THE MACHINIST (Spain, Brad Anderson)
Dark, unsettling film noir about young factory worker Trevor Reznik (sounding a bit like Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, no?), who, horrifyingly emaciated and admitting to having not slept for a full year (nor eaten, one would assume), starts communicating with a dangerous-looking stranger whose actual existence is questionable. Unlike other "What's the secret?" movies, while The Machinist lets on that all the weirdness and mystery will add up to the inevitable story twist at the end, at least one of the questions isn't "Is Trevor sane or not?" The film makes it pretty clear early on that this mysterious "Ivan" character he keeps seeing is a figment of his imagination. So the main question isn't whether Trevor is crazy, but how crazy he is - and what's making him so crazy. It's always a risk, this kind of plot, because every audience member knows that he or she will have to sit through an hour and a half of red herrings, fakeouts, subtle clues and glaring instances of something's-just-not-right, in order to be rewarded with a conclusion that wraps everything up. And if that conclusion isn't strong or unpredictable enough, it ruins the whole picture. Without giving anything away, The Machinist's conclusion did work for me, it did bring every little odd detail of the film together, and although it was nothing major, like the end of the world or anything, it worked within the intimacy of the story: this really is the inner turmoil of one once-regular guy. Much has already been made of star Christian Bale's dramatic weight loss, and though one might write it off as gimmicky, his skeletal appearance is absolutely the central part of his performance: he looks like a death camp victim, and it's almost unbearable to even look at him. But this all adds to the creepy tone of the film (which, though written by American Scott Kosar and directed by American Brad Anderson, and with an English-speaking cast of mostly Americans, was filmed in Spain by an entirely Spanish crew). So too does Xavi Giménez's deep blue cinematography (he shot the similarly dark Spanish thriller Intacto, one of my favorites from recent years) and Roque Baños's rich, haunting, Vertigo-inspired score (complete with Theremin!), which may be the best score I've heard all year. The Machinist is an icy cold horror-drama, definitely not for all tastes, but I do not doubt that it will soon engender a cult following. I for one was very impressed.

MADE (US, Jon Favreau)
Actors Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn team up for the first time since the indie film Swingers (written by Favreau) turned them into stars. Both have gained an alarming amount of weight in the 5 years since Swingers, and now they play a couple of lunkheads who are hired by mob boss Peter Falk to participate in a marginally dangerous money-for-drugs exchange in New York. But the story (written, again, by Favreau) can be summed up as this: Vince Vaughn is extremely stupid and annoys everybody in sight, and Jon Favreau mostly puts up with him. Whoopee. Trust me, you can safely skip Made. Whatever wit Favreau invested in Swingers is absent here. The only really good thing about it is the cinematography by Wong Kar-Wai's beloved alcoholic DP Christopher Doyle. Made looks kind of like a Wong movie, which is unsettling when you realize instead of watching gorgeous Hong Kong stars romancing each other ethereally, you are watching two puffy Yank jerks say the "F" word over and over and over again and occasionally beating each other up. Tiresome.

MAD HOT BALLROOM (US, Marilyn Agrelo)
Evidently someone in the New York Public Schools system came up with the curious but not unlaudable idea of forcing all the district's 5th graders to go through ballroom dance training, the top schools competing annually for a coveted trophy. Because this is New York, you have literally thousands of kids from all ethnic and economic backgrounds trying to out-dance each other. An easy recipe for a cute, lively documentary, and Mad Hot Ballroom delivers the goods. Agrelo takes her camera to three specific schools: One in tony Tribeca, whose vaguely privileged students are driven, to say the least; one in solidly middle-class Bensonhurst, where both Italian-American and Chinese-American kids have adopted the easy-going "fuhgeddaboutit" demeanor of their Brooklyn surroundings; and finally (and most pervasively) one in downright poor Upper Manhattan, where a dozen struggling Dominican children become the obvious underdog contenders for the prize - and for audiences' hearts. The first half of the film is forgettable, aiming too often for cute (lots of kids-say-the-darndest-things scenes) instead of telling a story, but the second half - once we head into the quarter-finals - brings with it all the requisite suspense and joy the film promises. Comparisons to 2002's Spellbound are inevitable: Charming youngsters in heated, tense competition. But whereas the amazing Spellbound painted an almost epic portrait of the American dream while intimately focusing on eight children and their families, Mad Hot Ballroom's cast of dozens seem practically anonymous, the stakes symbolic but not exactly crucial. And aside from a couple of surface class comparisons - the film's only deep point is in the contrasts it finds between each school's reactions to defeat - Mad Hot Ballroom is purely entertainment, nothing more. That's enough to make it a fun movie to take your folks to. But not enough to really resonate afterwards the way a great film like Spellbound did.

MAGNOLIA (US, Paul Thomas Anderson)
Magnolia is about a bunch of messed-up L.A. residents whose unhappy lives interconnect, sort of. Sound like Robert Altman's Short Cuts? Sure, but Anderson is after some other idea - something about the sins of the fathers being visited on the sons, I guess, since nearly every character in the film is either a father who has treated his children monstrously, or one of those children now dealing badly with the scars. Well-acted, naturally, but the film is bloated, and Anderson, who I doubt has lived much of a life outside his own pampered Hollywood existence (he even dates Fiona Apple, for Pete's sake), imagines himself some great sage who understands the world much better than any of his poor characters. He bites off more than he can chew.

I have the same problems with this film as I did Anderson earlier effort, Boogie Nights - the guy just needs somebody smart to stand behind him and say, "Paul, you need to trim this down a little bit." He frequently uses music as a crutch to pace his often leaden scenes. Here he commits another act of hubris, by allowing his buddies Aimee Mann (best known as the singer of 80's band 'til tuesday) and Jon Brion to provide songs and score, respectively. (Mann and Brion often perform at a club in L.A. called Largo. Michael Penn, Sean's brother and the composer for Boogie Nights, also performs there.) Brion's score is harmless but the songs are overplayed to the extent where we're expected to believe that everybody in L.A. listens to Aimee Mann. It's phony. A risky scene in which all the characters sing along to the same song is also phony. While we're talking about phony, much of the action centers around a live broadcast of a game show that involves several of the main characters. Excuse me, a live game show? What decade does Anderson think we live in?

I must give some praise, however: the last half hour of the film concerns an actual plague of frogs upon Los Angeles. Yes, millions of frogs fall out of the sky and splat everywhere. Why? By that point, who cares? At least it's exciting. One of the most memorable movie scenes of 1999. Go to your multiplex, watch the first ten minutes of Magnolia, then go see something else. When that other movie is finished, come back and watch the frogs. You will have missed nothing else of interest, not even Tom Cruise's "breakthrough" (read: tolerable) performance. Though John C. Reilly's Christian cop stands out as the one likeable and complex character.

THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE (US, Joel Coen)
The Coen Brothers play it (comparatively) straight this time around, with a somber, black and white noir about a nondescript barber named Ed (Billy Bob Thornton) living in a small California town in 1949, who decides to take a chance in life by investing in a get-rich-quick scheme involving the burgeoning dry cleaning industry. In order to raise the capital for his investment, he decides to blackmail his wife's boss (James Gandolfini), whom he suspects of having an affair with his wife (Frances McDormand), for $10,000. As with all classic noir setups - as well as most of the Coen Brothers' films - things unravel horribly when the rest of the world doesn't cooperate with Ed's simple plan.

When the Coens are uninspired, their films remain great-looking but empty genre-spoofing exercises (The Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother Where Art Thou). But when they really cut the crap and write a great story, they can come up with something transcendent like Fargo (still my favorite of their films) or The Man Who Wasn't There. In fact there are a lot of similarities between this film and Fargo, though you wouldn't think so at first. Ed is a kind of amalgam of Fargo's two main characters, Marge and Jerry. Like Jerry (William H. Macy), Ed is a weak husband who amateurishly enters the world of petty crime to make some easy money. Like Marge (McDormand), he is a well-meaning innocent whose heart sinks when he realizes the depths to which everyone around him has sunk. It's as though Ed, through his one act of deceit (he writes his blackmail letter in the third person), opens the door to the corruption surrounding him on all sides, from one character's phony war stories to a shifty lawyer's huge expense account to a sweet schoolgirl's sexual looseness. The Coens are at their most honest when capturing the pettiness of human nature, and while The Man Who Wasn't There lacks Fargo's completely original approach and its daft Midwest humor, it explores the same folds of melancholy and may surprise fans of their more glib work. Not that there isn't the requisite wacky dialogue, ironic plot twists and gorgeous cinematography (thanks to their longtime DP Roger Deakins, who should finally be getting his Oscar for his work here) that fans have come to expect from a Coen Brothers film. Needless to say, on a technical level, everything in this film is perfect. And although there's some oblique surrealist curly-cues in the story, the directness of their delivery is very refreshing. For once it doesn't feel like the Coens are just trying to pull a fast one on the audience.

THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST (Finland, Aki Kaurismäki)
Typically quirky, deadpan, seriocomic portrait of losers living on the edge from a man who has made a career out of such films, Aki Kaurismäki. Though perhaps best compared to American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch in terms of pacing and style, Kaurismäki is little-known outside of Europe, due to his films' dour wit which apparently rarely translates into dollar signs for U.S. distributors. The Man Without a Past, no more or less accessible or thoughtful than his previous films, surprised everybody by not only obtaining a Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination, but theatrical distribution in America. See it while you can. As usual with Kaurismäki's work, there is a great deal of subtlety and depth in this story of a man who arrives in a timeless Helsinki (presumably present day, but it could just as well be the 1950s) and is quickly set upon by a trio of thugs. Their quick, violent attack causes the man to lose his memory, and, starting with absolutely nothing, he manages to survive in the slums of Helsinki, using his resourcefulness to establish a new life for himself even if his lack of an "official" identity consistently befuddles the various bureaucrats he encounters. Lots of dry humor - a scene in which an attorney with a speech impediment fights for the man's rights against an astonished police chief had the audience (including this reviewer) shaking hard with laughter - and a real heart, beating without any affectations of sentimentality, make The Man Without a Past a rewarding experience for the very patient filmgoer.

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS (France, Luc Jacquet)
Pretty much as you'd expect, this is a cute, informative, often very beautiful documentary about the complicated breeding habits of the emperor penguin. The big mystery is why this became such a huge box office hit in the U.S. during the otherwise duddy summer of 2005. Perhaps people were so desperate to see something of quality in cinemas that they decided to invest their time and money into a film that actually doesn't rate much higher than a good Discovery Channel documentary. It's also the repackaging of this film that tells the most interesting story: The original French version had three narrators - one for pere, one for mere and one for le bebe penguin, speaking apparently in the first person. Was this gimmick too sickeningly cute for Yank art house filmgoers, and that's why the American distributors replaced it all with Morgan Freeman's stately narration? Or was Jacquet's original vision a richer, more unique filmgoing experience? Unless I ever see the French version (which also had a different soundtrack, one supposedly more trip-hoppy and electro), I won't know. All I can say is that I think March of the Penguins is just fine, but really no great shakes.

MARIA, FULL OF GRACE (US, Joshua Marston)
Low-key, realistically-shot drama about a 17-year-old Colombian girl (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who agrees to work as a drug "mule", ingesting capsules of heroin and smuggling them into the United States. With a high concept like this, it's nice to be able to talk about the film without having to divulge any plot details. Suffice to say, it's neither a fun nor glamorous trek for poor, headstrong Maria, but writer/director Marston refuses to let his story devolve into a routine violent crime thriller. I say this with both admiration and disappointment. While Marston deserves credit for keeping things intimate, I think this was more out of obligation to Sundance's ideal of the stately independent film (Maria was workshopped at the institute, and won the audience award at the 2004 festival), because after an increasingly tense buildup, the film ebbs to a close that feels at once rushed, anti-climactic, and rather too tidy. On a story level, it's technically satisfying; on a visceral, audience level, it left me asking, "That's it?" I had hoped for more. Not that I needed or even wanted any gunfights or car chases, but for a film that promises a harrowing journey along one of the scariest avenues of the drug trade, it winds up a sleepy drama that, while showing respect for Maria, shrugs off the complex, dangerous industry she has employed herself in. Nevertheless, it provides a refreshing point of view, casting light on a little-seen subsect of society, as well as daily life in Colombia. I'll leave the political arguments of why a white American man should be the one to bring to the screen this story, instead of a latino or a woman, to others. But even though as a rule I feel everybody has a right to make a film about whoever they wish, irrespective of race, class or gender, this discrepency did bug me. The acting is fine, though, and the title is so far the cleverest I've seen all year.

