying family. (His seven - seven! - nightmarish sisters only add to The Fighter's eccentric charms.) It's an exciting, crowd-pleasing conclusion, but it shrugs off the very troubles within the Ward/Eklund family that drive the rest of the movie. It's only a small misstep, though, in an otherwise terrific film. Bale and Leo are particularly excellent; their roles may be showy, but their work is truthful. One note: I'm glad I knew nothing about Micky Ward going into this movie, so I had no idea if he became a champion boxer or remained in Palookaville. If you are ignorant of the Ward saga, don't do any homework before watching The Boxer. If you already know what happened to Ward and his brother, you should still have a good time, even if there's a little less suspense for you.

THE FILTH AND THE FURY (UK, Julien Temple)
Entertaining documentary about the rise and fall of the notorious Sex Pistols, a quartet of working class London lads who, in 1976, banged away on their instruments, offended a lot of "proper" people, invented punk rock, and arguably changed popular music forever. Director Temple's involvement with the band dates back to his 1980 "mockumentary," The Great Rock & Roll Swindle, which was overseen by Malcolm McLaren, the devious Svengali who "created" the Pistols and then drove them to ruin. McLaren now clearly gets the shaft in this new documentary; how well-deserving he is of such wrath and ridicule may only truly be known by Sex Pistols front man Johnny Rotten, who definitely bears a grudge.

Mostly, though, the film is an objective document of a turbulent era, centering on a few very turbulent young people (mainly Rotten and late Pistols bassist Sid Vicious). Which isn't to say the film isn't great fun. Temple takes a whimsical approach to his editing, cutting between archival footage of the Pistols in concert, contemporary interviews with the surviving members of the band (coyly silhouetted so as not to reveal the gruesome old men they've become), snippets of old-fart English comics, scenes from Laurence Olivier's Richard III(!) and everything in between. Even if you weren't alive when "God Save the Queen" hit the top of the charts, you'll be fascinated by this lively, enlightening account of a seminal time in rock history.

FINDING NEMO (US, Anderw Stanton & Lee Unkrich)
I won't write an expansive review, as most everybody has already seen this movie. But let me say that the annoying thing about living in the Hollywood area is that Walt Disney owns the El Capitan theatre on Hollywood Blvd. and whenever one of their animated features is released, they show it there - charging at least $15 for it - and make it otherwise unavailable in the vicinity. You have to travel out to the burbs to see it at a decent price (I refuse to hand over $15 to the Evil Empire known as Disney if I can help it). Since the burbs around Los Angeles are depressing, I finally saw Finding Nemo back home in San Jose, over a month after it opened. Worth the wait, of course: This is another nearly-flawless computer animated adventure from Pixar, standing apart from their previous work for being perhaps their most visually beautiful film, as well as the first to not have Randy Newman as composer - which fortunately saves us from another of his insipid "You Got a Friend in Me"-type songs - but his talented cousin Thomas (who won an Oscar for American Beauty) instead. The result is a more sophisticated yet still kid-friendly movie about a neurotic clownfish (voiced by Albert Brooks, king of the neurotics) who teams up with a blue-finned dingbat (Ellen DeGeneres) to track down his son Nemo, after Nemo is swiped from the sea and dumped into a tank inside a Sydney dental office. Stanton and crew display such boundless imagination, mining every possible story idea they can, that Finding Nemo is chock full of smart and surprising details. You know, folks, sometimes it may seem that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but there are two things we should be very grateful that we have right now that our forefathers did not: Trader Joe's supermarkets and Pixar cartoons.

