THE LADIES MAN (US, Reginald Hudlin)
Oh no! Another "Saturday Night Live" skit has been adapted for the big screen! This alone should give you enough of an idea of the quality of this movie. Surprise: The Ladies Man is uninspired and stupid. Lesser "SNL" alumnus Tim Meadows plays lisping, oversexed, 70's-clad radio talk show host Leon Phelps. He's received a letter from a wealthy woman fan and tries to find out who she is. Meanwhile, a bunch of angry men whose wives have been seduced by Phelps (led by Meadows' very weird "SNL" costar Will Ferrell, who must have it in his contract to appear in every "SNL" movie that gets produced) plot revenge.

That's it, that's the story. You also get 85 minutes of tired double entendres, gross-out jokes, unamusing secondary characters, Ferrell acting psychotic, and poor Meadows, trying his hardest but providing no memorable moments for the Monday morning water cooler crowd to quote. There's also an entirely boring romantic subplot. (Why do filmmakers insist upon injecting "heart" into these pointless little comedies? Do they think audiences actually demand it?) Trivia buffs may note that Julianne Moore has a cameo as a horny clown. Why she agreed to it is inexplicable; it's like watching Laurence Olivier in a porno. There is also a Broadway-style dance number that appears out of nowhere and tries to milk laughs from those who can't find anything else in the movie funny. However, it too is not funny.

LA MOUSTACHE (France, Emmanuel Carrère)
I've been bad about seeing foreign films lately. Seems that almost everything I've been seeing this year has been American-made. Of this I am much ashamed, as often the best films I see each year will have come from non-English speaking countries. But the truth is, those that are released in the U.S. have such misleading marketing strategies nowadays that I am rarely compelled to go. And can anyone really be blamed for avoiding a film called La Moustache - about a Frenchman who shaves off his moustache? Sounds pretty inane, right? But it was a hot day and my wife and I wanted to cool down in a dark movie theater and there was nothing out there that we really wanted to see. So we took a chance and, to my surprise, La Moustache turned out to be something very strange and intriguing. For while our hero, Marc (Vincent Lindon), does - on a whim - shave off the moustache that he's sported for years during the film's opening moments, and while at first, when Marc's own wife Agnes (Emmanuelle Devos) doesn't notice the change, it seems as though La Moustache will be some light comedy about the overfamiliarity of long-married couples, when Agnes, Marc's friends and his coworkers soon inform Marc that he never had a moustache - even though he can see it clearly in old photos and on his passport - the story takes a sharp left turn into Kafka territory, and it's clear that there will be nothing light or whimsical about La Moustache, a paranoid, even nightmarish drama about identity that asks existentialist questions about whether we really know ourselves. At first I, a literal-minded American, found it hard to fight my urge to ask "Well, why doesn't he just prove he had a moustache by..." and accept that, in true Kafka fashion, the "why" behind this surreal situation is not to be explained, and just as we do not question why Gregor Samsa has woken up as a giant cockroach in The Metamorphosis but simply observe how this change affects his relationship with his family, so too must audiences simply sit back and watch Marc's knowledge of his self vanish before his - and our - very eyes. La Moustache is a very disconcerting film, and while I won't give away some of the surprise twists, I can say that it is something very unusual and compelling. Oblique, repetitive and slow-moving at times, it's possibly more interesting to write about than to actually watch, but for those with a yearning for arty subtitled fare, it's worth seeing.

LA PETITE LILI (France, Claude Miller)
Watching this film was possibly the most surreal time I've ever had at the movies. Allow me to explain: In 1998, Yelena Danova (who starred in my first film Foreign Correspondents) and another Russian actress named Olga Vodin hired me to write a script for them. The assignment: To adapt Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull for the screen, updating the setting from a summer idyll in Czarist Russia to the Malibu of today. It was enjoyable but very challenging work, requiring dozens of story meetings and drawn-out arguments over how to clarify some of Chekhov's many murky details for the screen. Though Yelena and Olga are as yet still struggling to raise money for the film, all agree that our script is a success. The secret? To refrain from worshiping Chekhov the Great Dramatist and simply have fun with his characters. Anyway, the whole reason I bring this up is that Claude Miller and his cowriter Julien Boivent decided (back in 2003, apparently) to do the same thing, only moving Chekhov's clutch of frustrated lovers to the contemporary French countryside. How strange it was to watch these characters walk on screen and to be able to say "Look, that's their version of Trigorin. And there's Masha right there." It felt as though I'd sold my script to the French... only to have them screw it up royally.

Of course, if this is all Greek (or, for that matter, French or Russian) to you, then you might see what the main problem is with La Petite Lili: If you don't know The Seagull fairly well, I fear you'll find this film pointless, drab, and pretentious to no end. And even as someone who can claim to know The Seagull more intimately than any other play he's ever read, I found this adaptation a crashingly dull affair. Miller and company take Chekhov far too seriously, their film a nearly scene-by-scene rehash of the first two acts of the classic play, with precious little wit (aside from Jean-Pierre Marielle as the wise-cracking old uncle). As for the third act, they disembark from the play's story entirely. And it's actually the most interesting part of the film. But it has nothing to do with The Seagull and only slightly more to do with Chekhov. (It has dawned on me that the whole film may be something of a put-on, a gag about the shallowness of filmmakers and actors; if so, then only cast and crew are really in on the joke.) In any event, I'm in a unique position here, reviewing this film, having actually done the same homework as Miller and Boivent. At the risk of sounding too proud, I must say that, whereas Olga, Yelena and I managed to figure out how to make this tricky play work as a modern movie, I believe our French counterparts finally gave up, after conceding privately amongst themselves that they couldn't really understand their source material. I could go on, but few of you reading this will care, and even fewer will get a chance to see this film. Trust me, you're not missing anything. But hopefully the Seagull that I wrote will, one day, come into being, and you can go to that and have a much jollier time.