MARIE ANTOINETTE (US, Sofia Coppola)
I want to like Sofia Coppola's films. I really do. It's rare enough to have a female studio director in the first place. To have an American female auteur - well, Coppola stands alone. It's important to have women helming big-budget films, and equally important to give them credit where it's due (despite the fact that Coppola was handed her career on a silver platter by her legendary father Francis - as I like to remind people, I went to CalArts with Sofia Coppola and back then no one could deduce in her any latent talent or even interest in making films). So I feel the same ambivalence towards Coppola as I do towards Condoleezza Rice: It's great that a woman can achieve such prominence in her field. If only I could admire her actual work! Marie Antoinette suffers from the same condition that afflicted Coppola's first two features, The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation: It has no story. Like those other films, it looks and sounds terrific. Coppola does have a talent for capturing a time and place, and she knows where to find just the right music. (The soundtrack for Marie Antoinette can be broken into three parts, to match the film's unofficial three-act structure: stuffy chamber music for Marie Antoinette's first few years as a lonely dauphine trapped in the gossipy court of Louis XV; 80's new wave - with a particular fondness for Bow Wow Wow - for her madcap years as a young, free-spending queen; and finally sad opera arias for the final days of the monarchy.) With minimal dialogue and no plot to speak of (outside of a bit of worry over whether Marie Antoinette can force her bashful husband to have sex with her, thus guaranteeing an heir to the throne), it's clear that Coppola has set out to make an "experience" film, one that simply purports to show what Marie Antoinette's life at the court was like, without commentary, context or judgment. The result feels authentic, but absent any real drama, the movie is frankly dull. Dunst is fine as the spirited young royal, and Jason Schwartzman (Coppola's cousin) is drily funny as her asexual husband, the future Louis XVI. The rest of the hip, if wasted, cast is peppered - intentionally or not - with other children of famous directors: Danny Huston (John's son), Asia Argento (Dario's daughter), Katrine Boorman (John's daughter). And it could be argued that what makes this a personal story for Sofia Coppola is the resemblance it has to her own charmed life as the heir of a rich and powerful figurehead. The problem, as I see it, is that Coppola herself doesn't seem like a deep person. Based on her first three films, I could argue that her main recurring theme is of a pampered but lonely girl who just wants to kick up her heels and have some fun. Maybe that says something about Coppola's past, but I'd like to see an actual story support that flimsy premise.

MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (US, Peter Weir)
Okay, so it took me forever to see this. My curiosity was finally piqued after its Oscar nominations, as well as weeks of people telling me how good it was. Thoroughly engaging sea yarn, based on the novels by the late Patrick O'Brian (the script is adapted from two separate books, Master and Commander and The Far Side of the World, hence the unwieldly title), about the crew of the H.M.S. Surprise, a British naval ship fighting the French in 1805, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. Moreso, it is about the enduring friendship of the ship's captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe, good as usual) and the ship's doctor Stephen Maturin (Paul Bettany, ditto), two men of distinctly different mindsets - Aubrey's belligerence, Maturin's scientific withdrawal - who bond over their own shared determination. As painstakingly researched as O'Brian's books, and almost as plotless, Master and Commander is an incredibly authentic re-creation of the period, giving you a you-are-there feeling of life on the high seas 200 years ago, with all of its perils, its camaraderie, and, most refreshingly, its downtime. People expecting wall-to-wall thrills may squirm during the long, slow period between the opening and closing battle scenes, but those with patience - and a love for character and detail - will be richly rewarded. Not a great film, but great filmic craftsmanship. And there isn't a false note during its 2+ hour length. Typically strong, unselfconscious direction from Peter Weir.

THE MATADOR (US, Richard Shepard)
Amusing if minor comedy about a sleazy hitman (Pierce Brosnan) who's losing his touch, and the naive yuppie (Greg Kinnear) he befriends in Mexico City and lures into his cockeyed world. A story sort of emerges where each man, at some point in time, needs the other's help to get through a sticky situation, but really this movie is enjoyable mainly as a vehicle for Pierce Brosnan's often-ignored comic talents. Although any number of actors could have portrayed the wacked-out but oddly lovable Julian Noble, the brilliant casting of Brosnan (who liked the part so much, he has a producer's credit) renders Julian as James Bond after too many adventures: friendless, homeless, his mind and body going to waste, his assassinations shoddy and his sexual escapades ridiculous. Brosnan - who, as the star of the TV show "Remington Steele," first became famous as a parody of the Bond character he'd later portray - seems thoroughly aware of his irony-soaked career, and plays it to the hilt, a movie star with nothing left to lose. The dependable (if unremarkable) Kinnear is decent as possibly the most ordinary man in an American feature this year. And writer-director Shepard, who finally gets his first major theatrical release after over fifteen years of making films, comes up with plenty of funny lines and some cute little twists at the end. But despite the colorful Mexican backdrop (apparently the entire film was shot in Mexico City, including scenes set in Manila, Denver and Budapest!), there seems something strangely small and anti-climactic about The Matador. Perhaps it's due to Shepard's straight-to-video background that this film feels like a B-movie. Not that this is bad; I like B-movies sometimes. But it makes for an essentially disposable filmgoing experience. The Matador may be the classic example of the "wait for it on cable" kind of movie. But Pierce Brosnan sure is entertaining.

MATCH POINT (US, Woody Allen)
Even despite our endless puritanical tut-tutting over Woody Allen's relationship with his former sort-of adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn (they've now been happy together for over thirteen years), Americans have a funny relationship with the man: All the U.S. critics are hailing Match Point as his best film in years, a thoughtful, non-gimmicky return to his Crimes and Misdemeanors era (which lasted only as long as Crimes and Misdemeanors did) while the Europeans, who never gave up on him, insist that his work never went anywhere that required a "comeback" from. And while Allen himself has admitted that his recent comedies Hollywood Ending and Curse of the Jade Scorpion were minor offerings, most of his Euro following agrees that even a lesser Woody Allen film still has a lot more interesting ideas than any given Hollywood "prestige" picture. I'm inclined to agree. Which is why I don't see what all the fuss over Match Point is about. It's okay, but hardly one of Allen's best. I suppose it comes down to hype: all the bobos tell their friends that Woody Allen is back in the game and so everybody rushes out to see the film. (My wife and I went on a Thursday night and the theatre was packed.) The Woodman must be amused by the turnout, as his film skewers - not too gently - the tacky, boring 21st-century bourgeoisie that primarily makes up his own audience.

