Reviews

It's an old story: a filmmaker is crowned king of all he beholds. As a follow-up to his calling card, he decides to call in all his chips--make an homage to the romantic opium of High Hollywood. But he's not going to make the usual pablum--he's going to tell the truth about the ugly world he lives in while arousing us silly with googly-eyed, sentimental movie tropes. Martin Scorsese followed up TAXI DRIVER with NEW YORK, NEW YORK, Coppola came back from APOCALYPSE NOW with ONE FROM THE HEART, and Jean-Jacques Beineix tried to top DIVA with THE MOON IN THE GUTTER. And in 1991, the then-wunderkind of French cinema, Leos Carax, bet it all on LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF.

These follies--a combination of studio sugar and bitter pill--never work. Carax's movie--many agonizing years in the making--doesn't either, but its head is screwed on a little more tightly than those other films'. His hero is a homeless, inarticulate boy; his heroine, a one-eyed painter losing her one good eye. He piles on bits of shtikum from movies he's too young for: a hobo who owns the keys to a museum, tramps poisoning the cups of coffee-sipping bourgeois to pick their pockets, an antique box stuffed with franc notes perched perilously close to the Seine. The alternation between this mothball-stinky hokum and grim, Frederick Wisemanish cinema verite depictions of the life of the homeless in Paris is meant to have a dazzling teeter-totter effect.

But the combination of Cassavetes and Vincente Minnelli in NEW YORK, NEW YORK was meant to wow too--and Scorsese is a better director than Carax. The movie's yin and yang, rather than balancing, cancel each other out. And you might feel guilty about noticing that the movie's big set piece--a romantic dance on the Pont-Neuf bridge as Quatorze Juillet fireworks burst--would have been nailed twenty times better by an American hack like Michael Bay. These folly-fantasias, always dubbed "delirious" in the press, are always oddly enervated. The gimcrackery of old-time moviemaking, once the suspension of disbelief is removed, makes for a dictionary definition of hollow form. And Carax isn't helped much by his actors, especially Juliette Binoche--who gropes at the anti-glamour of her role like a one-man band playing the Kentucky Waltz with seventeen spoons.

The experience of an Eric Rohmer movie now involves the dissolution of the rote conversation into a focus on the underlying sound: birdsong, high heels on gravel, the tinkle of forks and the plash of vin ordinaire. The talk is so pro forma that the atmosphere is all; and that atmosphere--so evocative of a glass of Mint Melody tea sipped while listening to NPR--may explain the current renaissance of the near-octogenarian director. Rohmer's last art-house hit was PAULINE AT THE BEACH, which I suspect succeeded mostly for its poster art of Arielle Dombasle's snugly swimsuited rump. In the fifteen intervening years, the culture's clock has more than come round again; an NPR reviewer defined AUTUMN TALE as "wry, ironic, and above all civilized." And isn't that what older viewers who pay to see European movies want to spend eight dollars on, anyway?



I hoped against hope that Rohmer, whom I haven't paid much attention to in recent years, had something on the ball that I missed in my callow moviegoing youth. But a recent reviewing of CLAIRE'S KNEE--fresh, organic-feeling, stuffed to bursting with ripe travel-poster images by Nestor Almendros--showed that reiteration hasn't produced reinvention in Rohmer. His characters tend to fall into two categories--the Rueful but Still Horny Grown-ups, and the Coquettish but Surprisingly Sage Nymphets. The sleazy sting in Rohmer's and-the-children-shall-lead-us moralizing is gone; but without that Humbert flavor, what's left is creepily enervated--sentimentality without melodrama. That recipe--complacency without contrivance, without the hoky apparatus of schmaltzy lowbrow art--probably explains what makes him wry, ironic, and always civilized.



In early Rohmer--even in a grating work such as THE AVIATOR'S WIFE--there were short-storyish "psychological insights" (a familiar term of Rohmerian praise) to be gleaned. By now, finding them is like going on an Easter-egg hunt; in their place are the indulgent-but-mean leers of his women and the grimaces of lustful befuddlement of his men. Are critics and audiences so battered by blockbusteritis that work as arid as this can be greeted with euphoric sighs of relief? By now, a younger generation of French directors, such as Olivier Assayas, work this terrain with surprising, sometimes brutal results. Has a Rohmer character ever startled an audience with what they're capable of? Have the stakes ever been higher than a broken date?

AUTUMN TALE left me gasping for a little divy energy. And in a summer in which BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, EYES WIDE SHUT and AUTUMN TALE receive rapturous praise, it left me wondering what has caused American film critics' sudden burst of short-term memory loss. We've seen all this stuff before.

