TABLOID (US, Errol Morris)
Documentarian Morris has always been attracted to eccentric characters, and he found a doozy in one Joyce McKinney, the subject of his latest feature Tabloid. Although perhaps the less you know about McKinney in advance, the more fun you'll have with this wild documentary about her life, here's the basic summary: In 1977, this would-be model from North Carolina, who claims to have an IQ of 168, believed that her Mormon boyfriend had been abducted by his "cult" (a term open to interpretation, given your feelings about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) and flew to England with an accomplice in order to free the man she loved from what was, in reality, just his missionary work. After spending a weekend together, the guilt-plagued boyfriend allegedly changed the story about what really happened and claimed he was kidnapped, tied up, even raped. What follows is at first a compelling examination of the Mormon church's beliefs and then a bizarre, often hilarious portrait of McKinney herself, focusing on the media frenzy that erupted in the UK in the wake of her lost weekend. Although I feel one may have to strain to find the cultural relevance of Morris's film, despite its release mere days after the UK tabloid News of the World went down in flames for criminal journalistic practices, there's no denying that it's tremendously entertaining, especially as the story takes one strange turn after another, and the ebullient, moon-faced McKinney - a willing interviewee who feels right at home oversharing with Morris and his camera - is a real character. She must be seen to be believed, even if you don't always believe her.

THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (US, Anthony Minghella)
Great-looking film that takes place in the early 50's and genuinely feels like it, from the Technicolor look of the film stock down to the well-chosen period faces. Matt Damon plays Tom Ripley, a New York nobody who is sent by a millionaire to Italy to bring back that millionaire's son, Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law, terrific), now spending his inheritence loafing on the beach with his stiff, whiny girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow - well cast!). Ripley winds up befriending Dickie... then falls madly in love with him. After "something horrible happens" (and you must be stupid if you can't figure out what), Tom winds up assuming Dickie's personality, while everybody else wonders just what happened to the real Dickie.

My main problem with the movie is a story one. I don't know about Patricia Highsmith's original novel, but the first film adaptation, the French film Purple Noon, played down the homoerotic aspect and showed Tom as simply a sociopath who so covets Dickie's golden lifestyle that it seems natural that he would resort to drastic measures to become Dickie. This new adaptation portrays Tom as just a frustrated closet homosexual - he covets Dickie, not Dickie's lifestyle, so it seems a mere plot contrivance that Tom should decide to start living his life as Dickie. It's like two halves of a story that don't quite click together. Though moderately suspenseful, the film never allows us to either love Tom or hate him, so I for one didn't care whether or not he was caught in his charade. But like I said, it's nice to look at, and Gabriel Yared's score is jazzy and rich.

TALK TO HER (Spain, Pedro Almodóvar)
Though some critic beat me to the punch with the suggestion that a better title for this film would be "Girlfriends in a Coma," if you think this is just a stuffy art film about two men sitting by the bedsides of the comatose women they love, nattering on endlessly into their deaf ears, you're either going by the wrong review or you don't know Pedro Almodóvar. For, like the rest of his body of work, Talk to Her is a sumptuous, sometimes outrageous psychodrama, full of color, music, life - and kinkiness. The setup is enough to write here; there are so many juicy plot twists that I dare not give them away. Suffice it to say that the two men (Javier Cámara, Darío Grandinetti) have significantly more complicated relationships with their "girlfriends" (Leonor Watling and Rosario Flores, respectively) than you might think. Though unlike other critics I can't imagine rating this higher than Almodóvar's previous outing, the heartbreaking All About My Mother, it's still a fine film by one of the world's very best filmmakers, and worth seeing as all of his films are. And once more there is an utterly fantastic score by composer Alberto Iglesias, with a moving number by Caetano Veloso (look fast during this scene to see cameos by Almodóvar regulars Cecilia Roth and Marisa Paredes).

TARNATION (US, Jonathan Caouette)
Jonathan Caouette's autobiographical documentary reportedly cost him just $218.32 to make, being essentially a montage of his own home movies and various found footage that he edited together on his boyfriend's computer using Apple's free iMovie software. Of course, the movie you actually see cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more - not just for the 35mm blowup and the stereo remix, but also for all the expensive legal fees required to clear the rights to the countless film, TV and song clips used throughout. But because Caouette originally made the film only as a form of self-catharsis (it only broke out when Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator John Cameron Mitchell discovered Caouette at an audition, and then hooked him up with the illustrious Gus Van Sant - both of whom signed on as executive producers and helped Caouette cut the film down from three hours to 88 minutes - then helped him get it into Sundance), it's hard to call it a "brave" film, since he literally had nothing to lose by making it. Also, it is immediately apparent that Caouette, who admits to suffering from "depersonalization disorder," a very hip kind of mental illness that means something like he has trouble separating dream from reality, actually suffers more from good old-fashioned narcissism: while it's to the film's benefit that Caouette started pointing a video camera at himself (and, to a lesser extent, at his dysfunctional family) as a child, in my view it was less a form of self-expression than it was pure vanity. Early in Tarnation, we sit through an extended monologue Caouette performed for his camera at 11, impersonating an abused Southern housewife. It's an astonishingly mature, developed performance, especially for that age, but I get the feeling that Caouette included it mainly to showcase his precocious talents. Ditto the film's one big laugh, the teenage Caouette's high school musical version of Blue Velvet with songs by Marianne Faithfull. It's pretty original, but there is this underlying message of "Look how cutting-edge I've always been!" that turned me off. I gotta give the guy credit for the massive amount of time it took him to piece together his film, and the sequences where he interacts with his mentally ill mother - a former beauty who lost her mind due to years of unnecessary shock therapy - carry the poignancy you'd expect, though they too smack of self-absorption. Caouette's manic editing style may put many people off - I noticed several couples leaving the theatre less than 30 minutes into the film - but if you give it time, it settles down, especially during the interviews with his mom. I'll accept it as an offbeat portrait of a troubled family by an enthusiastic young filmmaker/performer, but I can't help wonder if I'd be more impressed with Caouette as a person if a third party documentarian had made Tarnation, instead of Caouette fashioning it as a tribute to, mainly, himself. The soundtrack, however, is fantastic. If it ever comes to market, I highly recommend buying that instead of seeing the film.

TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE (US, Trey Parker)
Pretty much all I have to say is "The South Park guys made a puppet movie" and you know what to expect: ribald humor, razor-sharp sendups of American culture in general and American celebrity culture in particular, and songs. Copping the "supermarionation" style made famous by the 1960's British TV show Thunderbirds, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's marionettes embody the titular team of freedom fighters, thwarting terrorists around the world no matter the cost - to other nations, that is. Politically incorrect as ever, Parker and Stone pair up North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il with Hollywood's most notable peacenik actors (Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins, et al) as the film's villains, as Kim prepares to launch terrorist attacks across a world made helpless by their adoration of these self-aggrandizing thespians preaching peace. Leave it to the bickering Team America, a macho group of action movie hero cliches, to dispense not only with the terrorists, but with the movie stars themselves, in particularly gruesome fashion. Only the dimmest of dimwits won't see the satire behind this film's over-the-top patriotism: even if they depict a fat evil Michael Moore as a suicide bomber blowing up Mount Rushmore, Parker and Stone are still Moore's pals in real life. Yet the consistently refreshing thing about their biting comedy has always been their take-no-prisoners approach, where both right and left are skewered, and no envelope is left unpushed. (Team America features a hilariously hardcore puppet sex scene that in no way could ever have been done in a studio film with actual actors.) On top of all that, the mind-bogglingly detailed miniature set design is legitimately Oscar-worthy, and the costumes and cinematography, small-scale as they are, are top notch. Team America is an utterly strange film, in the best sense of the word, and gives us hope that if even in the bleakest of cinematic eras, a Hollywood studio - Paramount Pictures, no less - can produce something so weird, so unique, so funny and so rude and get it onto 2,000 American screens, then there is hope for us all. Team America is great, great stuff.

TEDDY BEARS' PICNIC (US, Harry Shearer)
I caught this at a film festival and I doubt it will make it to theatres, but it's jam-packed with so many familiar faces that I'm sure you'll stumble across it at Blockbuster someday. Writer-director Shearer is a very talented comic actor and commentator, best known for his numerous voices on The Simpsons (Mr. Burns, Ned Flanders, et al) as well as his role in This Is Spinal Tap. So how does he fare as a filmmaker? Let me put it this way: don't quit The Simpsons just yet, Harry. A broad satire, Teddy Bears' Picnic concerns a weeklong forest retreat for successful white men - business tycoons, celebrities and political leaders, millionaires all - in order to "blow off some steam," which means a) boozing it up; b) sleeping with the hookers across the lake; and c) otherwise acting like frat boys. The premise is clever (and allegedly has some basis in fact) but the execution is flat. Surprising, you might think, since the cast is full of witty comic actors such as Michael McKean, Fred Willard, George Wendt and Henry Gibson. Perhaps they were all so convinced that they were naturally funny that they decided not to do much with the material. There's always been something about Shearer's writing: it's so sharp that it's not really funny. Shearer chooses some obvious targets, too, and while he avoids most of the usual jokes, he nevertheless mocks his characters without ever relating to them, rendering this comedy too smug - and, even at 80 minutes, rather tiresome. It's ugly to look at, too.

TELL NO ONE (France, Guillaume Canet)
In this engaging French mystery/thriller, a humble pediatrician named Alex (Francois Cluzet, whose resemblance to Dustin Hoffman is uncanny) goes on a vacation with his wife to the family farm. One night he hears her scream out in the woods. Rushing to her aid, he is suddenly knocked into a coma and thrown into a lake. His wife's dead naked body is soon discovered. And that's all within the first few minutes! Eight years later, trying to rebuild his life but still unable to forget that horrible night, Alex gets an email that suggests that his wife is, in fact, still alive. The plot thickens considerably, and before you know it, both the cops and a group of ruthless murderers are after Alex as he tries to uncover the truth. Tell No One has a colorful cast, a stunning mid-movie chase scene, and plot twists galore. It's one of the few contemporary films that could truthfully call itself "Hitchcockian" in its themes, suspense and supporting characters. It's definitely an entertaining two hours at the movies. With a storyline that complicated, however, many questions came up for me after the film was over. It's always a problem with scripts loaded with that many twists. You start asking yourself things like, "Wait a minute - if that happened, then how could this other thing have happened? And why did so-and-so do that? And what about that one character we never hear from again?" I assume the answers are somewhere in the film, as it doesn't seem like the script (written by Canet and costar Philippe Lefebvre, based on the novel by American writer Harlan Coben) is stupid, but I still haven't worked it all out. Anyway, if post-screening confusion doesn't scare you off, Tell No One is a satisfying affair.

TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES (US, Jonathan Mostow)
Like most, I was skeptical when I first heard that Terminator 3 was in production. Why, twelve years after James "Jimbo" Cameron fashioned Terminator 2 into the ultimate action film, setting new standards for computer effects, big explosions and an irritating trend of hyper-abbreviating movie sequel titles, would anybody want to see a new Terminator film? What could another sequel have to offer? ("Look, the enemy Terminator is now a girl. Yawn.") And even though I can't stand that pompous old Jimbo, I was suspicious when I heard that he had absolutely zero involvement in this sequel. He's not even given a thank-you credit. How could it be good? The old-fashioned way, I guess: With a good script and a good director. Mostow is little-known aside from his capable "B" thrillers Breakdown and U-571, but then Cameron's only pre-Terminator directing credit was for Piranha 2, so why split hairs. Given a still-cool story premise - robot from the future is sent back to the present to kill the person(s) responsible for leading the human race to victory in a war against the machines - and a fresh cast (with the exception of Arnie, naturally), Mostow's craftsmanship and lack of pretension come to the fore. He's made a lean, exciting thriller, and if Terminator 3 (which I've noticed nobody is calling "T3," although amusingly some woman in line at the theatre asked for tickets to "T2") doesn't fully measure up to the adrenaline rush of its predecessors, it's still a damn sight better than any of the other action films put out in the last couple of years.

Nick Stahl is decent in the part that Edward Furlong originated (and is now too drugged-out to play), though his accent suggests that his character John Conner spent a few years in New York since the last film. Claire Danes delivers a performance that initially teeters on the annoying, but eventually settles in. Arnold is back in his natural habitat. And as the villainous T-X robot (whose trick is not so much the ability to morph, but, in this Internet age, to be able to plug in and control other machines) supermodel Kristanna Loken is effective in a role identical to Robert Patrick's in T2, but perhaps because of her distracting good looks she lacks the menace Patrick had, that feeling that she is truly unstoppable. But why quibble? I'm just impressed that three films with essentially the same plot line can still be distinct and fresh. Terminator 3 deserves praise for daring to be truly dark in these washed-out times, with a notably sharp surprise ending. Though as the years pass my memory may be clouded by nostalgia, I still think the first two movies carry more visceral impact. Nevertheless, this film is still worth seeing for a high-quality blend of action and story that is miles above the other summer blockbusters. Best of all, it doesn't have the dreary pathos Jimbo suffused T2 with.

TERMINATOR SALVATION (US, McG)
I got to work on the Blu-ray for this, and one of my tasks was to sit down and watch a preview copy of the film. If you've never watched an advance screener, it can be a bit of a bummer: black and white, with "PROPERTY OF WARNER BROS." printed in the middle of every frame, and not usually final audio or effects. So you've seen the movie, but you haven't really seen the movie. I'm glad I later saw this in the theater, because there were some interesting bits of dialogue changed for the release, and one genuinely surprising visual effect late in the story which I'll tell you about if you ask me. As you know, Terminator Salvation, the fourth in the series, is the first to take place after the mythical "Judgment Day," when evil computer network Skynet becomes self-aware and launches a nuclear attack on humanity, launching a years-long war between the human resistance and the machines, with the nigh-unstoppable Terminators serving as the latter's weapon of choice. So we finally get to see the prophesied resistance leader John Connor (Christian Bale this time) all grown up and in charge, and the film is thus starkly different in style from its predecessors. Instead of the nightmarish thrill of a killer robot hunting down nice people in present-day Los Angeles, we get a futuristic war movie. No time travel, no Arnold, not much time for reflection. McG - oh, how we all loathe to write and say that name - works very hard to create wall-to-wall action, but at the expense of the humor, suspense and focus of the earlier films. Instead of Arnold's amusing deadpan delivery, we get lots of shouting from Bale and costar Sam Worthington, as a mysterious murderer put to death in 2003 and waking up in 2018 a, shall we say, "changed man." (The trailer for the film explains nearly everything; I will be discreet.) There are also many, many explosions. The results are exhausting, even bludgeoning.

I'm not saying that this is a terrible film, nor that its forebears are flawless. Having re-watched the earlier installments as part of my job, I can tell you that the first Terminator is rather dated, mostly due to Brad Fiedel's $5 score. Other than his iconic dunnunt-dunt-dunt-dunt theme, it's cheapo synthesizer cheese. But the film is cherished because nobody in 1984 expected much from James Cameron or Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the film was startlingly exciting. T2 holds up, despite Cameron's stilted dialogue, mostly because the by-then A-list director shrewdly jumped on brand new computer graphics technology to knock our socks off with a unique and terrifying villain. It remains one of maybe four movies that has truly amazed audiences with CG effects. T3 is servicable, but offered nothing new except for a female Terminator. By now, with the T-101 now acting as governor of California and the rest of us living in a time well after Judgment Day supposedly occured, it's hard to get too jazzed about a new Terminator film, frankly. There's no magic anymore. No surprises. It's a franchise where you expect to see lots of things get destroyed. And whereas Terminator Salvation has a decent storyline (though not without its plot holes), generally good performances and numerous homages to the earlier films - especially the 1984 one - my general reaction is, Who cares?

TERRIBLY HAPPY (Denmark, Henrik Ruben Genz)
A young Copenhagen police officer (Jakob Cedergren, who looks like a blonde Ben Affleck) is transferred to a small Danish town in the middle of nowhere after he commits a disturbing act back home that is hinted at in the first moments of Terribly Happy but only revealed near the end. (Not that it's that shocking a revelation.) Small towns in movies come in exactly two flavors: idyllic and menacing. The lifeless village in this film falls squarely into this latter category, and Terribly Happy quickly adopts a tone that falls somewhere between Twin Peaks and the original Wicker Man. Actually, it's more like a bleak, somber version of Edgar Wright's comedy Hot Fuzz, as Cedergren's troubled character - the only lawman in a town where the isolationist residents take care of their own problems - gets caught in the middle of a domestic violence dispute between a sultry but possibly insane woman and her hot-tempered husband, and one starts suspecting that the townspeople know much more than they're letting on, and that there might be a conspiracy at work against the poor dumb cop. Terribly Happy isn't a, well, terrible film, but it lacks a spark. Cedergren has more than a physical resemblance to Affleck - like the fleeting Hollywood heartthrob, he shows little range as an actor here, and so it's hard to care about his character, especially as he commits the worst atrocities in the story! It's a cold performance in a cold movie that relies a bit too much on bombastic sound effects even though there are a few good suspenseful scenes and a rich atmosphere. Terribly Happy is recommended mostly to fans of contemporary Scandinavian cinema who have an affinity for its trademark bone-dry humor and nihilistic world view.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (US, Jason Reitman)
Aaron Eckhart plays Nick Naylor, a smarmy lobbyist for the tobacco industry and self-described "merchant of death" whose job it is to convince Americans that cigarettes won't kill you. During the first few zippy minutes of Thank You for Smoking, Naylor is at the top of his game - smooth talking, quick thinking. Soon, though, as he tries to broker a deal with a Hollywood superagent (Rob Lowe) to make smoking in the movies sexy again, sleeps with a newspaper reporter (the increasingly unwelcome Katie Holmes) doing a piece on him, and contends with a self-righteous Senator (William H. Macy) who wants to put a skull and crossbones on every package of cigarettes, Naylor soon comes off as a little directionless - as does, unfortunately, the movie. Funny but not funny enough, smart but not smart enough, there's something unsatisfying about Thank You for Smoking where, with its plum cast and easy targets, it could have hit a home run. I think first-time feature filmmaker Reitman - the 28-year-old son of Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman - should have insisted upon an extra couple of takes for every scene, to tighten up the pace and get more energy out of his actors. Eckhart skates by on his natural charisma, but his costars come across as a little lazy (though I'm sure they were all having a great time). Also, the film seems like Hollywood's idea of what Washington politics are like - it's a poor study, regretfully under-researched. (Naylor's L.A. adventures don't even feel accurate, a surprise given Reitman's Tinseltown upbringing. The agency depicted in the film is a toothless parody of the real thing.) And in what may be meant as the film's ultimate inside joke, not a single cigarette is smoked during the entire story - ha ha, but when a doctor tells Naylor that he has to quit smoking, and it's supposed to be a big deal, the fact that we haven't seen him so much as look at a cigarette beforehand kills the moment. I don't want to come down too hard on this film. It's got some amusing dialogue that expounds nicely upon the phenomenon known as spin, and takes us in with a spin of its own, by making us root for a lead character who is essentially a scumbag. (Naylor is shown as a happy-go-lucky guy who loves his son and seems like he could take or leave his job - this latter detail may explain why the story doesn't succeed.) Points also for James Whitaker's slick cinematography and Rolfe Kent's jaunty score. But ultimately I can't recommend Thank You for Smoking. It could have been a razor-sharp sendup on politics and hypocrisy, if only Reitman and company tried harder.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (US, Paul Thomas Anderson)
Maybe it says something about me that the Paul Thomas Anderson film I like best is the one that nobody else likes: Punch Drunk Love. For I found both Magnolia and Boogie Nights - still hailed by most film geeks as classics - bloated and irritating. Still, I think Anderson is an interesting director and I certainly looked forward to There Will Be Blood, thanks to intense advance critical acclaim and of course the cooperation of star Daniel Day-Lewis, who only infrequently chooses to work and always delivers an outstanding performance. Perhaps, then, my expectations for There Will Be Blood were too high, because I walked out of the theater during the end credits feeling just a little bit underwhelmed. Day-Lewis is still fantastic, of course, and it would be a surprise if he doesn't pick up his second Oscar for his work. Anderson's direction is notably scaled back, letting his monster actor do all the heavy lifting, and that's fine. And it must be said that the film is perfectly made in every way: the production design, costuming and cinematography expertly capture the film's time period (mostly set in 1911), and Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood's creepy, mostly atonal score adds significant atmosphere and tension. So what left me cold? I guess it was the smallness of the story.