Without giving away as much as other reviewers woefully have - admittedly, it's hard to discuss what Match Point is really all about without revealing details of the final half-hour of the film - I will say that its story of a poor Irish-born tennis coach named Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who befriends an ultra-rich London family, romances their ostensibly smart but rather simple-minded daughter Chloe (Emily Mortimer), all the while lusting for Chloe's brother's American fiancee Nola (Scarlett Johansson), owes as much to Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley as it does to Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment - which, rather portentiously, Chris is glimpsed reading early in the film (it's another irony that this humorless loner is more genuinely cultured than the jolly socialites who have adopted him: Chloe and her brother seem to think that The Motorcycle Diaries and the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical constitute "high art"). Match Point's ambitious young tennis player with a shallow yearning for a comfortable life and a troubled woman on the side definitely brings to mind Farley Granger's character in Hitchcock's adaptation of Strangers on a Train, but in this case Chris doesn't need Robert Walker to bring out his dark side: he is hero, villain, and - owing to Rhys Meyers's womanly good looks - even femme fatale, rolled into one. He's a fascinatingly blank character, who we know lusts after Nola but doesn't seem interested in much else - not even the wealth or power that are being handed to him on a silver platter by Chloe's insipid family. His own story centers around his sole pronounced belief, that of the importance of luck in a successful life, and his theories are put to the test in several of the film's later tense moments. I don't like Rhys Meyers much; he's a pretty-boy actor whose charmless priggishness usually sinks his roles. But he's well-cast here, being as much of a cipher as his character is. Johansson, as the film's token American (though Brian Cox plays Chloe's easy-going father), is fine as a typically plaintive Allen heroine. In fact, despite her introduction as a seductress, hers is ultimately the only sympathetic, rational character in the whole film. All in all, provided that other critics haven't spoiled the last act for you as they did for me, you may very well like Match Point. It takes a while to get up to speed, and Allen's dialogue for once doesn't work - he simply does not have a good ear for how British people actually speak - but it's got some nice surprises, several clever details, and, as usual, a lot of interesting ideas.

THE MATRIX RELOADED (US, The Wachowski Brothers)
When The Matrix first came out in theatres in 1999, I saw it right away and walked out thinking, "Eh, I guess it was all right." Truth is, folks, I didn't quite get it. I guess I was so lost in the flow of information that I didn't actually take the time to piece together just what it was about. So I borrowed the DVD a couple of weeks ago, in order to catch up on the story so I could make some sense out of the upcoming sequels. To my surprise, I not only figured it out, but I found it to be a cracking good yarn. Or at least a fascinating idea. Up went my expectations for The Matrix Reloaded. Then down they went when friends of mine who rushed out to see the sequel on opening day returned with negative reports. Which in the end was okay, as that way I had no idea what to expect.

Frankly, I found the first half hour or so of Reloaded pretty bad. The Wachowski Brothers, buying into the importance of their own myth just as George Lucas did when he started trotting out the second trio of Star Wars films, seem to believe that not only can they change the rules of their own storyline with little regard for their original setup, but that, of course, bigger is better. So they not only give us a lot more special effects, but also, unfortunately, a much bigger cast. One of the good things about The Matrix was that it was really about just five people: neophyte Neo, his mentor Morpheus, action chick Trinity, villainous computer program Agent Smith and turncoat Cypher. With a nice little cameo from Gloria Foster as The Oracle and half a dozen very minor supporting characters. But here in Reloaded we are quickly introduced to a score of fellow freedom fighters living in the groovy underground human kingdom of Zion, who dress like Star Trek peasants and intone things dramatically so we're supposed to immediately care about them. Bad mistake. Their dialogue is wooden, their relationships soap operatic, and most of the performances lean towards ham. Fortunately, things pick up when Keanu & Co. return to the Matrix to do battle with Agent Smith, who has now become something of a rogue agent and has picked up the ability to clone himself infinitely, which makes for some nifty visuals and wacky fight scenes. The Wachowskis get creative and add a host of new villains, a subset of Matrix denizens who are best described as "hacked programs." Treading into Tron territory, maybe, but it nicely complicates the world they created. Once again, I didn't comprehend a lot of the mumbo jumbo, especially towards the end, but in between the lame opening (which even includes a rave) and the perplexing last act, there are some spiffy action set pieces that will please the crowds. Outside of the core cast (including Foster), the Wachowskis also bring back their entire creative team, which means The Matrix Reloaded visually feels very much an extension of its predecessor. Only Laurence Fishburne seems to have changed, i.e. got fat. Anyway, I was about as impressed as I was the first time I saw The Matrix, which means in 4 years I may watch the DVD and really dig what the Wachowskis are doing. In the meantime, I have only moderate expectations for the concluding Matrix Revolutions.

THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS (US, The Wachowski Brothers)
The most interesting thing I can tell you about The Matrix Revolutions is that I heard a rumor that co-creator Larry Wachowski is planning to have a sex change. Anyway, Revolutions picks up where The Matrix Reloaded leaves off, almost to the second, but if you missed the previous outing then I imagine you'd have no interest in hearing about this one anyway, so there's no need to fill in the blanks. Suffice it to say that, as expected, like its predecessor (but unlike 1999's original Matrix, which is so solid compared to its messy sequels that I miss it now more than ever), Revolutions is a mishmash of cool ideas, flashy special effects, and cyberschlock. The Wachowskis have outdone themselves only in writing dialogue that consists of wall-to-wall cliches. Really, I'm amazed. Every line is trite. As are the heroics of all the tiresome supporting characters that were introduced in Reloaded. In fact, Laurence Fishburne barely registers, and Carrie-Anne Moss and Keanu himself disappear for great lengths of time.

Never trust any filmmakers who claim they always envisioned their work as a "trilogy." I'm convinced that neither Wachowski really knew where to take their story after The Matrix made it big. So a lot of the ideas presented in the film were negated by its sequel, and now a lot of the ideas presented in that film are negated by this sequel. Which is especially shocking since the latter two were made at the same time! But the subplot around the "Merovingian" and the "Key Maker" and all that is quickly thrown out, as is the whole idea that it is the Matrix itself that must be stopped. This time out, Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving, the only person involved in the franchise who seems to realize how goofy it is), who has replicated himself into such a huge virus that he literally takes over the Matrix, and may soon invade the "real" world as well, is the greatest threat to humanity. It's a little like George Orwell making the ultimate villain in 1984 not Big Brother but a government goon. The Wachowskis lose their own point, and so we're left with nothing to think about, none of those "what if?" questions about the reality of existence, which was what turned on audiences in the first place. Even the kung fu seems played here as an afterthought. The effects are better this time around than in the rushed Reloaded (the fight scene between the human survivors of Zion and the frightening Sentinels is great action), but see the movie only so you can cross The Matrix series off your to-do list, thankful that you don't have to wait until 2005 like with Star Wars.

