E to I

I found everything about this stylish movie compelling, from the Cole Porter music to Kristen Scott-Thomas’ performance as the acidulous matriarch of a failing English estate in the 1920s. The psychology of an unhappy family plays out in full display, with two daughters taking after their evil-tongued mother and the son following the example of his weak-willed (one might say shell-shocked) father (admirably portrayed by Colin Firth). Into this aristocratic bees nest comes the son’s new bride, an American race-car driver, self-confident and eager to make a good impression. Things go downhill from the moment she enters the domain, with the indomitable mother determined to break up the marriage between this déclassé outsider and her clueless son. Every scene brings fresh delights but for me the highpoint of the film comes in a remarkable tango danced by the bride and the Colin Firth character, a scene delectable in itself as well as dramatically fulfilling.

Mel Gibson currently suffers a bad rep, mostly of his own making, it would seem. But actors, like composers, deserve to be judged by their art and not their private lives, and in “Edge of Darkness” Gibson acquits himself well as a Boston police detective. Early in the film as he leaves his house with his daughter, visiting home after a prolonged absence, drive-by shooters gun her down and disappear into the night. Everyone assumes the bullets to have been intended for him. As the plot develops this assumption proves to be inaccurate. CIA connections, national security, unspecified terrorists—we’ve encountered the ingredients before, but a crisp screenplay and more than competent supporting actors make the film an enjoyable pastime. If you see the movie after reading these words, let me call your attention to an interesting footnote. Robert De Niro, hired to play an important secondary role, quit the production midway. His replacement, a heavyset fellow with a British accent, in no way resembles De Niro, but the part had been so careful designed for De Niro that you continually see him there. The other actor is perfectly acceptable, mind you, but he’s wearing another man’s costume, so to speak. Reviewers have complained about the flashbacks and hallucinations, but to me they seem like perfectly acceptance cinematic representations of the post-traumatic stress disorder that the main character clearly experiences. And it you don’t like the ending, well, supply you own.

From the time I was eight until I was through university I studied piano with a French woman, a graduate of the Paris Conservatoire and retired concert pianist. Although I thought nothing of it at the time, I now find it remarkable that she never aged over those twenty years and even when she died a few years ago, she still had the same jet-black hair, lively eyes and charming smile. The French seem to have a special attitude toward feminine beauty.

"8 Women" assembles beautiful actresses from several generations, and only Danielle Darrieux can be said to look old (though still beautiful). Fannie Ardant seems utterly unchanged from her appearance in films I saw two decades ago; Emmanuelle Beart retains the radiance of youth; Isabelle Huppert first appears in the repressed, severe style she adopted in "The Piano Teacher" but two-thirds of the way through the film transforms herself into a Lana Turner look-alike. The incomparable Catherine Deneuve utterly defies the passage of time.

The French have (to us) peculiar ideas about art. They elevate circuses to an art form, and consider Edgar Allan Poe to be one of the greatest geniuses of the English language. Roger Shattuck has observed the penetration of French literature in every aspect of their lives. For a Frenchman, he has written, an alexandrin comes as naturally as a pop tune to an American.

"8 Women" begins with the trappings of an Agatha Christie mystery: a country mansion in the Forties, cut off from the outside world by a severe snowstorm and a severed telephone line, a murder, and eight women, related by birth or marriage, with more accusations, secrets and revelations than a soap opera. Every so often (eight times, to be exact), the background music swells, and one of the characters sings a chanson, while the others serve as audience or, more often, backup singers. It recalls Woody Allen's "Everybody Says I Love You," in which the actors actually sing for themselves.

But really the film is mostly an excuse for some notable actresses to chew the scenery--delectably, marvelously. The movie encapsulates everything you most appreciate (or most detest) about the French, and strikes me as a charming way to spend a couple of hours.

“Most people say that they want love, admiration, closeness, loving relationships and long-lasting ties,” Robert Firestone writes in Fear of Intimacy. “However, they tend to recoil from rather than move toward them.” Those unable to resolve this contradiction may spend their lives actively pursuing what they refuse to accept when they find it. “But that’s irrational,” you may protest. It doesn’t take long for a psychotherapist to abandon any misconception that human beings are rational.

David Kapesh (Ben Kingsley) has achieved celebrity as a professor of literary criticism, television interviewer and interviewee, occasional writer for The New Yorker, reasonably accomplished amateur pianist and photographer. He walked out on a marriage several decades ago and enjoys a long-term relationship of sex without intimacy with an attractive independent businesswoman (Patricia Clarkson). Now he finds himself upset at growing old. As he informs us (and his long-time poet buddy, played by Dennis Hopper), “I’m not ready to give up the carnal aspects of life. My body may have grown older but my mind is the same age it always was.” A liaison with a Cuban student thirty years his junior (Penélope Cruz) fulfills that desire, but though she falls in love with him he cannot respond in kind. (Irrational, perhaps—if he just wanted sex, why not stick with his uninvolved partner? Regarding rationality, see above.)

The force of Ben Kingsley’s performance prevents us from regarding him as ridiculous, however frustrated we may become with his inability to commit, either with his young lover or with his estranged adult son, now confronting intimacy problems of his own. One may wonder why the Cuban student remains so long in a hopeless relationship, but she is hardly the first woman to misplace her faith in the power of love to change a man. The film presents David Kapesh with several opportunities to emerge from his shell of self-absorption. Whether we regard his resolute refusal as realism, as cynicism, or as tragedy depends on who we are, according to the critical stance that the professor announces to his students in each year’s introductory lecture. Your call—a beautifully realized film in any event.

After seeing this film evoking the Columbine disaster, you’ll wonder not how such a thing was possible but why it doesn’t happen far more often. Director/writer Gus Van Sant follows a number of teenagers through their daily lives in a suburban high school so large that it seems to take half an hour to get from one end to the other. I use the word "follows" advisedly, for the film consists almost entirely of extended tracking shots, the camera moving at a walking pace beside one character after another, so that we may see the same scene three or four times as different characters serve as points of reference.

One is struck by the absence of adults. The film opens as one boy takes the car keys from his drunken father. He enters school late and suffers the wordless stare of the vice-principal. A few other adults are seen only from the neck down. Otherwise, the students appear to be on their own. What makes the film so unnerving is the way it portrays, in a completely matter-of-fact style achieved by using non-actors to play the students, details of adolescent life utterly outside the consciousness of adult authority. Parents would be horrified to know that their daughters purged each day after eating lunch, that their children were sexually active, that their sons have ordered assault weapons through the mail and praticed using them in the garage. Obviously not every teenager follows the paths traversed by Van Sant’s camera, but everything we have read compels us to acknowledge that the young people shown here are not all that unusual. When the disastrous mayhem finally occurs, no one even summons the police. This portrayal of adolescents on their own seems in some respects more horrifying than "Lord of the Flies," since instead of taking place on a deserted island it occurs in a typical suburban high school. The flat, neutral tone of this film finally becomes much more disconcerting than the hysterical shivers of a teen horror flick.

Eleven international film directors, each given eleven minutes, nine seconds and one frame to express their ideas about the events commonly referred to as 9/11, have produced a film that both widens and deepens our perspective. An Iranian school teacher tries to make her young students, who have never seen a building more than one story high, understand what has happened in a city half a world away. We start out looking at this story condescendingly, conscious of our much greater sophistication. By the end of the film, we are likely to see ourselves as equally naïve. The Israeli contribution to the compilation centers on a young television reporter, totally absorbed in herself, lacking in compassion even for the victims of the suicide bombing she wants to cover, resentful of the events in New York that displace her air time. The Japanese segment portrays a survivor of atrocities in World War II that have led him to take on the identity of a snake in a most horrifying manner. The Mexican instalment offers a series of almost subliminally brief shots of the World Trade Center towers, expanding into longer clips as if to replicate our own consciousness of the disaster, beginning with incomplete reports and ending with hypnotic repetitions of televised film. French film director Claude Lelouche exploits the power of dramatic irony by offering a vignette of the life of a deaf-mute in New York on the day in question. The film invites North Americans, in particular, to step outside their limited personal reactions by viewing a singular event from several new perspectives.