Now released under the absurdly named Mack Video as the absurdly named BLACK KINGPIN, LA MALA ORDINA, once known as MANHUNT, shows the Italian seventies policier director Fernando DiLeo in peak form. The Italian cops-mob-and-corruption movies often had a neorealist tincture, not far from such British cousins as GET CARTER or THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY. (The best in this vein is the dark, harrowing VIOLENT NAPLES.) But some of them were as ripe and over-the-top as concurrent works of Italian horror; and this saga of a small-town pimp pursued, God knows why, by Mr. Big and two Vincent-and-Jules-looking U.S.-made button men, looks like the product of some torrid motel-room coitus between Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. The faces are sweaty, the beatings (to evoke Roger Ebert's memorable phrase) suggest the sound of ping-pong paddles smacking naugahyde sofas--the only thing that's missing is the groan of an Ennio Morricone score. An evening of Shane Black quips it ain't, but ninety minutes of top-shelf hardboiled groove it is.

A self-possessed, fortyish man of the world, on the verge of marriage, summers by the seaside, where his lust fixates on a wised-up nymphet who won't have him. Unsated, his desire moves on to her blank-faced sister--or rather, the sister's lithe, tennis-playing knee.

As always in Rohmer, the audience is cautioned to check its head in the opening scenes; we are forced to dial down to a level of attention where the nuances of conversational game-playing, phony retractions and crafty grabs at checkmate, are the only blips on our radar screen. The way Nestor Almendros photographs it, the seaside locations are so sumptuously sexual they're almost pornographic; they give the genteel proceedings a pregnancy, as if Hitchcockian mayhem is on the verge of eruption. It isn't; but the climax tells a different story from the rest of this cool, crickety, blithe picture--an ominous, O. Henryish one about the price of unfulfilled male desire.

I took a look at CLAIRE'S KNEE on the occasion of the almost-eighty-year-old Rohmer's latest picture, AN AUTUMN TALE, to see how the canon held up--is Rohmer what he seems to be, a sadder-but-wiser op-ed columnist on the subject of love intrigue? Or is he the "tasteful" poet of leetle-girl lechery? I am cynically leaning toward the latter, perhaps because I'm put off by scenes in which French males nod with ironic agreement as their little cherry pie intones earnestly, "Really, I'm a very old soul." Rohmer even has a menopausal (and hence genially washed-up) female watching the fortyish roue's frustrations with a classically Gallic laugh at the human comedy of it all. Rohmer's "tolerance" has an instructional, Old Wave fuddiness about it. And the ending--in which the roue's cruelty is undone by the innocence of youth, as if teenage girls were infants forgetting they had just fall down go boom--is creepy, like a self-reassuring entry in Humbert Humbert's journal.

But Rohmer deserves his due: he's as acute a journalist of move and countermove--some of them unconscious--as Marivaux. Unfortunately, like Marivaux, Rohmer suffers from excess courtliness. One yearns for entropic real life to drool down the sides of his porcelain.

Vicious and ingenious Italian policier featuring Harvey Keitel as O'Connor, an almost impossibly surly New York detective on the take, who smokes fine cigars while basking in his one prized possession--a Central Park West apartment paid for with drug dealers' money. In what must be a comment on O'Connor's tunnel vision, the apartment is almost totally unfurnished--it's as if O'Connor blew his whole wad on the place, and had none left over to make it liveable. Narcotics-division cops are getting slaughtered by a serial killer, and one day a scrofulous, pouty British geek (John Lydon--that's Johnny Rotten to you) shows up at the illicit apartment, confessing to the crimes. O'Connor is sure Leo the Brit isn't the cop killer--but the kid has seen his illegal crash pad, so now what?



The director Roberto Faenza has made what is surely the most explicit movie ever about the homoerotic subtext of the policier genre. The first two thirds are a fiendishly crafty minuet of sudden reversals; the last is a sadomasochistic folie a deux that's closer to Pinter or Genet than Don Siegel. Lydon is shockingly effective as the pettish punk (he ought to have a cat to stroke); Harvey Keitel seems Harveyish for a while, until you start noticing his hundred strokes of physical inventiveness. A Scotch glass smashed to bits shocks O'Connor with his own unconscious fury; a pair of chopsticks O'Connor doesn't know how to use turn into Saharan spears crudely crucifying a spicy tuna roll. Sizing up the averages, Keitel has the coolest resume of any contemporary actors--and O'Connor goes up in that gallery of scream-like-a-moose Harvey angst right next to Matthew the Pimp, the shylock-pianist from FINGERS, and that very bad Lieutenant.

If a beginning film class at a community college were given the task of adapting a Stephen King short story on video, the results would probably look much like this bewilderingly untalented feature, which is on its way to being the most popular independent film of all time. The two novice directors claim not to have seen Ruggero Deodato's extremely similar (and infinitely superior) CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, though the debt RESERVOIR DOGS pays to Ringo Lam's CITY ON FIRE is chump change in comparison. A snooty-toot documentary filmmaker schleps two guys into the woods of Maryland to record evidence of a fabled serial-killing witch. The two guys fill up the first thirty minutes of the movie with fart-sniffing jokes; then, when you're waiting for something terrifying to be unearthed, the crew is menaced with--a bundle of twigs? A pile of stones? A tooth? The B horror movies of Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur were low on horror and high on atmospherics. Here, in the absence of palpable shocks, you get--twigs. The oafish storytelling, the "documentary" surface that wouldn't fool a child in short pants, acting that evokes the adult-entertainment industry--somehow this all spun the buzz machine and turned BLAIR WITCH into the flavor of the nanosecond. Depressingly, a friend called tonight from Houston, Texas, to report that lines curled around two city blocks. This hunk of unutterable junk feels like taps for the independent film movement: the message seems to be, You can be a klutz with a video camera, just as long as you're high-concept. (The directors' advice in an interview to aspiring filmmakers: "Find a marketable niche.")