MAY (US, Lucky McKee)
Another in a recent trend of low-budget, character-based chillers that have run the gamut from Willard to Dahmer, first-time writer/director McKee's May is a predictable movie about a disturbed young woman (Angela Bettis) whose obsessions with cutting, sewing and the human body reach an inevitable convergence after she is spurned by a local hunk ("Six Feet Under" star Jeremy Sisto). Though Bettis is appropriately spooky in the title role, Sisto sleepwalks through his performance and the rest of the cast is your typical indie film assortment of minimally talented young actors who you've never heard of. McKee proves himself neither a good writer or director: the story is almost nonexistent, and never really makes us understand why May is so screwed up. She has a lazy eye that, since it's apparently easy to fix with the contact lenses she puts in at the beginning of the film, hardly seems traumatic enough to have messed up her entire life. A brief flashback involving May's perfectionist mother carries no weight. So we can neither sympathize with May or fear her. She's just a weirdo. Visually there is no suspense, it's mostly just a collection of well-lit but poorly-executed shots. McKee doesn't even make use of a creepy score that could add some tension; instead, he unwisely aims for hipster cred by filling his soundtrack with inconsequential alt rock, including a couple Breeders songs. The film gets a little gory at the end but that's the only thing that could brand this a "horror" movie. Roger Ebert must have been dreaming when he gave this four stars. Nothing to see here, folks. Move on.

MAYOR OF THE SUNSET STRIP (US, George Hickenlooper)
So far the most thoroughly entertaining new movie I've seen this year, this is a surprisingly intimate documentary about Rodney Bingenheimer, a gnomish middle-aged fellow who, after growing up the neighborhood geek in Mountain View, California, took off for Hollywood during the 60's and became a central fixture of the L.A. music scene over the next four decades, first as a groupie, then a PR man, then a club promoter, and finally as a seminal DJ at radio station KROQ, which ushered in the popularity of "alternative rock" during the 1980's. Bingenheimer is basically a one-man star-making machine, possibly the only rock DJ left who can make or break a band (even as KROQ insultingly shifts his show to more and more remote time slots - it now runs on Sunday nights from midnight to 3am), as the legions of rock stars interviewed in this film can attest to: He was the first guy to play, and promote, everybody from David Bowie to the Sex Pistols to Blondie to the Smiths to Oasis to No Doubt to Coldplay. And yet despite it all, he lives in near-poverty, his only wealth being his priceless collection of rock artifacts and autographs. Though he has many admirers, he never obtained any power himself, can count his true friends on one hand, and is painfully lovelorn.

Mayor of the Sunset Strip works on many levels: as a document of the changing music scene over the last 40 years; as an objective look at the intangible nature of celebrity; as an indictment of the contemporary radio industry; and most of all, and most poignantly, as a portrait of Bingenheimer as the Eternal Fan, a homely little man ignored by his own family and never quite fully accepted by the rising stars he attached himself to (except maybe Nancy Sinatra and Cher). This film affected me far more than I thought it would. Getting to see this at a movie theatre literally on the Sunset Strip, then walking home past the latest crop of beautiful people, I became somewhat depressed by this town: the widespread lust for fame, the tyranny of the young and the attractive, and how old age inevitably conquers all. Maybe because of my own situation as a slightly-known filmmaker, acquainted with both those doing quite well in show business and with those on the fringes, I could identify with poor Rodney. And to see the faces of the interviewees - some on top of the world, others fallen from glory, still others struggling after decades - speaks volumes about the fleetingness of the culture that obsesses Bingenheimer. (Hickenlooper amusingly underscores this point with repeated references to Kato Kaelin.) And though the film's subject himself at first comes across as an opaque, Forrest Gump-meets-Andy Warhol type, this shy man - so fragile he seems breakable - lets the camera see so much of his inner life that his story becomes nothing less than heartbreaking. But there's still large doses of humor and an incredible wall-to-wall soundtrack of the music Bingenheimer loved and made famous. (It must have taken a few years for the film's lawyers to work out all the rights.) Though it may not be found as interesting by those outside of LA, who probably never heard of Rodney Bingenheimer, it's still great entertainment and I highly, highly recommend it to all.

ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (US, Miranda July)
Outside of Barbra Streisand, I can't name any female writer/director/stars working in America. Can you? So I had strong hopes that video/performance artist Miranda July's debut feature - starring herself as a struggling video/performance artist - wouldn't just be a vanity picture. Thankfully, there's so much happening in this film that I quickly let go of the usual discomfort I feel when I'm aware that the person in front of the camera is also the one behind it, and could enjoy Me and You as the work of art it's meant to be. It didn't hurt that I'd never really seen or heard of Miranda July before, much less the rest of her cast. The importance of that freshness can't be overstated. Set in a nameless town (obviously filmed in Los Angeles, but presumably based on July's native Portland), the film looks at two lonely losers (July, John Hawkes) and the oddball family members and neighbors that surround them. Its laconic pace, eerily precocious children, bleak suburban setting and deviant sexuality reminded me at first of Todd Solondz's work, but July lacks Solondz's self-conscious nihilism, finding a bent sweetness behind even the creepiest kink. (A major subplot involves Hawkes' young boy's hilarious interchanges with a stranger in an online sex chat room.) Me and You is a genuine original - smart, often very funny, a tad oblique - never sacrificing its eccentric sense of storytelling and character for a more traditional way out. July is brave enough to keep her story true to her own unusual world view (best personified in her real-life "Learning to Love You More" web site/interactive art project); either that or she's such a film outsider that she simply doesn't know how to write a typical screenplay. Either way, if you can look past the occasional quirky-precious bit of dialogue, you'll find much to admire in Me and You and Everyone We Know, and hopefully this film will do well enough to fund July's future projects - provided she doesn't sell out. God knows, we need more great female filmmakers out there, and I don't mean Betty Thomas. (These days, I don't even mean Jane Campion.)

MEAN GIRLS (US, Mark S. Waters)
It's funny: when notable directors are at work, reviewers (myself among them) always refer to them as the true "authors" of their films; the writers are just hired guns. Yet on the odd occasion when the writer's name is better known than the director's, you can't help but talk more about the script than about how the movie was put together. In this case, Mean Girls arrived with something of a pedigree in that the screenwriter is clever "Saturday Night Live" alumna Tina Fey, who inspires more press than does director Mark S. Waters (best known for Freaky Friday). It's sadly rare to see a Hollywood film solely credited to one female screenwriter, so I wonder if expectations are unfairly raised - or unfairly lowered - when one actually comes out. Mean Girls turned out to be a sleeper hit, so Fey has done herself some good. But the script itself, an adaptation of Rosalind Wiseman's non-fiction high school survival guide Queen Bees and Wannabes (unlikely source material for a Hollywood comedy), is a hit-and-miss affair. There are so many sharp, truthful insights into teenage cruelty that I found myself often frustrated by Fey's tendency to follow them up with unnecessarily exaggerated comic scenes. The film soars when it revels in its characters' all-too-real cattiness, then flounders when it goes for broad comedy (girls stumbling head first into trash cans, a near-riot when a slam book is made public). But all in all, it's peppy, fun Hollywood fare. It's not nearly as fierce as its forebears, the scathing social satire Election and the cult black comedy Heathers, but then those are great films. Mean Girls is simply a nice comedy that delivers a smart, non-preachy pseudo-feminist message to its primary audience, teenage girls.