A very few Christmas stories succeed regardless of who reads them, St. Luke’s account being about the only one that comes to mind. Many Christmas stories fail regardless of the cast, a vast number of Christmas movies falling in this category. Then there are films like "Elf," blessed with actors capable of keeping the frothy confection from turning to treacle, actors like Ed Asner, whose god-like voice gives conviction to his Santa, and Bob Newhart, who despite his discomfort in a ridiculous costume, makes the whole tale seem consistent. James Caan seems perfectly convincing as an unscrupulous businessman who has abandoned his family emotionally and Mary Steenburgen seems comfortable reversing roles (in 1985 she played the Scrooge figure in Disney’s "One Magic Christmas"). But of course the film belongs to Will Ferrell, the imperturbable naïf, a human raised as an elf, with a special gift for manufacturing Christmas decorations, snowballs and, even better, good cheer. His transformation of the mailroom from hell ranks among the better bits of holiday spirit and his buoyancy helps keep the film afloat when it threatens to bog down (notably the pursuit of Santa’s misfiring sleigh by a troop of Central Park Rangers). His first encounter with an escalator produces a brilliant bit of physical comedy. The movie also gets an award for Best Scene of Suppressed Sexuality in a Children’s Film for a lovely rendition of "Baby, It’s Cold Outside," in itself a fairly risqué song, between fully-clothed Ferrell and naked Zooey Deschanel, the movie’s love interest.

You've probably seen turn-of-the-twentieth-century naughty films and wondered how anybody could have found them titillating. Tastes change in the course of a century. But only thirty years separate us from "Emmanuelle," which has now become unwatchable. I stuck it out for an hour or so, then left the theatre.

Teachers will have difficulty watching this story, set in an exclusive American boys school in the mid-1970's and again in the present. We will marvel at way Mr. Hundert (played by Kevin Kline) engages his students in the study of Greek and Roman history, an enterprise which culminates in the school's annual Mr. Caesar competition, a public test of students' mastery of a vast amount of factual material. Yet we will be troubled by the differences between Hundert's situation and our own: his classes begin on time, unabridged by Carol Service rehearsals or academic assemblies; his students are always present, their rapt attention unimpeded by field trips, sports commitments, prefect meetings, or university counseling sessions. The students have time at night not only to complete his assignments but to do reading outside the syllabus, and students spend all their study time reading, writing and discussing issues, not playing video games, surfing the Internet, or eating pizza.

The Mr. Caesar contest provides a structure for the narrative. A boy who lost the event in his student days has contrived to re-enact it, with the same participants and the same judge. On the first occasion, when Hundert discovers that one of the boys is cheating, the headmaster tells him to ignore it (the boy is the son of a U.S. senator). The second occasion strikes one as thoroughly bizarre. It is as if the star of the SAC basketball team, having lost in overtime to UCC in a CISAA final, reconvenes his team, the opposing team and the game officials twenty five years later in an effort to redress his fate.

The conflict of values between virtue and expediency is sharply drawn. The boy's father, the senator, rejects Hundert's goal of molding his students' character. "Your job is simply to teach," the senator insists. "I'll be responsible for molding my son's character." The film shows how thoroughly he has done so. If such a school as St. Benedict's exists, one would love to teach there. If not, the lessons of character and the value of the liberal arts lose something of their force.

This is one of those films that make sense only when you’ve seen the whole thing, after which you’d like to see it all over again to put the details in place. Why all the extreme close-ups, giving us the impression of seeing the world from the perspective of a myopic who has misplaced his glasses? What about the neurologist with the unusual theory of fantasy who turns up in the most unexpected places? What’s the significance of the red, remote-controlled airplane that appears from time to time? And what about those band members performing Ravel’s Bolero in an elevator? Eventually the film takes us to the Dead Sea, with a beautiful image of a man and wife floating together, head to head, against an enchanting landscape.

All becomes clear when we look at the film the way the writer-director first conceived it, seeing his children one morning and realizing that eventually they would grow up and move to far places. In the film the protagonist, a blocked writer, waits up for his teenage daughter, who actually appears for the first time in the closing scene. If you have a chance to see this film, don’t miss it.

Werner Herzog seems to have an ambivalent attitude toward the human race. On the one hand he apparently sympathizes with scientists who predict that human beings will follow dinosaurs into oblivion before long; on the other hand, he seems to approve the sentiment of the scientist who quotes Alan Watts: “each of us is a center of awareness for the universe to perceive itself.” Clearly the filmmaker has little use for the human settlement at McMurdo Sound, the centre of habitation in Antarctica, and makes light of the compulsory two-day survival course for anyone venturing beyond its limits. Yet he delights in the people he discovers there, including a linguist who has come to a continent with no languages, people Herzog describes as “professional dreamers.”

The film follows the activities of geologists, marine biologists, volcanologists and naturalists studying seals and penguins in the most remote location in the world. All speak enthusiastically about their work, as if pleased to have a chance to talk about it with a non-specialist. One scientist describes the iceberg he investigates as “larger than the iceberg that sank the Titanic, larger than the Titanic, larger than the country that built the Titanic.”

Herzog wrote, directed and narrated this strange film, financed by a grant from the National Science Foundation. While scientists in Antarctica search for neutrinos, or the sources of life on earth, Herzog asks why, if some insects enslave others as a source of food, chimpanzees don’t enslave, let us say, goats as a means of transportation, like humans with horses. The “professional dreamers” whom Herzog has found in Antarctica tell remarkable stories and display an immediate recognition of their “fellow travellers” who have ended up in this inhospitable place. Extraordinary choral music accompanies beautiful photography above and below the surface of the continent. Take a break from the procession of summer superheroes and spend an hour and a half entertaining existential questions.

In August 1914, as England stood poised on the edge of a world war that would render such an exploit almost irrelevant, explorer Ernest Shackleton set forth in a wooden sailing ship and a band of hardy adventurers with the aim of crossing the continent of Antarctica on foot. Circumstances thwarted this plan, and the next two years were occupied with the goal of bringing his crew back to civilization alive. Using motion pictures, still photographs and drawings made during the expedition, combined with contemporary footage, readings from journals, and descriptions by grandchildren of the expedition members, director George Butler has produced a documentary that conveys with shuddering vividness the perils of ice, blizzards, open sea, and rugged mountains and the indomitable leadership of a man who refused to give up. Seeing the movie, one can understand how so many lives have been lost in the Antarctic and marvel at a remarkable story of survival

In the peculiar world of codes and code-breakers, intelligence about intelligence can be nearly as important as the intelligence itself. During World War II, screen star Leslie Howard was permitted to go to his death because to have interfered with his fatal journey might have revealed to the Germans that the British had cracked their code.

The story of Enigma, the Germans’ fiendishly clever code machine, and how the British cracked it, subject of several fascinating books, deserves better than the somewhat superficial treatment it receives in this movie. The producers no doubt calculated that the audience for a love story would be greater than that for a detailed analysis of the cryptographer’s craft. But the film, for all its distortions or omissions, has several merits. Just as the cryptographer works from bits of evidence to piece together the whole—a process similar in kind if not in degree to solving a crossword puzzle—so the audience is asked to piece together a love story presented in fragmentary flashbacks, a structural device that gives the viewer a chance to experience the satisfaction of making sense out of disconnected details rather than mindlessly watching a story unfold in a normal narrative. Kate Winslet plays a bright young woman whose gender relegates her to a clerical position and excludes her from the all-male club of code-breakers. In the film, her cleverness nonetheless supplies a vital piece of the puzzle. A beautiful recurring image of hundreds of whirling disks—a primitive computer—keeps reminding us that cracking a code requires a combination of insight and brute force in order to arrive at the single correct combination from among the billions of possibilities. Just as the code-breakers sacrificed sleep, health and even sanity to the cause, so the excellent ensemble cast of "Enigma" has put aside glamour and individual achievement in the interest of creating a competent piece of cinema. A film well worth seeing. (And if anyone’s Morse code skills are up to the task, you might try to decipher the message that the leading man keeps tapping subconsciously while he thinks.)

Do you remember the 1973 sci-fi flick “Soylent Green,” with Charlton Heston, which portrays Los Angeles as a city of yellow polluted air? How about the 1975 sci-fi flick “Rollerball,” in which multinational corporations control every aspect of daily life? We laughed at the unreality of the premises, right? “Enron” gives exactly the same sense of unreality; unfortunately, it’s not a sci-fi flick but a documentary. You must have read in the paper about how Enron manipulated electricity supplies in California in order to boost its earnings, but somehow it didn’t seem as real until I heard tape recordings of Enron traders instructing power plant superintendents to shut down their operations in order to produce blackouts and a huge demand for electricity at inflated prices.

I’ve frequently described my love of magic—the eerie effect of seeing things that your mind insists cannot possibly be true. The image of charismatic Enron CEO Jeffrey Trilling speaking cogently in utter contradiction of reported facts is no less eerie but not a bit lovable. The whole enterprise was just a magic show, but the public refused to see it that way: with this many billions of dollars involved, surely it couldn’t be just an illusion. The reputable bankers and investment houses that poured money into Enron presumably knew the secret (though they claimed after the fact to have invested in good faith), but arrogance and greed prevented anyone from admitting that the emperor had no clothes. So it’s a fiction—as long as money keeps rolling in, who cares? And how the money rolled in! Founder Kenneth Lay saw the possibilities inherent in energy deregulation, and exploited them with a vengeance.

