Reviews

I went in with low expectations after reading some negative reviews. This movie blew me away. It moved me deeply. It is certainly one of the most original, unpredictable, unformulaic, gorgeous movies to come out of Hollywood in years. I find it almost miraculous that Spike Jonze was able to deliver his vision in such a truthful, seemingly uncompromised way. Chapeau, chapeau, chapeau to him.

He and Dave Eggers expanded on the book by Maurice Sendak by giving characters to the Wild Things. It's a story about raw feelings. About feelings so painful, so intense, that they cannot be articulated except through wild actions, like monster tantrums. Hurt, jealousy, loneliness, pain, joy. How does a child deal with these feelings? How do adults cope? One may grow up, but the feelings are the same.

Although people complain that not much happens, I think a lot happens emotionally. Jonze's achievement is his masterful control of tone. There is gorgeous, insane energy in the wild actions of Max, a child bewildered by a broken home (not in the original source). And then there is a lovely, melancholy but mischievous feel to the place where the Wild Things are. I find it a fascinating interpretation true to the core of the Sendak story. Nothing sounds canned or clichéd.

When Max first finds them, The Wild Things are utterly bewildered, Big guy Carol is running around destroying things without quite knowing why (it's because of unrequited love). Max brings them a sense of purpose, some order and some lost joy. He does that by becoming their king and soon he learns that this degree of control requires responsibility and honesty. Maurice Sendak made up one of the most brilliant and durable metaphors in children's literature. Our feelings are volatile creatures that behave in wild ways. But what fantastic creatures they are! They all sound reassuringly like neurotic New Yorkers and were made by the Jim Henson people with great fidelity to the original Sendak drawings. This is the opposite, for instance, of what happened to poor William Steig's Shrek, who was defanged of all his charm and transformed into plastic merchandising by a big studio.

The faces of the Wild Things are extraordinarily expressive, but what works like a charm are the actors who lend them their voices. I loved James Gandolfini as Carol. He has the voice of a lovable lug (one of the reasons he was so sexy in The Sopranos), and as Carol he brings out the sweetness and vulnerability in that warm, teddy bear voice of his. He was the only one I recognized off the bat, but the rest of the acting is extraordinary. Everybody's tone is just right, slightly off-kilter but emotionally true. Catherine O'Hara is a hoot as Judith (a shrew and a self described "downer"), Paul Dano, quietly tender as Alexander, who no one ever listens to; Chris Cooper, softly authoritative as Douglas, and Forest Whitaker, as Ira, deeply in love with Judith, and even Lauren Ambrose as KW is spirited and lovely.

This is not a film for young children. It may be a film for children the same age as Max, the protagonist, who at the beginning seemed to me a little long in the tooth for such tantrums. But as he goes to where the wild things are, he becomes more like a child, more vulnerable and more powerful and he is more delightful. The kid is put through the wringer, like kids are when they feel any of those terrible things that Max feels, and the tone is dark but playful. I can totally understand Sendak's impatience with parents who complain about the movie's darkness. The story, and the film are about the hard truths of childhood. They are not a fantasy land for blissful escape. However, thinking of my young nephews, I'm not sure that they would not be scared by the chaotic strangeness inflicted on Max.

But it is a wonderful film for adults, if you allow it to take you into its extraordinary realm of metaphorical feeling. It is more magical than anything I've seen in a long time. The one thing that got on my nerves was the hipsterish music by Karen O. The score by Carter Burwell (this man can do no wrong in my book) is fine, but all those cloying, cutesy songs were a little bit too much for me, particularly when inserted into scenes where the characters were talking. The cinematography by Lance Acord is amazing, the landscapes and the creatures are amazing. It is a deeply beautiful film.

Immediately after watching this new Coen Bros. film, I went home, dusted off my Bible and looked up the Book of Job. I was trying to understand the point of this frustrating movie. Giving the Coens the benefit of the doubt, I'm guessing it's some sort of modern day biblical parable, and it echoes Job. It's about Larry Gopnik, a Jewish college professor in Minnessota in the late 1960's who gets hit with a relentless series of tribulations that test his decency. He tries looking for answers with the Rabbis in his community, who can't or won't help.

The movie starts, amazingly, with a little parable that takes place in a shtetl, in Yiddish. The parable was in itself maddening, about the point of doing good, or of thinking evil; an illustration of moral ambiguity. The scene seems an homage to the days when films and theater thrived in Yiddish, and even more, to the millennial Jewish culture of storytelling, of teaching through narrative. But to judge from what follows, it's hard to understand why it's there. The result is disappointing at almost every level.

For one, the Coens have lost sight (ever since O Brother Where Art Thou, it seems) of their funny bone. Their attempts at humor have been leaden (The Ladykillers, Intolerable Cruelty, Burn After Reading, etc.). To misplace your funny bone in a movie about Jews that attempts humor is a particularly terrible sin. The movie is totally missing warmth and mischief, things that made masterpieces of Fargo, Raising Arizona and the Big Lebowski. It has chutzpah, but it feels stifling and stifled. It has no verve.

One of the main problems of the film is that Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, a resourceful actor stuck in a thankless role) is such a total pushover. He has absolutely no edge. The point about Jewish genius nerds (see Woody Allen, Larry David, Seinfeld, etc.) is that they may be nerdy, but they have rapier wit, or deep neurosis or a fantastically funny, warped way of seeing the world. Larry Gopnik has none of this. He is a decent, boring, literal man with endless tolerance for abuse. Thus, he is extremely unlikable. You can't root for a man that doesn't root for himself. I kept thinking of Gene Wilder, who could be as meek as a sheep but had this hilarious undercurrent of hysteria. Something like this would have helped the audience not to lose heart with Larry Gopnik.

The Coens have also become intellectually lazy. You can't have an argument with religion, which is what I think this movie is, if you are not going to look sharp. A Serious Man seems made by Jewish atheists duking it out with their religion. Is this a parable of Jewish suffering, of an unduly punishing God? Is it a modern retelling of the Book of Job? Unfortunately, it's hard to tell because the movie refuses to probe deeper into Gopnik's crisis of faith or confidence. I totally identify with the Coens' criticism of rabbis who speak in platitudes about parking lots or who answer everything with unintelligible parables, but what the movie seems to be saying, which is disturbing me, is that the Jewish oral and written tradition is useless in the face of cruelty. By corollary, so is all storytelling. Why bother telling a story if there is nothing to learn, nothing to be done?

What is the point of the movie? That you can't go to religion to solve your moral and existential dilemmas? Perhaps organized religion is indeed useless, but the source material is not, just read the awesome Book of Job, probably the first existential text about human despair ever written. It would have been interesting if Larry Gopnik realized he had to help himself and decided to turn things around, whether the outcome was good or bad, funny or tragic. But he just keeps flailing and the world is more and more cruel to him. He keeps claiming he didn't do anything. And that is the problem.

I also have a feeling that the Coens, like many modern Jews, are conflicted about their heritage and the ambivalence is palpable. Whatever they are trying to say, it's very confusing. Their portrayal of their Jewish milieu is slightly disturbing. Everybody is a cartoon, and because of this, most characters are unsympathetic. Here, let me bring the example of Larry David, perhaps the most unsympathetic Jewish character that ever walked the Earth. Somebody said to me he is the reason why people hate Jews, that's how polarizing he is. However, Larry David serves a purpose. He is cathartic. He relentlessly explores the fraught relationship of his monstrous inner self with the world at large, and by doing so, he sheds light on all of our interactions, Jewish or not. Onedimensional cartoons in a dramatic film is a different story. Those are actually trickier.