There Will Be Blood is about an oil man named Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis), a misanthropic opportunist who arrives at the birth of the era of the automobile and dreams of making it rich. Using his waifish adopted son (a terrific newcomer named Dillon Freasier) as a prop, he swindles a rural Californian church family - with the surname Sunday, no less - out of their land and commences drilling, thus setting up the story's main conflict between the atheist Plainview and the vain young minister Eli Sunday (Paul Dano, the only other recognizable name in the cast, who is very good). And herein lies the problem. Plainview's hatred towards the pious young preacher is palpable. Over the top, in fact. And yet it's never really explained why Eli - who seems a little too smart for Plainview's tastes, but is otherwise harmless - enrages the oil man so much. I can make up my own backstory, based on the tiny details delivered by the movie, that Plainview came from a religious and possibly abusive family and that Eli reminds him a little too much of his own father. But that's all conjecture; there's no concrete supporting evidence of this. Also, the film itself hints at an epic scope, but never delivers on it. This is about the dawn of oil - by many accounts, the greatest and worst thing to happen to mankind in the 20th century, and the source of many of the world's problems today. You can't make a film about the early days of the oil industry without the audience being keenly aware of what has resulted. But curiously, Anderson takes There Will Be Blood from a mid-scale look at man vs. community and, instead of showing how it shaped the world's development and priorities, whittles it down to a three-character drama about the troubled relationship between Plainview and his adopted son and the battle between Plainview and Sunday. And while Anderson might be telling us, "You put gas in your car today thanks to cruel individuals like Daniel Plainview," the film itself is so intimate that it's easy to forget that Plainview's story, however fictionalized, represents a class of men a century ago who carved out the future of the world, and instead finishes up as an actor's showcase for Dano and especially Day-Lewis. (His performance is reminiscent of John Huston's corrosive millionaire in Chinatown, down to the accent - it's not hard to imagine Daniel Plainview changing his name to Noah Cross and getting interested in water rights a few years after the close of There Will Be Blood). I still think it's a good film. And perhaps you will like it more than I did if you walk into it with the understanding that you are about to see a small movie about big characters, but with small ideas. Again, one could read a lot into the battle between the heartless businessman and the self-righteous churchman, but as There Will Be Blood hardly approaches the stuff of myth or even legend, it's a stretch to find a meaningful metaphor.

THIRST (South Korea, Park Chan-wook)
A Catholic priest (Song Kang-ho), yearning to be of greater service to people, volunteers to be a guinea pig in a vaccine test against a deadly virus in Africa... and the vaccine turns him into a vampire. The plot thickens when the priest returns to Korea and becomes involved with an unhappy woman (Kim Ok-vin) who feels enslaved by her dopey husband (the priest's childhood friend) and his smothering mom, at which point Thirst becomes something of a film noir, only with a vampire priest as its lovesick dupe. Then it gets really crazy. I've been a fan of writer/director Park since his 2003 breakout film Oldboy, but whereas his four previous features all carried a devastating emotional impact amidst all the artful compositions, nasty violence and eccentricities, it's difficult to ascertain just how seriously one should take Thirst. There are so many insanely over-the-top moments in the movie, and the story doesn't amount to anything very weighty, that it's possible that Park is just having a bloody - very bloody - good time. Although the film, at 133 minutes, is overlong by at least a quarter hour, it sure doesn't get boring. Fans of last year's great Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In will feel right at home here: this is Twilight with all the sex, all the grossness and all the cruelty put back in and thrust into your face. It's nowhere near as elegant as Let the Right One In, and as I said, I was ultimately disappointed that the story didn't wring me out emotionally like Park's earlier work, but other viewers may find a depth to the film that I couldn't fully appreciate.

THIRTEEN (US, Catherine Hardwicke)
It took forever for me to see this film, so forgive me if the review is a little late. Purposefully harrowing drama about a self-destructive thirteen-year-old is not much more than an extreme variation on your standard after-school special: Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood), a 7th grader with good grades, nice friends and promise (as a poet, naturally), falls in with bad influence Evie (Nikki Reed, whose precocious cowriting credit is the film's primary claim to fame), her junior high's reigning slut queen who has a penchant for sex, drugs and crime. Within days Tracy becomes, for single mom Mel (Holly Hunter), a living nightmare. For the rest of us, too: I suppose Thirteen is about the need to love and forgive even the meanest of children, but Tracy becomes such a holy terror that, for the average filmgoer, it's hard to see why she's worth the trouble. Despite the uninspired setup (body piercing and self-mutilation have taken the place of earlier misled-teenager hallmarks like smoking and shoplifting, but the message is the same), I certainly can't discredit the brave performances, particularly a ferocious turn by Wood. She is amazing, though after half an hour you just want to slap her. Still and all, despite MTV stylistics like handheld camerawork and blue-tinted cinematography, Tracy falls into the same trap and eventually learns the same lessons that fictional teenage girls of yore encountered on everything from "The Patty Duke Show" to "The Facts of Life."

THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED (US, Kirby Dick)
Documentary filmmaker (and CalArts alumnus) Kirby Dick sets out to unmask the anonymous raters at the MPAA - the people who slap all those "PG," "PG-13," "R" and most controversially "NC-17" ratings on films released for American mainstream distribution. Being possibly the only valid censorship board in the United States, there's something obviously creepy about these secret raters who get to decide whether an envelope-pushing filmmaker will have to make cuts to his film to bring his rating down to an "R," or face the exile of bad box office as mainstream media will usually refuse to advertise an NC-17 film. So Dick enlists the help of a chipper lesbian private detective to track down and publicly name those "ordinary citizens" - all too ordinary, it would seem - who decide what movie gets what rating. I wish the whole of This Film Is Not Yet Rated were as fun as these suspenseful, goofy sequences. But Dick fills his documentary with too many talking-head interviews (mostly with annoyed directors like Kevin Smith, John Waters, and South Park's Matt Stone) who merely repeat what we already know: Americans censor sex more than violence; gay sex isn't treated as fairly as straight sex; a woman's sexual pleasure is often more censored than a man's sexual pleasure. All true, and all bad things, but we don't need to be told this again and again. This Film Is Not Yet Rated also digs up some intriguing bits of trivia, delivered in eye-popping animated segments, and I wanted to see more of those. Not only because they're enjoyable to watch, but because the history behind the ratings system says a lot more about its problems than Kevin Smith can. For instance, Dick infers - provocatively - that the MPAA is in the pocket of the major studios, which gives the organization a bias against independent filmmakers. But then he moves on to less incendiary material. Hey, let's back up a little and go a bit more into that! While we're at it, how about a little background on how "NC-17" replaced "X," and the initial integrity of the "X" rating in the first place? How about a discussion on the origin and importance of the "PG-13" rating? And how about, instead of pointing the finger at a bunch of non-cineaste suburbanites who fill out the rating cards, we look at the real problem for filmmakers, which is the media's dunderheaded decision not to advertise NC-17 films? How did that come about? Who instigated that policy? You get the idea. This movie is good fun, especially for those already interested in the subject, but it could have gone a whole lot deeper about a small censorship organization that is, when you think about it, pretty scary.

THOR (US, Kenneth Branagh)
As a Norwegian American, I've always had a soft spot for the Marvel superhero Thor, even though frankly he always struck me as silly, with his long blonde hair, his winged helmet, and his hammer. With the comic publisher-turned-movie studio frantically churning out feature film adaptations of every character it can before Stan Lee kicks the bucket, Thor seemed a particularly goofy live action subject. Seriously, how do you make a big square hammer look cool? It was clever of Marvel to hire famed pop culture Shakespearean Kenneth Branagh to helm Thor, even if Branagh has no background in directing effects-laden movies. (It is a lesson that today's blockbusters are made by two teams of filmmakers: those who work with the actors and those who work with the computers.) By balancing Thor's grandiosity with his humanity, taking the drama seriously even while poking fun at his "you silly mortals" attitude, Branagh keeps his movie grounded. In the comics, Thor was an actual Norse god, hailing from the gods' realm of Asgard. As the Marvel films all try to be set in the real world, with science fiction replacing pure fantasy, the slew of writers on Thor have avoided the god stuff by making Asgard a sort of planet, and Thor some kind of warrior alien. Otherwise, his origin story mostly follows that of the comics: exiled from Asgard by his father, Odin (played with gusto by Anthony Hopkins), Thor (relative unknown Chris Hemsworth, perfectly cast and smartly manning Thor up by sporting a beard) and his hammer are sent to Earth separately, where the arrogant but confused Asgardian is befriended by sweet scientist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, in her sixth feature film to be released in the U.S. within half a year) as he seeks out his hammer. The "god out of water" scenes give Thor a surprisingly gentle charm and it is here where the film is at its most entertaining. Extended scenes back at Asgard - many of which, naturally, play out like ersatz Shakespeare - are less engaging. Battle sequences even less so. So yes, Thor is ultimately forgettable, but it's good summer fun, a fine popcorn movie that adolescents should love. (That's a compliment.) But can I just say how little I enjoy this current 3D fad? Not only does it make going to the movies needlessly expensive and turns the screen annoyingly dark, but for folks like me who already wear spectacles, the 3D glasses make the two hours in a theater so uncomfortable. I wish I'd had the choice to catch Thor in regular 2D. The novelty of three dimensions has already worn off - again - and this film, for one, doesn't need it at all.

THUMBSUCKER (US, Mike Mills)
Admirable Sundance-style indie film about a 17-year-old loner named Justin (appealing newcomer Lou Pucci) who quite literally still sucks his thumb. His well-meaning but frustrated parents (Vincent D'Onofrio and a sublime Tilda Swinton) determine that he suffers from some form of hyperactivity, so they get him hooked on Ritalin, which turns the sullen Justin into an aggressive speech and debate champion until he realizes that he's basically becoming a speed freak - and that's just the first two acts. Though ostensibly just another coming-of-age movie, Thumbsucker covers a lot of ground, touching on issues as varied as drug addiction, infidelity, teenage horniness, family dynamics, the awkwardness of high school crushes and, above all, the attempt to find The Answer to Everything. Of course what Justin finally figures out - and I don't think I'm spoiling any plot points here - is that there is no Answer, that life has its ups and downs and in the end you just go with the flow. Groovy, right? Well, it's not much of an update on Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, and in fact Thumbsucker could well be called a remake of Maugham's classic novel. As in the book, you have a sensitive young man struggling to find the meaning of life as he tries to figure out what to do with himself professionally and falls madly in love with a cruel young woman who thinks nothing of him. It's not as painful to get through as Of Human Bondage is, but in this case, being entertaining is fine by me. Music video director and former skateboarder Mike Mills, whose career path seems to be following Spike Jonze's except that Mills is also a graphic designer (which gets big points in my book), has, not surprisingly, a strong visual style. But he's also turned out to be good with actors, adept at pacing a feature (editors Haines Hall and Angus Wall deserve credit as well for their terrific work), and able to take potentially mawkish material to the screen with a dry eye and no small amount of creativity. Thumbsucker isn't brilliant, but it's a damn sight better than Garden State and its ilk. It's also one of the truest depictions of a suburban teenager's life that I've seen on screen.