LAST DAYS (US, Gus Van Sant)
Gus Van Sant's fictionalized account of Kurt Cobain's final hours is the third in his series of achingly slow youth-oriented tragedies, following Gerry and Elephant. As in those previous films, Van Sant eschews story in favor of atmosphere. But Last Days lacks the beauty and sadness that made Gerry and especially Elephant so effective. Which is ironic, since Cobain's 1994 suicide had such an emotional impact on his millions of fans. Van Sant's purposefully objective approach may be to blame: we are treated to numerous scenes of Cobain's onscreen counterpart "Blake" (played by Michael Pitt) wandering around the forested grounds of his decaying Seattle estate, muttering to himself like Popeye, while various "adults" come looking for him (Ricky Jay as a PI hired by Blake's unseen wife, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon as a sympathetic manager-type) and his no-account friends squat in his mansion. (One of the things I found most fascinating about Kurt Cobain was that, even after achieving great wealth and worldwide fame, his best buddies remained the sketchy, drug-addled slackers from his poverty-stricken past.) And that's basically it. Blake's world is clearly bleak, empty and deadening, but his story sheds no light on why Cobain was so important in the first place, nor the hopelessness he must have felt before he took his own life. Going by this film, you'd think his death was almost an accident, a random bad decision brought on simply by too many drugs. (Indeed, while nobody is shown taking drugs during the movie, everybody acts permanently wasted, particularly Blake, and his bloodless death suggests an overdose rather than a shotgun blast.) Also at fault is Michael Pitt in the lead role. He's a pretty boy, his pouty lips reminiscent more of Leonardo DiCaprio than of Kurt Cobain, even with the requisite stringy blonde hair and patchy beard. We've all seen photos of Cobain: the tense, haunted look in his eyes was real. There's no depth in Pitt's mannerisms; the closest he can achieve is "vacant." Even the ersatz Nirvana song he performs in the film comes off as a shallow imitation of Cobain's real work. The big problem is that Kurt Cobain was a true star - he had an inimitable charisma that went far beyond his grungy aesthetic - and few actors can be expected to tap into his complex mystique. Nevertheless, I fear Van Sant chose Pitt for his Calvin-Klein-model good looks over the intensity of his performance. Last Days has its merits - particularly its experimental sound design and elliptical editing - but finally it disappoints. It creates a mood, then fails to do anything with it.

LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE (Thailand/Japan, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang)
Kenji, a neat freak from Osaka (played by ubiquitous superstar Tadanobu Asano), has relocated to Bangkok, where he works in a Japanese-language library. One night, while contemplating suicide (yet again) from a bridge, he meets by horrific happenstance a local girl named Noi (Sinitta Boonyasak) - after her sister Nid gets killed crossing traffic to save him. Soon after, Kenji's own brother - a Yakuza - is murdered in Kenji's apartment by an associate. Kenji himself dispatches the associate, suggesting that he is more than the shy librarian he appears. Bonding, in a way, over their lost siblings, Kenji and Noi form a tenuous friendship, with Kenji volunteering to hang out at Noi's messy house outside town, tidying it up while avoiding the carnage at his own home. Though much of the story plays up the differences between the stoic Japanese and the earthy, emotional Thai people, it struggles to mean more than that, and almost succeeds. Last Life in the Universe is a strange, poetic, beautiful-looking little movie, at once romantic and slow and mysterious and silly and pointless. Pen-Ek and his cinematographer, the great Christopher Doyle, inarguably create a rich atmosphere, and in many ways the film is as much a mood piece as any of Doyle's frequent collaborator Wong Kar Wai's are. The Australian-born Doyle has become one of the central characters in Asian "art" cinema, and it's easy to see why: he is madly in love with both the landscape and the people of Southeast Asia, and his work is as important in Last Life as is writer/director Pen-Ek's. In fact, for many the cinematography may be the best part of the film. Though Asano and Boonyasak put in great, understated performances, and there are plenty of quirks in the storyline to keep viewers interested, some may find it all too vague. I liked the film myself, but after I figured out the puzzling plot elements, it didn't really stay with me.

LAST ORDERS (UK, Fred Schepisi)
A dream cast of England's finest (Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings and Ray Winstone) is assembled for this very British merchant-class drama about a tight-knit group of old farts who gather together after one of their own (Caine) dies, and embark on a road trip to deliver his ashes to the seaside town of Margate. Along their journey, they each flash back to key scenes throughout their various pasts, from the 40's to the 80's (it's not made explicit in the film, but I believe the "present day" of the story is around 1989). The various disappointments and minor triumphs of these ordinary lives are handled with typical English resignation. ("Ah well. 'Ere's to 'im anyway.") It's a pleasure to see these fine actors play off each other, especially Hoskins and Mirren. My only quibble is that the story doesn't give Hemmings or Courtenay's characters much dramatic reason to exist. They're just kind of there, and their motivations are ill-defined. It's a minor issue, though. Slow-moving and episodic, Last Orders may not appeal to many people besides the British - and the Anglophiles that love them - but it asks from you nothing more than to sit back and enjoy some fine acting and some well-etched, wistful characters.

LAUREL CANYON (US, Lisa Cholodenko)
One great thing about living in Los Angeles is being able to watch a movie called Laurel Canyon and then, walking out of the theatre, realize that you are just across the street from Laurel Canyon Blvd. Anyway, writer/director Cholodenko made a name for herself with the acclaimed indie High Art back in 1998. This, her second feature, could be called "High Art Goes West." The concept is similar: ambitious girl falls in with an artsy older woman and her decadent hangers-on, questions her own relationship with her dreary boyfriend. Here, though, instead of the drugged-out art scenesters of New York, we get to hang with the generally jollier, only mildly drugged-out rock stars of Los Angeles. Frances McDormand is just fine, as usual, as Jane, a fortysomething record producer who's had more lovers than most people have hair on their heads. Kate Beckinsale is Alex, the young square who falls under Jane's spell, and Christian Bale is Sam, Alex's uptight fiance, who would rather be as far away from all these degenerates as possible. Which is a little difficult as Jane is his mother and they are staying at her house/studio for a while as Sam adjusts to his new internship at a local hospital. Adding some spice to the mix are Jane's British pop star boyfriend (Alessando Nivola, convincing), who has a thing for Alex, and Sam's colleague Sara (Natasha McElhone), who has quite a thing for Sam herself. Eschewing much of a story, Cholodenko centers the film around this love pentagle, and if the film has anything to say, it's about the slipperiness of attraction. Cholodenko is thankfully as unapologetic about Jane's fluid sexuality as Jane is, and that makes for a sexier film. She also once again proves herself adept at creating a whole "scene" - I was astonished at how real this environment felt; you could practically smell the trees around Jane's hillside home. I also dig Cholodenko's eccentric casting choices - the cast's three Brits (Beckinsale, Bale, McElhone) play a couple of Yanks and an Israeli, respectively, while the story's one Brit is played by an American.