There are some tender and inspired moments, as in the relationship of Larry with his crazy brother Arthur (Richard Kind), and intermittent Coen funniness like a Bar Mitzvah boy stoned out of his gourd, and the always deeply gorgeous cinematography of Roger Deakins, but in all A Serious Man feels disturbingly dessicated and aloof, as if the Coens were trying to do a thesis about storytelling and they forgot to connect with their own hearts.

Still Walking is an intimate movie about a family reunion. Its observations about family dynamics are the most true to life I have ever seen. The movie paints the entire gamut of emotional family experience with delicate yet powerful brush strokes but it's not a sentimental film, nor an opportunity for actors to grandstand. It's Japanese, so all the strong undercurrents of emotion are held in check by equally powerful restraint (both cultural and directorial). A brother and a sister attempting families of their own go to visit their parents in Yokohama. The parents have lost a son and the family's devastation hangs heavy in the air. You can actually feel it bearing down on your shoulders from the first frame. Anybody who has ever spent the night at the house of relatives will feel the weight of family history that this film captures so truthfully.

The parents are engulfed by their quiet, ongoing grief and the surviving children resent all the attention given to the one who is not there anymore. The movie is surprisingly mordant, touching, cruel, sad, funny: human. The mother is this wonderful woman who cooks up a storm (I so wanted to be invited to that house). She is from an older generation, which means she has been forever in the shadow of her husband the doctor, cooking and cleaning and feeding the children, but she is not a pushover, nor a saint. She is mischievous, catty and petty, prejudiced, funny, generous and cruel at the same time. She is a marvel, and the actress who plays her is astonishing.

This movie has many emotional surprises that make the audience gasp, but they are presented with a sure, light touch, never falling into easy sentiment, never shying away from human complexity. It's a film about family, and love and duty and regret and it is stunningly beautiful.

I had really liked director's Luis Estrada dark political satire La Ley de Herodes and I was looking forward to this one. But A Wonderful World disappoints. It is a political satire/fable, and the premise is interesting. In a not too distant future, the Mexican Minister of Economy declares there is no more poverty in Mexico and plans to run for the leadership of the World Bank. However, a homeless drunk gets in his way. On paper, the movie should work like a charm. It's a very dark satire of the Mexican elite's indifference to the poor. But the execution is very flawed, even if the film boasts a veritable roster of some of the best Mexican acting talent around. This is what really bugged me: The rhythm is glacial. The plot meanders. And every scene is way too long. Every scene could have been cut in half and it would have still expressed its point, but Estrada loves the sound of characters cursing colorfully yet endlessly. He and his co-screenwriter, and the editor haven't apparently gotten yet William Shakespeare's memo that brevity is the soul of wit, and so it is with this film -- long and increasingly witless. Satire requires precise, surgical timing, economy of words and feelings and a coldish heart. None of this is in evidence here. There is a virulent strain of sentimentality coursing through this film's veins that really is unbearable. It's so bad that in scenes where the bum cries you can actually hear they added sniffles in post-production. So cheesy! There is a ridiculous, rather offensive love story, between the bum, played with great panache, and quite some hambone by Damián Alcázar, and a poor woman called Rosita, played by the unfathomably ubiquitous Cecilia Suárez. Now why is this offensive? 1. Because Cecilia Suarez is not believable as an impoverished inhabitant of a slum. She is tall and pretty and white as snow and and her attempts at sounding low class are absurd. I wonder if there are no other Mexican actresses available that don't look like they were born with a silver spoon in their mouths. She seems like she's trying to channel a silent film actress and the comic character of La Chilindrina, and she is not only insufferable but silly. Why could a poor woman not be anything other than a blathering, innocent imbecile? It is a disgraceful performance and no friend of anybody who is poor. 2. Because the Mexican rich and or middle class (and this includes the filmmakers) still think that the poor speak and behave like comic characters out of a 1940's movie. This may have been the intention, but it backfires, because instead of portraying them with some modicum of dignity, they are just corny stereotypes. Good hearted and innocent, to boot. This is patronizing. And patronizing is what the Mexican elites are and have always been to the poor. This is actually one of the points of the movie so it is rather maddening that this awareness didn't seep through to the way the poor are portrayed. The bum has a collection of bum friends (all great Mexican actors: Jose Carlos Ruiz, the great Jesús Ochoa and the great Silverio Palacios) and they are cool, but the direction as usual is as broad and unsubtle as if they were playing to the rafters in Azteca Stadium. 3. There is a sequence in a hospital which is a completely unnecessary, cheap, pathetic dig at Mexican Jews (which by the way, are like less than 1% of the general population). It's supposed to be a very fancy private hospital, called Sinai, and it seems like all the patients wear yarmulkes just so you don't miss the point that Jews are the only people in Mexico who can afford fancy hospitals, which of course is not true. An attempt at wit is to see signs for the spa and the golf course and the pool in the hospital's lush grounds. My heart froze when I saw this. It is amazing to me that screenwriters Estrada and Sampietro would write something so objectionable, so stereotypical, so inane and so uncalled for. 4. I can imagine what they were trying to achieve with the production design, which oscillates between the shiny modern Mexico and the slums, which are given a sepia, Fellinesque treatment, but even this seems pretentious and half baked. In short, a good idea terribly executed. Lazy and mediocre, written with more stupidity than wit.

Given the track record of Martin McDonagh as an incredibly gifted playwright, I expected In Bruges to be smarter and funnier, particularly smarter. McDonagh does have a way with words, but it seems to have eluded him in this film, which works better as a concept. Maybe it would work better as a play, but as a film it feels half-baked. I see that he is referencing Waiting for Godot and he's playing with his usual mashup of violence and humor, and he is paying homage to old, masterful movies like Touch of Evil and Vertigo, but the whole thing feels really forced and rather soulless. I am willing to suspend my disbelief and swallow that the wonderful Brendan Gleeson and the incredibly uneven Colin Farrell are hit men on holiday, but why? They really seem to be the nicest chaps, with no edge of meanness. Lovable thugs who work for a fastidious thug, played rather maniacally, by Ralph Fiennes, whose performance over the phone is actually funnier than when he actually shows up. It is nice to see him in a comic role and sporting a perfect thuggish accent, but he is not believable either. And the actors are saddled with stupid lines, which is really surprising coming from Mr. McDonagh. Gleeson is divine as a hit-man perfectly content to spend some downtime sightseeing. He revels in the calm. I love Brendan Gleeson and if there is a reason to see this movie, he is it. Farrell is all over the place, and trying really hard to be funny, which may not be entirely his fault. He is best when he feels guilty and dissolves into tears, but otherwise he mugs for the camera like there is no tomorrow. Jeremie Renier, who has starred in the distinguished films of the Dardenne brothers, L'Infant and La Promesse, has a bit part here. This always bothers me, that when the big foreign production comes to town, the best actors in that country end up playing stupid bit parts. Such is the pecking order. There is a subplot involving a racist dwarf, and fat Americans, so you know the movie is aiming low. Some American critics have vociferously objected to the violence, which is really beyond me, considering Hollywood is still churning out violent porn like Rambo. The violence is over the top in concept, as Farrell kills human beings that are taboo to kill. And this may be the point of the movie, that the principles of criminals are bogus, and killing anybody is wrong, period. But it's a point we expected Martin McDonagh to make with his accustomed panache, not all dumbed down.