You watch the film with fascination at the rapacity of greed upon gullibility, and then watch with disgust when the guys at the top (“the smartest guys in the room”) pull out their hundreds of millions, leaving thousands of employees pension-less when the whole house of cards collapses. If you made this story up, people would say it couldn’t possibly happen. Nobody could get away with theft on that large a scale. Welcome to the future.

Charles Kaufman, who gave us "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich," has come up with another surrealistic mind-bending story, but sufficiently grounded in reality that you’re willing to accept the premise. How close to reality? I’ll give a couple of examples from my own story. I once had a short-lived romance with a young woman whom I couldn’t get out of my mind. A year later I called her, only to find that she scarcely remembered me. More recently I underwent a medical procedure in which I was able to cooperate throughout but after which I was administered what the doctor called a "date-rape drug" which erased all memory of the experience. So reality is closing in fast on fantasy.

In "Eternal Sunshine" a scientist has invented a process allowing one to erase all memory of an unhappy relationship, in order to get on with one’s life. Clementine (Kate Winslet) impulsively undergoes the procedure to rid her mind of Joel (Jim Carrey). When Joel learns what she has done, he decides to undergo the procedure, too. ("Is it going to cause brain damage," he asks the inventor. "Well, technically, it is brain damage," comes the reply.) But as his memories are being expunged, one by one, he changes his mind: parts of the romance are too precious to lose, even if the affair didn’t turn out happily. He attempts to hold on to Clementine by taking her into parts of his mind where the doctor (Tom Wilkinson) may not be able to find them. But the doctor, using a computer scan of Charlie’s mind, pursues him through his mental landscape and eventually completes the procedure.

A subplot involving the doctor’s assistant (Kirsten Dunst) complicates the story (you didn’t think it was complicated enough already?) and allows the star-crossed lovers to grapple with another perennial question: if you could learn the future of a relationship, would your love be strong enough to overcome the prediction?

Kaufman plays fair with the peculiar logic of his story and in the process gives us some unforgettable cinematic images: a couple lying on the frozen Charles River in Boston, or finding themselves in a bed on the beach at Montauk. Jim Carrey gives his best performance since "The Truman Show," and while I found Kate Winslet nearly as annoying as Madonna, I thought the film was a lot of fun to see.

“A Chorus Line?” Nice show from the 70’s, you may suppose, but something of a period piece, not really relevant for the 21^st century. “Every Little Step” may change your mind. During the 2006 stage revival of the show, director Adam Del Deo received unprecedented access, not only to the closed-door tryouts but to the original taped interviews from which Michael Bennett created the original musical back in 1974. The film includes extensive interviews with Donna McKechnie, the original “Cassie,” and Baayork Lee, the original “Connie,” who also serves as a member of the casting team.

Why see a film in a theatre, some ask, when you can just wait for it to come to DVD or cable? Several hundred people gathered in AMC’s largest theatre at 9 a.m. on the final day of the film festival offered an unusually visceral response to the film (and answer to the question). You might imagine that after years of “American Idol” audiences would become jaded at the process of elimination. You’d never know it from this crowd. The film shows 3,000 dancers lining up in the cold for an open casting call, all of them maintaining, “God, I really need this job,” all of them certain that “I can do that.” The early rounds proceeded efficiently but by the time the thousands had been reduced to hundreds, choices became more difficult. The movie theatre erupted into applause and cheers when the casters opted for an audience favourite, and more than one moist eye followed the casting of Paul, a performer that left even the auditioners visibly moved.

A tour de force of film editing gave us several numbers from the show rendered by three or four finalists, cutting from phrase to phrase to show a variety of valid interpretation of these familiar standards. The screening ended with a standing ovation for the director, with sustained applause greeting the announcement that the film had likely secured a distribution deal that will bring it into theatres in the spring. This movie offers “one singular sensation” and gets my vote for the best I’ve seen at the festival.

The story of Ernie Davis, like the story of Jackie Robinson, cannot be told without reference to the courage of its subject in dealing with the challenge of racism in the 50’s. Davis, the first black Heisman Trophy winner, attended Syracuse University, where he was regarded as an oddity (though a great running back), and played against teams in West Virginia and Texas whose coaches and fans considered his mere presence an intolerable insult to be answered in the most physically punishing manner possible. Rob Brown plays Davis; Dennis Quaid plays Syracuse football coach, Ben Schwartzwalder, who, the film suggests, comes to understand something of higher value that Davis accomplishes through his play. A description of the film makes it seem like just another inspirational football flick, and I confess to a certain weakness for the genre, but in my opinion it struck all the right notes without ever crossing the line into sentimentality, and with me that counts for a good deal.

This film is so rich that I have difficulty weaving all its features into a coherent whole. Words need to be more or less linear to be coherent whereas the film treats themes of time, love, memory and pastry so allusively that understanding comes only at the end. The idea of rearranging all these elements to present them in a chronological order feels like a betrayal.

A single man watches a married woman through the facing windows of their two apartments, notes her idiosyncrasies and memorizes her routines. She sees him through the same windows and wonders about his life.

The woman and her husband come upon an old man in the street. He has lost his memory and seems very confused. They take him home and try to decide what to do with him.

In repeated flashbacks to 1943, we learn that the Nazis have rounded up Jews throughout Rome and sent them to concentration camps. One man, learning of the raid in advance, succeeds in saving many lives.

Sounds of a street musician rise to the woman’s apartment—she and the old man join in a dance which merges past and present.

The wife and the old man share a passion of pastry which leads to a lovely collaboration at cake-making, culminating in a breathtakingly beautiful scene. (Okay, maybe you have to like pastry; but I wasn’t the only one in the theatre to gasp.)

"You must demand a better life," the old man tells the wife, "not just dream about it."

Go see this film. I think you’ll like it. (Carlton Cinema; Italian with English subtitles.)

"Fahrenheit 9/11" has a number of very funny sequences: Michael Moore, flanked by a Marine recruiting officer, approaches members of Congress who approved the invasion of Iraq to invite them to sign recruitment papers for their sons or daughters--their reactions, though predictable, are priceless; a salesman displays the features of a "safe room" (where you could retreat in confidence to sip Chablis during an attack on your house) which looks for all the world like an outhouse; another post-9/11 huckster tries to point out the ease with which one can don a "personal escape device" (for jumping from buildings taller than 10 stories) while his assistant becomes thoroughly entangled in the contraption; and don't forget Britney Spears exhorting Americans to treat their president with respect.

But for the most part the film remains sophomoric and unconvincing, a propaganda piece built on visual insinuation rather than factual argument. When one measures this so-called documentary against "The Corporation," Moore's effort seems disappointingly puerile and transparently manipulative. After "Bowling for Columbine," and with such an easy target as George W. Bush, I expected more sophistication and substance than we get in this flimsy film. If this is the best the opposition can muster, the Republicans have little to fear in November. (Though they won't get many votes in Evanston, Illinois, whose July 4th parade included lots of anti-Bush posters such as "Re-Defeat Bush," "Save the Environment--Plant a Bush in Texas," and, my favourite, "Four More Months!"

Theatre embraces many experiences, from the fall of a thousand-pound chandelier in “Phantom of the Opera” to a solo recitation of Mark’s Gospel by Alec McGowan. Some of my most memorable evenings in the theatre have come on nearly-empty stages in which the playwright counts on the audience to fill in the gaps and relies on the words and the actors to sustain attention. Such was my experience in seeing Greg Nelson’s “The Fall.” Two actors portray four people: a man (Harry McKay, drafter of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms); his son David; Kate, a former clerk for the elder McKay; and Jane, a reporter for the Toronto Star. I had imagined that these double roles would be accomplished by changes of costume in different scenes. No such thing. Subtle shifts in the lighting or the surreptitious donning or removal of a pair of glasses, slightly altered tones of voice or postures: these provided the only clues, yet they proved more than adequate to hold an audience rapt through an eighty-minute intrigue surrounding the adoption of the Charter as two actors effortlessly moved back and forth between roles and between decades. As the play progresses we focus more and more on a physical dossier whose disposal over the years seems, in retrospect, to have been rather more improbable than the story it contains but whose secrets, removed one by one, drive the play along. This kind of theatre depends heavily on the skill of the actors to make it work and Ashley Wright and Sarah Dodd meet the challenge admirably.

Classic film techniques earn their stature from the aesthetic power they possess. "Far From Heaven" demonstrates that, properly used, the old ways have lost none of their potency. The film opens with shots of a gated park and urban trees growing through carefully measured squares in sidewalks, visual metaphors for the ethos of the Hartford, Connecticut in 1958. Modern film stock has been adapted to reproduce the incredible saturated hues of Technicolor, with Elmer Bernstein_s opulent score providing an aural counterpart. The screen virtually burns with the vivid colours of autumn, the last flash of happiness before the onset of winter chill. The images of Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid appear throughout the land as Mr. and Mrs. Magnatech, the perfect couple representing a successful business.

