RABBIT-PROOF FENCE (Australia, Phillip Noyce)
Peter Gabriel provides the score for Rabbit-Proof Fence, and although it is atmospheric, it's also strangely indistinctive. Which is an appropriate observation when discussing this film, based on a true story about three half-white, half-aboriginal girls who, in 1931 Australia, escaped from what could best be called a concentration camp for half-caste children, traveling 1500 miles across unforgiving Western Australian terrain on foot, driven to return to their tribal families back home. As the girls, the three young unprofessional actresses all do remarkably well, and they are matched by a thankfully low-key Kenneth Branagh as the "school's" headmaster hell-bent on bringing them back, and the great Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil as the tracker on their trail. Though he has just one line in the whole film, Gulpilil's weathered face reveals his character's determination, sympathy and guilt - he is, after all, keeping his own people from their families. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle pairs up with Noyce again to capture the harsh desert lands in all their glory. So what's the problem here? Nothing. And that's the problem. This is a handsome production, well-made and well-intentioned. But it lacks bite. You get the feeling that all the sweat went into the making and not into the creation, if you catch my drift. It must have been difficult for writer/producer/director Noyce to work with unknown actors in the middle of nowhere (almost the entire movie takes place outside), and he may have been so caught up in getting in right that he missed out on making it strong. I would have rather seen something rougher and angrier. Branagh is the villain, but he brings so much rationale to his character's beliefs that you can't even hate him. If you see Rabbit-Proof Fence you won't regret it - I didn't - but I'll say this: I think just about everybody in the theatre where I saw it got up at least once to leisurely go to the bathroom. I stayed in my seat, but I understood their assumption that you could skip a few minutes of this movie and not miss anything important.

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (US, Jonathan Demme)
Though the title and theme of this film may recall, to art house goers, 2007's Margot at the Wedding, Jonathan Demme's feel-good, feel-bad drama about a dysfunctional family whose most troubled member, nine-months sober junkie daughter Kym (Anne Hathaway, in an award-worthy performance), shows up at her sister's wedding only to open up all kinds of old wounds, is thankfully nowhere near as chilly as Noah Baumbach's well-made but unlikable Margot. Rather, with its handheld approach (even letting some of the wedding "guests" film part of the proceedings, sort of like leaving disposable cameras on reception tables for all to use) and flurry of invited entertainers caught in performance, it falls somewhere between Thomas Vinterberg's classic The Celebration and Jennifer Jason Leigh's middling The Anniversary Party in terms of both style and quality.

I liked Rachel in general, but had a lot of small problems with it. For starters, Demme and his cast and crew are having so much fun pretending to hold a real wedding that far too much time is spent merely documenting the festivities' many musical interludes. At times it's like a concert film. The result is a movie that, at just over two hours, is maybe thirty minutes too long. Demme forgets that, to the audience, it's not really that fun watching complete strangers having fun. One could argue that, as this is how the family's black sheep Kym must feel (she herself admits that she doesn't know a soul), it's intentional. But I think that Demme just thinks he's showing you the most awesome wedding ever. (It may sound cynical, but I can imagine certain brides-to-be watching this film and taking notes.) He also depicts a remarkable racial utopia amongst this extended family, which is refreshing, but after a while it comes across as a little too earnest, a little too politically correct. (The screenplay is by Jenny Lumet, whose own upbringing as the biracial daughter of director Sidney Lumet and granddaughter of the legendary Lena Horne may have informed this ethnically harmonious group.) It's never even mentioned what the groom's or bride's family must do for a living in order to have literally dozens of musicians - from Robyn Hitchcock to Fab Five Freddy to a Brazilian samba troupe - perform for them, and it smacks more of Demme's own connections than it does any of the characters'. What I was mostly hoping for was for the brutally honest Kym to lay the smackdown on all these phony multicultural feel-good theatrics put on by her severely broken family. It never comes, alas, but that doesn't detract from Hathaway's strong, no-nonsense performance, or indeed the work of any of her lesser-known costars. Lumet has written very rich characters and has allowed for some mind-bogglingly complicated relationships to develop between them, with no tidy endings. For that she should be lauded, and it forgives the ain't-we-hip bloat of Demme's movie.

RAN (Japan, Akira Kurosawa)
Why review a 15-year-old film? Because it's in rerelease, at least here in Los Angeles, and though it's been hailed as a modern classic, I had missed it earlier, so thought it worth checking out. Basically it is a long, slow, moody, often beautiful adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear. This I knew going in; what surprised me was how much it really is like Lear. I thought it was only similar in its setup (an elderly warrior retires and his heirs fight over his land), but in fact, much of the play is there: the King raving about the countryside with only his wise jester and loyal servant in tow; lines of dialogue from the play; etc.

Of course Kurosawa takes some liberties, though I find it wholly appropriate to restage the drama in feudal Japan, with a warlord dividing the land amongst his three sons rather than Shakespeare's mad king and his three daughters. However, Kurosawa also lets Macbeth creep in a little, with his invented character Lady Kaede, a truly evil woman whose lust for vengeance is at the heart of the family's bitter tragedy. Whether you find this sexist or not, it's still effective, as are two amazing battle sequences and Toru Takemitsu's stirring (if only briefly used) score. But is it a classic? No, not as much as Kurosawa's greats like Rashomon and Seven Samurai are. The glacially-paced film eventually outstays its welcome during its third and final hour, as we are subjected to more of the old man's raving than even Lear could cough up. There are also several odd story points in the last act that don't quite add up. However, just about any Kurosawa film is worth seeing just for the joy of watching his command over the medium. But if you're keen on discovering him for yourself, look to his earlier work first. It's far more affecting.