Stick together eighties Hollywood's two biggest hypermacho wackadoos--Michael Cimino and his co-scenarist, Oliver Stone--and the result is more noise than was made by Ray Milland and Rosey Grier in "The Thing with Two Heads." The hero--an embattled Polish cop (Mickey Rourke) who takes on historically entrenched corruption in New York's Chinatown--is told by those around him that he "just cares too much." His wife--a grotesque, spreading-rumped proto-diesel dyke played by the unfortunate Caroline Kava--shrills at him that "yesterday was my ovulation day, and you weren't here!" Meanwhile, some springtime trim beckons in the form of a Chinese-American TV-news spokesmodel (Ariane) who sneers at his Caucasian thickheadedness.



Rourke's Stanley White is Stanley Kowalski with a badge--a raging bull of preening self-righteousness. His abrasive dedication to his cause at all cost, his tendency to alienate all those around him, his air of unblinking monomania--sound like anyone you've heard of? Kind of like Oliver Stone, or Michael Cimino, maybe? The filmmakers can't seem to make up their mind whether Stanley is a racist vigilante screwball or the last Boy Scout; sometimes he seems to vacillate from one to the other within the same scene. Throw in a heaping helping of self-pity, some racial and sexual hysterias (these manly filmmakers jump up onto a chair like schoolgirls afraid of a mouse when the ambisextrous John Lone is onscreen), and a cocaine-like feeling of monumental importance, and you have this highly unstable pulp epic. Depending on your mood (and, no doubt, your grandparents' country of origin), the movie can have a gaga enjoyment--Cimino's Visconti-ish grandiloquence can be impressive. If a successful filmmaker's midlife-crisis crying jag turned into an overheated potboiler sounds like it rocks your world, this probably will.

Boaz Davidson's Golan-and-Globus PORKY's knockoff--a remake of his popular Israeli LEMON POPSICLE pictures--remains the gold standard of eighties teen-sex comedies. In other words, it was the only good one. (I don't really include FAST TIMES in this category.) What's distinctive about it is that the funny, gnarly stuff, while it's satisfying enough, is tempered in the second half with some of the most naked melodrama about geek angst ever put in a movie--building to a shattering climax that seems stolen from an early, self-pitying O'Neill one-act. Ill-fated love has never felt so cheesy or upsetting.

Bruce Wagner's Hollywood novels have a particular horror-movie frisson: a can't-turn-the-page-but-can't-stop-turning tension. A dark bill of goods read by a sardonic M.D. to a terminal patient, the typical Wagner story is L.A. loserdom braced onto a Renaissance canvas--a gossipy Movieline-magazine horror story given epic proportions. Wagner so loathes the calmly powerful, not-so-bright people who thwart him that he visits every kind of calamity on them--crack-induced strokes, cancer, AIDS, tabloid sex-torture. It's as if the power of his imagination and the boil of his frustration crashed into each other and made a monster hybrid--insider bitterness raised to a Mailerian scale, where the felicities of a crashed deal take on the properties of the goings-on in a Nazi death camp, or a terminal ward. A blurb in the jacket for Wagner's masterly "Force Majeure" read, "Wagner lavishes on Hollywood the kind of attention that novelists once lavished on sex, or the Second World War." Ain't it the truth: Wagner turns bellyaching into high opera.

Wagner's 1996 novel "I'm Losing You" was described by John Updike as "inhabiting a universe so cratered it's hard to turn the pages." The novel is a Boschian cry of despair from the bowels of Century City. In his new movie version, that Munchian shriek is turned into a soft, Cronenbergian whisper. The has-beens and never-weres of Wagner's ultimate dystopian L.A. are viewed not with sadomasochistic coolness here, but with gentleness and, dare I say it, love. There's nothing sentimental in this picture, and not a frame that isn't perfumed by death, but there is a quality that took me off guard. I'M LOSING YOU is a reminder, almost inaudible in this cratered blockbuster universe, of the humanistic potential of movies--the possibility of art as a guide for human beings to navigate their way out of hopeless predicaments. The insider edge is off the movie; unlike the book, it isn't about the perfectly poised name-drop. The movie might as well be taking place in Ohio: the substance of it is in its insight into beleaguered characters trying to buttress themselves with fame and money against catastrophes that claim the Hot 100 and Joe Nobody alike.