So what's wrong with the film? Not much - other than the fact that few of the characters are in the least likeable. Especially Bale's priggish whiner, who takes a long time to get used to. Admittedly, I'm no big fan of his, or of the usually wooden Beckinsale (slightly better here) or even of the nondescript McElhone, who I must say is a revelation as the shy but sexy Israeli intern. Eventually, by film's end, I'd gotten to know and like these characters, without feeling any sympathy for them. And despite Cholodenko's indie street cred, there is something a little too polished about the dialogue and camerawork of Laurel Canyon - it feels a bit Hollywood, even if its sexual politics are a bit more progressive. Still, not a bad date movie, thanks to a couple of hot scenes and a general mellowness. Its open ending may frustrate some viewers (or at least make some wonder if a Laurel Canyon II is in the works), but I actually liked it, for punctuating the story's central idea that relationships are anything but tidy.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (Sweden, Tomas Alfredson)
Completely original horror-drama, set in a snowbound Stockholm suburb in early 1982, about a shy 12-year-old boy who is mercilessly bullied at school until he strikes up an odd friendship with the new girl next door... who happens to be a vampire. Sure to attain cult status, especially among goth teens, Let the Right One In is a canny blend of sympathetic performances, highly creative scenes of violence, remarkable cinematography and a suspenseful story rich in unexpected moments. The film is so well made, in fact, that my only disappointment is that it never delves as deep as one might expect it to. Director Alfredson and screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist (adapting his novel) start exploring themes of loneliness, abuse and devotion, but instead of leaving us with something profound, Let the Right One In works mostly as just a really nifty vampire story. Oh well. If that's good enough for them, then it's good enough for me. To anybody already sold on the concept, I highly recommend the film, and that's coming from a guy who likes Swedish movies about a thousand times more than he likes vampire movies.

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA (US, Clint Eastwood)
So here's the story, as I know it: Originally, Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood's follow-up to Flags of Our Fathers and the second of his two films to deal with the critical battle of Iwo Jima during World War II, was meant to be released in the spring of 2007. I suspect the plan was that Flags of Our Fathers would win the Best Picture Oscar in February of 2007, and then Letters would ride into theaters on the wave of accolades for its predecessor. But, while good, Flags of Our Fathers wasn't the instant classic that Warner Bros. had hoped for, and due to lackluster box office and warm but not spectacular critical response, was clearly not going to be the front runner at Oscar time. (As of this writing, though, who knows?) So a worried studio realized that the super-efficient Eastwood was already finishing up Letters in time to qualify for the Oscars before the end of 2006, and soon early reviewers started claiming that it was the better film, and so now the film has become the great white hope for the studio. Or, if you'll pardon the racial pun, the great yellow hope. For Letters tells the story of the battle entirely from the Japanese point of view. Mel Gibson's dead-language fantasias aside, this makes Letters the first Hollywood picture to be filmed in a foreign tongue. This adds great authenticity to the film, which is otherwise your basic war movie, albeit a well-made one. The characters - some historical, most fictional - are appealing, likable people. People you don't want to see get killed. People who, sixty years ago, were depicted as buck-toothed, bat-winged monsters, flying out of the sky to rape white women in an endless assortment of appalling American propaganda campaigns. It's a pity that this film couldn't have come out in 1943; can you imagine the response it would have gotten, displaying enemy Japanese soldiers as introspective, soft-spoken human beings? Leave it to Hollywood's Mr. "Racial Sensitivity" himself, Paul Haggis, to come up with the story (with sole screenplay credit given to Japanese-American researcher Iris Yamashita). It's hip to pan his previous Oscar winner Crash these days as being sanctimonious junk, but Haggis is still a crack writer (his script for Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby is wonderful) and there is very little that is cloying about Letters from Iwo Jima, save for one scene that pushes the brothers-in-arms theme just a little too far. (Without revealing details, it involves the reading of a letter to an American soldier from his mother.) It's a fine film, definitely worthwhile and, for some, even important viewing during these modern days of war.

LEVITY (US, Ed Solomon)
As average as a movie can get. I saw Levity when it opened the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, and there was something so appropriate about that, a by-the-numbers redemption picture that has all the usual elements of what now constitutes your "classic" Sundance film: death, loss, drug addiction, crime, religion, gritty urban decay. And Redemption, of course. In Levity (written and directed by millionaire Men in Black screenwriter Ed Solomon, with an Oscar-winning cast and crew - this is independent?), Billy Bob Thornton puts on a long gray wig that makes him look like Killer Bob from "Twin Peaks" and is released from jail 20 years after killing a young man in a convenience store robbery. Obsessed with guilt for his crimes, he decides the only way he can find peace is if he befriends his victim's sister (Holly Hunter), whose troubled teenage son, by pure coincidence, is about to go down the same dark road that Thornton once traveled. If that weren't enough people who needed to be saved, enter Kirsten Dunst as a bored suburban girl who comes into the seedy section of town where Thornton lives in order to score drugs. Morgan Freeman, affecting a silly Redd Foxx growl, plays a preacher with a shady past (surprise) who befriends Thornton. Dunst's and Freeman's characters barely even belong in this story, which tries so hard to be earnest that it risks nothing, challenges nobody, gives us no new ideas. Basically it's a vanity project for a pampered Hollywood dorkus whose dreams of earning some credibility with a "low budget" project result in this generic, whitewashed tale which attains a level of blandness that not even its A-list cast can redeem.

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU (US, Wes Anderson)
I'm of the opinion that Wes Anderson's films represent a sort of cinematic law of diminishing returns: as each budget gets bigger, and as Anderson's cult following gets larger, his work becomes less interesting. To wit: Bottle Rocket was thoroughly original and charming; Rushmore was cute, if inconsequential; The Royal Tenenbaums was a bloated snooze. So it was with low expectations that I went into The Life Aquatic. Happily, it's a funnier, livelier film than its predecessor, and thanks to a surprisingly earnest performance by Owen Wilson (for once, not cowriting the screenplay with Anderson), it earns its pathos.

Set apparently during the early 1970s, The Life Aquatic is an anecdotal look at an American Jacques Cousteau (Bill Murray, going back to the anti-authoritarian slacker character that made him a star in movies like Stripes and Ghostbusters) and his ragtag crew of untrained scientists and documentary filmmakers. When a young man claiming to be his bastard son (Wilson) shows up, that, along with the presence of a nosy journalist (Cate Blanchett, sporting an odd Britishy accent), throws his concentration off his Moby Dick-like hunt for the "jaguar shark" that ate his partner. Anderson seems to like pacing many of his scenes in a stilted manner. This is risky, because if the audience doesn't fill those awkward pauses with laughter, the movie becomes less and less enjoyable as it trudges on. Which is what happened when I saw it on Christmas night. Granted, most of the crowd might have been wiped out after the day's festivities, but there were clearly lots of jokes in the film that people either didn't get or just didn't find funny. I was amused, but that's about all I can give it. Still, The Life Aquatic grew on me after a while, especially whenever it woke up from its laid-back comedy to run off on a zany bit of adventure (which is what made Bottle Rocket work so well). So I wound up liking it more in the end than I did during its first draggy half. And I have to hand it to Anderson (and his cowriter Noah Baumbach) for creating a gaggle of memorable characters (Willem Dafoe is especially funny as a whiny German crew member). Nevertheless, I'm getting tired of his "Because it would be wacky!" style of filmmaking. I love wacky, but in Anderson's case it's starting to come off as too self-conscious.