Who doesn't love British trashy movies? They are the best kind of trash. Literate gossipy trash, enacted for our enjoyment by gifted actors with plummy accents. Like Damage, remember that one with Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche and the amazing Miranda Richardson? Or The Mother, with a buck naked Daniel Craig? Or even Prick up your Ears, with Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina. There is something utterly delightful at seeing the Brits lose their emotional marbles in lurid little stories. I love it. Hence, Notes on a Scandal is a highbrow guilty pleasure, based on a novel by Zoe Heller, with a witty screenplay by Patrick Marber (of Closer fame) and well directed by Richard Eyre. It doesn't quite work for a number of reasons, which I will go into later, but the reason to see it is for Cate Blanchett, who will be Judi Dench when she grows up, and Judi Dench herself, who is our age's Sarah Bernhardt. And then there is Bill Nighy, whom we adore. I know we are all tired of Dame Judi getting nominated every year. We are tired of the Judi Dench drill. I am even more tired of the Clint Eastwood drill, because Dame Judi is talented, whereas El Clinto is unjustly overrated. However, this is one performance of La Dench that truly deserves a nomination. I'm still rooting for Helen Mirren (Judi would have been equally as splendid as Elizabeth II, if she weren't tired of playing every single Queen of England in every movie, always). Anyway, her level of actorly proficiency is truly frightening. She is also quite fearless. She uses her scariness and and her fearlessness to chilling effect as Barbara, an embittered spinster teacher in a bad public school in London. You take one look at Barbara, with her greasy bad perm and her pursed lips and you know bile courses through her veins. It certainly oozes from her mouth and her innermost thoughts. What a delight to listen to such articulate nastiness! One of the problems I have with the movie is that it gives away her badness from the very beginning, which makes it hard to believe that Blanchett, who becomes her victim, would be so naive as not to notice that this woman is a dangerous harpy. However, one forgives a lot because the dialogue is deliciously sardonic, and extremely literate, and since a lot of it is rendered by Dame Judi in a voice-over, you just let yourself listen to the way she inveighs a word like "invent" (as in "he did not invent it") with what would amount to polonium-210 in the physical world. There are a couple of willful-suspension-of-disbelief moments in this movie which almost ruined it for me. However, as we live mired in Hollywoodland where characters are usually one-dimensional, and female characters are virtually non-existent, it was refreshing to see two complicated characters that were not easily explained. Barbara, as all good sociopaths, has a vulnerable side. Like the Lieutenant of Inishmore, she loves her cats more than her people, yet her loneliness makes her vulnerable to love. Her scariness is a hoot, her intelligence is amazing, but her quiet moments of devotion are why Dame Judi kicks major, incredible butt. La Blanchett, meanwhile, shows her very considerable chops by not even attempting to outperform her colleague, and she turns in a careful, utterly believable and realistic portrayal of a conflicted, bored woman, a woman sheltered by a life of privilege. Because, you must know that this being a British movie, it is about class. And class is what the Brits do superduper-well. So while the contrivances of the movie take it a bit into the realm of "I'm not quite buying this", the artistry and truthfulness of the performances keep it firmly anchored in reality. Plus, it is thoroughly enjoyable.

Note on Phillip Glass scores: every movie nowadays seems to have one. They all seem to sound the same. It is getting to be almost self-parodic. The score for this movie is gorgeous and it works (the critics disagree with me on this one), but it is distracting, because it is so Phillip Glassiesque.

Alfonso Cuarón has many virtues as a director and they are all in evidence in this powerful, spectacular movie. My favorite virtue of his, which was much in evidence in the great Y tu mamá también, is his ability to weave many different moods and tones into a coherent emotional whole. Just as in Y tu mamá también he achieved a lovely melancholy undertone to the picaresque adventures of the two main characters, here he melds an urgent, moving emotional core to what is essentially an action movie. Or perhaps it's the other way around. His refreshing lack of sentimentality is what makes this possible: his movies are emotionally complex. Cuarón seems allergic to melodrama and to sentimentality, and I hope he is never cured. That is what I love about his films, the playfulness and sense of humor, the complexity, not of storytelling but of human emotion, the truthfulness of feeling. A couple of small details, like angelic choral music in a redemptive scene or the name of a ship at the end are as much as he is willing to concede to sentimentality; not much, considering that the fate of mankind is at stake. Children of Men is an apocalyptic movie about a future that is too close to home. It is apocalyptic, yet not futuristic. That is, the immediate future looks less like the Jetsons and more like a nightmare out of Hyeronimus Bosch. It takes place in 2027, which is just around the corner, and it's not a happy sight. In this world torn apart by conflict and self-destruction, the discourse that we hear today from the likes of Bush and Donald Rumsfeld has come to pass. Illegal immigrants are put in cages and deported, they are sent to detention camps closely reminiscent of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the environment is almost all toxic waste. The premise that the entire world suffers from collective infertility doesn't seem at all far-fetched. What makes the movie harrowing is how close we are to being in such a state. It's almost as if the filmmakers are saying "wipe the self-satisfied grin off your face and don't get too comfortable, for we are already there". This is a movie where there is no detachment. The camera follows the hero like a shadow and it feels as if you are there with him, right next to the explosions, shockingly close to the violence, with the point of view of the naked eye, not of the language of the camera. Yet amidst the incredible chase scenes and the beautifully exploding mayhem, Cuarón and Lubezki are capable of achieving quiet, luminous moments of grace. I was frantically looking in the credits for whoever was responsible for the production design, which, with the entire art department, deserves a standing ovation and an Oscar (imdb says it's Jim Clay and the great Geoffrey Kirkland). I don't think I remember (except for High and Low by Kurosawa) a film that is more crammed with visual information. Because of the wide angles, the frame is full of details, and it takes a few moments to get used to so much coming from the screen. The context is as much in the foreground as the characters. I heard Cuarón say in an interview that this was his and the great cinematographer Emanuel Lubezki's approach in Y tu mamá también and they use it here as well, albeit on a much grander scale. There are not a lot, if any, traditional set ups of close up, medium shot, and reverse takes in Children of Men. The camera is fully engaged in the world around the characters. As you may have already heard, there are several extended shots in this film that are absolutely mindboggling. The piece de resistance is a climactic nine minute (or so) extended tracking shot without a single cut. However, to their credit, Lubezki and Cuarón so immerse you in the dramatic narrative that you barely notice there is a tour de force in progress. It is a thing of breathtaking power and beauty. In Clive Owen (long live his mother, as they say in Spain, praise the Lord for making him, a bona fide movie star with tons of talent), Cuarón has found a perfectly reluctant hero and one of the main reasons why the movie works at an emotional level. Owen plays Theo, a jaded ex-activist, embittered and hurt by the loss of his son and who has grown inured to the horrors around him. I will not give you the entire plot of the movie, as Anthony Lane did in his review, because you must see for yourself. But Owen gives a sharp, moving performance of a despondent human being who is slowly wakened from his apathy by having to perform a heroic deed almost against his will. As the world collapses around him, what Theo has that many others don't is basic human decency. It's as simple as that. It is not grandiloquent outrage or a self-righteous belief in freedom and democracy or none of that crap that gets bandied about by the bad guys nowadays as an excuse for their self-interested mayhem. Theo drinks, he smokes, he winces at the grief of others and he wears his task quite uncomfortably on his sleeve. Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis or any of those simplistic, grandiose fools, he ain't. In the end, what I most admire about Children of Men, besides it's undeniable artistry, and despite some of its commercial inclinations, is its commitment to protest. Cuarón does not shy away from shocking violence, but it is not much different from what you see on CNN any given day: people's limbs torn out by bombs, ethnic strife, a generalized disregard for human life. The movie has a strong, quietly indignant point of view about the state of affairs today, and that is what makes it so relevant, so powerful and so disturbing.