The camera shifts to a jarring angle as the Dennis Quaid character wanders, apparently naively, into a gay bar, and the downward spiral of the story begins. Two likeable characters are drawn into a vortex of racism and homophobia. Dennis Quaid, whose easy-going, relaxed persona we have enjoyed in such films as "D.O.A," "Everybody's All American," "The Parent Trap," and "The Rookie," becomes almost unrecognizable in his uptight voice and stiff carriage. We feel uncomfortably aware of the rigidity and fussiness of the era's female fashions. But most of all, we feel almost physically stifled by the utter absence of language for dealing with emotions. "Was it really as bad as that?" we try to remember. As visitors from another culture, we feel as out of place as the Julianne Moore character in the Negro restaurant, or as the Dennis Haysbert character and his daughter in a lily-white art exhibit. We feel their pain as an almost unendurable Technicolor, symphonic poignancy. The final shot of spring blossoms offers hope for society but none for the characters whose lives we have entered.

You'll need both concentration and stamina for this prize-winning film: three hours of Inuktituk, a huge cast of similar-looking characters, virtually all of whose names begin with the letter A, and a complicated plot based on an Inuit legend. Cultural differences also present a challenge--are these people smiling because they're happy, because they're non-professional actors trying to please a director, or do smiles carry a different message in Inuit culture. Much of the film was shot in the warmest part of summer--the story calls for a warrior to run for miles, naked and barefoot, across ice and snow--but the snow crunching in early scenes produces a sound we don't get in Ontario, that special cracking sound that tells you the thermometer is near the magic -40 place at which Fahrenheit and Centigrade converge. If you think that the past winter was too mild, a three-hour film shot in Baffin Island may be the cure.

Once at university I was talking with a girl and some of her friends in a dormitory lounge while in a corner of the room a young man spoke earnestly into the ear of his date. "He’s trying to get her sleep with him," one of the girls explained. Many times since I have wondered why someone didn’t intervene on behalf of the besieged young woman and tell the would-be seducer, "‘No’ means ‘no’; get lost!" I guess everyone figured she was old enough to make her own decisions.

During the central half hour of "Fat Girl," as we watch an Italian law student trying to persuade a fifteen-year-old girl to have sex with him, it’s hard not to be revolted at the litany of lies boys tell girls in such circumstances. If an eighteen-year-old undergraduate can make her own decisions, we rely on parents to protect fifteen-year-olds, but the combination of complacency and contemporary lifestyles can make that difficult.

Most of "Fat Girl" I would recommend as a kind of deterrent by shock treatment to young adolescents, just as "Dying to Be Thin" might serve as a warning about eating disorders. But the final scenes of the movie contain such nasty violence that I wouldn’t want any young person to see them. Who knows? Perhaps this is director Catherine Breillat’s idea of a cautionary tale. If so, it’s pretty strong medicine.

The French have a genius for spinning something from nothing, as witness the soufflé or the bedroom farce. Who but a French author like Stéphane Mallarmé would imagine all of life, art, and reality summarized in the ash of a cigar (in "Toute l’âme résumée")? "Père et fils" stars Philippe Noiret, a veteran stage and screen actor that you’ve probably seen a number of times over the years in "The Night of the Generals," "Topaz," "Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?", "Cinema Paradiso," or "The Postman." He plays a widower, advanced in years, who pretends to be near death in order to get his estranged sons to take him on a family vacation to Québec to see the humpbacked whales (never mind that the whales are out of season). From this simple premise, also used for Gene Hackman in "The Royal Tenenbaums," the film concocts a delicious entertainment invoking the mistrustful relationship between the French and the Québecois to set off the ill feelings among the three brothers, and eventually uncovering the resentment that all three feel toward their neglectful father. In the manner of a farce, the logic of the film leads to two of the brothers running naked around a farmer’s field, but the subtlety of Noiret’s performance leads us to reflect on the precious frailty of human relationships.

Fay Grim (Parker Posey) is having a tough time of it: her husband missing, presumed dead; her brother in prison, leaving her alone to raise a troublesome teen. Suddenly a C.I.A. agent (Jeff Goldblum) appears in her kitchen. “How did you get in here?” she demands. “They teach us how to do that,” explains the agent’s assistant. Goldblum, with portentous tones and significant looks, suggests that her husband’s notebooks may contain encoded secrets being sought by the intelligence agencies of five countries. Fay agrees to fly to Paris to pick up two volumes of the notebooks in the possession of the French government in exchange for her brother’s release from prison. A complicated plot unfolds, punctuated by episodes of choreographic violence (e.g., agents from five countries shooting each other down in a hotel stairwell, all in pursuit of the precious notebooks). Jeff Goldblum spends the movie chewing up the scenery and Parker Posey registers an astonishing variety of expressions. Everything seems off-kilter because of director Hal Hartley’s proclivity for tilting the camera, not just occasionally for effect, but continuously for nausea. The irreverent treatment of the spy thriller genre remains engaging until we become aware, toward the end of the film, that Hartley actually takes his art very seriously, and sees nothing wrong with leaving his heroine (and audience) stranded in Istanbul, patiently awaiting the next instalment several years down the line. I don’t think so.

"Tibetan Women Refugees" (Roslyn Dauber, narrated by Susan Sarandon) makes a persuasive case that the it is the women of Tibet, resettled in India, who have taken on the burden of preserving Tibetan culture in the next generation. Includes a fascinating interview with the Dalai Lama.

"I Shout Love" directed by Sarah Polley, the feisty youngster in the "Road to Avonlea" series, depicts a young woman in the throes of a breakup of a relationship, who persuades her erstwhile partner to spend a last day recreating for video ten activities which meant the most to her from their failed life together.

"In the Refrigerator," written, directed and acted (in multiple roles) by festival organizer Leslie Ann Coles, explores the efforts of a dancer to come to grips with the less savory traits passed on to her by her mother and schizophrenic aunt.

"Fun with Roofies," (Naomi McCormick) a somewhat confused effort to dramatize the dangers of "Roofies" (date-rape drugs).

"Cotton Candy," (Roshell Bissett) a delicate yet disturbing portrayal of the sex trade involving schoolgirls in Japan.

"V", (Naomi McCormick) a brief experimental film treating the resurrection theme, with the Christ-figure shown as a gymnast.

I found this a compelling emotional experience, even if some of the films proved to be imperfectly realized (partly due to limited budgets--Sarah Polley's film, for example, cost around $40,000). In the question-and-answer periods, the film-makers showed themselves not only to be accomplished technicians but also articulate exponents of their works. I felt privileged to be able to talk directly with these directors. (After awhile people asked "Who are you?" I explained I was just a movie lover, but they gave me their business cards anyway).

Brian DePalma fills a reservoir of respect and admiration with the flamboyant visual style in the first half of "Femme Fatale." The film opens deliciously and slyly at the Cannes Film Festival, where we watch a brilliantly conceived and elegantly executed heist aimed at a jewel-encrusted bra, I guess you'd call it, in the form of a serpent, worn by a gorgeous movie star, the sinuosity of the apparel replicated in the snaky movements of slithering subterranean camera used to find the target for a laser beam.

The scene shifts to Paris and one of the thieves, who has double-crossed her accomplices, finds herself in the apartment of someone who looks just like her, someone who has left a passport and airline tickets to America conveniently lying about. Our credulity grumbles a bit but we remain carried along by the director's visual panache. Antonio Banderas makes his appearance as a photographer, and DePalma pursues his Hitchcock-like themes of voyeurism and double identity.

Alas, the Hitchcock parallel fails. Hitch, for all his fascination with the visual possibilities of cinema, recognized the demands of a coherent narrative structure. He dreamed of shooting a sequence in an automobile factory, following a car_s construction from the basic frame through all its steps until the finished product rolled off the assembly line. Then, the passenger door would be opened and a body would fall out. Hitchcock regretted never being able to work the idea into a film. But he had a keen sense of what he called "refrigerator talk," where filmgoers would talk about his movie as they put together a midnight snack, and wonder about possible holes in the plot. Hitch was determined that they wouldn_t find any. Not so DePalma. The trick endings of "Femme Fatale" will leave you cussing at the director and berating yourself for being so seduced by dazzling colours, costumes and camerawork. A pox on ye!

Even after nearly half a century, The Sixties remains a controversial decade. Those who admire the idealism and concern for community of that period try to downplay the drug scene which pervaded the era. Those who dismiss the Sixties as a time of race riots and assassinations tend to minimize the influence of the Peace Corps or the VISTA programs. Both the music and the ethos of this turbulent time have been captured in "Festival Express," a documentary incorporating film coverage that has been locked in litigation since 1970. In the summer of that year an extraordinary trip took place on a private train from Toronto to Calgary. Some of the biggest names in rock music—The Grateful Dead, The Band, Janis Joplin, Ian & Sylvia—as well as some lesser-known groups like The Flying Burrito Brothers and Sha Na Na—traveled together from city to city across Canada, presenting concerts in stadiums and jamming together in transit.