RATATOUILLE (US, Brad Bird)
After the listless, maudlin Cars derailed Pixar's track record for damn-near perfect cinematic storytelling, it's wonderful to see that they're back at the top of their game with Ratatouille, a wholly original entry in the computer animated movie field that seems destined to be the studio's least financially successful film primarily because it's their most sophisticated and mature. Not many marketing tie-ins here. That it's doing well at all owes everything to the quality of the film itself. With its multilayered plot about a common rat secretly cooking up magic in a snooty Paris restaurant - a rat in a restaurant? you can see all the suspense and the stakes with that setup right there - and its affinity for the intricate details of gastronomy, I can't imagine many children getting this one - how can they, when few adults can even pronounce the title? But I do think that all the little kids who dig Ratatouille today are going to grow into really cool adults. Major kudos to Pixar and to Brad Bird (an extraordinarily gifted director who thankfully took over after the film's original helmer, Jan Pinkava, was fired) for daring to make something urbane and witty in this day and age. The characters are perfectly shaded, the multiple plotlines merge seamlessly, and the photoreal backdrops of Paris and the French countryside are picture-perfect. What's not to like? I can't think of anything not to like about Ratatouille. And for a film that is essentially about the ups and downs of snobbery, I kind of admire the fact that, although it's still raking in tons of dough, it doesn't have that mainstream appeal that Finding Nemo or Toy Story did, and for that reason all of us who love the film are way cooler than all of those other people who don't have any interest in seeing a movie about a gourmet rat. All kidding aside, this is a marvelous, touching film about creativity, loneliness, and the bravery it takes to be a nonconformist. It's a "cartoon" that is inarguably made with adults in mind, and I have no problem with that.

RATCATCHER (Scotland, Lynne Ramsay)
Haunting drama of a dirt-poor Glasgow family, suffering through the city's infamous garbage strike in the late 70's. Ratcatcher focuses on the only son in the family, an 11-year-old who accidentally(?) drowns a friend in the muddy Glaswegian canals and suffers from the guilt surrounding his act as his world literally decays around him. Spare of much dialogue (which is fine; the accents are so thick that English subtitles have been provided!) and slackly paced, this film could have been extremely dull. Or given the subject matter, extremely depressing. That it isn't is a credit to Ramsay's artful, sensitive approach to her story. There's a great deal of beauty in this film, in a raw, gritty sense, and she invests as much into her imagery as a photographer would (and indeed, Ramsay was trained as a still photographer). An elegant, disturbing portrait of doomed childhood.

RAT RACE (US, Jerry Zucker)
I actually got a headache from watching this film, which isn't to say that it's all that bad. Just very loud. And all the characters scream a lot. A lot. Actually, come to think of it, it's not that good. Rat Race is about a bunch of idiots (played by a sort-of all-star cast) who are picked at random by John Cleese to make the trek from Las Vegas to Silver City, New Mexico - the first one to make it to a storage locker at the Silver City train station is entitled to keep the $2 million in cash located therein. As you would expect, lots of car chases and wacky shenanigans ensue as they make a run for the money. And lots of screaming. But Andrew Breckman's script is at least unpredictable; the dimbulb racers are put in nearly every kooky situation you can think of, from a balloon festival to a busload of Lucille Ball lookalikes to a rocket car to an ambulance carrying a slippery human heart... too bad it's not that funny. Perhaps all that screaming is meant for you not to realize that nobody in the audience is laughing. Cleese (who is masterminding the race as a gambling contest for his real clientele: millionaires betting on which of these losers will get to Silver City first) is amusing, at least, as are the various cruel bets he and his high-roller buddies engage in. But there was only one moment in the entire movie that made me seriously laugh, and that moment belongs to Jon Lovitz, a group of WWII veterans, and Eva Braun's errant lipstick. Rat Race at least has nice production values, and some impressive set pieces, which in the wake of innumerable cheap Paramount comedies is mildly refreshing. Still, make no mistake, it's just another piece of crap.

RAVE (US, Ron Krauss)
A disclaimer: This film held its world premiere at the Temecula Valley Film Festival, opposite my own film Foreign Correspondents, and because of its hot-button subject matter had a sizably larger (and younger) audience than ForCor did. However, I won't let that sway my review.

Guess what. It's about a rave! Well, sort of a rave. Actually it's just a big party with techno music at an old movie theatre in Hollywood (not a likely place for a rave, but what do I know). At the beginning of the film we are introduced to all the characters, a multiethnic crowd of disaffected L.A. youth (is there any other kind?) who will wind up at the titular event later that night. At this point the film seems like it's going to be really awful (sample dialogue: "DJ Moby will be there." "Moby? Like Moby Dick? I got one of those."), but thankfully the story settles into place soon enough and we cut back and forth between our litle ravers with ease. Throughout the film we are also treated to numerous shot-on-video "interviews" with the characters. The cast actually fairs pretty well in these interviews, which feel improvised, but there's just too many of them. I got the sneaky feeling that they might have been shot later, then cut in to explain some plot holes and murky character motivation. Anyway, the rave starts and everybody has a great time until a definite bad vibe creeps in, in the form of too-strong drugs and a couple of Chicano gangbangers who'd rather bust some heads than dance. A tragedy that's pretty much telegraphed within the first 15 minutes then ensues. Ho-hum. But nevertheless, I was happily surprised by the film's energy and authentic feel. Commonly-seen young indie faces like Douglas Spain and Aimee Graham stand out amongst a fairly good cast, but who cares, it's all just overboiled melodrama, and the story (by Kristine Tata, a former classmate of mine at CalArts) doesn't know whether it loves raves or wants to point a moralistic finger at the dimwitted young hedonists who frequent them. But you'll probably never see this film, so I won't go on.