Martin Scorsese and his wonderful editor Thelma Schoonmaker, certainly know how to open a film. The degree of visual energy and panache in the first twenty minutes of The Departed is absolutely glorious, beautifully thrilling. I wish I could say the same of the rest of the movie, which, while enormously entertaining, has so many twists and turns, and is so long that after a while one would like to get off the fun ride. It is extremely violent and as happens with all movies that depend on intrincate plots, at a certain point one asks very logical questions of things that are not happening but should. Such as "how is it possible that the Irish mafiosi controlled by a fun, over the top Jack Nicholson haven't figured out by now who the rat is"? The Departed is delightful because everybody in it is a pro: Nicholson goes to town hamming it up, but his relish is contagious and he is wonderful. Matt Damon is extremely fine as a cold, professional, ruthless villain. I'm glad he was cast against type. Di Caprio is quite good as his counterpart, a mole in the mafia. And the rest are adorable pros: my beloved Ray Winstone, Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, and even Mark Wahlberg, trying real hard to come up with the goods and acquitting himself nicely. The Departed touches upon recurrent themes in Scorsese's work: true morality, human hypocrisy, the corruption of the soul, how easy it is for evil to run rampant in this world, how very f***d up is human nature. The movie, as entertaining as it is, has substance, and is the best thing Scorsese has done in years. The one weak link I found was the subplot with the female shrink, played, not too convincingly in my opinion, by Vera Farmiga. She falls in love with both Damon and DiCaprio and to me that's already gilding the lily. Still, if you want to see what a master of movie making can do, run to The Departed and enjoy the mayhem. One big nitpick: too much rock and roll music in every scene.

It's been years since I liked a Pedro Almodóvar movie. I admired his very first movies: Law of Desire, What Have I Done to Deserve This, Matador and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. But in recent times I found his movies to be pretentious and overwrought without the freshness and verve of his earlier work. I liked Bad Education as an interesting failure, was not that thrilled with Talk to Her (I really hated its cinematic namedropping -- pretentious musical numbers by Pina Bausch, Caetano Veloso and Chavela Vargas really rubbed me the wrong way) and I had no patience for the sordid melodramas of The Flower of My Secret and All About My Mother. They seemed no better or sharper than the common variety Mexican telenovela. I am so happy to report that with Volver, Almodóvar is back in style. Volver boasts a magnificent ensemble cast of phenomenal actresses, led by Penélope Cruz and with the miraculous return of the long departed Carmen Maura, who is a national treasure of Spain and one of the most formidable actresses of all time, in my humble opinion. She apparently had a feud with Almodóvar which is why she didn't grace any of his movies for many years. But now they have kissed and made up. Fittingly, she plays someone whose return is quite unexpected, thus making it a doubly delightful surprise. The buzz out there is that Penélope Cruz is most certainly going to be nominated for an Oscar. She has always been a very good actress. She is a true movie star: gorgeous, alive, hypnotic, endlessly charismatic. And in this movie she is a stunner. I defy any American actress to muster her pep and vim and sexiness and soulfulness. However, the Oscar nomination, if there is justice in the world, should go to Carmen Maura. She is a great tragic comedienne. It is impossible not to be touched by her. One look of hers tells entire volumes. And how refreshing to see her without an ounce of botox or plastic surgery, all the wisdom and pain of her age reflected in her face. There is a scene where someone is watching a movie on TV with Anna Magnani and the homage is fitting. Volver is Almodóvar's paean to the strength of women, and La Magnani and La Maura are in the same league: genuine divas, larger than life. Chus Lampreave, (who I've been campaigning for the Spanish government to erect a statue in her honor, or at least give her a postage stamp), always plays slightly eccentric, slightly mad Spanish women whose view of the world is entirely logical only to them. She is hilarious. Here, she sadly appears for a very short time, but a two-word line comes out of her mouth with so much comic baggage, it's miraculous. And Blanca Portillo, as a youngish lonely woman, most probably a lesbian, stuck in an old provincial town, is also something to behold. The ensemble deserves the acting prize the won at Cannes. They all rock. Volver is classic Almodóvar: a comic melodrama that both skewers and pays homage to deep Spanish culture, and also an anthem to the pluckiness and the courage of women. It will remind viewers of his comic masterpiece, Women on the Verge, but Volver has a more poignant, calmer, profound quality. Volver is about the need for forgiveness and the need to set things straight. It's about the buried pain behind the human mistakes brought on by love. The title is taken from a famous tango, I believe, by Carlos Gardel. Volver is a tender, human and extremely enjoyable film. Even when it hits the heights of melodrama, it tempers it with smart dialogue and gentle irony. Calamities pile themselves on top of one another, but the tone is breezy and warmhearted. I wish the American audiences could enjoy the flavorful language. The characters speak with the most delightful Iberian mix of insolence and innocence. Almodóvar is a master in mimicking the most banal conversations, the most feminine gossip. He is a great observer of the quotidian. This beautiful, elegant, rounded screenplay is very well written, in contrast to some of his recent work. Volver is beautifully shot by Jose Luis Alcaine, a longtime collaborator of the director, in rich tones, colorful but not as tacky as the usual; with deep blood red as a recurring visual motif. There are scenes with modern windmills in La Mancha, the place where Don Quixote and the director both hail from. In Almodóvar's vision of Spain the old traditions coexist uneasily with the new and it is a little crazy-making. You can tell how fond he is of what makes Spain, Spain: the food, the superstitions, the little old ladies and their excessive reliance on prayer and gossip; and yet the narrow-mindedness exasperates him. He also comments on the appalling incidence of spousal abuse, the kind of provincial attitudes towards foreigners, or anybody slightly different, the self-same superstitions, and the idiotization of the masses by what he calls TVBasura, Trash TV. As in the best of his movies, Volver is a portrait of Spain through its women, resourceful, chaotic, emotional, bighearted, wise and courageous. His mastery of the tragicomic reminds me of Chekhov. Volver is this good.