Typically rock groups appear for a gig then depart for another. For many performers this was their first occasion to spend any appreciable time with their colleagues. Interviews with participants convey a strong sense of nostalgia and awe at the experience. "Nobody slept," one musician reported. "I’d try to lie down for an hour but I was too afraid of missing something so I always came right back." The trip organizer set up a drum set and amplifiers in the lounge car and the result was a week-long jam session in which the actual concerts started to feel like mere interruptions. The train had been well stocked with liquor but, as one performer recalls, "Most of us had done a lot of LSD and grass but this was the first time we’d done any serious drinking." As a consequence, the alcohol supply ran out and the train made an unscheduled stop in Saskatoon, where they bought out an entire liquor store.

The celebrated innocence of the era seems a bit tiresome nowadays. Little wonder that many in the States at that time were unwilling to turn the country over to a movement whose defense policy seemed to be "Why can’t everybody just play nice?" The Toronto concert at the beginning of the tour was marred by demonstrations of young people protesting the ticket price of $14, insisting that the concerts be free. The performers, who knew the logistical expenses involved in putting on such all-star events, sided with the tour organizer, but copycat demonstrations in each of the other cities hurt ticket sales and produced a big financial loss.

The movie respects the integrity of the music and, for the most part, presents songs in their entirety. Naturally I’d heard of these performers, but I confess this was my first time hearing entire numbers by The Grateful Dead or the all-consuming, seemingly self-destructive performances of Janis Joplin, who died of a drug overdose two weeks after completing the tour. Few people nowadays maintain the conviction of the time that rock and roll could save the world, but anyone can appreciate the joy that these performers evince in making music together.

At a recent Academy Awards ceremony, one recipient said that there are many qualities that lead to success in Hollywood, but one is prized above all others, and that is sincerity. (A pause). Learn to fake that, and you’re in.

This cynical, and probably not inaccurate, perspective infuses "Festival at Cannes," in which we see four actresses of different age being manipulated by four directors, producers or wannabes, and wonder how any personal relationship can survive in such an atmosphere of self-interest, hidden agendas, and deceit. It ain’t pretty.

Yet it’s a genuine pleasure to see Anouk Aimee, bringing grace, wisdom and beauty to her role of an actress faced with the choice of playing a lucrative cameo in a film starring Tom Hanks (!) or the lead in a small-budget feminist drama. Given the conflicting interested involved in closing a deal, as depicted here, it’s a wonder that films ever get made at all.

I have a weakness for romantic comedies and a love for baseball which surely influenced the way I responded to this film. That said, let me tell you how thoroughly I enjoyed this movie. Drew Barrymore, who has survived more than her share of difficult personal problems, remains unmatched at combining intelligence and sheer winsomeness. Her co-star, Jimmy Fallon, is unknown to me, but just right for the part of an unassuming schoolteacher with a great sense of humour who is passionately devoted to the Boston Red Sox (he and his buddies travel to Florida during March Break just to watch spring training). The two get together and seem to hit it off well, except for his terrible habit of getting the wrong answer to questions like, “I’m being sent to Paris this weekend; I could trade in my first-class ticket for two tourist tickets: would you like to come?” Each of the pair has a group of friends who persist in wondering “How can he/she be so great if he/she isn’t married by now?”

The film takes place in Boston, a city we haven’t seen nearly enough recently, and there’s lots of action at the ballpark, where Jimmy Fallon’s pair of season tickets makes him part of a “summer family” of dedicated fans who would never think of missing a game. Of course, the film had to be materially altered when the Red Sox did the impossible by winning both the American League pennant and the World Series. (And not just winning the pennant, but coming back after starting 0 and 3 against the New York Yankees—no writer would have dared invent such an ending.) The screenplay is first-rate and the interaction between the stars thoroughly engaging. I don’t know who you’d take to this film unless your partner was also a baseball fan, but I enjoyed every minute of it.

Any film that brings Julie Christie to the screen again can’t be all bad, and “Finding Neverland” has much to recommend it. Meticulous research combined with the skills of professional costumers, set designers and art directors offers us a privileged view into a bygone era as we see details of stagecraft in the theatre of 1903 (the kind of view offered in “Topsy Turvy,” set at around the same period). It’s one thing to read about children trying to play in clothing that in my youth would have been described as “Sunday best”; it’s another to see such a scene in motion. Julie Christie appears as a stern grandmother, the kind of role Lauren Bacall has been playing of late, but Christie is a generation younger than Bacall, and the ageing make-up does little to hide the radiant beauty that graced “Fahrenheit 451,” “Doctor Zhivago,” and “Petulia,” and that seems virtually undiminished by time. I would have preferred to see her in the role of the playwright’s wife, but Hollywood has strict rules in that department.

“Neverland” in the title represents not Michael Jackson’s notorious playground but its source, the magic land of “Peter Pan.” The movie shows James Barrie, the celebrated playwright, coming off a theatrical flop, becoming intrigued with the innocent play of some young boys, and gradually installing himself into their household as their playmate and the comforter of their widowed mother, for whom he eventually deserts his young wife.

The film-makers, I believe, expect us to be caught up in the thrill of recognition at seeing the real-life model for Peter Pan. I think we are meant to find the playwright’s interaction with the boys merely charming, an inspiration for a well-loved children’s tale. Yet the pattern of grown men escaping adult responsibility by fleeing into a childish existence has become so familiar that psychologists call it the “Peter Pan syndrome.” When discussing interactions of adults and children in Victorian times, some have argued that we must not look at the situation with modern eyes: we should regard Lewis Carroll’s photographing nude prepubescent girls (with the consent and in the presence of their mothers) as innocent, like the romping of James Barrie with a quartet of young lads, not on an isolated occasion but regularly over a period of months. On both counts I have difficulty surrendering to whimsy as I’m expected to do. And when Barrie comforts Peter on a park bench late in the film, I’m sure I’m not supposed to notice that on this particular take the assistant with the bottle of saline solution overdid it on Peter’s eyes. Of course you can’t express sentiments like this when everyone else in the crowd leaves the theatre sniffing. I hope I won’t be considered an irredeemable curmudgeon for failing to recommend this film with unreserved enthusiasm.

Five times two, cinq fois deux, five pictures of a couple--meeting, marrying, having a child, entertaining friends, divorcing—but shown in reverse order. You watch the film wondering why this relationship failed and in the course of the five scenes you find out. Described this way, the scenario seems distant, somewhat abstract. In fact, “5 X 2,” in French with English subtitles, gives a much more intimate portrayal of a relationship than we’re accustomed to seeing: the dialogue never sounds like a screenplay, the actors, while attractive, seem like real people; physical interactions are realistically explicit; the camera draws much closer to faces and bodies than Hollywood conventions dictate.

In the early scenes we are likely to judge the man harshly—words like “egotistical, shallow bastard” come easily to mind. Later we may conclude that the woman cannot be considered simply a victim. But the film discourages us from standing back at a sufficient distance to form such judgments. More often we feel the characters’ pain and, given the reversal of the narrative thread, we regret the paths they follow. Presented only with vignettes we cannot give a definitive answer to “why,” but strong performances by supporting actors open up a rich network of psychological avenues that the film suggests without actually exploring.

Director François Ozon has previously given us “8 Women” and “The Swimming Pool,” films depicting strong actresses in quirky situations. “5 X 2” has no such imposing presences as Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardent in the former or Charlotte Rampling in the latter film, but still challenges our conventional expectations regarding standard milestones in the course of a relationship. The surprising rendezvous immediately following the divorce, the asymmetric gender arrangement of hosts and guests (two couples, one homosexual, the other hetero), the inexplicable refusal of the husband to visit his wife at the birth of their son, the behaviour of both bride and groom after the wedding reception, the restrictions of employer/employee and prior engagements that would seem to discourage an affair, both keep us off balance and enrich the psychological complexity of a failing relationship. I found this to be a sad but impressive tale.

First the title (especially for Torontonians who, at the end of July 2009, may feel as if they haven’t had even one day of summer): Summer’s the girl and 500 days the length of time for a relationship to begin, flourish, and die and for the boy to finally get over its demise. Summer seems like the embodiment of every young man’s fantasy, a beautiful girl who offers sudden kisses in the photocopy room or public embraces on the mattress of an IKEA bedroom, who eventually lets the boy into her apartment and tells him things she’s never revealed to anyone before. The young man becomes distraught when she ends the relationship, unwilling to make a commitment. (I’m not spoiling anything here: the film, hopping back and forth among the 500 days, announces the end toward the beginning.) I suspect there must be something hardwired in the male brain to make us assume that physical perfection must be accompanied by emotional maturity. As a psychotherapist I see more than my share of gorgeous women who, usually as the result of early abuse of one sort or another, have deep-rooted relationship problems. My rational mind separates the physical from the emotional, yet in watching the movie I found myself sharing the protagonist’s dismay. I’d be interested in getting a female response to this film. (How I happened to see this film alone while Patti went shopping gets too complicated to explain: it involves Oskar.)