FINDING NEVERLAND (US, Marc Forster)
Curse you, Finding Neverland! Curse you for being a shamelessly manipulative tear-jerker! Curse you for every note of your sappy soundtrack coming in at just the right moment to reduce your audiences to a blubbering mess! Curse you for hauling out every old trick in the book and still turning me into a choking, sobbing idiot just like everybody else in the theatre. (Curse you as well for making me refer to a movie as "you.") Anyway, this is a stately weeper about J.M. Barrie, famed Victorian playwright who became a legend after penning the classic "Peter Pan." Finding Neverland is a fictionalized account of Barrie's friendship with the Llewellyn-Davies family - namely, the five boys with whom he spent a great deal of playtime - and how that friendship inspired him to write "Peter Pan." Yes, I said five boys, though this film inexplicably reduces the number to four. More crucially, in reality both of the parents were very much alive when Barrie entered their lives; I presume that in order to shift the Victorian tut-tutting away from the darker notion that Barrie was enraptured with little boys to the more dramatically acceptable scandal of the married Barrie cozying up to another woman, the Finding Neverland team bumps off Mr. Arthur Llewellyn-Davies before the film even starts, leaving Mrs. Sylvia Llewellyn-Davies a widow fetching enough to lure the lonely Barrie away from his frigid wife. Well, that's Hollywood for you. According to a friend, the original script to Finding Neverland spent more time on the uneasy notion that Barrie liked those little boys a bit too much. Naturally, a film that makes a pedophile out of a beloved children's author is depressing, and not good holiday (or Oscar) fodder. (For the record, the Llewellyn-Davies boys - who stayed friends with Barrie throughout their lives - insisted that he was as innocent as they.) So I'll forgive the filmmakers for dropping this creepy plot in favor of telling a wistful story about the power of imagination. The cast, for their part, seem to be in on the secret: not for a moment did I feel any actual romantic tension between Johnny Depp (as Barrie) and Kate Winslet (as Sylvia); they don't give so much as a smoldering glance at each other and, innocent though his intentions may be, Depp's Barrie is clearly much closer to the boys than to their mother. But any idea of scandal is quickly put aside the moment Winslet starts coughing, when the film heads deeply and irreturnably into Kleenex Territory. As I inferred, my heartstrings were tugged as much as anybody else's, dammit, so for that reason alone I guess I'll recommend Finding Neverland to those who want a good cry at the movies. Though it's not as genuine in tone, or as literary, it belongs in the same category as 1993's Shadowlands. And for God's sake, if you haven't seen that film, and want to bawl so much that your nose runs, rent it immediately.

FIRST SNOW (US, Mark Fergus)
If First Snow is too reminiscent of Memento, that may have to do mostly with the two films' shared star, Guy Pearce, but also to do with a similarly claustrophobic tone, a similarly deluded, pathetic lead character, and a similarly disappointing reach for profundity, ultimately sacrificing theme for story twists. If Memento is the better movie, it's only because of its athletic, daring reverse-chronological structure. First Snow plays around with nonlinear narrative as well, but only for effect. The story is about a sleazy salesman (Pearce) from Albuquerque, New Mexico who, while waiting for his car to get fixed, pays a visit to a local fortune teller and finds the old man's prophecies starting to come true - which worries him especially when he's told that he will die with the coming of the first snow. Like Memento, this film is a psychological drama disguised as a thriller; for while Pearce, on the surface, starts fearing that his possible demise has something to do with the release from jail of a former friend that he had long ago set up in a shifty business deal that had gone wrong, it really has more to do with the guilt he feels over what had happened. First Snow is not a bad little movie. The acting is fine, the cinematography is crisp, Cliff Martinez's score is eccentric and rich, and it's especially nice to see a rarely-filmed city like humble Albuquerque take center stage: First Snow was shot entirely around Albuquerque and its environs. The unusual setting gives the film a lot of regional flavor - especially one scene set at the Dog House hot dog stand, with its giant neon dachsund gobbling up an endless chain of neon wieners - possibly my favorite memory from my own trip to Albuquerque a couple of years ago - that is missing from most American films today. (However, it should be noted that Albuquerque seems to be the new filming hot spot: no less than ten big-budget features were shot there in 2006 and 2007.) The problem with First Snow is that it finally doesn't have much to say. It dabbles with the age-old argument of free will versus fate, but never commits to exploring the depths of the argument. What we're left with is ninety minutes of Pearce being paranoid, and a twist ending so quiet that you almost miss it. Still, a fair film, not unmissable but not a waste of time.

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER (US, Marc Webb)
Cute if sometimes overly precious romantic comedy about Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a young writer at a greeting card company, who falls madly in love with his new coworker Summer (Zooey Deschanel), an inscrutable loner who doesn't want to get serious. The 500 days of the title indicates the length of their turbulent relationship, and the script (by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber) jumps around in a gleefully nonlinear fashion, juxtaposing Tom and Summer's sweet early days with the sour times to come. There's a lot to like about (500) Days of Summer: I'm an admirer of Gordon-Levitt's film work, and while he's not as interesting here as he was in Brick, The Lookout and Mysterious Skin, he's undeniably charming. And I appreciate the filmmakers' sincerity in doing with Los Angeles what east coast filmmakers routinely do with New York: turn it into a beautiful, functional city conducive to romance. By setting the entire film in downtown LA, they effectively turn their Angeleno characters into Manhattanites: hip urban dwellers who don't have cars and who spend their entire lives downtown (which, as anybody who lives in Los Angeles can tell you, is pure fantasy). But the movie fizzles with some of its other many quirky ideas, such as a Pushing Daisies-like narration, giving Tom a world-weary kid sister who drily dispenses advice, and a few too many other cinematic fun-and-games. (An already cherished dance sequence after Tom and Summer first make love is a highlight, but other moments such as a sequence of black and white "interviews" with the male characters feel forced.) In the end, though, (500) Days depends on these eccentricities, because without them it would be a fairly normal story about the frustratingly one-sided relationships that most of us have had at some point or another. Which isn't exactly a bad thing. There's a lot of truth about love and human behavior in this film, something lacking in most studio romantic comedies. But without giving away the ending, the film's message, though honest, is also rather obvious to anybody over 25 who's tried to get serious with somebody who just wasn't that into them. (I've certainly had my share of Summers, though my wife has reminded me that I've probably been Summer to some of my exes as well. Almost all of us have, which is the point.) All in all, I thought the movie was fun. I just think it could have said so much more, without losing its goofy sweetness. But I am keenly aware that thousands of young people will fall madly in love with this movie and that it will develop an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-like following. That's fine. I can see the appeal - especially if one is already crushing on Deschanel and/or Gordon-Levitt. Don't let me stand in your way. I'm just saying that, for me, (500) Days is not that special.

THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS (Denmark, Jørgen Leth, Lars von Trier)
A truly one-of-a-kind motion picture. In 2001, famed director Lars von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Dogville) decided to submit his cinematic hero, Danish documentarian/experimental filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to a rather sadistic series of tests: Over the following two years, Leth was to take his own 1967 short The Perfect Human (which Trier loves so much that he calls it "the perfect film") and remake it five times, each time under several new artistic restrictions (or "obstructions") arbitrarily cooked up by the devious Trier. After finishing each film, Leth would watch it with Trier and get his next assignment. What seems at first to be an exercise in variations on a theme becomes a far more complicated intellectual examination of human nature, authorship and manipulation. Playing off the title of Leth's short, Trier's purported goal is to make the over-achieving Leth move from the "perfect" to the "human" as a filmmaker: to allow himself to lose control of his work, to make a bad film. And so the obstructions are explicitly designed to prevent Leth from doing what he wants to (the first set of rules forces Leth to keep every shot under 12 frames - half a second - and to shoot his film on location in Cuba). The problem is, Leth takes Trier's obstructions and, time and time again, uses them to his advantage, with surprisingly strong results (most of which we get to watch in The Five Obstructions). So while Leth is making a statement that creativity is inspired by restrictions, the increasingly frustrated Trier starts realizing that the joke is on him. Or is the joke on us? After a while, I started wondering if the whole film is something of a put-on. (I had to check online to make sure that there really is somebody named Jørgen Leth and that he actually did make a short back in 1967 called The Perfect Human.) There is a sense that Trier's discovery - that Leth's perfectionism is what makes him human - was not something that occured during the making of this documentary, but was the very reason behind it. Yes, this is what my friend Rob would call "Advanced Film Watchin'." Highfalutin, brainy stuff. But The Five Obstructions is wholly entertaining, never slow or repetitive, and Leth's work is remarkably flashy. If this comes to your town and you're up for seeing something different, run out and catch it.

FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS (US, Clint Eastwood)
An interesting history lesson of a movie, Flags of Our Fathers tells the behind-the-scenes story of the three surviving World War II servicemen from the infamous "raising the flag on Iwo Jima" photograph, who were plucked from the battlefront by a U.S. government desperate to raise funds to continue fighting the Japanese, who then put the soldiers to work on the home front, touring America and begging its citizenry to buy war bonds. The story insists that it was this stirring photo that gave a jolt of inspiration to a country that was suffering financially and morally after years of heavy fighting, but the film doesn't explain how all this fit in once the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, ending the war soon after these men's promotional tour. Instead it contrasts, effectively but repetitively, the horrors the men saw on the battlefront with the cake-and-ice cream world of fancy dinners and garish public displays they had to endure to get Americans to fork out for the war. The irony is not lost on any of them, particularly Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), the Pima Indian whose own blunt honesty about the war, compounded by his shell-shocked alcoholism and the racism that pervaded his life even when he was being ferried around as a "hero," drives him nearly to madness and eventually to a sad ruin. The film really is Hayes's story, as the other two servicemen - Ryan Phillippe as the blank John "Doc" Bradley and Jesse Bradford as the well-meaning if opportunistic Rene Gagnon (who never even fired a shot at Iwo Jima) - dutifully obey orders and thus sink into the background. Beach is extraordinary, and his performance makes Flags of Our Fathers well worth seeing. But Eastwood, as director, somehow misses his mark at effectively delivering to his audience the impact of the battlefield on his protagonists. Admittedly, I think Saving Private Ryan set the bar for capturing warfare on film sky high, and unless he out and out copied Spielberg's style, there's no way Eastwood could top the intensity of the earlier film's opening sequence. I also think his choice to break the film up into flashbacks may not have been as strong as telling the story chronologically. With all the numerous battlefield flashbacks, the only message it sends across is, "They're living it up with senators now, but a few months ago they were going through hell!" And it sends this message over and over again. Still, Flags of Our Fathers is a well-made film, certainly educational and demystifying. I for one knew nothing about the men in that famous photograph, or how some of them were used as show ponies for the war shortly afterward. But I'm hoping that Eastwood's promised follow-up feature, about the battle for Iwo Jima from the Japanese soldiers' point of view, will have more to say. Oh, and of course I can't complete this review without mentioning that my Foreign Correspondents and Claustrophobia star Melanie Lynskey appears in a few scenes as Gagnon's social-climbing girlfriend Pauline. As usual, she isn't given much to do, and I think she only has about four lines in the whole film. But she looks cute in her little period outfits.