I wonder what Truman Capote, who adored attention so much, would think about having not one, but two biopics immortalizing his writing of In Cold Blood on the silver screen. Two camps have seen the dramatic potential of this story and fortunately for us, with vastly different results. Douglas McGrath's version, Infamous, is based on the book of interviews by George Plimpton, whereas last year's Oscar winner for Phillip Seymour Hoffman is based on the biography by Gerald Clarke. So which one did I like better? Infamous. When I saw Capote, I thought the filmmakers got on a high moral horse and punished Capote for how he went about writing his masterpiece. It bothered me that they neglected to give credit to the quality of the book. It was an interesting film, but felt a bit cold, somehow superior to its subject. Infamous is less controlled, and thus much more emotionally gripping. There is a lot more information in it, not only about Truman Capote but also about his relationship with the two convicts, particularly Perry Smith. It gives a far more complex idea of who he was and what he did to write the book. Here Capote is an incorrigible gossip, someone you couldn't trust with a secret, a talented imp hungry for attention, a master namedropper, and a brazen, self-centered charmer, who could be callous to his lover, selfish and needy with his friends. It also shows his extreme sensitivity, his serious commitment to his art, the sad family reasons behind his larger than life character. The British actor Toby Jones, who in contrast to Hoffman, has the right physique for the role, gives an astounding performance as Capote. Not only because of the mannerisms and the voice, but because of the intellectual acuity, the vulnerability, the neediness, the calculation and the constant presence of deep pain beneath the surface. As much as I liked Phillip Seymour Hoffman, at times I thought he was verging on the caricature, and he had only a couple of scenes in which the human being behind the eccentric flaming queen persona came through. I don't blame the actor, but the writing. Toby Jones, as outrageous as he looks and behaves, and he is hilarious, never seems a caricature. He is wickedly funny and extremely poignant, and he is given a lot more backstory, a lot more personal detail to work with. The material allows him to scope out much bigger emotional and psychological territory. I guess what the first film lacks is this poignancy. Infamous has a marvellous cast of thousands. Sandra Bullock plays Harper Lee, and she is quite good, with a pretty solid Alabama accent and great empathy and intelligence. Then you have Sigourney Weaver, wonderful as Babe Paley and super sexy badass Daniel Craig as Perry Smith. Juliet Stevenson is dead on as Diana Vreeland and Peter Bogdanovich is very funny as Bennett Cerf. Before events turn serious, this movie is a hoot of characters and New York gossip and the eccentricities of the idle rich that Capote fawns over. It just seems much more full of life. It also dwells much more into the sexual attraction and the intimate relationship that Capote forged with Smith. In essence it is a tragic love story. The personal fallout of having written such a masterpiece which dealt with actual people, feels far more tragic in this film. Infamous does not easily condemn Capote for his sins, and does not do a simplistic moral equation in which manipulating people for the sake of art is an evil thing to do, deserving of punishment. The tragic outcome is here for us to ponder, as is that gem of a book and the curious, wounded, maddening spirit who wrote it.

It took me a long time to finally muster the energy (and courage) to go see this movie. Like most of this country's moviegoers, I really wasn't sure if I wanted to see it. To begin with, I am not fond of flying and to experience, albeit vicariously, the horrible sensation of knowing your plane is going to slam into the ground, already filled me with terror. Plus, having been in NY that fateful day, I was not finding myself in the mood to relive it, even if it was through a movie screen. However, being a fan of director's Paul Greengrass excellent Bloody Sunday, and having read the almost unanimously glowing reviews, I went. United 93 is a very good film. And it raises many interesting questions. Are Americans ready to watch a film about this subject five years after that terrible day? To me, if they are ready to watch the crap they do on a routine basis, they should be ready to watch a serious film about the day that changed this country's fate. Here we are, rehashing cheesy disaster films like the Poseidon Adventure, when United 93 is the disaster movie to end all disaster movies. You sit through this film trying to soothe yourself silly by repeating the mantra it's only a movie, when you know full well it isn't. This makes it almost excruciating to watch, and I'm almost ashamed to confess, extremely suspenseful. We all know how it ends, and still, even though the film has the feel of a documentary, it is written by Paul Greengrass with a beautiful and horrible dramatic arc that is extremely gripping. What I most admire is how spare and direct and powerful the drama is. It is not nationalistic, jingoistic, patriotic or any of the crap we are used to expect from movies about terrible disasters. Mercifully, there are no famous movie stars playing superhuman American heroes, no Arab villains that are caricatures of evil. Everyone in this movie is human, including, surprisingly, and extremely effectively, the hijackers (it just makes their choices all the more pointless, all the more impossible to understand) . There are no speeches, no poetry, nothing that sounds like words on a page, just the urgent, clipped language used in a time of crisis. Somehow, the words uttered by the people on the command control on the ground as well as the passengers and crew in the air, reminded me of the sparseness of Mamet (without the cursing) or of Harold Pinter. The movie is an existential drama and that is its greatest strength. One of my very smart friends pointed out that the real events of 9/11 seemed like a disaster movie to begin with. On the crowded, stunned streets of New York, one half expected Godzilla to appear in the horizon. It was a shocking realization how much like a movie it was: so unbelievable, so over the top. What's really interesting is that United 93 is as realistic and documentary-like as a fictional recreation of a real event can be. Instead of going for the Good vs Evil cliché that has been the mark of American film since day one, the filmmakers had the guts, the brains and the decency to try to recreate the experience of that day as intimately and realistically as possible. In my view, they succeeded in a way that no other film about real human calamity ever has (try to think about any truly worthy film about the Holocaust, for instance). The creative choices must be unsoiled by superficiality or preachiness. Here there are so many thoughtful, brilliant choices: for instance, the use of some of the real controllers on the ground. They must be the only people who can say their own jargon convincingly. I wonder how difficult it must have been for them to act out again that horrible nightmare of a day. The editing is magnificent, the mostly hand-held frantic photography, crammed with subtle details. I even liked the music, except for a couple of key moments where it felt like an unwelcome intrusion. The movie is violent in itself, but it does not dwell on the violence. It is shot as if you were there. It is a cathartic experience. So how much does film influence our perception of reality? Would the scope, the grandeur almost, of the attacks have been possible without the crazy things that happen in the movies? Once more, it seems that truth is way harder, stranger and exaggerated than fiction, and thus, to make it into a movie, Greengrass and his team went for the real. He turned out to be the perfect director for this film. Besides his mastery at pushing the story forward with almost unbearable tension, perhaps the fact that he is not an American also helps. There is a cool rationality in his sparse, stripped down delivery, yet there is also true empathy for the human predicament. He deserves a nomination both for writing and directing. It has been conjectured that the passengers in that flight knew they were going to die and they decided to die fighting. They must have understood that the hijackers intended to damage another crucial landmark. The movie does not dwell too much on their motives. It makes their rebellion, if indeed it happened, seem logical and heroic at a believable human scale.