The director of this Israeli film introduced it as an anomaly: not about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not about the Holocaust, rather, a romance. A divorced taxi driver falls in love with his son’s music teacher, a woman about to emigrate to Canada with her urologist husband. In reciprocating the taxi driver’s affections the woman poses herself an awkward decision, she who married very young, abandoned her dream of a concert career, and has seldom had to think for herself. Yigal, the taxi driver, goes through a subtle process of growth in the course of the movie. As the actor who played Yigal observed in the Q&A, “he loses his heart and he finds his heart.” The title refers to Yigal’s fear of flying, which threatens to prevent him from attending his son’s bar-mitzvah in Paris, five hours away by plane. His psychologist’s efforts to address the problem through desensitization and exposure therapy add a sympathetic subplot to this delicate and touching film.

If we look for a transition point between the previous print culture and the present image culture we might cite the beginning of the television in the Fifties. Books and newspapers continue to be published but for more and more young people the print medium has become secondary rather than primary.

As one character in “Flags of Our Fathers” point outs, wars are lost and won on the basis of a single image. The photograph of an American soldier holding a pistol to the head of a terrified Vietnamese peasant came to define the Vietnam War, and mark the moment at which the Americans lost it. The photograph of the raising of the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima similarly marked the turning point of public support for the War in the Pacific.

Clint Eastwood bases an entire film on that image and, in so doing, makes a trenchant comment on the cotemporary commonplaces that “perception is reality” and “image is everything.” Presumably today’s audiences are too sophisticated to believe that “the camera never lies,” but in the less cynical era of 1945 the image of six men, their faces unidentifiable, raising the American flag carried the force of truth.

To uncover layers of reality behind that photography, which appeared on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the nation at a time when newspapers, not television, served as the public’s primary source of information, Eastwood follows three story lines: the storming the hill on which the flag was raised, the subsequent enlistment of three of the figures in the photograph in a campaign to sell War Bonds, and the recollections of a surviving member of the trio, last of the “heroes of Iwo Jima.”

We learn that the celebrated flag was actually the second to be raised on the site, that far from marking the end of the battle the flag-raising stood at the beginning of a campaign that would cost tens of thousands of lives including three of the original six flag-raisers, and that the soldiers involved in the fundraising effort felt considerable discomfort in being singled out as “heroes.” (Their discomfiture appears most pointedly at a banquet in which a waitress asks each soldier whether he wants chocolate or strawberry sauce poured over a pastry replica of the flag-raising.)

In making a film about an iconic image and its distorted interpretations, Eastwood employs a number of deliberate distortions of his own. The sequences depicting the battle scenes have been drained of colour save for the red of blood. Digital magic creates an armada of attacking American ships. The post-traumatic nightmare scenes appear very stylized, with a minimum detail, as befits the haze of dreams. No stars in this film—only a tightly controlled story behind a powerful image. Don’t miss it.

Robert McNamera created such an impact as Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson that it’s easy to forget the other parts of his career: serving in the Air Force under Curtis LeMay, being appointed as the youngest assistant professor at Harvard University, giving up an $800,000 a year job as president of the Ford Motor Company to take a $25,000 cabinet post, heading the World Bank for thirteen years. Now, at age 85, Robert McNamera has collaborated with documentary film-maker Errol Flynn to share eleven lessons about war. Historical footage alternates with contemporary interviews, the whole accompanied by an attractive score by Philip Glass.

During his tenure in the Defense Department, McNamera went from being hailed as "the brightest and the best" to being vilified as the architect of America’s participation in the Vietnam War, and he has been a controversial figure ever since. "The Fog of War" shows the consistency of McNamera’s approach to problems as well as recognizing the limitations in that approach. McNamera reminds us of the firebombing of Tokyo that took 100,000 civilian lives in a single night, followed by similar episodes in many other cities, all this well before the atomic bomb, and quotes Curtis LeMay’s acknowledgement that he was carrying out actions that, should the United States the war, would lead to his being tried as a war criminal.

In arguing for the need to empathize with one’s enemy, McNamera points out that the successful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis depended in large measure on the personal experience of diplomat Tommy Thomson with Khrushchev that allowed him to understand the internal pressures on the Soviet leader. McNamera points out that we had no such experience in dealing with the North Vietnamese. Yet during the crucial time period there were many experts on Southeast Asia in American universities who argued that this was a Vietnamese civil war and not a playing out of the Cold War.

Again and again McNamera points out the limits of reasoning, the need to question and re-question one’s assumptions and to consider the human consequences of error before making a decision. Despite the futility of contrafactual history, the film suggests strongly that had Kennedy lived the United States would have withdrawn from Vietnam rather than expanding its forces there (arguments strengthened by tape recordings of conversations between McNamera and Kennedy).

McNamera acknowledges that he will continue to be criticized no matter what he says, but he demonstrates an almost desperate need to share these lessons with the public, and as one silently applies his words to the policies of the current American administration, one generally agrees that his ideas need to be heard.

You probably won’t discover a lot that’s new in this film, but it’s human nature to want to avoid bad news—particularly in areas where you feel personally helpless—and so you probably haven’t given a lot of thought lately to the Monsanto Corporation’s belligerent litigiousness or the actual living conditions of the chickens you eventually consume, or the worldwide effects of the U.S. government’s corn subsidization policies. Personally, I thought the film tended to pull its punches, deliberately avoiding showing us the most unappealing scenes from the beef slaughtering process. What really brought me a chill was the description of how the meat industry has used libel laws to do an end run around the First Amendment: in many western states you can be sued for saying anything uncomplimentary about beef consumption. If you ever had any questions about the control that a handful of corporations exert over your life, you’d better make an effort to see this film.

Christopher Guest has made some of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen, notably “Waiting for Guffman,” “Best in Show,” and “A Mighty Wind,” so I had high expectations for “For Your Consideration.” It’s a neat concept: a schlocky movie called “Home For Purim,” being made with has-been or never-were actors, gets mentioned for a possible Oscar nomination and suddenly egos bloom and the producers swoop in (“Maybe we could tone down the Jewishness”). Parker Posey, Catherine O’Hara, Fred Willard, Eugene Levy and a host of other Guest regulars fill the cast, which seems to get larger and larger as more television shows pick up on the buzz. Perhaps bad movies and bad television shows carry their own parody, or perhaps inflated egos are so commonplace in Hollywood that the idea has lost its edge. One way or another, “For Your Consideration” never seems to rise above amusing. You’ll laugh, but you won’t be counting the days until the DVD appears.

Two programs on volcanoes, earthquakes and tornadoes are currently showing at the Ontario Science Centre, the first an IMAX film sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the National Science Foundation, the second a presentation on realism and fantasy in Hollywood disaster movies, featuring clips from "The Wizard of Oz," "Earthquake," "Twister," and "Dante’s Peak." Not surprisingly, despite the enormous scale of the IMAX screen, the Hollywood clips prove to be the more exciting. Why? Because they’re designed to be. While the actors (or their doubles) operate in complete safety in a Hollywood film, deftly-timed explosions, flying debris, imitation flowing lava, or gaping crevasses give the impression of mortal peril. The scientists studying natural phenomena, by contrast, maintain a healthy sense of self-preservation. They endeavour to station Doppler radar trucks on either side of a twister, in order to determine just what causes the vortex to form. (Only a fool would try to stand in the middle of a real tornado, even though that’s what Judy Garland appears to be doing in "The Wizard of Oz."

Similarly, the photographs of a volcano erupting are striking in their own right, but for moviegoers accustomed to being virtually inside the volcano when it blows, any actual footage, no matter how remarkable, is bound to seem tame. As John Cage observed, most people, when given the choice of experiencing heaven or listening to a lecture on heaven, will opt for the lecture.

I guess I didn’t lower my expectations sufficiently: otherwise how could I be disappointed in a movie which sets the standard of entertainment so low? Vince Vaughan and Reese Witherspoon play a smug, unmarried couple who annually invent fictitious humanitarian projects allowing them to spend Christmas holidays in warm places and away from their fragmented families. One Christmas an ill-timed fog and intrusive television reporter give away the game and compel the couple to visit their four families in a single Christmas day. The sequence that made me laugh the hardest came when Vince Vaughan, falling off a roof while holding a satellite dish, causes the cable connecting the dish to the indoor television set to rip up the entire interior of the house and finally destroy the TV. ‘Nuff said.