THE LIFE OF REILLY (US, Frank L. Anderson, Barry Poltermann)
Charles Nelson Reilly, who died earlier in 2007, is best known as a game show fixture throughout the '70s, most notably on Match Game, with his outrageous outfits and catty responses. But the real Reilly was a professionally trained, award-winning actor, and, aware that his life was ebbing to its close, put on a one-man show for a couple of years in order to convince as many people as possible to remember him for his acting and teaching work, and not for Match Game. The Life of Reilly is just a filmed version of one of his 2004 performances - his last, as it would turn out - and while Reilly is a funny, engaging raconteur, I'm not sure if the film is relevant to anybody who has no idea who he is. There are no universal truths here, just some witty and at times horrifying anecdotes of his dysfunctional childhood in the Bronx and his rise on the New York stage. All in all, the show is just one actor's plea to be taken (somewhat) seriously after decades of chuckling buffoonery, and it would have come across as desperate if Reilly wasn't so darn likable. My wife and I saw this movie because we are Match Game fans, of course. But even though it isn't even mentioned by name - and Reilly only fleetingly refers once or twice to his game show career - The Life of Reilly offers one last chance to see the man in his finest, bitchiest form.

LILO & STITCH (US, Dean Deblois & Chris Sanders)
What a surprise. I avoided Disney animated movies for the past decade (with the notable exception of the Pixar films, which can't be considered "Disney" anyway) ever since being underwhelmed by the rather dull Beauty and the Beast. But after being assured that Lilo & Stitch eschewed the treacly song scores that have been the staple of Disney's recent cartoons (mushy junk by Alan Menken, Tim Rice, Phil Collins, Sting, etc.) in favor of Elvis Presley classics, I decided to check it out. The story of Lilo & Stitch may very well be the most original idea to come out of Disney - it's a wonder that they even agreed to do it. For how can you sell a family-oriented cartoon about a genetically-engineered space alien who has been programmed to destroy everything in its path, and winds up befriending a little orphaned Hawaiian girl? Lucky for us, the film is a hit, which will hopefully allow the folks at Mauschwitz (what former Disney employees call the studio) a bit more creative freedom in the future. The animation is, as usual, first-rate, the lush watercolor backgrounds are breathtaking, the story is tight and the characters are refreshingly realistic. Lilo's family situation sounds more like a Lifetime TV movie than a Disney cartoon: raised alone by her older sister Nani, who can't hold down a job and is too wrapped up in her responsibilities to even date the boy she likes, Lilo is a misfit who beats up her fair-weather "friends" and falls instantly in love with the obviously vicious little monster that is Stitch. It's this creature that brings the hilariously nasty humor to the film, as well as a great deal of its humanity. Lilo & Stitch is mostly reminiscent of the similarly-themed animated film The Iron Giant (which was produced by Warner Bros.) in terms of its depth, thoughtfulness, love and craft. A scene where Stitch finds himself alone in the rain forest one night and quietly cries, "I'm lost!" is literally the most moving thing I have seen in a movie theatre all year. And the Elvis songs work great.

LILYA 4-EVER (Sweden, Lukas Moodysson)
If I hadn't already become a fan of young Swedish director Moodysson through his first two features, the incredibly honest and uplifting Show Me Love and Together (both of which I insist you go out and rent right now), I wonder if I would have immediately accepted his sympathy for the tormented heroine of his brutal third film Lilya 4-Ever. Said heroine, Lilya (Oksana Akinshina), is a 16-year-old girl living in a slum in the former USSR. Her story starts off bad enough: her own mother abandons her to run off to America with her boyfriend. Lilya then gets kicked out of her apartment by a heartless aunt, loses her money, loses her friends... and that's just the beginning of an increasingly hopeless downward spiral. It's hard to talk about the main point of Lilya 4-Ever as it doesn't come up until after halfway through the film - though you can imagine what a beautiful 16-year-old girl with no money and no job winds up doing in order to survive. Moodysson's heart is in the right place, even if watching the film becomes something of a masochistic experience, and there's no denying that what he's trying to say is very important (though by the credits, with the director's dedication, the film is clearly more of a piece of agitprop than it is drama). But man, is it bleak. Oksana Akinshina is wonderful, though, as the alternately jaded and trusting Lilya. You can't help but love her more while the rest of the world transforms her from human being into statistic, and the tragedy of her story - and those of young people like her - is heartbreaking. Also impressive is the film's other non-professional young star, Artyom Bogucharsky, as the prepubescent lad who becomes Lilya's best and ultimately only friend. The rawness of their performances, and of Moodysson's documentary-like style, keep Lilya 4-Ever in the mind long after it's over. All the same, I hope this director returns to happy movies again very soon.

THE LIMITS OF CONTROL (Spain/US/Japan, Jim Jarmusch)
I will not defend The Limits of Control to anybody. In fact I predict that many will find the film insufferably pretentious and boring - and that includes fans of Jarmusch. The director once claimed that he makes movies that are about the time that passes between moments, and this is most true of this deliberately paced anti-thriller about a mysterious professional (Ivory Coast actor and frequent Jarmusch collaborator Isaach de Bankole) who is sent to Spain and spends several days waiting around, receiving vague instructions, then waiting around again. Though Jarmusch has outgrown the very long takes that first defined his style, he still loves silence and stillness. Cinematography by the legendary Christopher Doyle and a sludgy, psychedelic soundtrack by Japanese band Boris make sure that the silence and stillness have a personality. Meanwhile, a number of familiar actors show up in brief cameos, where they speak abstractly about art, science, music and the like before giving de Bankole a coded message which he promptly eats. All this repetition and ennui does eventually lead somewhere, though the payoff may not be worth it to some. (In fact, many might find the only redeeming facet of this film to be the appearance of Spanish actress/model Paz de la Huerta, completely nude except for a pair of glasses.) Did I like it? I liked it enough. Jarmusch's best films have a tendency to haunt me for many years, and although The Limits of Control doesn't measure up to Ghost Dog or Dead Man, this might be due to its dated message: giving nothing away, I have noticed that Jarmusch's films tend to be about the relationship between foreigners and America, and thought that this film might be a break in the trend until Bill Murray pops up, and his scene provides the meaning to the film's elaborate puzzle (as well as its title), though it may be nothing more than Jarmusch's anger at Bush-era American imperialism. A strong stance in 2004, but not so strong today as Bush and his ruinous policies already feel like distant, ugly memories.