THE READER (US/Germany, Stephen Daldry)
Tepid adaptation of the Bernhard Schlink bestseller about a German teenager (David Kross) who has an affair with an older woman (Kate Winslet, naked as usual) in 1958 Berlin, then discovers, years later, after her sudden disappearance, that she has been name-checked as an Auschwitz guard in a concentration camp survivor's memoir. The story jumps around in time as the adult version of the boy, played by Ralph Fiennes, reflects on his mixed feelings. There's nothing abjectly horrible about this film. It's stately and sober, clearly designed to win Oscars. But it has no heart. While it's difficult to discuss the film's major problems without giving away the big revelation (which, frankly, is plainly telegraphed several times in advance), I will say that the revelation, which explains the motivation behind nearly all of Winslet's character's actions, is poorly handled. Where the film should strive to examine moral uncertainty, it tries to be a love story. Where it should emphasize the passionate devotion the man feels towards his erstwhile lover, it turns him into a moralist instead. What I'm saying is that while the plot is technically solid, the direction tries to work our various emotions at exactly the wrong times. My heartstrings were begging to be pulled, but they were only given a few half-hearted tugs. I'm not totally surprised, as director Stephen Daldry (who also helmed the dull The Hours and the overrated Billy Elliot) is what I'd call an "art house hack." He works with willing actors who can be great, yet gets only competent, shallow performances out of them. Further demerits for what is becoming an increasingly dated filmmaking device: having English actors play foreigners, and then making them speak English with foreign accents. (The remaining cast, sans Swede Lena Olin in two(!) small roles, is German - though they too speak English throughout.) Winslet and Fiennes don't quite come across as Colonel Klink laughable, but it's a hoary bit of technique. (Imagine if a German cast in a German film spoke German with phony English accents just because they were portraying Brits - it would be ridiculous.) I didn't hate The Reader. I didn't even really dislike it. It's okay. But it pales in comparison to the more ethically challenging, and authentically German, The Lives of Others, which also deserves more credit for finally exploring a different part of German history. It seems you can't have an Oscar season without a Nazi- or Holocaust-themed drama, but what can be said that hasn't already been said in a dozen earlier, better movies?

REAR WINDOW (US, Alfred Hitchcock)
Definitely not a recent release; however, it is a recent re-release; Universal decided to unleash a new, super-saturated color print as an excuse to get people to see this classic again. You need no such excuse. Rear Window is a richly entertaining film, one of the true "must-see" films of the 20th century. Even if the film itself isn't coming to your town, surely you can rent it on video (even your library probably has it). See it. Enjoy it.

However, I must say, the new print doesn't add that much to the experience. I saw the film for the first time 8 years earlier and not much has changed. On top of that, seeing the film for a second time didn't really offer me anything new - I suppose it's a testament to the film's flawless craft that one gets its full message upon the first viewing. The story, for those unfamiliar, is this: James Stewart is a photographer who breaks his leg and ends up languishing in his New York apartment for several weeks, with nothing to do but spy on all the neighbors across the courtyard, while avoiding commitment with his marriage-minded society girlfriend (Grace Kelly). The first chunk of the film spends frankly a little too much time on their banter; the story really kicks in - and it is quite a kick - when Stewart suddenly thinks one of his neighbors has committed a grisly murder. After that it's all top-drawer suspense - and good fun. Certainly one of Hitchcock's most creative films (nearly all the action takes place within Stewart's apartment, and what he sees out his window), though for my money, you still can't beat Strangers on a Train, my personal Hitchcock favorite, as his most suspenseful - and funniest - film.

RED LIGHTS (France, Cédric Kahn)
One of my pet peeves is with movies that are marketed with all these quotes from critics calling it "White-knuckle suspense in the grand tradition of Hitchcock!" "A terrific Hitchcockian thriller!" "The Master would be proud!" Aside from the fact that nothing can truly be called Hitchcockian, because no filmmaker is Hitchcock (not to say that can't be as great as Hitchcock, just that they didn't live his life, they don't see things the way he did), distributors almost always attach these quotes to quiet, cerebral little foreign dramas, often French, and Red Lights is the latest to win these false accolades. I guess it gets butts in theatres to watch it - it did mine - but even though Red Lights is a very interesting little film, the advertising is, in a word, misleading. If I had no idea what to expect, I probably would have been less disappointed. But they really do market this film as a suspense picture, when it's not. The story: An embittered married couple embarks on a summer holiday in heavy traffic. What's different about this trip is that the husband (a truly excellent Jean-Pierre Darroussin), not normally a drinker, has decided to get himself sloshed, secretly, without his wife's knowledge. When one too many stops at a roadside bar finally incites the wife to storm off alone to the train station, the husband tries in vain to find her - though it doesn't keep him from making one more visit to a local bar, where he picks up a hitchhiker who may or may not be a dangerous escaped convict. There is some suspense here, true, but it's so underplayed that it doesn't depart from the film's true nature: a character portrait of a weak man coming to terms with his feelings of inadequacy. Though the story comes to a surprisingly tidy conclusion, it nevertheless leaves a lot of juicy vagaries about what really happened, and what the husband actually remembers from his drunken haze, that my girlfriend and I actively discussed on the ride home. That's enough of a rarity that I'd recommend Red Lights to anybody who enjoys having a little post-art-film conversation.