I can't finish this review without mentioning the terrific cast: Cute star Lindsay Lohan - possibly the film's only actual teenager - is instantly likeable as the new girl sucked into "The Plastics," the trio of vicious lookers who rule the school that hates them, but Rachel McAdams, as The Plastics' aptly-named leader Regina, is awesome. The nature of Lohan's character shifts so sloppily that one can only feel sorry that she wasn't given a more cohesive arc to play, but McAdams was lucky to be given the juiciest role, a singularly tyrannical she-devil, and she plays it to the hilt. McAdams is arguably the strongest actor in the cast, and should look forward to a healthy career, though Fey serves her role (as Lohan's math teacher) well, saving the funniest bits not for her own character, but for uber-confident "mathlete" Kevin Gnapoor, hilariously played by unknown Rajiv Surendra. Tim Meadows nicely deadpans it as the school's principal, and as Lohan's true friends, Lizzy Caplan and Daniel Franzese are ones to watch.

MEMENTO (US, Christopher Nolan)
Grim film noir with a fascinating premise (a man on the hunt for his wife's killer suffers from an extremely bad case of short-term memory loss) and a fascinating structure (the film begins at the end, and works backwards through a series of scenes, ala Harold Pinter's Betrayal but with more twists). Leonard (Guy Pearce) has been suffering from his affliction ever since he saw his wife get raped and murdered. He remembers everything up to that point and, as he slowly tracks down the killer, he resorts to taking Polaroids of everybody he meets, writing notes, even tattooing significant clues on his body so that he can never forget them, even if they appear brand new every time he looks in the mirror. At times the structure can be exhausting - the film is definitely a mental workout for the audience just to keep track of what's happening, and where we are in time - but the experience is very satisfying. Only the conclusion falters a bit (for me, anyway, but I can understand if others find it brilliant). I feel that Christopher Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan (on whose short story the film is based) were definitely reaching for some profound meditation on the inconstancy of memory and the idea that perception equals truth, but got too caught up in their story details to find any room for a truly human connection. Memento is indisputably a cold film. But it's certainly worth seeing, mainly for its bold structure, but also for its fine performances by Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano. Leonard is a wonderful character, and the Nolans mine his predicament for all the comic and tragic elements to be found therein. Memento is one of the better movies of 2001.

ME, MYSELF & IRENE (US, Peter & Bobby Farrelly)
Another one of those flicks I caught a few months late at the cheap theatre. Not being a big fan of Jim Carrey's physical antics, you can imagine I felt pretty strapped for entertainment during these, the really dead days of summer cinema. That said, I found myself sort of digging Me, Myself & Irene. Here Carrey's runaway mugging is restrained to a degree where it actually serves the story and the character without becoming mere empty schtick. Whether this is due to Carrey's new maturity as an actor (following his appearances in 3 serious films) or his comfort with the Farrellys, I'm not sure, but he's tolerable, even watchable, which is saying a lot.

There is some plot about the titular Irene (Renee Zellweger, a perfect comic foil for Carrey) being chased by various bad guys for knowing too much about a corrupt country club's shady ecological record, and Carrey as the Rhode Island cop chosen to escort her back to New York state even though he is suffering from a (clinically unsupported) split personality syndrome. Mostly, though, it's about the gags, and what gags there are - in both senses of the word. After seeing the Farrellys' There's Something About Mary and Outside Providence (which they didn't direct themselves), I think I actually like what these guys are doing with comedy, blending dark, extremely vulgar humor with corny human relationship stuff and actually making it work. This is due to the brothers' genuine humanity and inclusiveness, evidenced throughout Irene, from their love of fringe personality types (like an albino with a telescopic lens attached to his glasses) to their jovial respect for family (Carrey raises three enormous black boys who are both toilet-mouthed and mentally gifted; that they still unconditionally love their "Dad" is a Farrelly gift), and their affection for their home state of Rhode Island. Sick as the jokes can be, the directors still have clear sympathy for their characters. Heck, these guys are so nice, even during the end credits they point out each and every extra in the film! So while I wasn't rolling in the aisles (they still need to perfect their comic timing), I still think Irene stands head and shoulders above the scores of "feel-good gross-out" movies (Road Trip, et al) out there. And it certainly pushes the envelope of bad taste more than John Waters can ever hope to do these days.

MICHAEL CLAYTON (US, Tony Gilroy)
George Clooney plays the protagonist of the title, a "clean-up man" at a high-powered New York law firm whose job is apparently to cover the butts of the firm's clients whenever one of them gets into personal trouble. His latest assignment is to hush up one of the firm's own partners, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson, fine as usual), who has gone off his meds and flips out during a hearing in a $2 billion class action suit against a scummy ConAgra-like farming corporation called UNorth. Except that Arthur hasn't just gone crazy: he's been hit by a crisis of conscience, disgusted with defending a cold-hearted corporation that may have poisoned hundreds of innocent people. That Clayton's situation turns ugly is telegraphed in the first few minutes of the film, where Clayton, during a long drive back to Manhattan from upstate New York, stops off on a country road to look at some horses - and his car explodes behind him. The next ninety minutes trace the four days leading up to that explosion, with the final fifteen or twenty minutes of the film showing us Clayton's reaction. Although much is ostensibly explained, writer/director Tony Gilroy fails to convince us of many unlikely turns: chiefly, why Clayton would just happen to suddenly get out of his car to look at some horses, of all things, and just at the right moment to avoid a car bomb. It's hard not to see this magical coincidence as a bald-faced plot contrivance, one of many in a hole-ridden screenplay. And that is the main problem I have with Michael Clayton, an otherwise intriguing character study of a broken lawyer quietly finding his soul. The acting is fine (it's Clooney's show, and he pulls off a solid performance), the dialogue is fine, the relationships are fine, the pacing is fine - but the more I think about this film, the more I find wrong with the script. I've read a bunch of defenses from fans of the film, but they all sound desperate. I can't get past the feeling that Gilroy, a veteran screenwriter and first-time director, chose to ignore his plot holes instead of dealing with them logically, but I'm surprised that nobody on the production team - including Clooney and costar Sydney Pollack - stepped in to say, "Wait a minute - why should anybody believe that these things would happen?" (I won't mention the other implausibilities, though one doozy involves a Midwest farmgirl's unexplained willingness to fly alone to scary New York after being invited by a lunatic who had just chased her across a snowy parking lot with his clothes off. Is anybody really that naive?) I would heartily endorse Michael Clayton if I felt there were worthy answers to all these story gaffes. But as I haven't found any believable ones, I suggest giving this one a miss.