LITTLE CHILDREN (US, Todd Field)
I didn't much care for Little Children during its first half hour. A tale of bored suburbanites in Massachusetts, I detected something portentiously American Beauty-like in its opening minutes - and I hated American Beauty. The initial meeting between unhappy stay-at-home spouses Sarah and Brad (Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson) is contrived. The gossipy housewives in the playground where Sarah takes her daughter are too cartoonish, especially the bitchy "queen bee" Mary Ann (Mary B. McCann). And the burgeoning romance between Sarah and Brad seems too obviously doomed from the get-go. But when Jackie Earle Haley appears as a recently-paroled pedophile, suddenly the film gets interesting. Not because Haley's character is sympathetic - these days, it's like you can't make a movie without having a sympathetic pedophile in it (see L.I.E., Happiness, The Woodsman) - but because he's so interesting to watch. A former teen actor known in the 1970's for starring in the Bad News Bears series, Haley hadn't performed in 13 years when he got the part. He embodies his role to such a real degree that you might wonder if Field found the actor while surfing through a "Megan's Law" site. And even though Haley's scenes play second fiddle to the main drama - the extramarital adventures of Winslet and Wilson - it both wakes up the story (based on the novel by Tom Perrotta, who cowrite the script with director Field) and grounds it in reality. The title of the film gives away its theme, for "little children" doesn't refer to the characters' own offspring, or of those supposedly endangered by the return of the pedophile to the community, but to the characters themselves, weak adults who use their past failures as excuses for not growing up and getting their lives together. They practically want to become the old schoolyard stereotypes: the bully, the jock, the cheerleader, the loner. It is, after all, easier than dealing with the endless complications that come with actual maturity. And while the story sets us up for all manner of potential American Beauty-esque tragedy at the climax, the film almost magically brings it all together for a conclusion that, though maybe a little rushed, is graceful and heartfelt where I expected violent and grim. In its own way, it grows up. There are still plenty of glitches in Little Children - Patrick Wilson is a bland, dime-a-dozen hunk who makes only obvious acting choices; a couple of attempts at visual humor make an awkward fit with the rest of the film; an intrusive third-person voiceover narration (by Will Lyman, who doesn't appear in the picture), intended perhaps as a Brechtian distancing device, comes across as pretentious and unnecessary. I wish I could have seen a cut of the film without it. But Winslet is truly great here. I'm not usually a fan of her work - I find her acting a bit mannered most of the time - but here I think she truly gets what the film is about, and dives into her role as an obsessed lost soul who first pretends she's an adult, then pretends she's an adolescent, and fails at both. She and Jackie Earle Haley are the best reasons to see Little Children, a flawed but interesting movie that does not disappoint.

LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (US, Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris)
This is the breakout hit from the 2006 Sundance Festival, about a comically dysfunctional family from Albuquerque whose awkward 8-year-old daughter surprisingly makes it into the finals of a beauty pageant for little girls and who then gather together to embark on a two-day road trip to Redondo Beach, California for the finals. And while the kooky characters and zany yellow VW bus they ride in may scream Quirk-O-Rama, the script, by first-time writer Michael Arndt, continues to dodge all manner of preciousness while serving up some bone-dry laughs and wise, honest insight about a family of born losers. His offbeat mix of vulgar black comedy and feel-good movie, directed by the husband and wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (their first feature after innumerable music videos), may make some viewers uneasy, not only in its delivery but in its message - rare for an American film - that compared to the creeps we call "winners" these days, it's not only okay but maybe even preferable to be a loser. For despite the upbeat finale (and I'm giving nothing away, since the tone of the film in general suggests from the start some sort of happy ending), Little Miss Sunshine still has, at its heart, a real anger at the soullesness of our corporate, hypercompetitive modern world, where everyone from beauty pageant hosts to grief counselers reflect a shallow, unfeeling status quo that the Hoovers, one by one, find themselves rejecting. In fact if there is one character whose growth is central to the film, it is not little Olive (the disarming Abigail Breslin), the chubby, nerdy child who believes she has a chance of winning a grotesque beauty pageant where appallingly sexed-up little girls strut their stuff on the catwalk, but her father Richard (Greg Kinnear), the success-obsessed entrepeneur who cannot stand the stink of failure in his family even as he becomes aware that he is as big a loser as everybody around him. Although Kinnear is, for much of the film, pretty hard to take (especially in light of the rest of the largely appealing cast, including Alan Arkin as the foul-mouthed, heroin-snorting grandfather and Steve Carell, nicely underplaying it as the suicidal gay brother), I see his initial obnoxiousness as necessary to his character's growth during the story. As for the grand finale, though there is something Hollywood-friendly about it, it still rings as a genuine "f--k you" to mainstream America, and it still doesn't pull the Hoovers out of their desperate, nowhere lives - they're actually all worse off by film's end than they were at the beginning! Maybe it's due to my own fascination with success and failure, but I for one found the film refreshing. I also feel that the filmmakers worked very hard to convince audiences that their characters deserve whatever happiness they find, even if it's not the happiness they were looking for. By my standards, they succeeded. (And surprise - there's even a cameo by Claustrophobia/Serial Slayer star Mary Lynn Rajskub towards the end.)

LITTLE OTIK (Czech Republic, Jan Svankmajer)
In a contemporary Czech city, an ordinary couple is desperately trying to have a baby, despite their own stubborn biology. In a light-hearted effort to cheer up his wife, the husband, a wood-carving hobbyist, fashions a baby out of an uprooted tree stump. To his dismay, his wife, whose sanity had apparently long been on the breaking point, starts treating the chunk of wood as if it were their actual child! What starts out as a dryly humorous look at modern parenthood suddenly becomes a 21st-century Eraserhead when their "baby" comes to life - monstrously so. The film them shifts into even wilder fairy tale territory, ranking with the grimmest of the Grimm, when the pigtailed girl down the hall gets involved. Welcome to the darkly humorous - and at times very sick - world of famed Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, whose short films have prefigured, if not outright influenced, the work of Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, and scores of stop-motion animators. Over the last decade Svankmajer has concentrated on feature films that are about 90% live action, with pockets of animation often popping up startlingly (and always to great delight), and Little Otik is as good as his best. I won't give away any more of the film's surprises; I will simply say that it offers not only the darkest laughs of the year (not many people can successfully elicit genuine humor out of an elderly pedophile's obsession with a 12-year-old girl's bottom), but plenty of inspiration as well: you can't help but get caught up in Svankmajer's ceaseless creativity.