TIME AND TIDE (Hong Kong, Tsui Hark)
Tsui Hark was, during the late 80's/early 90's, the very best of Hong Kong's talented crop of action directors. (For the record, "Tsui" is the director's last name, and it's pronounced "Choy.") When the impending Chinese takeover scared the colony's film community into fleeing to Hollywood to establish new careers in the mid-90's, Tsui went along with everybody else. His first assignment was a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. Why not? After all, his compatriot John Woo got his start in the states with a Van Damme movie, and then moved on to the much-classier Broken Arrow, Face/Off, etc. Unfortunately for Tsui, all he was given for his labors was another Van Damme movie. So he did the wise thing and beat a retreat back to Hong Kong, where - surprise! - the Chinese takeover hadn't stifled the local film industry at all.

One thing did happen to Hong Kong while Tsui was away, however, and that was the critical deification of art film director Wong Kar-Wai. Suddenly the style of Tsui's earlier HK work, with its golden hues, clean master shots and light comedy, was outdated. To save face, he filmed Time and Tide like a Wong Kar-Wai movie: jerky camera, cool blue lighting, off-center camera placement, occasional bouts of nonlinearity and general post-modernist seriousness. It's flashy, but it's not Tsui's native style, and it shows. Thankfully, he hasn't lost his creativity in staging fight scenes, and the many gun battles in Time and Tide reveal his trademark chaos tinged with whimsy. There's no real reason to go into the plot, which involves a hitman deserting his compadres, a low-rent thug with a phony gun who befriends him, several pregnant women, and of course a billion bullets. You go to see the action, and you get plenty of it. But the style kills some of the fun, and the action isn't nearly as pulse-pounding as it could be, or as Tsui's earlier period films (the Once Upon a Time in China series, among others) clearly are. The problem may be with the sound mix: perhaps it was just the theatre I saw it in, but the audio seemed oddly muted during several manic shootouts that should have been blisteringly loud. If Time and Tide comes to your local art house cinema, gently ask your projectionist beforehand to crank up the volume, and you may be more properly "blown away."

THE TILLMAN STORY (US, Amir Bar-Lev)
Compelling documentary that sets the story straight about Pat Tillman, the NFL football star who gave up a lucrative career in order to join the Army (with his brother) and fight in the so-called War on Terror. After Tillman was killed in Afghanistan, the Department of Defense concocted a self-promoting story about his heroic end, which fell apart months later once it was revealed that Tillman was accidentally shot to death by his own buddies. Bar-Lev, who directed the fascinating doc My Kid Could Paint That, once again explores a family caught in the middle of fact and fiction, as Tillman's mother embarks on a quest to expose the military's cover-up, which takes her right to the top of the chain of command. The film also debunks the various myths surrounding the surprisingly complicated Tillman, who at first came across as a lunk-headed jock whose rah-rah patriotism got the best of him, but in fact was an atheist who read Noam Chomsky, dismissed the Iraq War as illegal, and kept his reasons for fighting the war so private that even Bar-Lev, out of deference to Tillman's family, doesn't dig into it. (It's a misstep for the film, since the question "Why did he join?" is never fully answered, though it's implied that Tillman had an overwhelming sense of duty and commitment to everything he set his sights on.) I was also surprised to learn that Tillman was a San Jose boy, like me, and that his politicized memorial service - John McCain was even in attendance - was held at San Jose's modest rose garden, just a few blocks from my mom's house. Just goes to show you what the media hides from you: I had pictured the man as some Texas roughneck from a conservative family, not a Silicon Valley dude from a liberal clan. All in all, The Tillman Story is excellent filmmaking. Angering and depressing? Yes. But also great documentary storytelling.

TIMECODE (US, Mike Figgis)
First of all, if you loved Mike Figgis's overrated piece of junk Leaving Las Vegas, then stop reading now and rush out to see Timecode. You'll love it. I, however, had my prejudices walking into this film, though I admitted that the gimmick behind it was intriguing. In fact, the gimmick is really the only interesting thing about it: the screen is divided into four quadrants. Each quadrant contains a single, unedited take from a handheld video camera. All four cameras are synchronized. And what are these cameras filming? Actors improvising. And it goes on for over 90 minutes. No edits. No cuts. A three-ring (or in this case four-ring) circus before your very eyes.

Surprisingly, it's not as nauseating as I thought. The camera movement is very fluid, and Figgis does adjust the audio mix so you rarely hear what's going on in more than one quadrant at a time, preventing complete sensory overload. And in the middle of all this high concept is the skeleton of a story, centered around four people: Stellan Skarsgard as an alcoholic film executive; Saffron Burrows (Figgis's real-life sweetie) as his estranged wife; Salma Hayek as his bisexual mistress; Jeanne Tripplehorn as her jealous girlfriend. This quartet is surrounded by a dozen or so wacky Hollywood types, consisting of a strong cast of familiar faces (including Holly Hunter and Kyle MacLachlan). So what happens? Well, not much. Which is Time Code's main problem: the story is as shallow as a cookie tin. That would be fine if Figgis were aiming at comedy (the film works in its lighter moments - most actors, when given the chance to improvise, tend to goof around and crack jokes). But Figgis - and the quartet of actors at the core of the movie - are taking it all dead seriously. Which is Figgis's problem anyway: he tends to concoct silly, cliched, college-level storylines, but by throwing in things like alcoholism and "steamy" sex, he thinks he's making mature, challenging cinema. Please. Timecode plays best as a demo for "what you can do with a digital video camera," not as a serious piece of filmmaking.

Figgis and his cameramen are to be lauded for the seamless staging of the cameras and cast. The film flows beautifully. But they capture a Hollywood that doesn't exist: Skarsgard is apparently a super powerful film executive, and yet he works in an ordinary cubicle! His film company seems to produce mainly softcore porn, and yet some 19-year-old European art film superstar earnestly pitches her new film idea (a film split into four quadrants, four synchronized cameras... get it?) to them. And Figgis sticks no less than four earthquakes in his film! L.A. doesn't even suffer four earthquakes of that size even in a single decade! Clearly the earthquakes are staged just so Figgis can have all four cameras shake at the same time. Show-off. This isn't reality. This isn't satire. It's just Mike Figgis's self-deluded brain. Split into quarters.

TIMECRIMES (Spain, Nacho Vigalondo)
Expertly crafted low-budget time travel movie about a middle-aged man (Karra Elejalde) who, after espying a naked woman in the forest outside his new house, goes into the woods to take a closer look and is suddenly stabbed in the arm by a fiend in a pink head bandage. If that wasn't weird enough, the man, feeling chased by his mysterious attacker, runs to a nearby building and hides inside... a time machine, which then sends him back about an hour. Timecrimes is a very smart film, and writer/director Vigalondo, who is also one of the five cast members, figures that audiences will quickly guess what the big "twist" is (guess who's under the pink bandage?) as it's rather obvious. So Vigalondo himself reveals the twist less than halfway through the film, at which point it's up to the viewer to keep up with his twisty, turny puzzle of a plot. And while it may remind some of the U.S. no-budget film Primer, Timecrimes's tangle of time travel paradoxes is far less confounding, wrapping things up nicely at the end, though it's still worth a second viewing to catch all the details. Direction, cast, editing, cinematography and music are all strong. This is must-see viewing for any fan of time travel fiction, and a good movie period. Its theatrical future is unknown outside of a brief run in LA and New York, so you may only be able to catch this later on DVD. Not surprisingly, a Hollywood remake is in the works.

A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES (Iran, Bahman Ghobadi)
Bleak portrait of the life of ethnic Kurds living on the border of Iran and Iraq, focusing on a cluster of newly-orphaned children who try to survive a harsh, snowy winter on their own, where the only income is in smuggling goods across the border at the risk of being shot in an ambush. As an added strain, one of the siblings, Madi, is suffering from a debilitating disease that has stunted both his physical and mental growth at infancy (though he is reportedly 15 years old - the oldest in the family). Despite Madi's constant demands and the doctors' repeated warnings that he has mere months to live, his brothers and sisters are willing to sacrifice everything to keep him alive, without complaint. Though Ghobadi forces his characters to endure relentlessly harsh conditions, endure they do, and what the viewer is left with is not only a troubling look at an enormously disadvantaged culture (which was first-time director Ghobadi's stated goal of the film) but an oddly reassuring testament to the strength of family ties and unconditional love. The title, by the way, refers to the Kurds' habit of giving their mules alcohol to keep them warm during the long winter hikes across the unforgiving snows of the mountains.

TIME OUT (France, Laurent Cantet)
An inexplicably eerie film about a middle-aged businessman named Vincent (Aurelien Recoing, looking like a cross between Kevin Spacey and Dan Aykroyd) who, after being fired from his job, hides his unemployment from his family, and in fact starts getting hooked on telling lies, even concocting a bogus investment scheme to swindle money out of dear friends, strangers, even his own father. Why? Because even though it doesn't bring him any happiness, he can get away with it. Time Out moves along at a measured pace, and there is always a sense of payoff coming that never quite arrives, but the film has a way of getting under your skin and haunting you. Is Vincent a pathological liar? Is he just reacting to the soul-stifling rules of his middle-class existence, which insist that he stay at his futureless job all his life and not complain? Is he simply losing his mind? Time Out suggests it all, but wisely refrains from coming to any smug conclusion as to what is going on in Vincent's head. In the end what is most effective about the film is that it suggests the world is full of Vincents. Naturalistic, melancholy and filled with fine detail, I'd be surprised if it didn't wind up on my list of favorite films for the year. It's probably gone from theatres by the time I write this review, but if you stumble across it at your local video store, and have a quiet evening where you're in the mood to enjoy intelligent, thought-provoking fare, please don't overlook Time Out.

THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE (US, Robert Schwentke)
Faithful adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's novel about a man named Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana) who suffers from a unique genetic condition that causes him to time travel randomly, across various stages of his own life for a few minutes, hours, or even days, and Claire Abshire (Rachel McAdams), the woman who loves him throughout his appearances and disappearances in her life. Schwentke and screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin (who penned the schmaltzy hit Ghost, a film not dissimilar in tone) mine the story for both humor and tragedy, and while fans of the book will find a great many details missing, including various subplots involving secondary characters and the darker undertones of the thirtysomething Henry meeting the horny adolescent Claire in her family's meadow, that's only to be expected: it takes a good couple of days to get through the novel, but here you have just 107 minutes to present Henry's unusual condition, show the effect it would have on two people trying to have a normal relationship, and tell something of a story. You can't spend much time going into the world that surrounds Henry and Claire. On the upside, it keeps the film very lean and focuses the story on Niffenegger's inventive and ultimately heartbreaking plot. On the downside, it strips away everything that isn't a part of the author's basic premise and thus sucks a bit of life out of the story. The two leads don't help: watching The Time Traveler's Wife, I couldn't help but think back to Mean Girls and Chopper, the films that made stars out of Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana, respectively. In those early movies, the two actors were both ferociously funny, daring and energetic. They were hungry to show the world what they could do and they blew audiences away. Today, though, making millions per picture, their performances reflect the typical "safe" route that many Hollywood actors choose: read the lines, show the appropriate emotions, but don't try anything unusual. The result is that Henry and Claire could have been played by anybody. Because the characters' circumstances are so abnormal, perhaps the cast and the filmmakers thought it best to play them as completely ordinary and in fact rather bland people. With Schwentke's equally competent yet unremarkable direction, the star of the show remains Niffenegger's imagination, which is perhaps as it should be. She really did concoct a nifty concept and developed it to its full "what if?" potential. I enjoyed watching The Time Traveler's Wife for this reason. As that rare bird, the sci fi weepie, it delivers the goods. But it was only after it was over that I saw how much the film failed to live up to its potential.

TOGETHER (Sweden, Lukas Moodysson)
The young director of the Swedish sleeper hit Show Me Love returns with an even better follow-up, this one a charming slice-of-life portrait of a 1975 leftist commune and the various well-meaning kooks that populate it. You know there's some justice in the world (or at least in Sweden) when something like this can outgross The Grinch in its home country six times over. It's hard to use words like "joyous" when describing a film, for the word unfortunately has come to suggest schmaltz, corniness or sentimentality, all of which Together thankfully lacks. But Moodysson nevertheless has made a very joyous, and very much alive, film, filled with great characters (it's a testament to his storytelling skills that he can introduce over a dozen different people within a few minutes, yet you can immediately keep track of who's who), a terrific cast that don't seem like they're acting at all, a witty script and a keen eye for 70's detail. (It even feels three decades old - the director employed the "Dogme" verite look for Show Me Love but here uses lots of wacky camera zooms and quick dissolves that shouldn't work, but do.) For me the film brought back many pleasant memories of the summer of 1979, where I stayed with my family in Norway. So perhaps I'm biased. But for God's sake, if you want to see the work of one of the most enjoyable filmmakers around today, then go see Together. You will actually leave the theatre feeling happy, and this review goes out to all those people who accuse me of only liking "depressing" films.

TOKYO! (Japan/France, Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon Ho)
I'm rather surprised at the limp reception this film has received in the U.S. Just look at those directors: Gondry won millions of fans with his inventive music videos and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Carax has more of a cult following, thanks to his extravagant features Lovers on the Bridge and Pola X. And Bong made a big splash a couple of years back with his excellent monster movie The Host. Yet Tokyo! seems to be breezing in and out of theaters with barely a mention. Maybe it's because so-called "omnibus movies" such as this (or Paris, je t'aime or New York Stories), in which numerous directors contribute short films about one particular city, are never hip to like. And I agree that feature film directors are often not that adept at delivering shorts. But it works in Tokyo!, perhaps because the film's Japanese producers hired outsiders - two directors from France and one from South Korea - to take a surreal, critical look at their country's capital. You won't find any of the romanticism or big stars from Paris, je t'aime here. Still, there's always an imbalance when watching an omnibus film when one short stands out so well that it makes the other shorts feel disappointing and dull. But Tokyo! is solid throughout.

The first segment is typical whimsy from Gondry about a young woman and her filmmaker boyfriend who move to Tokyo from elsewhere in Japan, looking for jobs and a place to live. It takes a surreal twist towards the end, but feels rather slight. (Then again, I think every film Gondry makes feels rather slight.) There's also something vaguely Western about the characters and their behavior, which makes sense when you realize that it's based on a graphic novel set in New York by Gabrielle Bell. However, it's enjoyable enough, buoyed by the very appealing Ayako Fujitani in the lead. (She's Steven Seagal's half-Japanese daughter, but thankfully she has inherited neither her father's looks nor his acting ability.) Carax's segment, entitled Merde, is a fantastically insane tale of a demented, leprechaun-like man (Carax regular Denis Lavant) who crawls out of the sewer to single-handedly wreak havoc on Tokyo. It's an amazing bit of cinema, completely strange and multi-layered and original, a welcome return for this reclusive filmmaker. Tokyo! ends with Bong's quiet yet unnerving look at a hikikomori, a man who, like many contemporary Japanese urbanites, has withdrawn from society and hasn't left his house for years. All of these stories touch on distinctly Tokyoesque themes of isolation, claustrophobia and science fiction. I was impressed with the entire film and recommend it wholeheartedly, especially to those who don't mind their movies on the strange side.

TOKYO SONATA (Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
This story about a small middle-class Japanese family whose father is laid off from his job and hides it from his wife and sons may bring to mind the similar (and excellent) French drama Time Out. And just as Time Out felt like a thriller, Tokyo Sonata at times plays out more like an end of the world movie than a mere domestic tale. That isn't a big surprise, given the director: though Kurosawa has helmed fairly straightforward dramas before (I enjoyed the little-seen License to Live), he's better known for his relentlessly creepy horror-ish features, including Pulse and Cure. But as the G-rated The Straight Story was still very much a David Lynch film, so too is Tokyo Sonata entirely Kiyoshi Kurosawa, in terms of its pace, sense of dread, moody lighting and eerie minimalism. The film takes a sharp left turn in the third act, with the introduction of well-known Japanese actor (and Kurosawa regular) Koji Yakusho, but if you can make it through that, you'll be rewarded with one of the most graceful, moving finales you'll see in years. Tokyo Sonata isn't perfect: it's got a handful of pretentious moments, and that crazy third act will put off as many people as it intrigues. But its got a strong cast and solid direction, and serves as a poignant reminder that the United States isn't the only country suffering through tough economic times right now.

TOMB RAIDER (US, Simon West)
I guess the actual title is Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, but who cares - this movie stinks under any name. But did anyone expect it to be art? From the get-go, it was clear that this film was made by the Paramount marketing department: take a high concept (a female Indiana Jones!), throw a hot star at it (sexy Angelina Jolie!), make sure it's a safe sell (the video game it's based on is a big hit!) and advertise the hell out of it. Then hope enough people buy tickets for it on opening weekend, before word spreads out that it's awful. It's a cynical, flavorless process, and it shows in the final product. There is no personality here, no inspiration, nothing special at all. So despite the $100 million spent on computer graphics, big sets, explosions, and Jolie's fat paycheck, everybody - from the director to the stars to the writers (no less than 5 are credited) to the cinematographer to the composer to the production designer - seems to be involved only for the money. The result: a bland, suspenseless, flat-looking piece of poop. You should know to stay away from any film that has the scary credit: "Based on the game series by EIDOS INTERACTIVE, developed by CORE DESIGN." Are we really at a point where companies are now being credited with creative work, instead of individuals?

TOPSY TURVY (UK, Mike Leigh)
Leigh's intimate portrait of Victorian theatre superheroes Gilbert & Sullivan and the making of their musical masterpiece "The Mikado." Leigh deserves kudos for taking such unusual subject matter and mounting a lavish, $15 million film about it. It's also a terrific examination of the creative process as we follow the composer and librettist through their individual writer's blocks in 1884 to the triumphant success of the Japanese-themed "Mikado" the following year.

That said, it is also very long, very slow, and very quiet. I enjoyed it - and I'm no student of Gilbert & Sullivan - but I would not recommend this to even the slightly impatient. Leigh pays such attention to Victorian-era detail that this includes people being endlessly polite to each other and repressing their true feelings. There is also quite a bit of musical footage, and if you just aren't into G&S then you will find these lengthy scenes tiresome. But as I said, I enjoyed it all. I liked the authentic period flavor, the dry humor (the always funny Jim Broadbent is hilarious as the endlessly grouchy Gilbert), and Leigh's wise decision to upturn the "Let's Put On a Show" story genre, reminding us that just because a creative work may triumph, it doesn't automatically make the artists' lives any happier or more fulfilled. It's a bittersweet afterthought, and absolutely true.

TOUCHING THE VOID (UK, Kevin Macdonald)
Not many films really deserve to be called "docudramas" - so few, in fact, that the word has come to mean "a fictional film based on real-life events" - but Touching the Void reclaims the term, blending talking-head documentary with dramatic re-enactments perfectly to tell its story the best way it can be told: In 1985, mountain climbers Simon Yates and Joe Simpson were determined to scale a peak in the Peruvian Andes that had yet to be conquered. After a rough but successful climb up the mountain, they soon became reminded of the statistic that 80% of all climbing accidents occur during the descent when, after a rough fall, Simpson broke his leg horribly and Yates, who couldn't see him, gave him up for dead and cut his lifeline. Since both climbers narrate their own story from the present day, we know that Simpson somehow survived his excruciating ordeal, and it's the details of that incredible survival that propel the story. Not for those with acraphobia (fear of heights), claustrophobia, or dislike of snow, it's still an effective, and harrowing, depicition of the events. It's also a marvel knowing that the filmmakers braved the clearly forbidding elements to accurately re-create the actual events, warts and all, getting some truly awesome footage in the process. If Touching the Void has any faults, it's Macdonald's self-conscious camera trickery during the last half-hour of the film, as he tries to convey Simpson's rapidly debilitating mental state, due to his pain, hypothermia, dehydration and pure exhaustion. There is merit to Macdonald's method, but the bulk of the film is so straightforward that these visual effects are distracting. On the whole, though, good scary entertainment with a surprising mental depth that may not change your mind about the insanity of mountain climbers, but will make you admire their fortitude.