RELIGULOUS (US, Larry Charles)
Borat director Larry Charles goes on the road again with another flippant provocateur, TV talk show host Bill Maher. The concept is as easy as the targets: atheist Maher confronts an array of religious hucksters around the world to underscore his beliefs that all religion is a sham. Speaking as an atheist myself, I found the film too obviously preaching to the choir (pun intended). And as an atheist, I was rather let down by Maher, who doesn't strike me as a gifted social critic so much as simply a pushy comedian. I learned absolutely nothing new. Perhaps watching this movie will be a more delightful experience to those who know and love Maher's TV work. I haven't seen much of him before, so I wasn't giving his smirky "But what if you're wrong?" remarks to religious sorts a free pass. There is a lot of potential in making a film that, even in an era rife with documentaries critical of Christianity, dares to expose all religions. (A Christian friend reminded me that if atheists are true to their word, they can't just slam the Christians, and maybe the Muslims, while keeping their mouths shut about the Jews, Buddhists, Rastafarians et al.) Where the film gets interesting is when Maher finally starts investigating some of the kookier devotees of Judaism and Islam. But there's obviously too much to cover for just one film - perhaps Religulous would be better served as two films, one which attacks Christianity alone and one which attacks the other world religions - and Charles and Maher ignore Hinduism and Buddhism completely while wasting their time with a boring marijuana devotee in Amsterdam and some Latino con artist who's convinced thousands that he is the Second Coming. What gets the biggest laughs in Religulous are Charles's very clever cutaways to pop culture references and obscure Christian films. It reminded me of the older David Letterman shows where director Hal Gurnee would randomly cut to a strange camera angle or some stock footage just for a laugh when the show was dragging. The cutaways here are equally hilarious, but they're not enough to warrant rushing out to see the film, whether you're an atheist or not.

REPRISE (Norway, Joachim Trier)
This drama about two young novelists in Oslo has been marketed as some sort of slick, fast-paced European hipster movie, ala Run Lola Run, which is a bit disingenuous. There is the occasional stylistic flourish, but mostly it's a solid, no-nonsense story about - well, I can only say it's about growing up, but it makes the film sound sappy, which it isn't at all. Mostly it's about the grueling, insecure act of writing, it's about mental illness, and it's about being a young adult in Norway. As some of you reading this may know, my father was born and raised in Norway and so I feel an obvious connection to the country and its people, as I have over a dozen cousins, aunts, uncles and so on still over there and visit from time to time. Reprise isn't trying to be an American film or even a German or English film. It is Norwegian through and through, and its characters feel truly authentic as a result. These lads are sort of nerdy, fairly snarky, gossipy and sarcastic. They drink a lot of beer and smoke a lot of cigarettes and have weird haircuts and tend to annoy women (and it's fair to say that Norwegian women are often easily annoyed). They like both punk rock and classic literature. They remind me pretty much of every young Norwegian guy I've ever met. Trier - who is a distant relation of Danish auteur Lars von Trier (Lars added the "von" himself) - seems to know this world very well, of the educated, erudite slackers who use music and books as a shield against growing up and settling down. And so there isn't a single false note in the film. My only criticism is that it goes onre a little too long, and that Trier could have trimmed a couple longer scenes without losing much. But I could connect with Reprise. Others in the theater - who couldn't all be half-Norwegian - seemed to connect with it as well. Its dry humor and its freshness will appeal to those who love foreign cinema and who may be hungry to experience something good for a change.

REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (US, Darren Aronofsky)
Director Darren Aronofsky and his cowriter Hubert Selby, Jr. (on whose book this film is based) appear to be after one goal with Requiem for a Dream: to provide audiences with a thoroughly unpleasant filmgoing experience. Which in itself is not a bad thing; just as we go to movies to laugh, cry or scream, so too should we be able to see movies that make us go "Ick." Nothing wrong with that. And this film certainly presents us with many such opportunities. A near-psychedelic, delirium-paced non-story about drug addiction, Requiem follows young heroin addict Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto) around a hellish New York as he tries to score his next fix, while keeping his buddy (Marlon Wayans) and girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly) on their own habits as well. Meanwhile, Harry's elderly mother (Ellen Burstyn) is falling into her own drug-fueled nightmare as she becomes addicted to the diet pills she starts taking in order to lose weight and fulfill her lifelong dream of being on TV.

Aronofsky is the guy who made the indie hit Pi a couple of years back, and while I prefer this film to Pi - the acting is significantly better, and his hyperkinetic directorial style is more suitable to a story about drug addiction than it is to his half-baked "mathematical thriller" - I have the same problems with it that I did with Pi. It's very slick, but there's a real shallowness to Aronofsky's style. He pulls out every cinematic trick in the book: timelapse, extreme close-ups, video superimposition, fisheye lens shots, etc. But there's something very juvenile about his approach that I just can't shake, some ham-handed silliness that kept me from connecting to the story. It depresses me because I fear that many people will see this film and somehow believe that this is what "Important, Serious Filmmaking" is all about. Just like they did with hogwash like Natural Born Killers and Mississippi Burning. But it's all too obvious! Whatever happened to subtlety? However, kudos to Clint Mansell's evocative score (his music was also the best thing about Pi), accentuated by the Kronos Quartet's lush strings. And the performances are solid, especially Leto's surprisingly low-key loser, believable in the midst of all this stylistic excess, as well as screen veteran Ellen Burstyn, who seems willing to subject herself to whatever humiliation Aronofsky and Selby have in mind for her, and yet somehow lets her character squeak by with some depth and humanity.