LITTLEROCK (US, Mike Ott)
This bare bones indie about a Japanese tourist stuck in a listless California town has much more going for it than meets the eye. It opens with the brother-sister duo of Atsuko and Rintaro (played by Atsuko Okatsuka, who also cowrote the story, and Rintaro Sawamoto) arriving in the titular Littlerock, about an hour east of Los Angeles, when their rental car breaks down on the way to the ruins of the Japanese internment camp at Manzanar. They soon become the subjects of idle fascination for the bored young locals who, post high school, have not yet figured out what to do with their lives. The first to latch on to them is Cory (Cory Zacharia), a garrulous but little-liked nerd who spies a rare chance at friendship - and possibly romance - with the hip, gentle Atsuko, even though she doesn't speak a word of English. When their car is repaired and Rintaro is eager to at least check out San Francisco, Atsuko decides to hang around in Littlerock on her own for a few days - not because of Cory, but because of a scruffy, handsome dude named Jordan who's also been giving her the eye. So Rintaro takes off, taking his limited English and thus Atsuko's only means of verbal communication with him. Littlerock is truly what American independent cinema is supposed to be about: zero budget, no stars, and a quiet but emotionally honest little story about human relationships. In using foreigners to examine the bleak American landscape, it follows in the footsteps of Jim Jarmusch's early films - Mystery Train seems like the obvious parallel because of its Japanese tourists, but Stranger Than Paradise is a much more direct comparison - though it eschews Jarmusch's rigid formalism for the gritty, handheld look more typical of today's low-budget movies. It's not flawless - the characters' inability to learn even a couple of words of each other's language in order to communicate is a little disingenuous, even if I see the point. Also, it depicts a world that only seems to exist in indie films, where the '90s apparently never ended, young people still listen to cassette tapes, and nobody has a cell phone - but Littlerock's charms are plentiful. Okatsuka has a quiet appeal, the sun-baked high desert environment provides a haunting backdrop, and there is genuine feeling on display here, subtle as it is. For anyone who complains that American independent cinema has lost its soul, Littlerock is for you.

THE LIVES OF OTHERS (Germany, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck)
One of the few surprises at the February 2007 Oscars was the award for best Foreign Film. Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth - which caused some upsets itself by winning three Oscars in art-related categories - was the clear front-runner in this category, but his sumptuous, gory fantasy got trounced by this quiet, low-budget drama from Germany about the East German secret police - the Stasi - during the final years before German reunification. After having seen both films, I think the Academy got it right: whereas Pan's Labyrinth tried to distract from its script problems and one-dimensional characters with disturbing imagery, The Lives of Others relies on good old-fashioned storytelling, with strong actors portraying rich, complex characters. It also, like Pan's Labyrinth, succeeds at taking us to a time and a place that most of us know little about, in this case East Berlin in 1984-85. The Berlin Wall would be torn down within five years, but at the time that seemed to everyone an impossibility. The Stasi were in complete control, the citizenry lived in fear of being informed upon, and all assumed that was the way it would continue to be forever. The particular story that The Lives of Others tells is of a lonely Stasi agent (the bald, stoic Ulrich Mühe, perfectly cast) who is enlisted to spy upon a successful East German playwright, apparently because a Bureau Chief has the hots for the playwright's actress girlfriend and wants to discover some treasonous act to justify sending the playwright off to prison. When the Stasi agent discovers that the playwright is planning to publish something scandalous in the West, the plot thickens. One of the strengths of The Lives of Others is that it suggests how much of the power the Stasi held over people was a purely psychological one. These secret policemen aren't shown torturing or killing people. Instead, by threatening to demote family members or keep them out of prestigious schools, and by rewarding informants with gift baskets, they appeal to the petty, workaday needs of most people. Beautifully shot on a small scale and well-acted by all, the film's only fault is that, at 2 hours and 17 minutes, it runs a little too long. Oh, and it also uses the same piece of music about twenty times. Writer/director Von Donnersmarck's budget may have been low, but he could have afforded to have a bit more scoring. Still, don't let any of that stop you from seeing this fine, satisfying film.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING (US/New Zealand, Peter Jackson)
I don't know what to say about this film other than it is, as expected, perfectly made. But I will fill a little column space with biographical trivia: when I was a kid, I saw the Ralph Bakshi animated version of the Lord of the Rings saga, in a feature film that only covered the first book and a half of the three original novels. I remember liking it enough to see it 3 or even 4 times while it was in theatres, but friends tell me now that if I saw it again, I'd hate it. Maybe. But at least it served as a good introduction to the story and the characters. I tried to read the books, but they were too large, too unwieldly, and I was too young and easily distracted, to get past page 30. I was a TV baby, hooked on the boob tube until I weaned myself from it at age 21 (and have since not looked back). So I didn't read much back then. Anyway, all these years later, I still remember things like Pippin's real name is Peregrine, and Aragorn is nicknamed Strider, and Gimli's a dwarf, so while watching Peter Jackson's triumph of a film, part of the joy for me was seeing all my childhood memories flooding back. But I couldn't help but wonder, "What would people make of this film if they were completely unfamiliar with Tolkien's original tale?" Would they find it confusing? Pretentious? Dorky? But from my uninitiated friends' reports, most seem to understand and enjoy the film just fine. I'm sure there isn't anybody reading this who is on the fence about seeing The Fellowship of the Ring; you are either dying to see it, have seen it already, or feel somewhat ambivalent towards the whole enterprise and thus don't care. Nothing I say will change any of it. But I liked the film a lot.

Okay, more trivia: Rings co-star Sean Astin was the first person to come up to me at the premiere of my first film Foreign Correspondents to tell me how much he liked it. I was so nervous that night that I didn't even realize who he was until somebody said "Hey, 'Rudy' just thanked you!" This was in early 1999, a few weeks before he was cast in Rings. I guess he was a friend of Wil Wheaton's and got invited to the premiere that way. Also, I met Rings costar Ian McKellen back in 1992 when he performed Richard III onstage in L.A. I introduced him to my friend Norma. 5 years later, he wound up narrating a documentary about my friend Norma, and totally forgot that he'd met her years earlier after his play. And needless to say, if I hadn't seen Peter Jackson's 1994 film Heavenly Creatures and discovered his young star Melanie Lynskey, my own first movie, and maybe my whole film career, would have been entirely different. Small world, eh folks? Small world.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (US/New Zealand, Peter Jackson)
I won't fill this review with autobiographical notes as I did in my review of Fellowship of the Ring. But I will say again that it's nearly pointless to review this. If you liked Fellowship, you will surely see The Two Towers. If you didn't, you won't. Because although I enjoyed The Two Towers more, it's hard to critique it as a separate work, as all three movies in the Lord of the Rings series were shot at once, so this isn't so much a sequel as it is the second part of one 9- or 10-hour film. But yes, I did like it better. Maybe Tolkien's book is simply stronger than the first, or maybe the film's epic sweep is more commanding, or maybe it's because Jackson and crew used that extra year of post production to perfect what they established with Fellowship. The special effects are even more awesome, if that's possible, but the real improvement is in the music. Howard Shore composed a great, Oscar-winning score for Fellowship, but he outdoes himself here, bringing in new sounds and elements and lessening the bombastic main theme too frequently featured in the first movie's soundtrack. Not only that, but he ditched the God-awful Enya; the vocalists featured in the Two Towers score are the much-hipper Elizabeth Fraser, Sheila Chandra and Emiliana Torrini. I suppose at this rate Return of the King will have Björk performing the end credits song!