THE TOWN (US, Ben Affleck)
A fairly routine cops and robbers movie ably directed by Ben Affleck, who also co-wrote the script (adapted from Chuck Hogan's novel Prince of Thieves) and stars as a clever crook who knocks over a Boston bank with his three cronies (chief among them a hothead played by Jeremy Renner, finally getting the A-list projects he deserves) and then rather inexplicably falls in love with the bank's manager, played by Rebecca Hall, whom the quartet had briefly held hostage after the heist. (Hall, who never saw the men's faces because of their masks and then her blindfold, apparently is no good at recognizing voices.) Mad Men's Jon Hamm rounds out the hip (except for Affleck) cast as an FBI agent hot on the thieves' trail. Affleck, who pleasantly surprised everybody with his directorial debut Gone Baby Gone, proves again that he has the chops to turn in a decent thriller, and the love he has for his hometown is evident in every frame. But as an actor, he is as wooden as ever, and the story is a pile of cliches, though given a bit more conviction than usual from a cast that seems truly engaged. Essentially it's Heat set in Beantown, with a miscast lead and a handful of exciting, well-staged action scenes. An entertaining two hours, but ultimately forgettable. Affleck should stay behind the camera.

TOY STORY 2 (US, John Lasseter)
Everybody's seen this film already, so I won't say much. Highly enjoyable. Those Pixar guys are some of the best story people in Hollywood today. The narrative is airtight and fast-paced, with an off-kilter and just-hip-enough sense of humor that will endear it to even the more jaded audiences who believe animation should be more like South Park and less like Disney.

If anybody has been putting off seeing this film because they missed the first Toy Story, then don't be a boob - you don't need to see the first to enjoy this one immensely.

TOY STORY 3 (US, Lee Unkrich)
I'm just going to come out and say that Toy Story 3 is as perfect as Pixar gets. And if you've been reading my movie reviews for a while, you know that I'm not one to agree that Pixar's output improves with each subsequent movie: yes, I did enjoy WALL-E and Up, but I wasn't among those who found them flawless. Pixar set the bar extremely high in terms of storytelling and character, and I'm aware of that bar each time I see one of their features, so I am happy to report that Toy Story 3 reaches that bar. Picking up in the present day, eleven years after Toy Story 2, Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the gang are seeing their boy Andy - now 17 and too old to play with toys - packing up and heading off to college. Are they destined for the attic? Or the curb? Neither, as it turns out, for the toys' future lies in a children's day care center, which seems idyllic but harbors some dark secrets. And "dark" is the operative word here, for after the bleak dystopia of WALL-E and Up's poignant treatment of aging, disappointment and death, Pixar can't go back to those innocent Bug's Life days. But Unkrich and company understand that, because audiences already know and love these characters, the filmmakers can ramp up the emotional investment by placing the characters in more intense, even existentially profound, situations. Of course the movie is still lots of fun, and in the Pixar tradition of employing out-of-work actors, Ned Beatty and Michael Keaton show up to voice new characters. What seems new here - or at least more prominent than in previous Pixar movies - is the subtlety of the animation. Don't get me wrong, there are some great wild moments, especially involving Buzz's "special mode" which is a triumph of character animation, but there are times when the characters just look at each other, almost motionless, and those are among the strongest moments in the film. Pixar is always pushing themselves further with each feature, and here instead of any new technical wizardry or settings, they are exploring new depths of emotion. In doing so, they have achieved that rare thing: they have created a movie trilogy in which every chapter is stronger than the one before it. Special mention should go to the opening short, Night and Day, a very inventive cartoon that fuses traditional and 3D animation and which in my mind is the cleverest short that Pixar has produced thus far. All in all, a great time at the movies, which so far appears to be in short supply during the summer of 2010.

TRAFFIC (US, Steven Soderbergh)
Mostly gripping multi-story drama about Americans and Mexicans on all sides of the failed "War on Drugs," based on the British mini-series Traffik, this film is, like all of Steven Soderbergh's work, stylish, gritty, creative, honest and well-made. I didn't find it the be-all end-all that other critics are claiming it to be, mainly because I just couldn't buy into the rather implausible subplot featuring Michael Douglas as a federal judge who's just been named drug czar for the U.S. government when he discovers that his own daughter is an addict. The plot device (undoubtedly a remnant of the British original) is just too convenient and his response a little too heroic. In real life I think he'd be more preoccupied with how it would hurt his career (noting that George Bush Sr. blithely served as President of the U.S. in the midst of the Drug War while his son, also a future President, struggled with cocaine and alcohol addiction). Mostly though I just don't like Michael Douglas. As simple as that. Get turned off by the man. Dennis Quaid, though in a much smaller part, also doesn't do much for me. The rest of the cast, however, is fine, particularly Benicio Del Toro and Don Cheadle, both giving very human performances as Mexican and American police officers trying to do right. The film, of course, deserves its acclaim mainly for being frank about the failure of the U.S. government's costly and misdirected war on drugs. Though there are a couple Big Monologues About Why the Drug War Failed, they are smartly given to supporting characters and usually couched in humor so as not to sound too heavy-handed. Ultimately this film suggests that, since nobody can possibly win the war, all we can hope to do is win our small individual battles. Which is one of the most decent sentiments of the year.

TRAINING DAY (US, Antoine Fuqua)
Training Day lets Denzel Washington finally play a creep, and the actor is clearly enjoying the experience, for he gives us one of his most energetic performances since Glory. Washington plays Los Angeles Police Detective Alonzo Harris, a corrupt, foul-mouthed cop showing his new partner Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke, playing it squeaky clean as written) how to survive the mean streets of L.A. during the film's daylong timeframe. Heads get cracked, minds get messed with, so on and so forth. The story holds up pretty well for the first 90 minutes before devolving into another one of those inevitable showdowns between the two stars. In the meantime, though, Washington provides a great deal of suspense as the audience cannot tell whether his character is truly nasty, or if his wicked ways are just a put-on in order to uphold the law the only way he can in such a violent environment. Fuqua, known for slick, empty films like The Replacement Killers and Bait, finally grows up a bit, while maintaining his music video gloss: Training Day certainly looks great. But let's blame writer David Ayer for its derivative, predictable ending, as well as a crucial plot twist in the third act that relies on a laughably unbelievable coincidence. Also, considering that Hawke is often the only white person in neighborhoods filled with pistol-packing African Americans and Latinos, the story is somewhat aloof about race relations in testy L.A., suggesting that most minorities will side with The Man and against one of their own if righteousness was the only test. I don't think that's a very honest sentiment. Stranger still when you consider director Fuqua is a black Angeleno who has undoubtedly witnessed otherwise.

THE TREE OF LIFE (US, Terrence Malick)
Writer-director Malick's highly-anticipated fifth feature opens like an experimental film, with an abstract series of sights and sounds giving us the following information: A couple (father Brad Pitt, mother Jessica Chastain) learns that their 19-year-old son has died. Years later, one of their two surviving sons has grown up to be a successful businessman (Sean Penn), still questioning the loss of his brother. Before any kind of story settles in, Malick takes a sudden detour - riffing off of one of the mother's whispered voiceovers about whether God even noticed the boy's death - into a 2001-like meditation on the origin of the universe and the early millennia of Earth, up through the death of the dinosaurs. It's a stunning but completely far-out mystical journey that sent several audience members packing when I saw it. If you can make it through this extended tangent, you'll find that eventually Malick returns to this family, sometime in the 1950s when all three brothers were alive and well, spending their childhood in Waco, Texas. (The film feels intensely personal at times, and I assume it's at least somewhat autobiographical; the press-shy Malick lived in Waco as a child.) For most of the rest of the movie, we're with the three boys as they experience their father's sternness, their mother's warmth, and the everyday cruelties of childhood. Don't get too comfy, though - the last act of the film (and I'm not giving anything away) gives us more of Malick's metaphysical, digital effects-laden ruminations on life, death, and afterlife.

Of the many snippets of poetic voiceover in The Tree of Life, towards the beginning we hear something about each of us having to choose either the way of nature, in which we only care about ourselves, or the way of grace, in which we only care about others. The parents at the center of the film represent the two paths: Pitt's serious, ultra-strict father and Chastain's spontaneous, forgiving mother. But your enjoyment of the film itself may depend on which of these paths you're on. In other words, the visual poetry that makes up the opening and closing portions of the movie will either entrance you or make you roll your eyes. Malick has a background in philosophy, and this is a highly spiritual - even religious - film. Being non-spiritual myself, I admit that, while I am a big fan of Malick's work, even I was pushed to the edge by the pretentiousness of the voiceovers and the space odyssey scenes set to an operatic soundtrack. I get it: Malick is using these scenes to reflect on how insignificant our own lives are against the grand sweep of space and time. But it's an oft-quoted platitude that I'm not sure needed to be literalized cinematically. Still, I can't dismiss these scenes because they, like the rest of The Tree of Life, are breathtaking to behold, though the earthbound, quietly emotional story of this Texas family is much more effective than Malick's ambitious "life, the universe, and everything" scenes, and I suspect a lot more people would enjoy this film if they only caught the middle of it. If I'm a Philistine for saying so, then so be it. But The Tree of Life was designed to be haunting and thought-provoking, and I could go on for pages about it, so in this respect Malick has given us a gift: A challenging, visually beautiful, sometimes self-important, and definitely divisive work of art. As he remains one of only a handful of American directors with a truly unique style, we are lucky that he is still working. But in the end I prefer his first two films - and his underrated The New World - over this grandiose spiritual quest.

THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (France/Canada/Belgium, Sylvain Chomet)
A Tour de France rider is kidnapped by gangsters, and his teensy grandmother and obese dog set out across the ocean from Paris to a Gallic fantasy of mid-century New York to rescue him, enlisting the aid of the titular triplets, former vaudeville dance hall singing stars who have aged into frog-eating, batty old hags. A simple plot, with almost no dialogue and running less than 80 minutes, the charms of The Triplets of Belleville are in the details. French through and through, it's a refreshing take on animation for all those who think Disney and Japan have the bases covered. That said, keeping an animated feature interesting is a challenge, and it almost always requires a strong story or memorable characters, two things sorely lacking in Triplets. After a while, the lackadaisical pacing and the uniformly grotesque characters wear thin, and there's an inescapable aloofness that keeps the film from being engaging. I'm not saying every cartoon needs to be cute, but when something is this ugly to look at, that ugliness needs a good counterbalance. And Triplets is neither funny enough nor fast-paced enough to provide it. I will say, however, that there's plenty of creativity on display, the animation itself is flawless and the backgrounds are rich and in their own way beautiful.

THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE (UK/Italy, Clare Peploe)
Witty staging of a somewhat obscure 18th century farce by French playwright Marivaux, starring a surprisingly well-versed Mira Sorvino as a princess who dons the disguise of a man in order to infiltrate the estate of her enemies, an influential philosopher (Ben Kingsley) and his scientist sister (Fiona Shaw), and entice Kingsley's ward (Jay Rodan), the actual heir to the throne, to marry her. A complicated set-up leads to more complications, as she reveals her femininity to both Kingsley and Rodan, while hiding it from Shaw, and all three wind up falling in love with her. As it is a fairly faithful adaptation of a 400-year-old play, it's quite talky, overtly theatrical, and stagy. Peploe makes good use of the lush grounds of a sprawling Italian estate, but it's still basically filmed theatre (a couple of awkward cutaways to a modern audience on the lawn underscore Peploe's admission of such). The actors are all quite wonderful (especially Shaw as the lonely spinster who falls head over heels for the disguised Sorvino), the story itself is whimsical, but the camerawork is a trifle weird and the editing is overtly weird, almost random: with a movie filled with jump cuts, slightly different angles of the same scene cutting against each other, and jarring close-ups, I couldn't decide if Peploe was just being arty or didn't know what she was doing in the editing room. Either way, it doesn't work. The only other major flaw is that for some reason composer Jason Osborn wrecks his own lovely classical score by including anachronistic (to say the least) electric guitar solos by Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. I'd recommend this film to theatre buffs: the performances of Sorvino, Kingsley and Shaw are all joys to watch, and they clearly seem to be having a good time. Others might squirm in their seats, unaccustomed to all the chatter and the unexpected length of the comedy (two hours). Trivia note: a lot of the production crew come from Bernardo Bertolucci's camp, and indeed Bertolucci cowrote the script and produced the picture.

TRIXIE (US, Alan Rudolph)
English actress Emily Watson plays Chicago goofball Trixie Zurbo, who works as a house detective at some unnamed coastal casino town (actually Vancouver) and encounters various shady types as she digs up a murder mystery. The "mystery" in question is so completely uninvolving that I won't go into it; as with most of Alan Rudolph's films, Trixie isn't about the story as much as it is about the characters. So how do they fare? Dermot Mulroney is quite funny as Trixie's klutzy studboy suitor; Nathan Lane is sporadically tolerable as the casino's drunken comic; as a corrupt state senator, Nick Nolte is pretty good at first, until he falls into his usual routine of angry barking. I don't see why people go for Nick Nolte. He just gives me a headache. As for Watson? Well, you must understand that I am madly in love with her, so I'll forgive her anything. I imagine her constant gum-chewing may annoy the casual viewer, and her character's nonstop propensity for absurdly mixed metaphors ("He smokes like a fish;" "You've got to grab the bull by the tail and look it in the eye") are definitely a like-it or HATE-IT kind of schtick. But if you dig Watson's expressive face, you're in for a treat, as she provides an orgy of eye-rolling, smirking and mugging. But let me emphasize that Trixie is solely for the handful of Emily Watson fans out there. The movie is otherwise too long, aimless, and rather ugly to look at.

TROPIC THUNDER (US, Ben Stiller)
For a wussy little art film snob like me, going to see Tropic Thunder, a big, loud, foul-mouthed action comedy about egotistical Hollywood actors fighting Southeast Asian drug lords during a film shoot gone wrong, is as out of character as my attending a football game. And I've never been to a football game. So why did I bother with Tropic Thunder? I was simply interested in seeing all its famous stars - most of whom (Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Cruise) I normally wouldn't pay to watch in a movie - do something different, well beyond their usual shtick. So you have Stiller as an action hero, Black as a drug addict, Downey as an Australian Method actor pretending to be African American, and Cruise as a bald, overweight movie producer. All working blue, by the way - a nice change from their usual family-friendly personae (and probably a lot closer to their real selves; the only thing this film gets wrong about actors is that it doesn't show any of them chain-smoking). I thought the story was well-structured and entertaining. There are some wonderfully nasty moments during the first half hour or so. If the rest of the film doesn't quite live up to the sharpness of the first act, I wasn't too disappointed, since this is obviously not trying to be a classic. But the cast is giving it their all, the movie doesn't look cheap or rushed, and if you like Hollywood comedies, you're sure to laugh a bit. Me? I'm just not into Hollywood comedies. It isn't snobbery; it's simply that I have an odd sense of humor. (My appraisal of Bob Newhart as being the funniest comic actor alive probably says everything you need to know about my taste in comedy.) So though I can't say I really laughed at Tropic Thunder's bravado, I still found it amusing. You pretty much gets what you expects here.

TRUE GRIT (US, Joel & Ethan Coen)
The Coens' remake of the 1969 John Wayne classic - allegedly hewing closer to Charles Portis' 1968 novel (which I haven't read) than the original - is a visually stunning Western, peppered with the brothers' trademark sadistic violence and gallows humor but otherwise remarkably mainstream and, shall we say, un-Coen-like. You probably know the story by now: In 1870s Arkansas, 14-year-old Mattie Ross (appealing newcomer Hailee Steinfeld) enlists the aid of grizzled, one-eyed federal marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges, nicely reinventing both himself and the iconic role) to find the man who murdered her father and bring him to justice. While the plotting of the film - and perhaps Portis' novel - is somewhat unusual, as the villain of the piece is ultimately a minor character while a new antagonist dominates the third act, and the ending is oddly protracted, you can't deny the spectacular visuals. The Coens and their team - chiefly cinematographer Roger Deakins, costumer Mary Zophres, and production designer Jess Gonchor - have captured the Old West with such attention to detail that you can practically smell the leather and dust. True Grit is a film rich with texture. And while Coen purists may bristle at the story's brushes with sentimentality (owing much to Carter Burwell's score, which incorporates the hymn "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms", a tune familiar to anyone who's seen The Night of the Hunter), the brothers understand that there is a unique line to straddle in telling the story of a cute if headstrong 14-year-old girl experiencing the most unforgiving wilderness and appalling human behavior that the West had to offer. In balancing the begrudging tenderness between Mattie and Rooster with splashes of horrific violence, True Grit is almost like a Takeshi Kitano movie. It's not completely satisfying in the long run, but it's an enthralling cinematic experience, absolutely made for the big screen.

TSOTSI (South Africa, Gavin Hood)
Outside of his derelict Johannesburg township, a young hoodlum nicknamed Tsotsi ("Thug") carjacks a wealthy black woman and later discovers to his surprise that her infant son is still in the back seat of her car. And no sooner than you can say the words "redemption tale," Tsotsi, now forced to care for the baby, begins to re-evaluate his violent lifestyle. In every film about redemption there's an inherent predictability: you are watching a character emerge from darkness into lightness. Thus what defines each film is the creativity of its approach to this standard storyline. Unfortunately writer-director Hood, adapting and updating Athol Fugard's 1980 novel, mostly just comes up with the usual gimmicks: flashbacks give us a dead mother, an alcoholic father, a notable scene of childhood trauma and so forth, and his filmmaking style is a little too clean, too rehearsed, as are the actors (though Presley Chweneyagae is magnetic in the lead role); I wanted to see something more documentary-like, choppy and shaky and rough around the edges. Something that felt more urgent, that might make us want to do something about the horrible conditions that Tsotsi and his friends live in. But Hood, alas, is no Fernando Meirelles. For good or ill, his film makes us feel that South African shantytowns are just part of life. However, he does handle his story with grace, never falling back on melodramatic twists or manipulative scenes of emotional catharsis to engage his audience. For that, while Tsotsi is hardly the best foreign film of 2005 (as the Academy Awards has dubbed it), it's still a moving, heartfelt work. I should also point out Lance Gewer's wonderful cinematography as well as the energetic pseudo-rap called Kwaito that fills the soundtrack and fits the setting perfectly.

THE TV SET(US, Jake Kasdan)
This satire about how network TV shows are created works mainly because it doesn't feel like a satire. There's nothing here that is over the top. Of course there have already been a ton of Hollywood movies that spoof Hollywood, and The TV Set doesn't add much new to this mini-genre, but it's smart, well-acted and doesn't hit a single false note. David Duchovny plays the neurotic creator of a new show that's sort of a comedy and sort of a drama, and he quickly plunges into network TV hell when the show's pilot is given the green-light to be shot and the network's head suit - a very funny Sigourney Weaver - starts destroying his precious project before his very eyes, starting with the casting of an obnoxious young actor (Fran Kranz) in the lead role and then trying to squeeze out whatever integrity was in the show in the first place. While the intended audience for The TV Set may appear to be only studio insiders, I think its appeal is more universal than that. For how many of us have had to, on our jobs, capitulate and compromise again and again at the whims of our pushy, intimidating bosses - just because we need that paycheck? We've all been there, which is what makes The TV Set feel both familiar (in the best sense of the word) and yet not too painful to watch. In the end, Kasdan knows, as we know, that network television has always been the land of mediocrity, where if anything good bubbles to the surface, it's a miracle. So even as Duchovny sweats and strains through the pressures and the double-crosses as he tries to get his dream TV series made, we know from the start that his show wasn't that brilliant to begin with, and that any of the seemingly cruel changes to its format are merely business decisions. This isn't a must-see, but it's honest and entertaining, and I recommend it highly to anybody who thinks they want to make their own studio film or television series. The TV Set serves as both a warning and an education.