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD (US, Sam Mendes)
Believe it or not, I was excited when Titanic came out in 1997. Having worked on a documentary about the ship a few years earlier, I was among the first to catch it when it was released. At the time I also was a fan of both its young leads; I was as impressed by Leonardo DiCaprio in This Boy's Life and What's Eating Gilbert Grape? as I was by Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures and Sense and Sensibility. So try to put yourself in my shoes when, halfway through Titanic, during the scene where Jack teaches Rose how to spit, I literally said to myself, "THIS MOVIE'S TERRIBLE!" And I felt that the two stars had no chemistry. Clearly, millions disagreed with me (at the time, anyway; now it's hip to hate Titanic), and so it was inevitable that DiCaprio and Winslet, who go on and on about being best friends in real life, would work together again. I was hoping that it might be something like Woody Allen's Titanic, where they'd play a pair of befuddled survivors. Instead, we get them as a morbidly unhappy married couple in 1955 Connecticut, which is what Revolutionary Road is about.

The movie opens with the two actors meeting at a bohemian party in New York. Cut to seven years later, where April (Winslet) has just realized that her dreams of becoming an actress are not about to come true, as she apparently has no talent and in any event, by now she's a mother of two living in the burbs with her shlumpy husband Frank (DiCaprio), who is stuck in a dead-end sales job in Manhattan. They drink, they smoke, they argue, they cheat on each other, until finally April decides what they need is a change of scenery, specifically a move to Paris. Surprise: things don't quite work out that way. Revolutionary Road is based on the 1961 novel by the late Richard Yates, who never met much success during his own life. I haven't read the book, but the movie seems faithful to Yates's voice, or at least his literary dialogue. His cries against the oppressiveness of conformity are heard loud and clear here. But whether it's the adaptation, the direction or the acting, any themes he has about the challenges of staying vibrant and alive in the face of stultifying comfort are forgotten, as Frank - thanks to DiCaprio's baby face and fratboy charisma - comes across as a well-meaning dope and April appears to be mentally ill. But I have the same problem with both of these stars as I do with most actors who make it big in their teens: they are praised by press and industry as having an immense latent talent, thus they never get proper training because they don't think they need it, and their work suffers. While Winslet and DiCaprio are known for their professionalism, they remain uncreative actors who make mostly obvious choices in their scene work. What's original and nuanced about many classically trained thespians is not on display here. Similarly, director Sam Mendes - Winslet's husband - made it much too big, much too fast, winning an Oscar for his debut film American Beauty, and as with his cast, there is an "emperor's new clothes" sense about his work. He hasn't earned the prestige he's got. There are a lot of problems with Revolutionary Road, including supporting actor Michael Shannon as neighbor Kathy Bates's insane son, whose presence as The Guy Who Speaks All the Dark Truths the Other Characters Are Unwilling to Admit comes across as a plot contrivance, and his performance is hammy to boot. There are some good things, too: Mendes's pedigree allows him to work with the best craftspeople, and there is indeed beautiful cinematography from the brilliant Roger Deakins, a good score from Thomas Newman and rich, realistic production design by Kristi Zea. But the self-important "Acting with a capital A" from Winslet and DiCaprio doesn't measure up, and for a film that relies so entirely on the performances of its two leads, that's unforgivable. And they still don't have any chemistry (though that may be the point of the movie). DiCaprio certainly creates more sparks with the quirky-looking Zoe Kazan, in a small role as a secretary he has a fling with. Zoe Kazan comes from Hollywood royalty, but she is still an experienced Broadway actress with a BA in theater from Yale. Here's to more screen roles for Zoe Kazan.

RIGHT AT YOUR DOOR (US, Chris Gorak)
Spooky, Twilight Zone-ish disaster movie about a young couple (Rory Cochrane and Mary McCormack) dealing with a devastating chemical bomb attack outside their Los Angeles home. The catch is that Brad (Cochrane), a stay-at-home husband and failed rock musician, is "lucky" enough to be inside when the bombs go off, while the careerist Lexi (McCormack) is caught right in the middle of the destruction. Like any ordinary paranoid citizen, Brad winds up sealing off their house with plastic sheeting and duct tape, and when a chemically poisoned Lexi finally makes it home past the police barricades, she's horrified that her husband won't let her in. This realistic drama (though the future may show that the threat of "dirty bombs" is overwrought, and that the old duct tape- and-plastic method of keeping the toxins out is of the 1950's "duck and cover" variety of useless acts) makes the most of its low budget: shot almost entirely in one house, with the use of ongoing radio broadcasts (conveniently, the couple has just moved into this house, which explains both the plentiful packing supplies and the lack of cable TV), Right at Your Door persuasively suggests a citywide nightmare even with a minuscule cast. (First-time writer/director Gorak cut his teeth as an art director on dystopian films such as Fight Club and Minority Report.) However, it does have its flaws: frankly, Lexi comes across - well before the bombs go off - as an obnoxious person who doesn't appreciate her kindly if unemployed husband, and Gorak makes the common mistake of not making us believe right off the bat that this couple actually likes each other. On the one hand, I suppose it shows why Brad could lock his own wife outside their home - there's already some distance between them, whereas if they were a gooey pair of lovebirds, you'd imagine he would sacrifice his own safety by letting her in the house, or by joining her outside in the poisonous clouds of ash that drift into their back yard. On the other hand, how great the drama would have been, and how stinging the sense of betrayal, if this couple had seemed inseparable at the start. As it stands, I think the film will have far more resonance for Angelenos purely for its "It could happen here" vibe. Outside of this hip-to-hate city, though, I suspect audiences will think these not-very-likable LA drama queens kind of get what they deserve. There's some good suspense and a nice twist ending, though.

RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (US, Rupert Wyatt)
Hollywood has been feeding upon itself so much lately, I don't know quite how to categorize Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Is it a reboot of a prequel? A prequel of a remake? Perhaps it's best to say that it's just the missing chapter in pop culture's fictional history of Earth's primate rebellion, now that computer graphics have gotten us to the point where we can believably simulate a simian uprising without resorting to casting actors in ape suits. Now the actors are in gray unitards with little dots on them, their performances motion captured and brought to life by computer jockeys. Fair enough, if the results are as impressive as they are in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Thespian Andy Serkis, whose groundbreaking "virtual performances" as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and as the eponymous star of King Kong portrays Caesar, the offspring of a test chimp in the research labs of a San Francisco pharmaceutical company. After his mother goes berserk from drug injections meant to reverse the effects of Alzheimer's and is killed, baby Caesar is taken under the wing of the drug's inventor, played by James Franco. Franco, you see, is watching his own father (John Lithgow) fade away from the disease, and his good intentions are what lay the groundwork for the apes' eventual domination. The film is divided into three acts: Caesar's youth, his captivity in what is essentially an ape prison, and the action-packed finale you see in the movie's trailer. All in all it's a well-paced, intelligent, sometimes thrilling and occasionally quite moving film, not so dark that it doesn't provide the summertime moviegoing goods, but not so slick as to be written off as mere escapist entertainment. Serkis, as usual, puts in outstanding work, which is significant as Caesar is unequivocably the star of the film. Whether the human characters are intentionally two-dimensional or not is hard to say, but Freida Pinto is wasted as Franco's girlfriend, as is Brian Cox as the manager of the "prison". Harry Potter's Tom "Draco" Felton and David Oyelowo are cardboard villains, Franco himself is bland, and only Lithgow finds enough humanity in his character to match the depths of Serkis's Caesar. Cookie cutter dialogue doesn't help anyone.

So no, it's not a perfect film. (And Vancouver, where the film was shot, is an unlikely stand-in for the iconic streets of San Francisco.) But it's still one of the most entertaining and satisfying blockbusters I've seen in the last couple of years. Credit is due not only to Serkis but to his fellow Rings/Kong alumni, cinematographer Andrew Lesnie and the Weta digital effects workshop. It's probably unfair for me to downplay director Rupert Wyatt's role in this, but the relatively unknown Brit, with just two low-budget features to his name, may have just been following studio orders (the film is produced by Fox head honcho Peter Chernin, which is noteworthy; fellow producers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, who also penned the script, haven't worked since the 1997 bomb The Relic, so can't claim much authorship either - although the story is tight). In any event, he and his visual team pack the film with amazing images. Somebody, whether it was Wyatt, Lesnie or an anonymous pre-viz artist, sure knew how to set up a great big-screen composition using a bunch of CG apes. Some shots are just so downright awesome that I could hear audible gasping in the theater, and I can't remember the last time that's happened at the movies.

RIVERS AND TIDES (Germany/UK, Thomas Riedelsheimer)
Elegant documentary about Scottish environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy, whose sculptures are produced entirely from - and using - materials he finds in the natural surroundings of wherever he decides to work, be it a riverbank, a grassy field, or a seashore. Watching Goldsworthy at work is a little like watching somebody build a house of cards, only with leaves, flowers, rocks, branches, whatever he finds around. The film is slow-moving, meditative in the way that watching a shadow climb a wall or the tide coming in is meditative, but Goldsworthy's art, painstakingly and obsessively made, can be so stunningly beautiful that the results make for some breathtaking visuals. For fans of this artist's work, the film is a must, as a rare occasion to see Goldsworthy's work as it was meant to be seen - in motion, in the wild, as opposed to still photos or in a museum (which are usually the only way most of us will ever see it). And thankfully, director Riedelsheimer keeps his film focused on Goldsworthy as an artist. We are given almost no biographical information about him, his is the only voice we hear, and he never waxes philosophical about how we can save Mother Earth. Goldsworthy talks only about his art. And like that art, the film's soundtrack by Fred Frith borders on the New-Agey but never crosses over. You may see a lot of long-hairs in the audience, but this film is for everybody.

THE ROAD HOME (China, Zhang Yimou)
All aesthetics and personality traits aside, I see Zhang Yimou in the same light as Woody Allen, in that the films he made with his former lover, Gong Li, all contained intense waves of tragedy, usually resulting from the selfish actions of Li's characters (Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Shanghai Triad, et al). Similarly, Woody Allen's films with his ex-wife Mia Farrow grew more and more painful as their marriage disintegrated. Thus, as Allen's post-Mia work, inspired by his peppy young girlfriend Soon-Yi Previn, is generally lighter and fluffier, so too is Zhang's post-Gong Li work. Especially now that he has his peppy young girlfriend: Zhang Ziyi, the star of The Road Home. You know her as the eye-catching little spitfire from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but it was Zhang Yimou who gave her her big break with The Road Home several months earlier. (Sony Pictures Classics, the American distributor for both films, wisely sat on The Road Home while Crouching Tiger turned Zhang Ziyi into a superstar.)

The film's story defines simplicity: in a stark black-and-white contemporary China, a businessman is called home to his childhood home in order to bury his father, the beloved village teacher. While dealing with his grieving mother, he comes across a photo of his parents when they were young, and the film then bursts into gorgeous autumnal color as he relates the story of how his mother (played as a young woman by Zhang Ziyi) first fell in love with his father. At this point Zhang Yimou's infatuation with his own star constantly pushes the film towards the realm of fetishism: Zhang Ziyi is incredibly cute, but you get endless close-ups of her smiling face whenever her unwitting suitor crosses a field or walks his young students home from school. Again and again. But it's all so sweet that I can't bring myself to call it annoying. Let's just say that if you have a crush on the girl, then here's your chance to bask in her cuteness. If it sounds like it would be too much for you, though, it probably is. Fortunately, like all of Zhang Yimou's films, The Road Home has a fantastic emotional payoff - played out in the black-and-white present day - that will surely leave a lump in your throat. And technically it's first-rate, down the line. A great date movie, too. You can even take Grandma to it. It's hardly the best work for either of the two Zhangs, but I have to applaud a story (written, by the way, by Bao Shi) that takes a quiet romance between two ordinary people and elevates it to a mythic level. Would that all human relationships were treated with such reverence.