I have to respect a movie that has managed to annoy both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian craziness. Some Palestinians are complaining that Munich's sympathies are more with the Israelis (what did they expect?); on the other hand, some formerly ultra-secret Mossad agents, even more secret than Maxwell Smart, have argued that the movie fudges the facts and that's not the way they did things (pray tell: just how do you do things at the Mossad?). All the carping is a fitting tribute to a movie that tries too hard to appease everybody. Good luck with that one, Steve-o! Munich is a really interesting mishmash. On the one hand, it has the directorial powers of one Steven Spielberg, a prodigy at film-making, who could not stop being entertaining and just plain freaking dazzling if a court order asked him to. On the other hand, the film was written by Tony Kushner, a playwright who likes to whip himself into a frenzy about big, hairy moral issues, and Eric Roth, the man responsible for serious-minded Hollywood spectacles like The Insider (Russell Crowe vs. Big Tobacco), Ali and the inexcusable Forrest Gump. This means that Munich is weirder than a mole enchilada with hummus and whipped cream on top. The Spielbergian magic is there in all its gripping glory, with sequences so beautifully staged, so tight with tension that they are not only a marvel, but, as in Spielberg's best work, they refuse to leave your mind long after you've left the theater. Sometimes he gets carried away and Munich feels like a spunkier, nastier version of a James Bond flick. Give him four guys with explosives and guns and watch him unleash spectacularly controlled mayhem. Yet true to form, he cannot ever let a movie happen without a completely gratuitous subplot about a father and son (it's his Rosebud), and he certainly cannot have a movie without heaping amounts of schmaltz. Still, Munich has the best writing ever seen in a Spielberg film. The movie illustrates with many intelligent twists the utter pointlessness of avenging murder with murder. As the plot unfolds, there is always a TV set tuned to another terrorist act, making it clear that the bloodbath is neither cleansing nor bringing closure to anyone. The writers give the audience a crash course on the long list of grievances of the Jewish people, and they insert the equally grievous list of the Palestinians, doing both with clunky dialog that hits the audience in the head like a ball of hardened falafel. There are several ridiculous scenes where checking your disbelief at the door is required, like one preposterous scene set up to facilitate an exchange between the Mossad leader Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana, gorgeous and fantastic) and one of the Palestinian terrorists. In it, Kaufman is extremely harsh and contemptuous of the Palestinians while the Palestinian makes his case for a homeland strongly and compellingly. The writing is sharp in a Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 101 kind of way, but the situation is absurd. It's a pajama party! Thus, I beg to differ with those who complain that all the sympathies lie on the Israeli side. Quite the contrary: you can hear the writers and the director spinning like the Tazmanian Devil on acid as they grapple with the kvetching of one side and the other (both of which I am sick of, if you must know). So even with all the cheese inside this blintz, my hat off to Spielberg and Kushner and Roth for making sure we remember that we Jews have a historical moral obligation not to behave like savages and that revenge is an eternal nightmare that turns people into murderers and the world into hell.

It is my duty to report that I have mixed feelings about the Mountain: I was ecstatic to see that the man responsible for the stunning, sensitive cinematography is my incredibly talented countryman Rodrigo Prieto. Prieto has worked on Amores Perros, Eight Mile and many other splendidly lit movies. In Brokeback Mountain he reins in his spectacular color effects and lights this film in a beautiful, tender, unobtrusive way. The same can be said for Ang Lee's sensitive, graceful, touching direction. He has a wonderful way with actors and all of them are quite terrific. The mood is elegiac and tragic and beautiful and managed to move me deeply. But I kept wishing for a number of things: 1. That they would not keep cutting away to a full moon, as if we were watching a documentary on the life of the wild coyote. 2. That Jake Gyllenhall, who is a subtle, delightful actor on whom I have had an enormous crush since Donnie Darko, would get his cowboy accent straighter. And that I would believe more that he is actually a cowboy. My dream casting for the film would probably have been Joaquin Phoenix and Peter Sarsgaard, both of which radiate something more mysterious and elusive and who I love to death in everything. 3. I wish I liked Heath Ledger, who is wonderful in the film, more than I did. Hype is evil. (How come the Aussies and the English always nail the US regional accents better than the homegrown talent?) 4. It would have been nice to see the cowboys rough it out a little more. I would'nt have lasted a day and a half eating beans in the great outdoors, but for instance, when they decide to kill for lunch, instead of a demure cut to them already enjoying their dinner, I would have liked to see a little bit more of how they got to extract the meat. 5. I wish that the writers did not have to resort to intimations of terrible violence against homosexuals in order to make the point, which they already make beautifully, that the prejudice against homosexuality is terribly pointless and stupid and tragic. Just the fact that two people go through such self-denial, destruction, deception and sadness because of social prejudice is enough to drive home the point. However, I understand that I may get it, but others less enlightened may not. Still, Brokeback Mountain is a movie worth pondering. The women in it are wonderful, particularly Michelle Williams, as Heath Ledger's wife and the amazing Roberta Maxwell, who steals the film in one scene as Jake's mom. I hope that audiences in multiplexes all over the homophobic world will approach this movie with the grace and thoughtfulness it deserves. Since I have no faith in mankind, I seriously doubt it.

Who shall I ask for my money back? The producers of Down in the Valley, or the critics who said it was worth seeing? I'm leaning towards the critics. The guy from New York Magazine owes me $10.75. What was he smoking? 85% of what happens in this movie is not only thoroughly unauthentic, but completely implausible. Down in the Valley is a potentially good story of a drifter with cowboy fantasies who hangs around somewhere in the San Fernando Valley and meets a restless teenager and things go very wrong. The movie wants to be very poetic and ends up being rather dull, long and opaque. There is nothing authentic and everything is contrived about it. Edward Norton is quite good as Harlan, a drifter with cowboy fantasies, but after two extremely slow hours he seems to be doing a one note performance real well, which is a waste of his mercurial talents. It doesn't help him that his romantic interest is Evan Rachel Wood, a beautiful teen actor (Thirteen) whose every reaction is strenuously strident and faked. Even worse is her brother, played with sullen, unbearable, charmless monotony by Rory Culkin, the youngest (and I hope the last) of the Culkin acting brood. The screen comes alive when Norton is around doing his aw shucks shtick and also with the great David Morse, excellent as the kids' stepfather or guardian or something; the movie doesn't bother to explain what he is to those kids or why. And I'll pay full price of admission to watch Bruce Dern just show up for five minutes. He is fantastic. But the movie is pretentious and long. Everything is dealt in elliptical fashion as if it's cool to keep the audience guessing stuff that actually could add more depth to the drama. There is a ridiculous, underexplained sequence where Norton ends up at an LA synagogue full of ultra-orthodox Jews, which could have been lovely in its surreal quality, but instead it is muddled and overwrought. He then goes into a house next door and absconds with the Menorah and everything of value, leaving behind a letter for his dad. Huh? I got it, this is where he comes from, but the way it's set up is so weak, it just goes by in a blur. Even though the movie gets more implausible as it progresses, it feels like it's been sucked out of life. It is strangely static and muted and annoying.