Wagner has assembled the strongest ensemble cast since BOOGIE NIGHTS. Rosanna Arquette is a strange overlap of the luminous and the feral as an art evaluater who makes a melodramatic discovery about her roots that leads to a reconnection with a mystical Jewish practice. Andrew McCarthy, as a fallen eighties actor, goes places you wouldn't imagine him capable of--he suggests a warmer, less remote Edward Norton. As a fortyish Hollywood rich kid who's HIV-positive, Elizabeth Perkins fairly scorches a hole in the movie--the rage of a magnificent woman pushed out of the box before her time lights up every scene she's in. And Amanda Donohoe, Buck Henry and Laraine Newman all have potent brief moments.

The pitfall to Wagner's genius is generally that he uses his gift for conjuring catastrophe only cruelly--it sometimes feels as if there's no possible response to his books except to faint. Here, he's put that talent to use: he questions the tactics we use to deal with the undealable. In a stroke of ill fortune endemic to the characters in Wagner's books, I'M LOSING YOU was released on the same day as EYES WIDE SHUT and THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. I can only hope someone within the sound of my voice will see this beautiful, almost-great movie before, like its characters, it passes into the ether.

The last and least of Kubrick's twelve extant features, EYES WIDE SHUT suggests a wistful postscript to the theme that dominated the director's career: the turning of men into machines. In EYES, the machinelike master director yearns to be a man--to make a non-misogynistic, non-misanthropic movie that sits at eye level with its characters, viewing them with empathy rather than lordly detachment.

That the attempt is a sad botch stems first from Kubrick's choice of scenarist. Frederic Raphael is a witty and craftsmanlike British screenwriter who left the movie scene (more or less) after writing DARLING and TWO FOR THE ROAD. One can only speculate that Kubrick chose the sixtyish Brit to tell the story of an attractive, upwardly mobile Central Park West couple (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman) because he wanted a brainy but controllable foot soldier to do his bidding. (Kubrick touched up Raphael's script.)

Kubrick's and Raphael's incomprehension of contemporary sexual mores, the details of behavior and language that are specific to late-nineties America, gives this adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's "Traumnovelle" a generic, uninvestigated, sketched-in feel. Unlike the phony-looking Vietnam backdrops shot in England for FULL METAL JACKET, the upscale-Manhattan ambience of EYES isn't meant to be deliberately stylized and out-of-time; it just rings phony, flat. And the flatfooted approach to scene-building that's charming in a movie like THE SHINING--where, in beginner's fashion, Kubrick opens scenes with handshakes and hellos and ends them with goodbyes--squashes whatever atmospherics Kubrick intends here. A fairly simple night-on-the-wild-side tale is molasses'd into coma by Kubrick's plodding.

Visually generally undistinguished--except for a near-autistic fascination with the trippy properties of Christmas-tree lights--and clotted with dreadful bit players (Kubrick's favorite style of acting seems to be found in the featured parts in Hammer horror movies), EYES suggests a grotesquely attenuated episode of RED SHOE DIARIES. The problem is that our experience of sexuality has changed since Kubrick first announced plans for this movie, before the release of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE--but somehow the period stretching from amyl nitrate and herpes to Monica's cigar didn't reach Kubrick Manor, where the height of id-run-amok is depicted as a group of medieval-styled swingers staging a sort of Benedictine theme orgy.

When the hero is meant to be chastened and shattered by his experience of Sex Untrammeled, you can only stare at the screen in bafflement. Are we really meant to think that a wealthy, good-looking doctor--surely a one-time raging frat boy--has spent his adult life in New York City and never encountered drag queens, fetish balls, subway perverts, winking hookers? Tom Cruise's performance as the regular guy undone is the best thing about the movie. His boyishness and air of unsinkability, so dull when placed in synch with a go-for-it Simpson-Bruckheimer movie, gives energy and poignancy to what would otherwise be a strictly academic exercise. Nicole Kidman is an able actress who's wrecked by Kubrick's direction--which seems to be modeled after the ticking metronome David Mamet uses to hypnotize his actors like chickens. Her giggly-airhead business in the first scenes seems to be roiling toward a boil, but then Kubrick hands her a pot-smoking big-revelation scene that seems to have been paced after the fashion of an exposition-fest in an Ed Wood movie. Blam--Kidman gets vaporised by the doomsday machine.

What's touching about EYES WIDE SHUT is both that the Schnitzler material seems to have meant a lot to Kubrick, and that he had no idea what it meant. Kubrick just didn't trust himself, or didn't trust that it would be commercially sound, to give Schnitzler's ideas their proper language--free-form Expressionist poetry. Fearing becoming David Lynch, he turned himself into Adrian Lyne. Kubrick clearly took pains to make a movie that wasn't "clinical," sex-negative, girly-objectifying. But he also seems to have lost what he wanted the material to say. What's left is an "erotic thriller" paced like a late Rossellini movie. It's possible that Kubrick, a valedictorian at thesis-making, didn't have the understanding of the soft insides of human beings to make this kind of movie. Or, sadder still, nearing the age of seventy, he didn't have the energy to bring it together.