ROAD TRIP (US, Todd Phillips)
I was interested in actor DJ Qualls as a possible Sharky Baby cast member, so I thought I would check out the film for his performance. By now you all know the story of Road Trip: a college student accidentally mails his long-distance girlfriend a videotape of himself having sex with another girl, so he enlists the help of three friends to drive from Ithaca, New York to Austin, Texas in order to apprehend the incriminating video before the girlfriend does.

That's it for plot. The rest of the film is gags, gags, gags - several of them, of course, gag-inducing. And frankly, though I wasn't rolling in the aisles, I enjoyed it. The gross-out moments aren't mean-spirited (and feces-free!), Phillips and cowriter Scot Armstrong sympathize with their characters, and the cast is likeable. It's nice to see a movie about horny college students that doesn't resort to slapstick violence and even dredges up a modicum of respect for its female characters. All in all a light and lively movie that recognizes comedy's cardinal rule: don't throw out the jokes just to make room for feel-good B.S. Jokes feel good enough as is. My only real beef is with Tom Green, who plays the friends' stay-at-home slacker pal (and the film's narrator). It seems as though Phillips just let him cut loose, which doesn't always sail. But then I never found Green very funny. I know many people do, so I'll leave it at that. (I don't think Jim Carrey is funny either.)

As for DJ Qualls? He's just plain great as bone-thin, virginal Kyle: he elevates what could have been standard dork schtick into actual humanity. Though he is certainly game for anything, whether it's dancing like an idiot or making love with a large 'n' lovely black girl or shoving his hand down his underpants, you always see him as a person - and a lovable one at that. He's a very focused actor. I'm only sad that his career has taken off (he's next headlining a Disney film), so he might be unreachable now. Shucks.

ROCKET SCIENCE (US, Jeffrey Blitz)
Writer/director Jeffrey Blitz is the man behind one of the most entertaining documentaries in recent memory: 2002's Spellbound. After the runaway success of his geeky-kids-in-a-spelling-bee movie, it was expected that Blitz would soon be getting offers to direct a non-documentary, and his choice of subject matter for his first dramatic feature seemed like a perfect fit: geeky kids on a high school debate team. The only problem is that designer/music video director Mike Mills already made that movie: the underrated 2005 indie Thumbsucker. Blitz, lacking the all-star cast that Mills had access to, takes a cue from Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse and plops his story in Solondz's Darwinian New Jersey, a quiet suburban hell where outcasts receive neither love nor justice, and families are kinky and cruel. But lacking the bite of Dollhouse and the style of Thumbsucker, the well-acted Rocket Science has nowhere to go. It doesn't help that its nerdy teenage protagonist (Reece Thompson) is an incurable stutterer who takes half a minute to get through a single sentence - if he even makes it to the end of one. Having your main character stammer furiously through every scene may sound good on paper, but it quickly grows wearying on the screen. And like many a coming-of-age movie, there's an unpleasant misogyny hiding behind the usual "girls are a mystery to our young hero" theme. Where Rocket Science falters especially is in trying to get us to believe the love that its stutterer has for the cutthroat debate champion (Anna Kendrick) who rather unbelievably insists that he'd make a great debate partner for her. I wanted to like this movie so much, but all I can say is that it's got a great young cast (Vincent Piazza, as Thompson's nearly psychotic brother, steals every scene he's in) and doesn't talk down to its audience. But there's so much wasted potential here. And Blitz's decision to add a clumsy third-person narrator and a "cool" Violent Femmes soundtrack (the rights for which probably ate up the bulk of the film's astonishing $6 million budget) says he's trying too hard. Better luck next time, Jeffrey.

ROMAN DE GARE (France, Claude Lelouch)
This entertaining Gallic diversion is part romantic comedy, part murder mystery, part suspense thriller and part meditation on professional jealousy. It opens with a famous novelist (Fanny Ardant) being questioned by the police about a couple of her "victims." We have a handful of brief flashbacks to indistinct points in the novelist's life, and then settle into what seems at first to be a completely unconnected story: a man (Dominique Pinon) is driving his car through France late one night. He witnesses an argument between a soon-to-be-married young couple and offers the girl (Audrey Dana) a ride once her fiance drives off in her car. Pinon, with his hatchet face, will be familiar to anybody who's seen Jean Pierre Jeunet's films, or Diva, and so it's easy to buy the odd-looking actor as anything: is he an escaped serial killer known as "The Magician"? Is he a schoolteacher who has just left his wife and children? Is he the aggrieved ghost writer for Ardant? Or is he someone else entirely? The film plays with expectations nicely, and when Ardant enters the picture again, it's just another of the plot's many fun twists. "Roman de gare" is the French term for "airport novel," referring to the engaging, if disposable, action/mystery books that are usually found in airport bookstores, and this movie lives up to its title rather well. It's not a great or profound film, but it's an enjoyable couple of hours. So if you want a night out at the movies, are tired of Hollywood fare, yet aren't necessarily up for anything heavy, then Roman de Gare is for you.