I’m not a big fan of films in which characters exchange minds (or bodies, depending on which way you look at it). A successful portrayal requires a genuine gift for physical comedy, hence the success of Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin in such a venture. I wouldn’t have picked Jamie Lee Curtis (you’ve seen her in the "Fish Called Wanda" films) for such a role, but she acquits herself brilliantly as the mom. Adriana reminded me that Lindsay Lohan, who plays the 15-year-old daughter, is no stranger to double roles, having played the identical twins in the recent remake of "The Parent Trap." At one point, playing the mother in the teenager’s body, she casually pulls down her friend’s top so that it covers her midriff, a gesture so unconscious and inconspicuous that you hardly notice it until you think about it later on. And Jamie Lee Curtis, as the adolescent in an adult body, does brilliantly with an electric guitar. If you get to accompany a child to this film, consider it time well spent.

When I was in college I asked a cellist friend why I could recognize Mozart’s "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" even though I had never heard the work in concert. He thought a moment then proposed that we were born knowing the "Eine kleine Nachtmusik," or else that our mothers played it for us in the nursery. Either way, light classical music formed a universal language for previous generations, turning up even as background music for the Warner Brothers Looney Tunes series, with Bugs Bunny & Co.

Those days have passed, rock music having become the new lingua franca. Thus the Toronto Symphony’s Kids’ Klassics programs perform a unique service in giving children access to works that would have just been "in the air" for their parents or grandparents. Thus Adriana listened to such warhorses as the Brahms Hungarian Dance No.5 or the first of the Dvorak Slavonic Dances for the very first time.

The concerts always include a contemporary work, in this case "Tom Sawyer’s Saturday" by British composer John Dankworth. Yet even here the composition helped to fill an important lacuna as a narrator retold the episode of Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, a tale that adults know by heart but kids don’t read anymore since Mark Twain’s classic novel has been declared not-PC.

The program concluded with two works based on "Romeo and Juliet": excerpts from Prokoviev’s ballet music, danced by Ballet Jorgen Canada, and selections from Bernstein’s "West Side Story."

Every generation decries the educational standards of its successor. A woman my age rolls her eyes in recalling being forced by her father, one of my professors, to perform in family versions of Sophocles, spoken in Greek. Will Adriana tell her college friends, "And he forced me to listen to Brahms, can you believe it?" Next weekend we’re off to see a production "The Pirates of Penzance."

I’ve been blessed with a happy career as a football fan: when I was at Amherst our team lost only three games during my four years there; my time at Cornell coincided with that of Ed Marinaro; my tenure at Pitt overlapped the brilliant career of Tony Dorsett. At each level, the game had loyal followers and dedicated players but never have I come into contact with the kinds of pressure experienced in Texas high school football and depicted in "Friday Night Lights."

The story takes place in Odessa, Texas, shown here as almost a derelict town with little going for it except a passion for football that borders on the pathological: a football stadium larger than most universities’, a football coach paid more than the high school principal, and a bunch of seventeen-year-old boys who know that a football scholarship is the only way they will ever be able to leave town. The people clamor for another state championship and when the team loses a game early in the season, a forest of "For Sale" signs appears on the coach’s lawn. One boy’s father’s life has been frozen (or rather, pickled in alcohol) in the state championship he won as a youth, and his pressure on the lad to match his feat frequently crosses the line into abuse.

In contrast to the safe distance of televised football, this film takes the camera right into the roiling action. I can’t speak for woman viewers—there probably won’t be many—but any man’s heart will beat faster during the climactic championship game. Billy Bob Thornton, whom I detested in "Bad Santa," gives a nuanced, multidimensional portrayal of the football coach. Recommended.

The movie allows Martin Sheen and Frank Langella to reprise their performances from the play based on the television interviews of David Frost and Richard Nixon, in which Nixon, having bested Frost for the first three sessions, finally owns up to his culpability in the Watergate scandal and its aftermath of cover-ups, corruption and obstruction of justice that had led to Nixon’s resignation as President. The movie shows how the protagonists misjudged each other and depicts the peculiar chemistry between a talk-show host venturing in over his head and a disgraced president seeking one last opportunity to redeem himself. I found the movie fascinating and, to my astonishment, was touched by Langella’s performance to feel a measure of sympathy for Nixon.

A child whose life is shattered by abuse or trauma may suppress feelings too overwhelming to process. Memories may emerge later in fragmentary form, hence the “fugitive pieces” of the title. In the book on which the film is based, the author shares individual shards from the experiences of the protagonist, who survived in concealment when SS officers broke into the apartment and sent the rest of the family to concentration camps. A Greek labourer discovers the lad hiding in a forest and takes him first to Greece and later to Canada. The Greek rescuer has endured losses of his own, which he records in journals. The fragmentation continues as the boy learns Greek, and later English, losing not only his mother but also his mother tongue. In time, the rescued becomes the rescuer as the boy, now become a grown man, tends to his author friend at the end of his life, and to his affairs after his death. The book presents such a detailed and personal account that one swears the book must have been autobiographical, but no, just the result of a great deal of painstaking research. The film is no less convincing, with admirable performances all around. Phrases such as “heart-warming” send me fleeing in the opposite direction, but I think you’ll find this an affecting film.

During the 18^th century a chess-playing automaton caused a sensation in European courts. At one point the machine succeeded in defeating Napoleon Bonaparte, who reacted to the loss in much the same way as the Wookie Chewbacca in “Star Wars.” What might have been an astonishing precursor to contemporary explorations in artificial intelligence turned out not to be quite as advertised. When the inner workings of the machine were exposed, one compartment contained levers and pulleys controlling the arms and hands of the manikin, but the other contained a hollow space where a chess-playing human concealed himself. It was a complete fraud.

In 1996 Gary Kasparov, the world champion chess player and, by many estimates, the greatest player of all time, took on IBM’s chess-playing computer, called Deep Blue, and soundly thrashed it. Once Kasparov learned the nature of the computer’s play, he could set traps for it to which the programs could not respond. IBM asked for a re-match and the world champion, who had accepted the challenge in the nature of a friendly competition, casually accepted.

During the interval between the two matches, half a dozen IBM programmers worked full-time on the project, aided by a small army of chess grandmasters. The computer was said to have been programmed to learn from its mistakes so that it could keep on improving without limit. All of Kasparov’s previous games were fed into the computer, along with the accumulated knowledge of the grandmasters. The new version of the computer was said to be able to analyze two billion moves every second.

No human player had been able to touch Kasparov in competition. Established grandmasters who encountered the young Russian when he first came onto the scene were so befuddled by his originality that they desired never to play him again. His competition against Karpov for the world championship left Kasparov decisively in command. The 1966 encounter with Deep Blue made it clear that a computer program capable of defeating any ordinary player simply could not cope with the ingenuity of a Kasparov.

But to combine a human player and a computer program would be another matter altogether. If a human player could take advantage of the machine’s brute force analysis of every possible move, and then intervene to select the best possible move from a dozen possibilities, Kasparov could be brought down.

In the first game of the 1967 rematch, Kasparov easily defeated Deep Blue. In the second game, Kasparov laid a trap for the machine. An unprecedented pause of fifteen minutes occurred, after which the computer produced an extraordinary move, a move which chess commentators said could not possibly have come from a computer, the kind of move that only another chess grandmaster could have manufactured, since it required turning down a clear gain in material and apparent gain in position. Kasparov himself was staggered, and never recovered. He spent the night sleeplessly trying to figure out how a machine could possibly have come up with such a move. Kasparov played for a series of draws and finally lost a game, and therefore the match, to the computer.

Kasparov insisted on seeing the log sheets of the computer activity that had produced the devastating move. IBM promised to turn them over but never did. Deep Blue was dismantled and all further research into chess-playing abandoned. The IBM programmers maintained smugly that everything was aboveboard and that Kasparov was just a sore loser. “Game Over” brings Kasparov back to the scene of his defeat and offers him an opportunity to reflect on the experience. The film has little in the way of chess analysis, perhaps because the level of play was simply too elevated for us ordinary folk to follow. But the documentary clearly hints that Kasparov was competing not against a computer program but against a computer-aided human player. This film represents a fascinating footnote to anyone who has seen “The Corporation.”

Like an oil painting by Brueghel, "Gangs of New York" fills every square inch of its canvas with detailed depictions of social life. We see the "Five Corners" district near the harbour in all its variety, from the political shenanigans of Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall gang to scenes from Chinese opera to bare-fisted prize-fighting to warfare between rival fire companies who carry out their turf battles while buildings burn.