FLICKERING LIGHTS (Denmark, Anders Thomas Jensen)
One of those blink-and-you-miss-it releases, though it was apparently a big hit in its native Denmark when it came out 2 1/2 years before its brief theatrical run in the U.S. Proving that not all Danish directors are plying the "Dogme" style of filmmaking to their work, Flickering Lights treads ground similar to that of that other recent hit (in Denmark), In China They Eat Dogs, being another low-key crime comedy about some gruff but lovable gangsters on the run from some gruffer and entirely unlovable gangsters. Though Lights lacks the earlier film's notoriously weird ending, it shares its same oddball blend of startling violence and laconic character-based comedy. And it's enjoyable. The story, since you may never see this film, involves a quartet of low-rent thugs who steal a suitcase full of money, make their escape from the psychotic kingpin who wants it... then, on their way to Barcelona, find their van breaking down outside an abandoned restaurant in the forest. With the excuse of having to wait around for a couple of weeks as one of the friends' bullet wounds heal, they eventually start cleaning up the restaurant and decide to open it up for business. All in all a sweet-natured story, with a fine cast turning in generally pleasant performances (even though most of the characters are a bit nuts), though its bursts of gunfire and murder may be too jarring for some. Anybody who's seen two or more Danish films from the last 5 years will recognize several faces in the cast: Denmark must have a pretty small talent pool.

FLIGHTPLAN (US, Robert Schwentke)
Severely flawed thriller about an airplane designer (Jodie Foster) who, after the sudden death of her husband, flies home to New York from Berlin with both his coffin and their 6-year-old daughter on the biggest jumbo jet you've ever seen. When Foster awakes from a nap in mid-air, she realizes the daughter has vanished - and yet nobody on the airplane even remembers having seen the girl. Is there a conspiracy afoot, or is Foster going crazy? That's the question Flightplan's screenwriters Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray hope you'll be asking yourself, but unfortunately they - and German film director Robert Schwentke, in his American debut - forget that what looks convincing on paper and maybe even during production can lose a lot of credibility when unspooled before an audience. First of all, you know walking in that the movie won't just wind up saying "Jodie's crazy, her daughter was never with her, the end" because then you'd have no movie. On the other hand, the buildup is so intriguing that the revelation of what is really going on is bound to disappoint. So when we finally find out the truth, just in time for the third act, the "surprise twist" is woefully limp. Still, Schwentke, Foster & co. are game enough to keep the movie going, opting for a sort-of tense final chase around the airplane even though by then the audience has been taken out of the story by the sheer number of ill-explained plot contrivances. Flightplan has one of those scripts where in order for the bad guy's plot to succeed or even get halfway there, a ton of random, impossible to predict variables have to fall exactly into place. Why, for instance, can none of the 425 passengers on board remember seeing Foster board with her little girl? Because the film conveniently forgets the concept of the "departure lounge" where people would have seen them. Maybe if Foster was late to the airport - but no. Then that would negate her getting on first (because she has a small child, naturally), as the movie has her do, so that none of the passengers would see the girl boarding with her. Except that if she hadn't been with a small child, the flight attendants wouldn't have pre-boarded her! This is only one of about a dozen or so serious plot holes that mar the story and ultimately make for an unsatisfying film. And it's too bad, because the first hour is a really good puzzler. Maybe if the filmmakers had been daring enough to take their story into the Twilight Zone in order to solve the imponderable riddle of how a person could disappear on an airplane at 37,000 feet, Flightplan might have been interesting. As it is, it's barely even serviceable.