The 3 Burials of Melquiades Estrada stars and is directed by Tommy Lee Jones and written by my compatriot, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who is responsible for Amores Perros and the very clunky 21 Grams. Well, this time Mr. Arriaga has written an existential allegory of justice and redemption about the Border, which is no small feat. To sound less pretentious, he has written sort of a pretentious western, but he gets lots of Brownie points for ambition and sheer moxie. Good for him for writing a western about the border. Good for him for finally writing an actual human character that is not a symbolic representation of a big preachy notion. Good for him for imagining a border crossing in reverse. Mr. Arriaga, true to his Mexican roots, has a morbid, sentimental temperament. He also has an original mind, a dark sense of humor and a great sense for structure. Unfortunately, subtlety is not his forte. He doesn't trust that the audience can get it without being hit over the head with a tortilla press. Although the dialogue in this film is much more fluid than the one in 21 grams, Arriaga is inconsistent; he writes good zingers and then some pretty stilted dialogue, to be fair, both in Spanish and in English. Still, this is a real western, which is lovely, and I would say, daring. There are magnificent landscapes, there are horses and cowboys and cattle. The movie does not depict the industrial wasteland of maquiladoras and ugly shantytowns that make up much of the actual border. The majestic Big Bend National Park is the backdrop for a more dreamlike crossing. Here, however, very real Mexicans risk their lives to cross over, where the equally real Border Patrol lies in wait to send them back. Barry Pepper, the American Klaus Kinski, plays a transplanted Cincinattian who has just moved to this nowhere land with his pretty prom queen wife. He is a violent, insensitive border patrolman who handles the "wetbacks" and his wife with an utter lack of finesse. Yet by the end of the film he goes through so much punishment that I was hoping he got part of the domestic gross, at least. He represents the ultimate Mexican revenge fantasy -- Kick the Gringo's Ass. It's between funny and appalling, until Arriaga bestows the character with redemption and everything turns to mush. Tommy Lee Jones directs himself into an amazing performance as Pete, a wizened ranchhand who befriends the Melquiades Estrada of the title. Mr. Jones' face looks like Big Bend itself. Deeply lined and pockmarked, it is a compact landscape of human experience. His gaze is sad, and his magnificent voice quite mellow, but he is a strong and stubborn man, quick and efficient with violence, set in his lonesome ways. It is a great character and Mr. Jones smartly imbues Pete with a quirky, dry authenticity. He is the best thing in the movie. My movie companions commented that this movie was so intense, so bloody and graphic, that it could not have been written by a gringo. It's a good point, because the violence is, unlike most American film violence, feral, intimate and messy, not choreographed. Guillermo Arriaga likes big, dramatic gestures; he has a penchant for the grotesque which is quite Mexican in sensibility. Although there are some very smart twists to the story, it is quite baroque, or, like the Mexican baroque, Churrigueresque. The tone of the film oscillates between dark humor and philosophical musing, and then it turns into an almost surreal optimistic fable about the power of redemption. Even the music gets schmaltzy at the end. Still, the Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is an enigmatic, entertaining film and on the topic of the border, one of the most interesting so far. Can't wait for the one with none other than J.Lo investigating the deaths of Mexican women in Juarez (!!).

My wildly successful Sunday evening movie club was inaugurated for the third consecutive year with an outing to see Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep. I had a feeling it's a good omen to start out this year with a crappy movie and I was not disappointed. It sucks. Now, I normally absolutely detest whimsy. Amelie, for instance, made me want to gag. (Compared to this one Amelie is like Proust). I knew this movie was going to be whimsical, but it had two things going for it: my compatriot Gael Garcia Bernal and the fact that Gondry has done well before. Some of his videos are truly fantastic, I really liked his Dave Chappelle: Block Party and I was well impressed with The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which he directed and which was written by Charlie Kaufman. And therein lies the rub. Because Mr. Gondry is not a writer, and as a writer, he is not even remotely close to Mr. Kaufman, although he'd like to be. The Science of Sleep is a self-indulgent, sloppy movie about a guy, played by Gael (as he is known by his legions of female fans) who is an incurable dreamer and whose dreams he confuses with reality. The premise is interesting enough. But the character, instead of learning something about himself, or overcoming his problem, just becomes more childish and obnoxious as the film plods along. I sort of felt sorry for the actors. Gael tried his best to infuse his non-role with charm. He was quite funny sometimes, his body language very comically precise, and surprisingly good at deadpan, although his character became tiresome very soon into the proceedings. Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose appeal as an actress I fail to understand, had even less to play against. I have very little patience with the conceit of men who refuse to grow up. Men who behave like children are not interesting to me. Dramatically, it is far more interesting to see a character grow or change or respond to a challenge by adapting, than someone who doesn't learn anything about himself at all. By the end of this movie, the poor guy comes across like a real schmuck, she comes across like a long-suffering fool and you want your money back. There are playful, mischievous writers and directors, like Charlie Kaufman or like the Coen Brothers, or even Spielberg, who are not monumentally self-obsessed and who craft their characters and their stories with great care. The Science of Sleep is sloppy and boring and hard to swallow.

I confess:

I like Adrien Brody. What's more, I like Ben Affleck too. Okay? I read the reviews for Hollywoodland and they were mostly unkind to Mr. Brody. Some were kind to Mr. Affleck and some were not. All were kind to Diane Lane, and rightly so. No one mentioned the best one of them all, Bob Hoskins, in a marvel of a character turn as a ruthless studio manager. Bob Hoskins is the man. Well I saw the movie and, while I can see what exasperated the critics, I beg to differ. My ex-husband says that Adrien Brody looks like one of those sad clowns in velvet paintings. I find him very attractive, like the Ermenegildo Zegna folks do. Some critics said he was miscast for his role of a sleazy private detective in this film. I thought he acquitted himself quite nicely and it wasn't his fault if the movie plodded itself out of steam. He plays a slightly amoral gumshoe (is that the word?) who loves as much of the spotlight as he can get, or whatever specks of remaining spotlight he can dust up from under the lives of the truly glamorous. Brody may not be hard jawed, and there seems to be an empathy in his face (the sad clown factor) that works against the very concept of inmorality, but he is intensely present in each scene, and he brings a New York chutzpah to his role that I found credible. The movie is a dark fable about George Reeves and his wrong kind of fame. Reeves was mainly known to the world for briefly playing Superman on TV with those ridiculously huge briefs. In a nutshell, he got a part in From Here to Eternity with Burt Lancaster and they cut it out of the film because the preview audiences recognized him as Superman. I'd have killed myself too. I remember watching Superman on TV and even when I was five, those briefs seemed way too big. Even when I was five, I could see that Mr. Reeves had no personality whatsoever. He seemed like a big nerd in tights. Which is why I think they are doing him a considerable favor by casting Ben Affleck in the role. If Reeves had had half the easy charm of Ben Affleck, he would have been a Ben Affleck. I like Ben Affleck. There is something winning and likable about him. He is a very natural actor. He doesn't sweat it. He seems to be having fun. As Reeves, he is very good with the self-deprecation and the charm but I found him lacking in the desperation department. He seems to be a perfectly content young man, and I'd have loved to see more shades of darkness in the character. He lacks a bit of gravitas.

Because it got such good reviews, I thought I'd be disappointed, but actually I really enjoyed it and strongly recommend it. Little Miss Sunshine is a sweet, subversive little movie. It's about a family of heroic "losers" on their way to a mini-Miss America pageant. That the grandfather in the film is played by the inimitable Alan Arkin, who should delight us forever with his adorable crankiness, is a good indication that the heart of the movie is in the right place. Little Miss Sunshine is a road movie with a VW van that barely works, a father, wonderfully played in all his optimistic, pathetic obtuseness by Greg Kinnear, his long-suffering wife, Toni Collette, excellent as usual, the ever surprising Steve Carell as the suicidal world's number one Proust scholar, Paul Dano as a Nietzsche teen freak on a vow of silence and the lovely, talented child actor Abigail Breslin as the Little Miss Sunshine contender. The movie builds up to a magnificent finale of American grotesquerie that is biting and true and gleefully perverse. It is a conventional comedy about highly individual, unconventional people who triumph in all their flawed, vulnerable, weird glory. Very well written, wonderfully directed, very delightful and one of the best American movies I have seen this year (which is not saying much, but there you have it).