MIFUNE (Denmark, Soren Kragh-Jacobsen)
The third official film from Denmark's rightfully ballyhooed "Dogme 95" collective - a group of filmmakers dedicated to a cinematic "vow of chastity" in which they shoot on location with handheld cameras, use no artificial lighting or post sound, etc. - is the most mainstream of the bunch, and it's no great wonder: Kragh-Jacobsen is a veteran filmmaker and one-time mentor to Dogme founders Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Significantly older than both, seeing his interpretation of the Dogme aesthetic is a generally refreshing experience, because you're basically watching a regular filmmaker freeing himself of the usual formalistic ties and having fun. Which is what the Dogme philosophy is supposed to be all about. However, I feel that, were this film not part of a well-publicized film movement, nobody would pay it much attention at all, for it isn't that effective. Not to say that it's bad, just not particularly strong (Vinterberg's shattering The Celebration, the first Dogme film, has perhaps spoiled me).

The story: a young businessman named Kresten, newly married to a wealthy, shallow woman, receives a call on his wedding night that his estranged father has died. As we follow Kresten out away from the city to take care of his father's burial, we learn that his father was a dirt-poor farmer living out in the countryside. We also learn that Kresten has a mentally retarded older brother still living on the farm. Don't think Rain Man, at least not entirely: Mifune (named after a childhood game Kresten used to play with his brother, where he would imitate Toshiro Mifune in The Seven Samurai) is about owning up to one's past, accepting one's identity, and rebuilding a sense of family. Thrown into the mix is a runaway prostitute whom Kresten hires to take care of his brother, and her brother, a vicious teenage boy with a nasty sense of humor. Well-acted and mostly heartfelt, the film still feels a little too precious (often the case when actors portray the mentally handicapped), but it's lively and unpredictable and a worthy night out, especially if you haven't seen a Dogme film and want a fairly painless introduction to the movement.

A MIGHTY WIND (US, Christopher Guest)
Christopher Guest delivers another of his trademark "mockumentaries" about oddballs living on the fringes of the entertainment world, in this case a collection of corny 1960's folk musicians brought together for a reunion concert in Manhattan. Anybody who saw Guest's similarly-made Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show will recognize most of the returning ensemble, talented actors improvising their roles as singers, managers, PR types and various hangers-on. If there's a problem with A Mighty Wind, in fact, it's that the cast is too big. It's evident that Guest filmed a lot more scenes (many of which can be found on the movie's web site and are often funnier than what wound up in the final cut), but had to trim in order to make his story work. He should have edited before he casted: The film tries to squeeze in so many characters that some great comic performers such as Parker Posey and Jennifer Coolidge get barely more than a couple of minutes, whereas we are forced to spend far too much time with a one-note Bob Balaban as the concert's neurotic organizer and Ed Begley Jr's tiresome Swedish-American network executive, who apes Yiddish expressions around his Jewish colleagues. Better served are a bleach-blonde Fred Willard, putting in his usual turn as a merry idiot, and a very funny Jane Lynch as a creepy folk singer with a porno past. But best of all are Eugene Levy (who cowrote the story with Guest) and Catherine O'Hara as an emotionally damaged former couple who were the darlings of the 60's folk circuit, getting back together for the first time in 30 years. What they do with their characters' relationship is surprisingly touching, not only because I didn't expect such pathos in this film but because, even though I have always loved O'Hara, and even though Levy is an old pro (whose career choices usually can best be described as "embarrassing"), I had no idea the two had the capacity to find something so deep and so moving in such an otherwise slight little comedy. They cut right through the B.S. and belong in a movie all their own.

MILLION DOLLAR BABY (US, Clint Eastwood)
Flawlessly old-fashioned character drama about a struggling female boxer (Hilary Swank) and the grizzled old trainer (Eastwood) who reluctantly takes her under his wing. I don't have much to add to the praise that's already been heaped upon this film, but I definitely want to opine that I think this is the best thing Eastwood's ever helmed - though that's not saying too much, even given 2003's overrated Mystic River. His films usually don't do anything for me, but here he directs - and performs - with great sensitivity. Of course, this is as much Hilary Swank's movie as it is his, and it's no surprise that she won the Oscar (her second) for her performance. I'd like to take a moment and discuss Swank's truly weird career. Her first major role was in The Next Karate Kid, which flopped, though she was most likely cast for her tomboyishness. After floundering for years with minor roles and TV guest star spots, she won the Oscar for Boys Don't Cry - where she played a female-to-male transgender. Despite her handlers' efforts to play up her feminine side, she was only offered a handful of new projects, in generally sexless supporting roles. Still, the wide-eyed, toothsome actress always gave it her all, until the next great role for her turned up - as yet another tomboy - in Million Dollar Baby. In fact, if there's only one detrimental comment I can make about her performance in this film, it's that it's virtually the same as her work in Boys Don't Cry. But it's still great stuff. (Though God only knows what unsatisfying parts wait for her still.) As for the film itself, I'm still wondering why Eastwood chose Los Angeles instead of Boston for this tale of Irish Americans, and I could understand if some criticize its villains (an opponent who plays dirty, Maggie's white trash family) as being too one-sided. But man, you really get to hate those ugly people just as much as you grow to love Swank, Eastwood, and the redoubtable Morgan Freeman as Eastwood's longtime friend and former boxer. Million Dollar Baby is a highly emotional film that gives us a trio of richly detailed, unforgettable characters. I'm sure it will be just as rightfully praised in fifty years as it is today.