Anyway, though I admit that neither film struck a deep chord with me emotionally, I cannot deny that this entire series provides great entertainment, much adventure, and a fully-realized fantasy world. Even though George Lucas is sadly still at it, this trilogy is the real Star Wars of our times. And I can't finish this review without mentioning the amazing achievement in creating Gollum, a miracle of computer animation (though Andy Serkis is well-lauded for his performance). Gollum was always the most fascinating character in the entire Rings saga, and he is easily the best thing in a very good film.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (US/New Zealand, Peter Jackson)
The celebrated adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy ends here, with a movie bigger, bloodier, longer and, yes, better than its fine predecessors. Jackson and company pull out all the stops, with huge battle sequences, intense emotional drama, and new levels of evil and madness. The computer-animated Gollum assumes his rightful place as one of cinema's great villains, and the interplay between him and his hobbit colleagues/victims Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) remains, as it did in The Two Towers, the most compelling aspect of the Rings saga. But you can't discount those awesome battle scenes! I needn't go on, since everybody who's already been following the movies will be running out to see this concluding chapter anyway. I throw out a warning to arachnophobes about the terrifying sequence where Frodo battles the giant spider Shelob, and happily report that the tired subplot involving Elf queen Arwen (Liv Tyler) is cut mercifully short, so much so that it barely feels necessary by now. Filling out her character was apparently the one major change Jackson and cowriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens made to Tolkien's storyline, in order to have a female star to help market the series. You can almost sense Jackson editing down her sequences in the latter two films as he realized they added little to the story. But that's a minor quibble. The music, the cinematography, the production design, the performances - all are more powerful in Return of the King, which must have been part of Jackson's grand design. All too often, these mythic trilogies end on weak notes (Star Wars, The Godfather, The Matrix), so despite the rather elongated denouement (I guess after nine hours with these characters, we can sit through 20 minutes of coda), this film brings the epic series to a completely satisfying close.

And let's hear it for my Kiwi friend Lucas Young, the only person in the world who can claim to have worked on both Claustrophobia and Return of the King!

LOST IN LA MANCHA (US, Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe)
Witness a film director's worst nightmare, the director in this case being the revered Terry Gilliam, whose 10-year quest to bring Cervantes' Don Quixote to the big screen floundered after just one week of production. But what a week! Flash floods, Spanish jets, a lead actor's prostate problems... everything that can go wrong does, and while I don't like to give the game away, it's pretty obvious that Gilliam never finished his film, so you know there's no happy ending. Though painfully fascinating to watch, and certainly worth seeing for any filmmaker who thinks he's the only one who's ever had production problems, there is still something unsatisfying about Lost in La Mancha. This could be because directors Fulton and Pepe aren't true documentarians but hired hands, brought on by Gilliam originally to simply shoot "behind the scenes" footage for the DVD release of his film (which was to be called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, starring Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp). They got a lot more than they expected when things turned sour right before their eyes, but because Fulton and Pepe didn't begin with any greater goal in mind other than to document production, when their footage became a rare glimpse at the un-making of a major feature, they weren't prepared to do anything meaningful with it. I left feeling bummed that I will never see Gilliam's movie, but that was about it. Had Fulton and Pepe been stronger filmmakers, Lost in La Mancha could have taken on the tone of something like Startup.com, which was meant to follow the success of some hotshot Internet entrepreneurs, and wound up capturing their downfall. Those filmmakers managed to find resonance in the failure of their subjects' pursuits, but in Lost in La Mancha Terry Gilliam simply remains a giggling visionary with a doomed project, nothing more. This could have at least been a meditation on why people even bother making films, given the obstacles. But other than obvious comparisons between the futility of his efforts and Don Quixote's tilting at imaginary windmills, Lost in La Mancha gives us little more than a small insight into how Gilliam makes a film, with a couple of moments watching Depp plying his craft. That's still interesting stuff, especially for fans, but wait till it shows up on cable. Even the tantalizing widescreen clips from Don Quixote are shown via a video transfer!

LOST IN TRANSLATION (US, Sofia Coppola)
Meandering comedy-drama about two lonely Americans stuck in a Tokyo hotel, with nobody to talk to but each other. Bill Murray plays a fading Hollywood star who's been brought to Japan to film a Suntory Whiskey commercial for a couple million dollars. Scarlett Johansson plays the young wife of a hotshot photographer (Giovanni Ribisi) who's in town to shoot some Japanese rock bands. Despite the thirtysome years that separate them, the two form a friendship, then a kinship, then something dangerously approaching romance, during their brief week together in an often comically, sometimes depressingly alien Japan.

I'm not convinced Lost in Translation really knows what it wants to be. The first few minutes provide some frequently hilarious culture shock scenes, with a baffled Murray trying to make sense of those wacky Japanese. The story bogs down during an extended documentary-style interlude of a long night our heroes spend partying with some local hipsters, and the blossoming affection between Murray and Johansson is frankly a little creepy. Also, something I couldn't get away from while watching the film was the nature of Murray's character's fame. Apparently he is big enough to warrant a $2 million salary for a simple whiskey commercial - something common in Japan for only top American stars like Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, et al, actors who wouldn't dream of selling out in the States yet have no problem shilling to the Asian market. This suggests that Murray's character is a big name. Yet in other scenes, it's hinted that his career is washed up. Which would certainly not engender a lucrative commercial deal in cash-strapped Japan. In any case, it's strange that his notoriety is not even acknowledged as part of Johansson's interest in him. It's nice to think that she simply sees him as a person, but for a guy whose face is already on billboards throughout Tokyo, not even the Japanese people he meets seem to know who he is. I mean, I went to Japan when I was 23. I was a complete nobody, and still teenage girls ran up to me to take my picture. Maybe there's something existential here about Murray's unusual anonymity, but it feels poorly thought-out. In the end, I found Lost in Translation to be well-made, amiable and harmless. But I can't help but think that writer-director Coppola was more interested in bolstering up her coolness quotient by exploring the uber-hip Tokyo scene than in her pseudo-Wong Kar Wai storyline, and is simply lucky to have two fine actors so dedicated to delivering thoughtful, fully lived-in performances.