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (US, Wes Anderson)
Wes Anderson's second feature Rushmore reminded me, in its tale of a wise-guy prep schooler frightened of his own loneliness, of J. D. Salinger's classic novel The Catcher in the Rye. Only much lighter and shallower. So when I heard that Anderson's next film involved a family of child prodigies who grow up to be unhappy adults, I figured this would be his riff on Salinger's other novel Frannie and Zooey. Only much lighter and shallower. Right again, to some degree. The Royal Tenenbaums follows the titular Royal (Gene Hackman), the ousted patriarch of the well-to-do New York clan, who goes broke and thus feigns stomach cancer in order to worm his way back into the family. At the same time he shows up, the three miserable Tenenbaum children all find themselves gravitating back to the family home, one by one: Chas (Ben Stiller), an angry father of two who has recently lost his wife in a plane crash; Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), Royal's adopted daughter, who hides in the bathroom from her suffocating older husband (Bill Murray); and Richie (Luke Wilson), a failed tennis star who has been traveling around the world as he mulls over his secret love for Margot. Cheery bunch, no? Well, see, that's the problem. Described as such, The Royal Tenenbaums sounds like a wallow in misery. But Anderson's visual style is just so damn peppy that, when the tragedy finally does poke through the characters' fragile fronts, I felt nothing, because of the glib setup. Though Anderson does subtly and imperceptably shift his style from overly formalistic, balanced shots (think Peter Greenaway meets Pedro Almodovar) to a more relaxed, "normal" film staging, I can't credit this as anything special to Tenenbaums because he has already established this as his signature look in both Rushmore and his first film Bottle Rocket (all of which, incidentally, were cowritten by Anderson and actor Owen Wilson, who appears in Tenenbaums as their wannabe neighbor who makes it big as a writer but still wants in the family). And even if he loses the cloying symmetry later on, he retains the film's crisp, colorful pop look, which betrays the story's suggestion that life is sloppier than we want it to be.

The Royal Tenenbaums is still entertaining: many of the lines are deadpan funny and that's one hip soundtrack, blasting everything from the Ramones to Nick Drake. But its own quirkiness undermines the serious issues at its core. With Ben Stiller and his boys in matching red Adidas sweatsuits, and Owen Wilson hamming it up in his cowboy getup, the story fumbles in its attempts at gravity. Despite the darker themes of drug addiction, marital infidelity and suicide, everything is so shiny and neat that it's hard to believe anything truly bad could happen to this bunch. The reason why Bottle Rocket worked, and why Rushmore worked somewhat, was that the characters were smalltown dopes with smalltime dreams. You get the sense here that, with this film, Anderson has bitten off more than he can chew. The all-star cast (which also includes Anjelica Huston and Danny Glover) doesn't help: they're inarguable pros, but there is little chemistry between most of them (though I liked Hackman's flakiness and found Paltrow strangely alluring as a spooky poet-type with raccoon eye shadow), and while watching many of the scenes I could see the actors reciting words from the script. Not a good sign. I suppose a lot of people will like The Royal Tenenbaums, but beware: it's not nearly as deep or as meaningful as it thinks it is. Trivia note: in each of Anderson's films, an interracial romance takes center stage. Nothing wrong with that, I just think it's interesting to point out.

RUDO Y CURSI (Mexico, Carlos Cuarón)
Rudo and Cursi are the nicknames given to two poor, dumb banana farmer brothers (Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, respectively, performing together for the first time since 2001's Y Tu Mamá También made them famous) who, rather improbably, become soccer superstars after a sports agent finds them kicking the ball around on a dirt field. Born losers both, the film follows the brothers, constantly in rivalry, as they rise to the top, only to find their newfound fame and fortune preying on their weaknesses. As a vehicle for its stars, Rudo y Cursi is an entertaining movie, and the two actors are clearly having a great time. But it's not all that funny, it's certainly free of pathos, and it doesn't give you much to chew on afterward. It's fun to imagine that Cuarón, whose own brother Alfonso has since become an A-list Hollywood director after Y Tu Mamá, is expressing his own brotherly envy here, but it's not likely. Rudo y Cursi doesn't seem to be a personal film for anybody. Mostly it's just a drily silly but pointed look at what it means to be upwardly mobile in today's Mexico, and who in the end really comes out on top.

THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT (US, William Friedkin)
My employer Paramount has a tendency to churn out the most conservative-reactionary motion pictures around these days. Case in point: The Rules of Engagement. The studio decided to play it completely safe, combining several sure-fire elements from their recent hits: the hero and villain from last year's Double Jeopardy (Tommy Lee Jones and Bruce Greenwood), the star of their upcoming Shaft remake (Samuel L. Jackson), a military investigation (ala The General's Daughter) and a director who just happens to be married to Paramount's head of motion pictures, Sherry Lansing. At that point, the studio figured, the movie can go on auto-pilot. Which The Rules of Engagement basically does.

Jackson is a war hero called in to rescue a U.S. Ambassador (Ben Kingsley, doing it for the paycheck) from civil unrest in the small Middle Eastern country of Yemen. A Muslim demonstration outside the U.S. embassy turns violent and, after three of Jackson's marines are killed by sniper fire, Jackson suddenly orders his troops to open fire on the supposedly "peaceful" crowd of women and children protesting. 83 Muslims are killed and dozens more injured in the melee. Jackson returns to the U.S. to face a court martial. He asks his old 'Nam buddy Jones to defend him, even though all the evidence and the audience's own eyes seem to support the case against him. So Jones does a little good old investigatin' in Yemen, finds out some stuff, blah blah blah, courtroom drama ensues. No surprises really, but if you're a fan of the Perry Mason stuff you'll be entertained for two hours. Of course there is a government cover-up involved and of course the Arabs are all depicted as bug-eyed, screaming savages. There's also quite a bit of violence throughout the film, and a generally knee-jerk pro-military tone that turns downright insulting by the film's rushed conclusion. Performances are serviceable (except for an over-emoting Anne Archer, bless her cut scenes) and the dialogue is crisp. But please, there are plenty of good films out there much more worthy of your time and money than this.