THE FOG OF WAR (US, Errol Morris)
It's not an overstatement to say that Errol Morris has changed the face of documentary filmmaking. Known for a string of slick, absorbing docs (The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death, A Brief History of Time et al), Morris once was the bane of other nonfiction filmmakers who accused him of cramming too much artsiness into his movies. But as time went by, the purists were silenced once it became accepted that documentaries can be stylish. Morris himself likes to focus in on creepy, morally ambiguous characters, and former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara fits the bill. Derided for being the man behind the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo (which killed 100,000 civilians) as well as for taking the U.S. into Vietnam, the highly intelligent - and somewhat haunted - McNamara is allowed by Morris to narrate his own story to us directly (thanks to a neat invention of Morris's where the interviewee looks at the filmmaker through a glass and actually winds up talking to the camera), reflecting on the ethics of war and the responsibilities of those who engage in it. It's fascinating, but not revelatory. McNamara, always in charge even when the camera is pointed at him, chooses his words wisely, and we miss the opportunity to catch him in any truly unguarded moments (though he tears up at mention of JFK's death, which might seem a cheap shot except that it shows the duty he had to his Commander-in-Chiefs). Instead he dispenses opaque rhetoric left unchallenged by Morris. (At the film's start, there is an outtake which reveals both McNamara's and Morris's understanding that the Secretary is not going to be caught off guard in this film.) "The fog of war" is an apt title, for in the end the only clear message is that the nature of war is so byzantine and unpredictable that nobody will ever truly understand what it is or why we wage it. It's a bit maddening, because I for one left the theatre ultimately having to shrug and say, "Well, so what was the point?" while admitting that, had I more of an active interest in U.S. military policy, or a better knowledge of Vietnam or the Cold War, I would have understood more. So I accepted it mainly as a portrait of what happened between the so-called clarity of warfare during World War II and the uncertainty of every war the U.S. has fought in since. There's a catchy score by Philip Glass, too.

FOOD, INC. (US, Robert Kenner)
Intentionally troubling documentary about the American food industry and why we're eating what we shouldn't be eating will be eye-opening for many - at least those who, unlike me, haven't already seen other recent documentaries about food, such as King Corn, The Future of Food, The Real Truth About Farmer John and so on. (What can I say? I'm married to a vegan, we have Netflix, these movies get seen.) Not to mention the books Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma, the authors of which show up here in several talking head interviews. It's hard to knock Food, Inc. because it is a very important film to watch, especially if you don't know what's really going on in the meat industry. (The film should really be called Meat, Inc.) That said, Kenner takes the same stereotypically wussy liberal stance that a lot of "political" documentarians do lately: he focuses blame on the industry and makes the consumer seem blameless, even while reminding us, rather preachily at the end, that we can easily make a difference simply by buying organic or locally-grown food. But when a poor Mexican American family of four is shown buying a nutrition-free lunch at Burger King for $12 because "vegetables are too expensive" (the film's point being that corn is subsidized, and is thus much cheaper, than broccoli), I call B.S. I know for a fact that $12 can buy you enough organic beans, rice, broccoli and so on to feed that family of four for lunch and dinner. Kenner touches on personal responsibility a bit too briefly for my liking. Also, despite the unsettling footage at slaughterhouses, for all the little "you can make a difference" reminders, Kenner can't even bring himself to say, "Oh, and maybe you should try at least one dinner a week without meat." (Again, I'm married to a vegan, but come on.) See this documentary anyway as it's good to be educated about what's going on behind the scenes at Tyson, Monsanto and other shady food conglomerates.

FORKS OVER KNIVES (US, Lee Fulkerson)
My wife Miki is vegan. Years ago, before I dated her, like most people I treated veganism as a joke: What a bunch of kooks! Meat's great! Nowadays, though I still eat meat once every two weeks or so, my own diet has become primarily vegan simply because Miki is an excellent cook. So I have a rare vantage point, not being vegan but having to defend veganism whenever friend or stranger makes the usual glib, insulting remarks about it. But times are changing, as evidenced not only by the rapidly expanding availability of vegan-friendly restaurants across the world (trust me, this is something I research deeply whenever we go traveling) but by the large audience who saw the pro-vegan documentary Forks Over Knives with us yesterday. Though it's likely that many of them were already converts and not simply omnivores who wanted to know more, the film serves a secondary purpose to keep vegans committed to the diet (it's easy to fall off the wagon, often because of the inconvenience), as well as its primary purpose, which is to scare omnivores away from animal products.

The argument in Forks Over Knives is something I've heard for years, but may be news to others: never mind the whole "save the animals" stuff; you should stop eating meat and dairy because they make you fat and unhealthy. More significant may be the film's revelation that a "whole foods, plant-based diet" can actually reverse the damage, faster and more safely than all those high-price drugs (namely Lipitor) can. In other words, you may be at risk of a stroke, diabetes, or a heart attack, but by eating a vegan diet for a couple of months, you can turn all that around. Thought-provoking, but I found this film a little too repetitive and wished that it could have explored all the gray areas: how does one fare if one cuts out only red meat, or dairy? Is someone who eats meat once or twice a week hugely worse off than a vegan, or not so different? Could a cheese- and milk-loving vegetarian be less healthy than someone who disdains dairy products but eats lean meat once a day? These questions aren't addressed, but obviously Fulk, a seasoned documentary filmmaker who makes himself one of his film's test subjects, Morgan Spurlock-style, wants to stay on message: Eating meat and dairy will kill you, so don't do it. (The threat from processed foods is briefly discussed, but perhaps Fulkerson is leaving that to other documentaries such as Food, Inc., so we're left wondering whether tofu and rice milk count as "processed" or not. Forks Over Knives cannily sidesteps the issue by showing its interviewees enjoying overwhelmingly healthy-looking salads and whole beans; not a scoop of soy ice cream or slice of seitan in sight.) Most interesting, for me, is how the V-word - not just vegan, but vegetarian - is barely uttered in the film. Only one interviewee, professional fighter Mac Danzig, dares to call his diet vegan. Everybody else keeps saying "plant-based diet". A couple of months ago, former President Bill Clinton declared, in an interview, that he too is eating a mostly "plant-based diet" these days. (Daughter Chelsea is vegan.) In a time where one left-leaning identifier after another is vilified by conservatives, and then the mainstream, in order to marginalize its proponents, this is another example of how forward-thinking people have to alter the terminology to make their beliefs less vulnerable to attack. So "liberal" becomes "progressive", "atheist" becomes "secular humanist", and "vegan" becomes "one who eats a plant-based diet". Well, if it makes it more difficult to treat these people as punchlines, then more power to them.

THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN (US, Judd Apatow)
Having heard nothing but good things about this film, I finally went to see it only when my old friend Rob caught it - the day after his own fortieth birthday, in fact - and told me that the main character struck him as a combination of both of our own personalities. I'm not a 40-year-old virgin - I wasn't even a 30-year-old virgin, thankfully - but I was a 20-year-old virgin, and as such I felt encouraged by the news that this film tackles one of the most embarrassing situations a grown man can find himself in, and does it with sympathy and, yes, dignity - even amongst a passel of jokes involving erections, bodily fluids and sexual deviants.

Now that I've seen the picture myself, I find it hard to write anything about it that hasn't already been mentioned by every other critic. I will say that I too was surprised at the sweet story that slowly emerges from beneath an incredibly high concept (dorky 40-year-old virgin Andy - played by co-writer Steve Carell - reveals his secret to his macho coworkers, who then insist upon getting him laid). For this isn't a movie about a horny nerd desperate to lose his virginity, it's about a thoughtful adult who has grown so accustomed to his own celibacy, and finds sex so far out of the realm of possibility, that he'd rather continue his own monkish existence than brave the waters. So actually, The 40-Year-Old Virgin is less about sex and more about fear of change. Having experienced a bit of that firsthand, I give Apatow and Carell a great deal of credit for their ability to not look down on their admittedly clueless protagonist. Most of the movie's likability, in fact, comes from Carell's performance. Somewhat like his character, the 42-year-old actor is arriving rather late to screen stardom, and as a result, he brings wisdom and maturity to a part that a more established star, relying on time-tested shtick, would have bungled. (Imagine Ben Stiller or Jim Carrey in the role!) Instead of just tripping over himself whenever a pretty girl walks by, his middle-aged virgin is by turns defensive, game, frustrated, angry and scared. Carell's work is balanced by an equally well-shaded turn by Catherine Keener (as the woman Andy finally, reluctantly, decides to pursue) and in fact most of the supporting cast is great, especially Apatow's crony (and co-producer) Seth Rogen as Andy's dudelike colleague. The only sour note is hit - repeatedly - by Paul Rudd, playing their pathetically lovesick buddy. In a film filled with rich characters, his is surprisingly poorly conceived. Not only that, but nearly all of his jokes fall flat, and he ultimately becomes an unwelcome presence. (He definitely seems out of step with the rest of the cast, which is strange, as he's collaborated with both Apatow and Carell before.) Likewise, as with all comedies, there are misses as well as hits - several of the minor characters are cliched, and a couple of the comic sequences fizzle. But they're very small complaints; this is Carell's vehicle, in the end, and he does a phenomenal job. I found The 40-Year-Old Virgin thoroughly entertaining, quite funny (which is rare, in my opinion, for a Hollywood sex comedy) and with a lot of real insight into human relationships of all stripes. Finally, if there is one thing that I can remark on which has been otherwise unreported, I found it very apt that the story is set in Los Angeles. Presumably they filmed here for budgetary reasons, but as far as I'm concerned, L.A. has both the most sexually aggressive men and the most objectified, leered-at women of any big city in the United States. So it's a brilliant move to place Carell's sexless hero smack dab in the middle of it.

4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (Romania, Cristian Mungiu)
This chilling drama, set in 1987 Romania (before the fall of the Iron Curtain and Ceausescu), concerns a college student seeking a then-illegal abortion and her roommate who decides to help her and gets more than she bargained for, is all the more harrowing because of its quiet, matter-of-fact approach. At a time and place where everybody works only for bribes and nobody trusts each other, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (apparently referring to the amount of time the girl has been pregnant, though this isn't explicitly stated in the film), creates such an air of paranoia that it literally becomes a sort of thriller. (Even the countdown-like title suggests suspense.) You just know something bad is going to happen, though writer-director Mungiu subtly surprises throughout with what really does go wrong and what doesn't. It's safe to say, though, that this is absolutely not a "date movie," and will likely make many, many women (and perhaps some men) feel extremely uncomfortable. And if it finally stands only as a fictional document of life in Romania under Communist rule (though authority figures are almost entirely absent from the story), or as a reminder - as Vera Drake reminded us - that, while abortion is undeniably traumatic, it's still better to have it safe and legal than secretly carried out in anonymous hotel rooms - it's a potent viewing experience, and the actors are so natural that they seem like non-professionals until you realize that it takes trained skill to keep the energy level up through the film's many long, unbroken takes.