TWELVE AND HOLDING (US, Michael Cuesta)
Michael Cuesta's debut feature L.I.E. was such a critical darling that I suppose it's only to be expected that Twelve and Holding would get a drubbing by those same critics for not being as auspicious as its predecessor (which raised eyebrows as its most likable character was a pedophile). So when walking into this film, I was prepared not to like it (even if I think L.I.E. is a little overrated; Brian Cox's phenomenal performance aside, its daring story is diluted by a predictable and somewhat moralistic ending) and wound up pleasantly surprised. It's still not a great film, but it's an interesting one, with fine performances, especially from a trio of adolescent actors who portray three seventh grade misfits in New Jersey, affected by a horrible tragedy: an early scene features two bullies setting fire to a treehouse owned by twin brothers, unaware that one of the twin brothers and his obese friend are inside it. The brother dies while the obese kid escapes. The surviving twin, who suffers from a large birthmark on his face, plots of revenge, while the obese kid - his sense of smell and taste gone after his escape from the fire - decides to get in shape, much to the shock of his disgustingly overweight family. Their mutual friend, a young Asian girl whose inexplicably white mother is an aloof psychiatrist, deals with her budding hormones by flirting with a twentysomething construction worker who is helping build a new house on the land where the treehouse once stood. And while all three storylines end rather too neatly, there is genuine sympathy here both for the children and, eventually, for the broken adults that they lock horns with. (Jeremy Renner as the construction worker is especially good - it's a shame that he's not getting more leading roles.) As I said, it's not a great film - Michael Cipriano's dialogue is a little overwritten (the kids keep talking like adults), and Pierre Foldes' score is uneven - but as expectations are everything, I did appreciate Twelve and Holding more than I believed I would, and for that I do recommend it, though not strongly.

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE (UK, Michael Winterbottom)
Falling somewhere between the Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury and This Is Spinal Tap, Winterbottom's docu-like comedy/drama details 16 years of the music scene in Manchester, England, from the moment the Pistols played their first gig in town (with an audience of 42) to the closing of the legendary nightclub the Hacienda, all seen through the eyes of TV host and self-made impresario Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan), who not only founded the Hacienda but also created Factory Records and "discovered" the bands Joy Division (soon to become New Order after the suicide of singer Ian Curtis) and Happy Mondays. The film focuses primarily on the two separate Manchester scenes during this era: the late-70's post-punk scene with Curtis and Joy Division at the helm, and the late 80's ecstacy-fueled club scene with drug addict Shaun Ryder and the Mondays its posterboys. Fascinating as a look at the birth of rave culture that dawned once Curtis's departure lifted a veil on the local dirgey music scene and allowed for bands like the Mondays (as well as Inspiral Carpets, the Stone Roses, and other bands barely mentioned in the film) to flourish and establish late-80's Manchester as the center of the musical universe. Unfortunately, like the surprisingly similar Hollywood documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, the film only skates over so many enticing facts and characters, as the events are distilled through what Tony Wilson himself experienced. So just as the documentary on Robert Evans spends more time on his relationship with Hollywood footnote Ali MacGraw instead of how Chinatown was made, so too does Party People linger too much on Wilson - an amusing character, but of little interest to those outside Manchester - and his marital woes, his cocaine problem, etc. instead of exploring how the surviving members of Joy Division came to be New Order, and how they got to be huge, and what the scene was all about beyond Shaun Ryder's hooliganism. Actor Sean Harris makes his portrayal of the doomed Ian Curtis so involving that frankly I wish 24 Hour Party People was all about the rise and fall of Joy Division rather than the rise and fall and rise again (ala Robert Evans!) of Tony Wilson. Still, Winterbottom creates a canny you-are-there feel to his film, with no small help from the great cinematographer Robbie Muller. See it if you're a fan of the music, avoid it if you have no idea who Happy Mondays or Joy Division even were.

2046 (Hong Kong/France, Wong Kar Wai)
Wong Kar Wai is one of the few international directors whose films are actual events: As it's been over five years since the release of his masterpiece In the Mood for Love, the excitement - within Hong Kong and throughout the art house world - has been palpable. So I suppose there's some justification for many film critics to find Wong's ambitious follow-up, 2046, a bit of a let-down. It's hard not to compare the two films since Wong himself fashions 2046 as a sequel, picking up with In the Mood's hero Mr. Chow (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) shortly after the earlier film's heartbreaking ending. Mr. Chow, now a single man, sports a rakish moustache and has devolved from a quietly lovelorn cuckold into a caddish ladykiller. He has kept up his writing, however, and channels his buried longing for his lost love Mrs. Chan (In the Mood's Maggie Cheung, here seen only in glimpses) into an oblique science fiction story set in the year 2046 - a number significant for being the hotel room in In the Mood for Love. I should stop right here and tell you simply that you must see the first film before heading into 2046. As it stands, the later film's storyline may confuse you enough. You might be hopelessly lost without knowing Mr. Chow's back story - and in any event, your knowledge of In the Mood for Love will make viewing 2046 a far richer experience.

Anyway, this film follows Mr. Chow through three different relationships - the most substantial amount of time spent on his torrid affair with a neighboring prostitute (ubiquitous Chinese spitfire Zhang Ziyi), but with time given to his chaste friendship with his landlord's daughter (Faye Wong, who stalked Leung in Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express) as well as a truly murky encounter with a mysterious gambler (the former top leading lady of mainland Chinese cinema, Gong Li, still great but worryingly tired-looking). Each woman reminds him of his lost love in some way - Zhang lives in room 2046, Wong helps him write his stories just as Mrs. Chan did, and Gong shares Mrs. Chan's maiden name. Interspersed with expressionistic clips from Mr. Chow's story (with Wong as an android with whom Chow's hero falls in love), 2046 is a highly artful mix, with a fantastic soundtrack, stunning cinematography (Wong Kar Wai's usual DP, the genius Christopher Doyle, shares credit with two others), and the greatest cast a Chinese filmmaker could ever ask for. At times I missed the elegant simplicity and emotion of In the Mood for Love, but I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon with other critics and write off 2046 as a disappointment. Chilly as it may be, it's still a substantial film. In many respects it's a meta-film, a wistful look at the aging of its famous stars and Wong Kar Wai's own relationship with them, a wink at the fetishistic qualities of his earlier films, and an examination of Hong Kong's complex history. (The film opens during the riots of 1966-67, and the sci fi story's setting has relevance as well: 2046 is the year when HK becomes fully part of Communist China; the 1997 "handover" was largely symbolic.) I won't even go into the whole story behind this film's production; that's worth a separate page to itself. (I will say that Wong intended to make 2046 years ago and, while waiting for the money to come in, shot In the Mood for Love instead.) My sole reservation is that, at just over two hours, this film could have lost at least a good 15-20 minutes. Wong spends too much time with Zhang Ziyi's character, whose relationship with Mr. Chow is ultimately trivial. I suspect Wong was so enamored with Zhang's onscreen appeal - and her intense chemistry with Leung - that he simply couldn't bear to pare down her scenes. Perhaps this obsession will be something worth exploring in a later work.

21 GRAMS (US, Alejandro González Iñárritu)
A muscularly-edited non-chronological structure is the main draw here, and it's important, for the story at the core of 21 Grams is pretty simple: Three strangers are drawn together in the wake of a horrible car accident. Iñárritu and his writer Guillermo Arriaga would rather you not be able to figure out anything about what's going on during the first 15 minutes or so, until the fractured moments start coming together to form a plot of sorts, but it is nice to know from the start this basic premise; otherwise you might be so lost as to give up on the film. I'll be nice and not reveal how each stranger is involved in the accident, but you do have Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro as the three main characters. At various points, it seems that one of them is dying, two of them are in love, none of them know each other, one of them is saving the other's life. This seemingly confusing editing style works beautifully, actually, as we are aware of how relationships between people can change so dramatically over time, which I think is the entire point of 21 Grams. Iñárritu uses water as a recurring theme that often is the link between the supposedly random cuts across time. That said, once the film was over and I could only look at the events chronologically, the story is fairly weak. A crucial scene, where one character decides the third must be killed, is so over-the-top that, though acted well, is one which I am thankful I didn't have to direct. There would have been no subtle, real way to make it work, but then it's a major part of the story, so in the end it's a script problem. Iñárritu and Arriaga should have rethought it, and instead they aimed for unnecessary melodrama. But it's good to see Iñárritu retreat from the mania he exerted in his first film, the shrill and overrated Amores Perros, while still maintaining his style: the gritty, tinted handheld look of the cinematography feels so at home here that it doesn't feel self-conscious at all. And while Penn and Watts are winning all kinds of accolades for good, if ordinary, performances, in my book it's Del Toro who should be getting all the attention. I suppose because he underplays it, the critics forget how good he is. But it's his character who is the most complicated, and it's his role which is the most difficult to pull off. He's great.

2 DAYS IN PARIS (France/Germany, Julie Delpy)
An indie spin on Meet the Parents, this annoying comedy about an excessively neurotic American (Adam Goldberg) who spends two days in guess-where with his French girlfriend (Delpy, who wrote, directed, produced, edited and scored the picture) feels honest, but wears thin quickly. Dealing with the in-laws (played by Delpy's real-life parents, French acting veterans Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy), culture clash issues and language barriers, Goldberg's Jack is, for all his tattoos and New York cynicism, unrealistically narrow-minded, ignorant and humorless. Admittedly, his sojourn in Paris comes after a disastrous trip to Venice where he was stricken with diarrhea, and his strolls around the City of Light with Delpy's Marion are filled with awkward encounters with an endless array of Marion's sleazy ex-lovers, so one could see why he would be cranky. But Jack is a selfish loser and a terrible boyfriend, so who cares? Not that Marion is any prize either: prone to lying, flakiness and her own neurotic flip outs, Marion's so screwed up that you might buy the notion that a mess like Jack is her only option. But this couple has apparently been together for two years already, and although this European trip is putting their relationship to the final test, it's hard to see how it lasted as long as it did. Aside from a funny moment at the beginning of the film where Jack willfully gives the wrong directions to a team of fat American tourists (much to Marion's delight) and some strained redemption at the end, you never see any love between these two, and for me that's what keeps the film from working. And Goldberg - who I usually like - is just way too uptight to endure. On the upside, Delpy's parents are hilarious and it's nice to see the real, non-tourist Paris as a backdrop. Still, comparisons with Delpy's famed "French girl and American guy" diptych, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, are inevitable, and 2 Days in Paris completely lacks the romance, chemistry and bittersweet charm of either of those films.