Oscar pool tip: It's Helen Mirren, all the way. I'll be surprised (and will rise up in arms) if she doesn't get it. Every acting prize this year, in fact, belongs to her miraculous performance as Elizabeth II. The Queen, directed by Stephen Frears, and expertly written by Peter Morgan, is a delightfully elegant satire, a surprisingly complex film. I was expecting a fun, broad skewering of the royals; and it is certainly fun, but it isn't broad. I did not expect such grace and humanity from a satire, and such intelligent restraint. The movie is as much about the crisis of the British monarchy because of their tone deaf handling of the death of Diana, as it is about the disappointment of Blair's promise, the increasing irrelevance of the monarchy, the nature of duty and power, protocol and politics, and about the transformation of this world into a vulgar media spectacle. It is a highly satisfying movie with many levels to parse. And if you just want to have a good time peering into the private lives of the royals, you can too. The Queen is less about what happened ten years ago, than about the state of England now. And as such, it strikes a somewhat elegiac, bitter tone for what should have been. It shows a bright, eager and naturally attuned Tony Blair (fabulously portrayed by Michael Sheen), who started out his mandate by doing a most extraordinary bit of public relations. Basically, because of his intuitive, compassionate handling of the death of that insufferable pest, he had all of England eating from his hand. One cannot help but sigh as you see him handle this crisis so well, (which today seems utterly banal, as crises go), being so attuned to the mood of his people, almost singlehandedly saving the monarchy from imploding, and then realize that he wasted all the good faith of his country through a misguided, hubristic allegiance to George Bush. He seems to be as tone deaf to the will of his people about the war in Iraq, as the Queen was about the death of Diana. Except that the war in Iraq is a far more serious matter. The parallel is brilliant and it stings. There is a wonderful scene where he defends the Queen from the scathing sarcasm of his colleagues. Evidently, as the man in charge he identifies with the woman in charge. He is mesmerized by the allure of the monarchy, the mystique of such ritualistic, almost God-given power. Such is the seductive nature of power, which must be why some of those who are in power are also in bed with others in power they shouldn't be touching with a ten foot pole. In the end, the movie is not that kind to him. Just to look at him then and to see him now is rather sad. About Diana, I think the film gets it quite right. If anybody was a selfmade creature born of the constant necessity of media attention, it was her. I never swallowed her beatific little act. I don't begrudge her her many acts of charity, but it always seemed to me they were narcissistic, selfserving. In the film they show that famous interview where she bats her eyelashes innocently and claims she wants to be the queen of the hearts of the people, or some such patently manipulative rubbish like that. Today the footage looks like a performance, calculated and maudlin. It's hard to believe people fell for it. Fittingly, of all the historical people in her saga, she is the only one in the movie who appears as herself always through the eye of a camera. She is only real when scrutinized by the media. Obviously, what made her death so fascinating was that her end was so apt to her story. She lived by the cameras and she died by them. The film posits the idea that Diana actually usurped the role of the Queen. While the Queen was mired in dusty protocol, and chose to live her very public life in as much privacy as possible, with a just disdain for the media circus that her daughter in law craved, Diana basically took it upon herself to act like a fairy tale princess for this age, with spectacular results. She stole the love of the Queen's subjects. The disenchantment and disappointment in the Queen's face when she registers this fact not only moved me deeply, but it is one of the many beautiful moments of Helen Mirren's incredibly human, funny, precise performance.

What a delightful, beautiful movie by David Lean, spectacularly well written by Noel Coward and beautifully acted by Trevor Howard (they don't make them like that no more), Celia Johnson and the magnificent Stanley Holloway. Brief Encounter is not only a classic, but a smart, modern, unabashedly romantic and extremely intelligent film. The script by Noel Coward is peerless, but then the elegant and empathetic touch of David Lean brings it all home. The premise is an illicit love affair between a married woman and a married doctor. And to me, for all of the lovely Celia Johnson's protestations, there is no way you can say no to Trevor Howard. No way. You might as well surrender without the slightest and, if or but. Go rent this movie, get some wine or some ice cream or some chocolate and ravish yourself with it.

I have always loved Forest Whittaker. He has a remarkable presence and he is a subtle, powerful actor. Now he plays Idi Amin in the movie The Last King of Scotland, also co-written by Peter Morgan, of The Queen. Sure enough, Forest Whittaker gives a subtle, powerful performance as the Ugandan maniac who killed 300,000 of his countrymen, who is a textbook case of dictator madness and who ended his life without paying for his crimes, sheltered first by Libya and then by Saudi Arabia. The movie disappointed me. I think some of the creative choices got in the way of the incredible story it tells. It seems that nowadays every movie about Africa has to be shot with a hand-held camera that feels as if it has Parkinson's, grainy textures, manic editing and everything looking either yellow or green (The Constant Gardener suffered from the same malady). I can understand these devices are meant to express turmoil and lack of stability and all that, but I wish the filmmakers had more faith in telling the story straight. The turmoil is there, no need to shake it up. The Last King of Scotland is the story of a young Scottish doctor, played by the wonderful James McAvoy, who ends up being Amin's personal physician and adviser. His Dr. Garrigan is a young kid who craves adventure, sort of a slightly amoral cad who loves seducing women and who is charmed by Amin, apparently a big charmer himself. Garrigan wears his conscience lightly and goes to Uganda, more to escape his fate as a country doctor in Scotland than because of humanitarian concerns. I hate to give the story away, so I won't tell you everything that happens, but suffice it to say that it's clear that Garrigan is given plenty of evidence of Amin's dark places from the start but he insists on ignoring it. He prefers to be seduced by the charms and luxuries of absolute power. It's rather hard to believe one could be so naive and so brazen at the same time. I mean, who has ever met a dictator and not known that something must be very wrong with him? What dictator on Earth doesn't send shivers down people's spines? You have to live in Jupiter, or perhaps the Scottish countryside, not to guess than an African army general who just came to power through a bloody coup is not quite Florence Nightingale. This film is the story of two charmers, one who may have begun with some sort of a conscience (though I find that hard to believe from Amin) and ends up in utter satanic madness, and one who starts out with none and painfully gets one, as he grapples with the fact that being loyal to a murderous despot is evil. This movie should be seen for several reasons: To appreciate fantastic acting all around. Whittaker and McAvoy are a wonderful pair of cads. Whittaker is mercurial, his moods change in a split second and it is a very contained performance. He makes the guy extremely likable, manipulative and very comfortable with his own power. Then there is the surprisingly touching Gillian Anderson as the frustrated wife of a saintly doctor and the fantastically creepy Simon McBurney as some sort of a horrible British spy. He rocks. There is a lot of interest in this story, and the movie builds up from a fun romp through a beautiful African country to a descent into hell. By the time Garrigan realizes he's aiding and abetting the devil, it is too late. There are many powerful moments in the movie but somehow it operates too much like a movie, with a relentless barrage of music, with certain movie conventions that amp up the excitement, but fail to work as a convincing recreation of what happened in reality.

And it's a pity because it deserves it. Have you ever wondered where your bananas come from? You may never feel snug and comfy buying your cheap GAP t-shirts ever again after watching this amazing film. This is a mordant and devastating documentary, beautifully shot, about the obscene unfairness of "free trade". Learn about the bully tactics that the US employs against underdeveloped countries to protect its interests. See how thousands of gallons of fresh milk have to be spilled into the Jamaican ground because of cheap powdered milk coming in from the States. See this movie and weep.