THE LOVELY BONES(US/UK/New Zealand, Peter Jackson)
Jackson's long-awaited adaptation of Alice Sebold's runaway 2002 bestseller about a murdered teenager who looks down on the people she left behind - even her killer - from her own private heaven was perhaps a doomed venture from the start. Although incredibly, Sebold optioned the film rights to her novel back in 2000, before she was even finished writing, the story fundamentally lacks a tight narrative drive. I read the book, and while I didn't dislike it, I found it a weird blend of horror, obsession and dorky sentimentality. However, to me the point of the book was to show the effect that a gruesome death can have on those close to the victim, and the bittersweet truth of life eventually going on as the years pass. Jackson and his cowriters/partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens created some controversy by removing the part where the 14-year-old heroine, Susie Salmon, is raped before her murder, but I think this is a minor quibble; if there's one thing Jackson is good at doing, it is exploring the darker side of human nature, and Susie's murderer George Harvey is played with such profound creepiness by Stanley Tucci that the circumstances surrounding her death are disturbing enough without the added cruelty of her sexual violation. I get a sense that Jackson et al knew that the Harvey plotline was the most dramatic of the novel, so Tucci gets the lion's share of screen time, which ultimately reduces The Lovely Bones to a kind of crime thriller, where the question is whether Susie's father and sister will identify and capture Harvey in time. Gone is her mother's love affair with the detective assigned to her case; gone is much of the relationship between Susie's Indian/English boyfriend and the spooky girl who can sense her presence; gone is the sense of time passing and the poignancy of Susie's young siblings trying to build their own lives in the wake of tragedy. In short, gone is the heart and soul of Sebold's novel. For those who haven't read it, I suspect you may still feel that something is missing in this movie. Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz and Susan Sarandon, as Susie's grieving family, don't have much to do, and nearly disappear from the narrative entirely, as do most of the supporting characters. What we're left with are several groovy CGI-filled minutes of Susie's afterlife - a psychedelic trip for teenage girls - and many scenes of Tucci being icky. Don't get me wrong: Tucci is easily the best thing about the film. But the boldest thing about Sebold's story is that George Harvey is presented as just one of the many people in Susie's life, so much so that Susie's eventual forgiveness of his deeds feels like a foregone conclusion. Notably, that forgiveness is entirely absent in Jackson's film. The Lovely Bones may look great, but I will file it under the "Noble Failure" category. Good intentions, bad execution. It probably should not have been made in the first place.

LOVE ME IF YOU DARE (France, Yann Samuell)
Ever since Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim there's been this weird trend in French cinema where suicide is seen as a quirky, romantic end to that other French standby, the amour fou - "mad love" - story. It's been a common schtick in Gallic hits from Betty Blue to The Hairdresser's Husband, and it's always bugged me. It's an invented psychology, a state of mind that exists only in French movies and has no ring of emotional truth. This gimmick is once again worked over in Love Me if You Dare, a slick but weak comedy-drama about two unhappy brats, a girl and a boy, who embark upon a lifelong game of dare, based on who is in possession of a little tin box shaped like a carousel, given to the boy by his dying mother. The dares are always wicked, starting off simple (urinating in the principal's office, releasing the emergency brake on a school bus) and growing progressively more cruel and dangerous as this star-crossed couple grows older. But it's a slight idea, enough to sustain maybe a 10-minute short, not a full-length feature. Any sense of story, character, theme or point of view is subservient to this insistent high concept, and its repetition grows stale once it's established that the movie isn't about anything other than two unrealistic people devoting their entire lives to a game. Though his work is visually stylish, director Yann Samuell lacks the fresh ideas of someone like Jean-Pierre Jeunet, his generic lead actors fail to charm, and the classic song "La Vie en Rose" is so annoyingly overplayed that halfway through the film I decided I never wanted to hear it again. Ever. I should have expected as much, considering that the film's stateside distributor Paramount Classics - the art house division of my former employer - has shown consistently poor taste in the foreign films they pick up.

LUCKY NUMBERS (US, Nora Ephron)
Another Paramount flop. John Travolta plays Russ Richards, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's super-popular TV weatherman. He seems to be at the top of the world - he drives a flashy Jag, the locals love him, he even has his own private table at Denny's (ha ha) - but his financial situation is desperate: preparing for winter, he's loaded up his car dealership with a storeroom full of new snowmobiles, only to see the warmest winter in years. He needs cash, lots of it, and doesn't mind doing what it takes to get it. Which eventually revolves around a plan to rip off the Pennsylvania state lottery with help from his girlfriend (Lisa Kudrow) who picks the winning numbers on TV, a shady buddy (Tim Roth) and various other losers.

Artless studio hack Nora Ephron is best known for her dippy romantic comedies (Sleepless in Seattle, Michael et al). So it should come as a gigantic red flag to any alert moviegoer that she decided, with Lucky Numbers, to take on a black comedy. At least she didn't write it: those honors go to Adam Resnick (who concocted both "Get a Life" and Cabin Boy - hmmm). Actually, the script isn't that bad: the jokes are overwritten but the story is at least lively and unpredictable. In the hands of a director who is actually good at satire (are there any these days? Perhaps Alexander Payne), Lucky Numbers might have worked. But Nora Ephron doesn't have good comic timing, she doesn't know what to do with a camera, and she seems positively terrified of giving her actors any direction. Thus, in a film entirely dependent on its stars' chemistry, you have wildly variable performances in the cast. John Travolta, for his part, is awful. Simply terrible. He screams and mugs his way through every plot twist and practically sinks the movie. Kudrow tries her best, Roth phones in his performance, and the supporting players come and go. (Only Bill Pullman, coming in at the third act as a flaky cop who hates his job, elicits any real laughs.) Only the poorly-chosen 80's songs on the soundtrack reflect the film's seemingly arbitrary period setting of 1988. It looks just like 2000 to me, and I see no reason why Resnick felt the story needed to take place 12 years ago. Maybe 1988 was a good year for him.

LUNACY (Czech Republic, Jan Svankmajer)
Another crackpot bit of surrealism from famed Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, who made his name from a number of gruesome stop-motion animated shorts and who has been writing and directing live action features - all with some amount of animation - since 1988. Fans of the filmmaker will find more of his usual craziness here, in this story about a young man who suffers from delusional nightmares and his adventures in an insane asylum with a madman who fashions his clothing, his lifestyle and his philosophy after the Marquis de Sade. The story - inspired by the writings of both de Sade and Edgar Allan Poe - takes a while to find its point, but once it does, it's a strong one. The best way I can describe Lunacy is to say that it succeeds on every level where the self-congratulatory Hollywood film Quills failed: it's perverse, profane, blasphemous, angry, funny, troubling, and completely over-the-top. Pretty much like Svankmajer's previous features Conspirators of Pleasure and Little Otik, only with ultimately more serious undertones. It's a great film. The only thing that bothered me was its surprisingly misogynist attitude, missing in Svankmajer's previous work. (I wouldn't recommend this to sensitive vegetarians or conservative Christians either.) But if you can get past that, you can enjoy some good old-fashioned surrealist filmmaking, where digital effects are nonexistent and the story is frequently interrupted by brief displays of raw meat, eyeballs and brains dancing around in stop-motion animation. It's safe to say that nobody makes films like Jan Svankmajer does. I hope the 72-year-old director gets to make a few more before he shuffles off this mortal coil.