A Pakistani taxi driver in Britain (Om Puri) is plagued by a bad cosmic joke that seems co-written by Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis: his son, rather than becoming an unrecognizable assimilate, turns into a jihad-embracing Muslim fundamentalist. At the same time, the warmth of a white hooker (Rachel Griffiths) beckons, to the chagrin and hissing tongues of his local countrymen.

The writer Hanif Kureishi's onetime Benetton smugness has mellowed into ripe colors of rue, mockery and regret as he eases into middle age, and this adaptation of his short story is a lovely, surprisingly beautifully shot, sneakily haunting small movie. The dialogue sometimes has a novelish explicitness, and the performances are variable--Puri sometimes drifts into F. Murray Abraham terrain, but he has an amazing, craggy, pain-absorbent face. But the movie has a real subject: the ways in which postmod culture-hybridity isn't always a rainbow-colored day at the beach. And the warmth amid desperation of the central relationship suggests what Neil Jordan's MONA LISA might have been without the smoky-sax romanticism.

The sad thing about seeing this movie was that, after Miramax gave the movie one of their unceremonious heave-hos (par for the course for their good movies), the audience, unblanketed by buzz, hype, an aura of hot-ticket, reacted as shruggingly as critics seem to have. Too bad: MY SON THE FANATIC evokes the sweet, melancholy fatalism of seventies pictures like THE NICKEL RIDE and STRAIGHT TIME. It has the atmosphere of an overcast crime picture without the crime. And it has at least a handful of real, breathing people in it--as rare an occurrence these days as a flight of the dodo.

Some wonk at Universal woke up one Monday last August, went to his desk, picked up the phone and said, "Gimme SOMETHING ABOUT MARY for sixteen-year-olds"--and now we have this wedge of comic raunch, a schizoid vacillation between the WB-sweet and the Farrelly Brothers salty. It's a very bad and quizzically likable movie--endearing mostly for its talented cast, a group of game, fizzy youths you wish you were watching in something else. The movie lacks the guts of my favorite eighties horny-teen movie, Boaz Davidson's coarse and then strangely lachrymose LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN (1982), but even the cloying stuff feels heartfelt. The best performances: Eddie Kaye Thomas as a pint-sized version of Aaron Eckhart in a Neil LaBute movie; Chris Klein, reprising his saintly jock from ELECTION; and Natasha Lyonne, reprising her mouthy malcontent from SLUMS OF BEVERLY HILLS.

In its abhorrence of moms, the Army, appropriate viewing material, Bill Clinton's legacy-polishing through NATO bombing, Alan Menken scores, and finally itself, SOUTH PARK ranks among NATURAL BORN KILLERS and THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE in the annals of studio movies that atomize every item of mainstream culture and dearly-held values that pass in their wake. Unfortunately, it doesn't equal those movies in acuity, skill, or even laughs. It's a ninety-minute movie in which construction-paper stick figures call each other testicle-biters. That the filmmakers manage to hold our interest with that material on a giant screen for an hour and a half is a heroic achievement; but the pre-release hype outpaces the movie--at least in the yuks department.

The movie suggests that Stone and Parker may be smart guys who could actually graduate from the poo-poo world; it also suggests that might not really believe all this scandalous stuff, any more than Howard Stern does when he pulls off a gross stunt to maintain his "outrageous" quotient. (You can sense him wanting to discuss politics, or talk to Albert Brooks.) The test of the movie's effectiveness for me, though, is that it really makes you angry at its satirical targets. It has an invigorating I'm-gonna-say-whatever-I-want-and-you-can't-stop-me quality--you wouldn't think anyone could work you up into a lather over nosy parents and Winona Ryder.

SOUTH PARK is a badly needed corrective to the protect-our-precious-children smarm that arose in the wake of the Littleton shooting--it's the only voice that has emerged in popular culture to say what's needed. It says the unspeakable--that all this protectiveness really isn't about the kids in question at all, but about parents' images of themselves. The weird thing about the picture is that it really is a movie of ideas--you come out wondering about Stone and Parker's politics more than you remember laugh lines. And the scenes in Hell, involving some poignant gay sex between Satan and Saddam Hussein, are more deliriously surreal than anything ever seen with a Warner Brothers label. But for all that, the Disney song parodies are endless, repetitive and endlessly repetitive; and Stone and Parker have more funny ideas than funny jokes. But they once seemed like a couple of obnoxious, gen-x frat boys in the manner of Kevin Smith. They ain't no more. If they put on a button-down shirt and get away from the scissors and rubber cement, they might grow into a millennial version of George Axelrod.

If you come out of Spike Lee's SUMMER OF SAM feeling a letdown, there are two other New York movies that much more vividly capture the panic of the city during the Son of Sam's spree in the summer of '77. Abel Ferrara's FEAR CITY, not quite a good movie, at least has a Bickle-ish frenzy and delirium that's right on; and there's this sicko platter of cold cuts, the first movie of the talented, then-25-year-old William Lustig, a Son of Sam exploitation picture that seems to perfectly capture the clammy smell and taste of cold sweat.