FREQUENCY (US, Gregory Hoblit)
The gimmick: solar flare-ups enable 1999 cop Jim Cavaziel to communicate, via shortwave radio, with his late fireman father (Dennis Quaid) in 1969. After giving Dad some information that saves his life, he realizes that it has somehow triggered a horrible side-effect, wherein his mother gets murdered by a serial killer! Thus, father and son team up, over a 30-year gap, to catch the killer and save Mom.

Frequency is the consummate Hollywood movie: an intriguing idea grafted onto a cookie-cutter plot, in this case the old We must identify the murderer and stop him before he kills again! scenario. You can imagine the screenwriter's pitch: "It's like Back to the Future meets Silence of the Lambs!" Ho-hum. Starts off good, ends bad, same old story with most movies these days. But Quaid and Cavaziel are fine, New Yawk accents and all, and the first hour is tolerable. Naturally, it devolves into a climactic battle that you could have predicted about 10 seconds into the film's trailer, and the epilogue, complete with a horrendous country-rock beer anthem, is dreadful. I ran out of that theatre as soon as those credits started rolling. A bit of trivia: Foreign Correspondents costar Douglas Coler auditioned for the part of the killer, and almost got it. Tough luck, Doug.

FRIDA (US, Julie Taymor)
Great-looking but bland biography of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. For Salma Hayek, who stars, apparently making this film was a real labor of love (she is also credited as a producer). Which makes me wonder if the reason she hasn't been in many films lately is because she'd been so focused on getting this one off the ground, or if the reason she wanted to make Frida was because she wasn't getting any work. Anyway, labor of love or not, Hayek is a mediocre actress at best, and I got the feeling in every scene that her passion for making this film was less about her love for the woman she portrays, and more about Winning That Oscar. Her wan talents are matched by a script that falls into the typical biopic trap: instead of trying to capture the essence of the film's subject, it tries to cram every detail of her life into two hours. Frida is little more than a history lesson. If it weren't for the copious amounts of sex (Hayek must have agreed to bare her breasts in order to secure the leading role and get the movie funded), it would be something you'd watch in a high school art class. Hagiographic, obvious, and overladen with recognizable stars trying on phony accents (though Alfred Molina is all right as Diego Rivera, Kahlo's lifelong love, who threatens to usurp the story away from her constantly), Frida is too full of distractions to make any real point about who Kahlo was, or why she stuck with the womanizing Rivera, or ultimately what her place is in art history. The surprising thing is that director Taymor (best known for her stage adaptation of The Lion King and the film Titus), a gifted visual artist in her own right, finds no personal connection between herself and Kahlo, as women striving for greatness in a male-dominated field. The lack of personality and passion in a film about a woman who created some of the most personal and passionate artwork of the twentieth century is more than regrettable, it's a crime. Frida, in short, is a bore, Hayek's body and some nifty animated sequences notwithstanding.

FROM HELL (US, The Hughes Brothers)
Much has been made of the "surprise" that Albert and Allen Hughes, two African-American filmmakers who made the urban crime dramas Menace II Society and Dead Presidents, would helm a film set in Victorian London, working with an all-white cast. As if they were only allowed to make "black" films! Some critics tried to justify it by saying the Hugheses showed us that Jack the Ripper's Whitechapel stomping grounds - filled with prostitutes, gangs, pimps and drugs - was in its own way "The Hood." Still an offensive sentiment. Why not just agree that their style - graphic in every sense of the word - was simply suited to this claustrophobic, hallucinogenic thriller?

That said, the whole allure of the real Jack the Ripper case is, for me, the enduring mystery surrounding it. We will never know who he - history's first known serial killer - was, why he started killing, or why he stopped. The downfall of From Hell is that it takes great pains to explain it, with a solution inclusive of every single theory ever concocted: he didn't act alone, he was a wealthy man, he had surgical training, he was a pillar of society, he had some connection to Queen Victoria's royal court, there was a government cover-up, a cult was involved, and so forth. I was let down by the story's insistence on wrapping up all the loose ends within 2 hours. I would have preferred if the opium-addicted detective put on the Ripper's trail (a typically fine performance by Johnny Depp) never found the answer to this case, and went mad trying. But then it wouldn't have been bankrolled by a major Hollywood studio. So it's got a good atmosphere - though The Hugheses' version of East London is not quite as grimy as it could've been - and a very welcome supporting cast including Ian Holm, Robbie Coltrane and Katrin Cartlidge. But not much else. Heather Graham, for her part, settles into her role eventually, but her English accent is shaky (they explain that she was "born in Ireland") and really, any actress could have played her role just as well. The story stays fairly close to the facts (such as we know them) but takes great liberties in suggesting that the 6 prostitutes murdered by Jack the Ripper were best friends. For the squeamish: the film isn't as bloody - or as scary - as the ads make it appear to be. The gore is limited to brief but effective flash frames, and nothing pops out at you.