MINORITY REPORT (US, Steven Spielberg)
You already know everything you need to, going in: Tom Cruise plays a cop in a future where murderers are caught before they can even commit the murder they're charged with. And Steven Spielberg directs it. But is it the "thinking man's action picture" that some critics have purported it to be? Of course not. But it does have plenty of nifty special effects, a surprising (for Spielberg) amount of dark humor, fine production design by Alex McDowell (who did similarly strong work in Fight Club and The Crow - both movies as dominated by their production design as this one), and a top-notch supporting cast including Max Von Sydow, Lois Smith, and especially Samantha Morton as one of three "pre-cogs," zombie-like mutants held precious by the Washington, D.C. police force for their uncanny ability to predict when a local citizen is about to murder somebody, hours or even days before it happens. The story kicks in when the pre-cogs determine that Cruise himself is due to murder someone the following Friday. Naturally, Cruise insists that he's being set up (he doesn't even know the man he's supposed to kill) but has to take it on the lam when his colleagues hear the news: after all, the pre-cogs are always right. Or are they?

The populist Spielberg is as poorly matched with gloomy sci fi writer Philip K. Dick, on whose original short story the film is based, as he was with the ghost of Stanley Kubrick for his ill-fated A.I. The feel-good filmmaker/studio head, having lived as charmed a life as any could hope for, cannot wrap his admittedly gifted talents around the cynical, fatalistic visions of Dick. Oh well. You pretty much know that going in, so you sit back, enjoy the effects, tolerate Cruise (who, Spielberg realizes, is best served as a human special effect - the director keeps his star so busy with physical activity that Cruise doesn't have the time to do his standard overemoting, symmetrical-hand-gesture schtick) and never mind the story. Which, as usual, is the sinker here. I group Minority Report with those other futuristic thrillers that failed to deliver on their gimmick: Gattaca and Strange Days. All three movies blew their chances at greatness by pairing intriguing sci fi concepts with shopworn film noir storylines; in this case, Cruise is the character you've seen a million times before: the good cop with a painful past who gets set up for a crime he didn't commit. Who could be behind all this? Minority Report stacks the deck against itself by giving us a whopping two potential bad guys to choose from. Gee, tough. I figured it all out the moment Swedish actor Peter Stormare appears, leering and raving as a creepy eye replacement surgeon who puts Cruise under the knife: don't trust those Swedes! Still, despite the expected schmaltzy ending (easily the most frustrating thing about Spielberg's films: he must be addicted to tacking on happy endings, no matter how unconvincing they are in the context of the stories to which they're attached) and the occasional overshoot of future technology fantasies ("no way could we have Tron-like rocket cars on superhighways in just 50 years!"), Minority Report is made with great craft and provides some good solid entertainment. But it's not a "thinking man's" anything.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 2 (US, John Woo)
Tom Cruise plays James Bond. The only major difference between the original "Mission: Impossible" TV series (and the first awful film) and the James Bond movies was that the IMF - Impossible Mission Force - was a team of spies, while Bond was a lone wolf. Not this time. Though assisted by the first film's only other returnee, Ving Rhames, Tom Terrific is basically playing it solo here. Add gadgets, guns, a madman threatening to kill everybody and a babe, and you have my employer Paramount's yuppie version of MGM's golden franchise: Cruise. Tom Cruise.

Or Ethan Hunt, as he's called in this film. Sent by his employer (Anthony Hopkins in an enjoyable cameo) to Australia to track down some mystery virus and its antidote, he hooks up with master thief Nyah (Thandie Newton) to double-cross her ex-boyfriend Ambrose (Dougray Scott), a rogue IMF agent who is behind a devious plan to control both virus and antidote. Strangely, Hopkins admits early on that he had sent Ambrose in on Hunt's very assignment first, because Hunt was on vacation. Ambrose being such a dastardly character, it's a bit hard to swallow that the IMF would have trusted him to this, and also that nobody seems to mind when he winds up killing hundreds of innocent people in the process of nabbing information on the virus. Is the IMF that full of rogue agents? Hmm. Well, if you can get that bad taste out of your mouth, you can enjoy the following: lots of slow-motion shots; a story that veers from muddled to simplistic; Robert Towne's goofy dialogue; and director John Woo at odds with himself, his star and his crew. Fans of Woo's classic Hong Kong films (like me) will find plenty of great stunts to chew on, as well as doses of his over-the-top melodrama (which may put off audiences used to more typically cynical action fare), but only when there are guns or cars involved. Otherwise the rest of the film could be anybody's: Woo seems to say "I give up" in most of the non-action scenes. Big problems during the film's production have now become the stuff of legend, and the disorder shows: the first half of the film is weirdly paced, even rushed. There is no character development evident to justify Hunt's apparent love for Nyah (whose "master thief" abilities are almost entirely ignored after her first scene). But you'll see this film anyway because stuff blows up, Cruise shoots people, and it all goes down great with a handful of popcorn and an icy cold Coke. Please give Paramount your money. That's all this film asks of you.

MR. LONELY (UK/France/US, Harmony Korine)
Harmony Korine was one of those names you couldn't escape during the 90s, if you were following art house cinema or art snob culture. Debuting, barely 20 years old, with his screenplay for Larry Clark's incendiary Kids, Korine followed with his own auspicious directorial debut, the highly divisive Gummo (which I personally like very much). He had an interesting misfire with his "official" Dogme entry Julien Donkey-Boy and then more or less disappeared from the scene in 2000. Finally as a mature filmmaker in his 30s, Korine presents another of his trademark freak shows, only Mr. Lonely carries with it a softness that leavens its grotesque qualities. It is, simply, the story of a lonely Michael Jackson impersonator in Paris (Y Tu Mama Tambien's Diego Luna) who meets up with a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (the ever-luminous Samantha Morton) and is introduced to her husband and friends, celebrity impersonators all, living in an abandoned castle in the Scottish highlands. Scenes of these lost souls living in their isolated world are interspersed with scenes taking place in Panama, where famed director (and friend/hero of Korine) Werner Herzog plays a priest who realizes that the nuns in his charge have learned to fly. (Sally Field is not among the cast.) What it all amounts to is not something that I've yet put my finger on, but it taps into a gut feeling most of us have when we think about the kind of person who feels a need to become a celebrity impersonator, and runs with it. These characters aren't necessarily symbolic. They are, like perhaps many of their real-life counterparts (meaning actual celebrity impersonators, not actual celebrities), simply seriously damaged human beings, and as such it's not hard to see why they fascinate Korine enough to make a movie about them. Mr. Lonely is a truly unique film, sweet and depressing and embarrassing and pathetic and funny and creepy all at the same time. Fans of Gummo who appreciated that film's sadness more than its over-the-top white trash antics will probably find much to like in Mr. Lonely. I think it's a work of art, a special, highly self-assured and often beautiful film, though it most definitely won't appeal to all tastes.