Joe Spinell, the Berkowitz manque of this Times Square programmer, was a sort of neighborhood version of Karloff's Frankenstein: a huge, darkly glowering, pitted-faced, scary-looking guy who, in the films of Coppola and Friedkin, always suggested the soulfulness inside grim button men and cops. Here, his Son of Sam is a sort of melancholy Bluebeard who beats his head with remorse after every killing. Spinell was a marvellous actor who died young and probably would have had a nineties renaissance; Lustig captures the soot and the soiled wallpaper, the atmosphere that you makes you guiltily feel that the Berkowitz story was the quintessence of New York noir. This may be (with the Larry Cohen-scripted MANIAC COP) Lustig's best picture; it seems more like an Abel Ferrara version of the Berkowitz story than the one Ferrara actually made.

It's unique among Spike Lee's bad movies in that it doesn't suffer from a lack of commitment. Most of Spike's turkeys seem wanly unengaged in their subject matter: does anyone think he really cared about a confused phone-sex operator (in GIRL 6) or a non-dysfunctional family having solvable problems (in CROOKLYN)? In SUMMER OF SAM, Spike Lee tries to put on his Martin Scorsese costume, roll up the sleeves and dig into the mess at hand, but then he doesn't, quite.

Making his first movie that's almost exclusively about white people seems to fill him with ambivalence. He wants to go at the Bronx Italian-American milieu straight, but he's full of resentments and has a few comments he'd like to add. And by the end, you realize that he's assembled these guidos in the drawing room to reenact the same replay of Bensonhurst lynch-mob violence that stood behind DO THE RIGHT THING. (It's as if Lee were getting at his Oedipal relationship to Scorsese by compulsively pointing out Italian-American racism--as if Scorsese hadn't done that already!)

Spike has everything in his corner here: angry goombahs, a colorfully dumpy Jewish serial killer, Mira Sorvino looking puzzled and hurt at a Plato's Retreat orgy, Jimmy Breslin talking into the camera, a surreal-looking Reggie Jackson, boylesque dancing, porn, blood, the Who. And yet the film shares one thing in common with other unsuccessful Spike joints: the scenes are non-scenes, the story is untold. In a good Spike Lee movie, the scenes are really built; you might not like them, but you wouldn't miss them in a Sherman tank. In a bad one, nothing has shape--the actors have that insecure so-who-am-I-again? look and Lee covers up the wobbly improv with wall-to-wall music. SUMMER OF SAM drags on for two and a half hours, and you find yourself asking, "Guinea hairdresser has bad sex, David Berkowitz shoots coeds--the connection being?"

SUMMER OF SAM may have started, in Spike Lee's mind, as an Oliver Stone-style madhouse allegory--Son of Sam as Uncle Sam. (It would be interesting to see what Michael Imperioli's original modest, indie script looked like.) What it has ended up as is another movie where Spike Lee gets impressed by a recent impressive film, and filters it through his sports-talk-radio sensibility--in this case, BOOGIE NIGHTS, which, ghostlike, reappears in tired Steadicam trolleys through a disco, plagiaristic music choices, and what we might call the Overambitious Seventies Canvas. Spike Lee exasperates us--that's his beauty, and that's sadly what will probably forever rob him of his due: recognition as one of the best American filmmakers. It may be time to acknowledge that empathy is not part of his bag of tricks. It was once--in DO THE RIGHT THING, where everyone was simultaneously right and all wrong. But it isn't now, and we can only pray a subject engages him again, before he stops getting turns at bat.

This dazzling comedy mixes a wry, offhand allegory for the Nixon-Kennedy debate; a slice of small-town misery pitched right in the midway point between Updike and Preston Sturges; and a homespun update of Bunuel's SIMON OF THE DESERT, with a good-guy high-school teacher (Matthew Broderick) as Saint Simon and a pert, implacable, hard-shelled overachiever (Reese Witherspoon) as Satan.

The director and co-writer Alexander Payne has a ziggety, hotfooting but unstressed style that never misses its mark, and the performances are stunning. Broderick perfectly varnishes the hidden desire and rage inside a principled nobody; and Reese Witherspoon gives a great performance as a resentful, pit-bull-like go-getter whose button nose, narrowing eyes and helmetlike hair are like a turtle's carapace, blocking the world's aggressions.

This picture--probably the best-written comedy since BARTON FINK--is full of delights, like the rich, popular jock (usually a figure of terror or mockery in American movies) who turns out to be a flawlessly saintly sort of holy idiot. And Payne makes the fluorescent-lit classrooms, chain dining experiences and bit players look the way they look in life, not in dressed-up studio movies, without being strainedly "realistic." The picture combines intelligence with a rampaging, chaotic sense of fun in a way that seems mostly lost in contemporary film; the movie seems to have been beamed in from another era. It was bunglingly sold by Paramount and quickly squashed by the work of George Lucas; Alexander Payne, like his protagonist, like his mentor Bunuel's heroes, must by now have learned the hard way that nice guys finish last.