FROST/NIXON (US, Ron Howard)
Tense retelling of the historic televised interviews between British talk show host David Frost and recently resigned U.S. president Richard Nixon is not at all the talkfest you might suspect, but is actually structured like a boxing movie, with each contender training, honing his strategy, entering the ring, taking his blows, then retreating to the corner to confer with his team. Frank Langella and Michael Sheen may not look or sound much like Nixon or Frost, respectively, but both are nothing less than excellent, as is the rest of the impeccably professional cast. (Only Rebecca Hall, quite good as the Vicky of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, seems wasted here as Frost's love interest - but then, this is a Ron Howard movie, and women in Ron Howard movies are not allowed to be anything other than the supportive wife or girlfriend. Are you afraid of strong women, Ron Howard?) The real star of the show is screenwriter Peter Morgan, who adapted his own successful play. Morgan's the guy who wrote The Queen, and Frost/Nixon is something of a counterpart to that film, being similarly a dramatization of the scenes behind a major event in recent history that pitted pop culture-savvy climbers against political dinosaurs. (Interestingly, Sheen also starred in The Queen, as Tony Blair.) Morgan's smart take on the role of television and mass culture in history is very compelling, and I'm eager to see what event he chooses to tackle next (apparently something called The Damned United... starring Michael Sheen!). All in all I found Frost/Nixon to be quite good. The real-life interviews may be more fascinating - no one can play Nixon as well as Nixon himself - but there's enough strong behind-the-scenes drama to make this film well worth seeing.

FULLTIME KILLER (Hong Kong, Johnny To & Wai Ka-Fai)
Remember when everybody was going nuts over Hong Kong action pictures some 10 years ago? Well, they're still cranking them out, even if American film geek faddists have moved on. Case in point: Fulltime Killer, a wild drama about two dueling hit men - one Chinese (played by tireless Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau), one Japanese (Takashi Sorimachi) - and the difference in their approaches to their job. Lau's killer "Tok" is a grinning madman, copying his lines and his kills from American movies. Sorimachi's killer "O" has a more traditionally Japanese demeanor: cold, somber, reflective. Of course a girl (Kelly Lin) has to come between them, but as with many Hong Kong action films, it's always left to the audience to wonder whether either man really covets her romantically or if she is just in the way of their own violent flirtation with each other. In the meantime, you get some really great action, lots of flying bullets, a serpentine story - all the hallmarks of Hong Kong action cinema, but with the added depth that comes from a style that has been allowed to mature with time (along with its co-director, the legendary Johnny To, who has helmed more than 30 feature films over the last 25 years). It boggles my mind to see how many genuinely interesting and exciting movies get cranked out by Hong Kong filmmakers each year, even several years after their "golden age" of cinema has officially faded.

THE FUTURE (US, Miranda July)
Artist Miranda July's long-awaited followup to her wonderful debut feature Me and You and Everyone We Know is every bit a proper Miranda July work, in that it explores her usual obsessions with communication, loneliness, guilt, sexuality, and repulsive '80s fashion. But it takes a murkier, gloomier path than her last film. July once again stars, this time as a woman in a blank, empty relationship with her live-in boyfriend (Hamish Linklater, battling July for title of "sloppiest indie haircut"). They have decided to adopt an injured cat, but have to wait a month for the cat's paw to heal at the shelter before they can take him home. (In a move that seems cutesy at first, but becomes increasingly unsettling, the cat himself - voiced by July - narrates the film.) Stricken by the realization that adopting this cat is the first step towards becoming a boring old couple - not that they aren't already pretty boring - July and Linklater decide to "live it up" during their final month of irresponsibility, which entails quitting their jobs and - well, let's just say making some bad decisions, but not in any way that is particularly compelling. Miranda July is a very creative person with a very interesting world view, and The Future is peppered with intriguing ideas, but the sense of warmth and community present in Me and You is missing here. The Future is a more inaccessible work, deliberately paced and claustrophobic, with little joy to be had. I'm fine with downer movies, and I'm pretty sure I understand what she was going for with this film, but July's work - not just Me and You, but her art and writing as well - usually strikes a chord with me, and this film left me cold.