To see why Bruce Wagner is, with Lem Dobbs, the most under-utilized writing talent in movies, see this humble Fox movie of his vaultingly ambitious sci-fi script--a mix of Jacobean fright, fairy tale and fifties, Fantastic Planet hokum that has more brains and bursting imagination in any given five minutes than the life work of George Lucas. The direction is flattish and the budget isn't up to Wagner's sumptuous vision, but the seeds of magnificence are everywhere visible.

Gary Sherman's sensational programmer about a psycho pimp (the always invaluable Wings Hauser) and a surreally determined hooker (Season Hubley) was the last gasp of what B movies used to be. Two oddities: yes, that's Nina Blackwood, MTV VJ, getting raped with a coat hanger. And yes, it was shot by John Alcott, better known for his work with a better-known director named Stanley Kubrick.

The first hour is dazzling: Robert Duvall, a bank-heist guy screwed over by the mob, decides he wants $250,000 as recompense. And like Lee Marvin in POINT BLANK, he doesn't take no for an answer. The director, John Flynn, is one of the most underrated in crime cinema on the basis of this picture and ROLLING THUNDER alone: he takes a pretty familiar man-against-the-syndicate story and shoots it with a plainness so eloquent the movie takes on the dignity of a Shaker chair. Duvall is an extraordinarily expressive hard case, especially in his brutally unsentimental scenes with his uncertain moll (a lyrical and volcanic Karen Black). Maybe it's the Donald Westlake source novel, but all the bit parts are beautifully, almost journalistically characterized (with none of the cutesy color of Elmore Leonard). The last act detours into Quinn-Martin territory, but that's not the worst thing in the world, is it? Almost everything in this movie is just incredibly articulate: check out the scene between Robert Ryan, an aging, cock-of-the-walk, but rather insecure mob boss, and the beautiful, put-together young wife (Joanna Cassidy) whom he loves but treats like dirt. A single argument about listening to a Rams game on a car radio speaks novels about their relationship in four terse lines. Flynn could give today's neo-noir directors seminars in the beauties of haiku-like plainspokenness.

Altman at the absolute top of his form--which is to say among the freest, loosest and sensorily densest great movies ever made in America. Visually and sonically thick as a brick, it also represents some of the highest-flying improvisatory acting you've ever seen. Put the Godard of the early sixties in a polyester shirt, lay him down among the rummies and compulsive cases of the American gambling subculture, and fill him with equal parts beer and caffeine, and you have some idea of this thoroughly amazing, free-and-easy comedy, which has a scary undertow: the scene where George Segal tries to persuade co-addict Elliott Gould of the hollowness of the big win might be the most scarily desolate in any Altman picture.

There is a certain breed of European filmmaker, typified by Mike Van Diem of CHARACTER, the ZENTROPA-era Lars Von Trier, and THE CELEBRATION's Edward Vinterberg, who seems a sadly updated version of the old new-wave auteur. Where Godard and Fassbinder secretly wanted to be Sam Fuller and Douglas Sirk, these guys want to be...Michael Bay? (I would throw into that mix the Danny Boyle of TRAINSPOTTING--a guy who did tremendous huffing and puffing to get the world to notice, then turned out to have absolutely nothing on his mind.) Tom Tykwer, the tyro behind RUN LOLA RUN, is maybe the most frenetic and emptiest of the lot.

The first half hour of this picture, massively hyped since its premiere at New Directors/New Works in New York last year, gives you a sensation generally only enjoyed by characters in Bret Easton Ellis novels: kind of like sitting in the lobby of a poshly designed Mid-Atlantic hotel, watching MTV with the sound turned down while techno Muzak plays in the foyer, and those two Vicodins you just chewed kick in. Then the Central Narrative Gimmick comes into play, and a slight but very recognizable Entertainment Value starts coursing through your bloodstream. The conceit is O. Henryish and old-hat: If you failed to bump into that old lady on your way to work today, she wouldn't have gotten nicked by that passing car, and wouldn't get the insurance payout, and so her son would've died of an overdose...

you get the picture.

Here, red-dyed Lola needs to get 100,000 deutschmarks to save her punk boyfriend from a deadly shylock. She has twenty minutes; and, through a device the movie in no way explains, her potential route from home to money to boyfriend is played out, then replayed twice.

When Tarantino built a tripartite time-bending structure in PULP FICTION, he had a reason: spiffing up the shopworn-old- chestnuts-with-a-twist that constituted the plot. In RUN LOLA RUN, as in Doug Liman's GO, it's as if the filmmakers thought Tarantino's gimcrackery were a holy ur-text of new-fangled narrative. Tykwer way outdoes Liman's shenanigans: he has made a movie that's like a cinematic analog of a PlayStation game. If that sounds perfectly decadent and yummy, dig right in; I found it almost smotheringly hermetic and quickly wished to flee the theatre.

What's stifling about the movie isn't just its emptiness, its total paucity of characters or any sense of life outside narrative gamesmanship. It's the director's frantic tap-dancing to show his self-styled virtuosity. The movie features maybe more directorial gimmickry than even TRAINSPOTTING, to even less effect: the tricks Tykwer thinks are dazzling us are strictly yesterday's news. The pounding techno beat, the emphasis on hysterical cleverness at any cost, and the general air of panicked, oxygen-deprived need for attention, might make you long for an observant, quiet, well-acted scene shot in a really boring master.

Even if you live in Park Slope, and your idea of a big time is a cup of herbal tea, a Sweet Honey in the Rock CD, and a curl-up with a volume of Audre Lorde, this suicide-inducing lesbian indie will probably have you craving a late Steven Seagal feature, a chili dog, and a six pack of Miller Genuine Draft. Characteristic moment: poker-faced non-actor erupts, "Hey you guys! Does our community really have to get down on an empowered woman who's in charge of her sexuality?"

Gwyneth Paltrow must have had a lot of laundry to do--there's no other explanation for her absence from this broad, hamhandedly "crowd-pleasing" exemplar of the Miramax style. The studio's name was once synonymous with hipness, freshness, daring; now, it means cut-rate MGM, with high aristocratic gloss and clipped syllables at wholesale prices.

This adaptation of Wilde's comic melodrama lacks the Louis B. Mayer high varnish of SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE; it's lush and overstuffed but looks a little tatty and quickly hurled together. Slowish and potboilerish, it details the moral crisis of a self-made MP (Jeremy Northam) agonizing over whether to compromise his principles to avoid the blackmail of his wife's diabolical classmate (Julianne Moore). IDEAL HUSBAND was twice filmed before, but this movie is an object lesson in why it is rarely revived for the stage. The director, Oliver Parker, gasps along from one blockish closeup to another as the exposition sputters out; the film resembles a very early, stagebound talkie. (One moment, when Julianne Moore is seen eavesdropping on a fateful conversation, is like a Gus Van Sant frame-by-frame rendering of a discarded, early George Cukor clinker.)

As a hand-wringing wife and her eager-to-be-wed chum, Cate Blanchett and Minnie Driver are the very picture of inauthenticity, but Rupert Everett continues to pose the question: why isn't this guy a major movie star? The handsome devil has only to gaze limpidly and emit a few words of dialogue, and the audience melts in a lava-burst of sheer, molten charm. And Julianne Moore continues to tie with Judy Davis for most underused major talent in movies. Earlier this year she was Glenn Close's idjit foil in COOKIE'S FORTUNE; here, she seems to be playing a wry parody of Close. Her sheer presentness is surfeiting; it seems to overflow the tinny, technical requirements of this wicked-grande-dame role, and damn near drowns this gray, clinking movie.

Great title; and in its day Bruce Wagner's extravagantly purple dialogue made a lot of eyes widen. In his fiction, Wagner scales astonishing heights of cruelty and scabrousness, but writing a SHAMPOO-style rondo, he seems miscast; it's as if Terry Southern had ambitions of being Ernst Lubitsch. There are savory performances generously sprinkled: Paul Mazursky is the wistful shade of a TV producer, brought by lust back to this mortal coil, and Wallace Shawn makes a sumptuous entrance, flanked by two LAPD officers, telling his hostess, "These perverse gentlemen have made a slanderous assertion."

George Cukor's adaptation of Lawrence Durrell's ALEXANDRIA QUARTET forms the shape of a dial made of character traits from medieval mystery plays--Fanatic Patriotism, Sexual Cunning, Heartless Bargaining, Furtive Retreat. If Durrell sought to catalogue every human impulse, Cukor had another, lower agenda that serves the material beautifully: shifting these allegorical characters into ripe, lustrous kitsch icons who seem to have time-travelled from a Sternberg movie circa 1931.

The whole picture seems to have undergone a time-machine move from THE SHANGHAI GESTURE to swinging '69. It's Cukor's most vibrant movie visually, and each gorgeously staged and color-patterned shot finds a new way to layer an Islamic tapestry atop psychedelic poster art.

Cukor, brought in as a replacement, brings a vigor to the material you don't associate with him, and at 70, he still knew how to shape the beats of a scene like a Broadway pro. It is reported that he and the star, Anouk Aimee, loathed one another, and in honesty it's easy to see Cukor's frustration: she gives a dismally coy, incommunicative performance as the black widow whose web forms the story. She seems aberrantly at odds with the coolly dignified, taciturn style of the other performances: Dirk Bogarde, as the Graham Greene-ish diplomat with a lurid secret may never have been more creepily sympathetic than he is here. And John Vernon, an actor best known for playing pompous authoritarians in B movies, has such noble composure as Justine's long-suffering husband that he seems to turn into a folk-art engraving of a noble and besieged human soul.