The film opens with a brutal but almost balletic set-piece, a formal conflict between two gangs, the Irish "Dead Rabbits" and the "Native Americans." The leader of the Irish forces, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), dies at the hands of Bill "The Butcher" Cutter (Daniel Day-Lewis), before the eyes of Vallon's young son. Twelve years later the son (Leonardo diCaprio), taking the name of Amsterdam, returns determined to avenge his father's death.

This fictitious personal struggle plays out against the backdrop of the American Civil War and the actual historical riots that occurred in New York over the conscription of men to fight in the Union army. To my eyes, diCaprio lacks the screen weight to serve as a proper protagonist, but who could stand up to Daniel Day-Lewis, who rules the movie with the same authority that Bill Cutter exercises over the Five Corners! Displaying a seemingly limitless wardrobe, Cutter combines the skills of a warrior with those of a political boss who lets nothing escape his notice. The only really jarring note in the film comes with Cameron Diaz, so thoroughly modern a persona that her every appearance on screen seems anachronistic (like Richard Gere in "First Knight).

Without dwelling too much on historical details, director Martin Scorsese uses purely cinematic techniques to show how times have changed between the initial battle and the inevitable rematch between Cutter and Vallon's son. This time, though the challenge be offered and accepted, and the terms of warfare agreed upon, the actual battle is interrupted by the firing of heavy naval artillery of federal forces brought in to quell the draft riots, signalling the beginning of an era in which local neighbourhoods would become amalgamated into a larger city.

Scorsese has celebrated New York before in films ranging from "Mean Streets" (1973) and "Taxi Driver" (1976) to "New York, New York" (1977), "After Hours" (1985) and "New York Stories" (1989), but never has he attempted a larger panorama than in "Gangs of New York," a powerful, multi-layered portrait of the city.

A first movie by a talented film-maker, like a first novel or first work of non-fiction, tends to pack in everything the author has thought up over two decades or so. Think of the richness and quirkiness of Douglas Hofstadter’s "Gödel, Escher and Bach," never matched by any of his subsequent writings. Zach Braff wrote, directed and stars in "Garden State," a film overflowing with fresh sight gags that had the theatre audience laughing loudly, the kind of images that seem so obvious you wonder why no one had thought of them before. Braff has evidently been gathering up such ideas for years. In the story he plays Andrew Largeman, a struggling actor who has had just one successful role, who returns to New Jersey from Los Angeles to attend his mother’s funeral. For nearly a decade, Largeman has been on a pharmacopeia of drugs prescribed by his psychiatrist father, who sent him away to boarding school after the accident that rendered his mother a paraplegic. Having left his meds in lalaland, Largeman is getting his head clear for the first time at age twenty-six. In New Jersey he encounters former high school classmates who seem to spend their lives in a constant high, whether from marijuana or more exotic drugs. He also meets Sam, a pathological liar and epileptic (we see the former but are spared examples of the latter affliction) who provides the first friendship he has known in awhile. The action takes place in the few days immediately following the funeral, as Andrew reconsiders his life from the new perspective of relative mental clarity.

The film self-consciously, and affectionately, parodies "The Graduate," which creates an interesting perspective for me, who was Andrew Largeman’s age when Benjamin Braddock first appeared, and who has held the Simon & Garfunkel songs and California scene in a special place ever since. Neither the music nor the setting of "Garden State" has the impact of "The Graduate," but the tempo and feel of that movie are always present in "Garden State," which serves as a kind of homage in the style of Woody Allen’s "Play It Again Sam" as a riff on "Casablanca." A number of the characters and situations in "Garden State" strike one as a screen transposition of a writer’s fancy, and that isn’t supposed to happen in a film, but the movie is hugely entertaining. It remains for today’s twenty-six year olds to say whether it has any important impact on their lives.

Sometimes the opening scenes of a movie give clear evidence of a master craftsman at work and you can relax, knowing that you’re going to see a movie of quality. At other times the opening scenes give clear warning of a genuine turkey and you have to begin calculating how long you need to wait before bailing out and demanding your money back. Nowadays I usually manage to avoid those, but in the 60s and 70s, when only one or two new films appeared each week and I saw them all, there were always a certain proportion of turkeys.

Based on the opening scenes, “Georgia Rule” could have gone either way, either vindicating the New York Times reviewer who thought well of the film or the Toronto Star critic who excoriated it. But before long the movie settled down as a witty and touching treatment of love’s absence, loss, repression and perversion, with star performances by Jane Fonda and Lindsay Lohan carrying the film over any rough spots in the script. Lilly (Felicity Huffman) decides to get rid of her uncontrollable adolescent daughter Rachel (Lindsay Lohan) by leaving her with her estranged mother Georgia (Jane Fonda) for the summer. Soon Rachel finds herself falling for a Mormon who has vowed chastity until marriage (Garrett Hedlund), and working as a receptionist for a local veterinarian (Dermot Mulroney) who, in the absence of a regular physician, occasional treats humans,.

The comic aspects of the film reside in the clash of cultures when a spoiled California girl collides with a Mormon community in small-town Idaho with an impact like that of Reese Witherspoon in “Pleasantville.” Amusing changes rung on this theme help us past the grim sight of promiscuity and moral confusion in the wake of sexual abuse. Rachel’s wantonness runs into Georgia’s rigidity (meals at precise hours and soap in the mouth for taking the Lord’s name in vain).

Lindsay Lohan displays chameleon-like changes with bewildering speed—saucy, helpful, childlike, and tough—as she vainly seeks a “good father” to replace an abusive step-father. Jane Fonda struggles with the problem of rigidity: how do you become more flexible without losing your moral compass? Felicity Huffman portrays a woman coming to grips with her alcoholism. Throughout the film runs the question of how to maintain the boundaries between sex and love. I highly recommend this provocative drama disguised as a comedy.

Another movie made from a television series I never saw. Steve Carell manages to pull off the difficult task of ultimately succeeding despite, at every step along the way, appearing to be an idiot. And despite carping from professional reviewers, I thought the “chemistry” with co-star Anne Hathaway worked fine (she takes a dim view of his self-assurance). Like most films of this genre, the only scenes you’ll really recall an hour after seeing it are the ones you saw repeatedly in the previews. One could even say that if you’d seen the preview you didn’t really need to see the film itself, but then you’d have to find another way to spend 110 minutes of a summer’s night. Harrington, Québec and Montreal supply most of the locations; Terrence Stamp provides the villainy; Alan Arkin plays the bureau chief compelled to send the Steve Carell character into action when all his other agents become either indisposed or deceased. I defy anyone to successfully summarize the plot a month (or even a week) after seeing the film.

Is there anything more annoying than trying to carry on a conversation while someone else keeps interrupting? According to “Ghost Town,” there is: it’s when the interrupter is dead and you’re the only one who can see him. Greg Kinnear plays the principal interrupter so persistently and so annoyingly that you overlook the machinery of a familiar story of redemption (the basis of “A Christmas Carol” in its many manifestations). The “Scrooge” in this piece takes the form of a self-absorbed dentist, the kind of guy who steals your cab or deliberately shuts the elevator door in your face just in order to spare himself the intrusion of your company. Through an operating table anomaly, he receives the gift of seeing dead people: not all dead people, mind you, just those with unfinished business on earth, people whose frustration and anguish the dentist could relieve simply by passing on bits of crucial information to the survivors. But is this bastard going to help them? Not a chance. The Greg Kinnear character, however, annoying and persistent, more or less coerces the dentist into helping him prevent his widow from marrying a man of whom he disapproves. Without the Greg Kinnear character, our sentimentality detectors would go off and ruin the movie, so all the persistent annoyance pays off and allows this low-key, charming movie to work its magic.

“THE GHOST WRITER”
Alfred Hitchcock delighted in making movies in which an innocent person becomes enmeshed in a plot that either engages him in complicity or threatens his well-being (preferably both). In such films, not knowing whom to trust, the protagonist, totally out of his element, develops paranoiac tendencies in which innocuous situations seem to conceal a lurking threat. The constant state of uncertainty adds to the suspense since the audience never knows where peril lies. Roman Polanski has concocted a thoroughly Hitchcockian thriller in “The Ghost Writer,” in which the nameless protagonist (Ewan MacGregor), engaged to rewrite the memoirs of a British Prime Minister modeled on Tony Blair (Pierce Brosnan), finds himself entangled in current events when the International Court announces prosecution of the Prime Minister for war crimes. It shouldn’t be considered a spoiler if I tell you that virtually nobody in the film is as he or she appears. In addition to Hitchcock references, I found a lovely echo of the cat-and-mouse game between Fernando Rey and Gene Hackman in “The French Connection,” this time played out in a ferry boat. And, like Jack Nicholson in Fellini’s “The Passenger,” the Ewan MacGregor character follows a path left by his predecessor, this time in the form of a BMW navigational system. Polanski seems to take particular pleasure in turning a security system into a virtual prison. This is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. If you enjoy the genre, don’t miss it.

The novel on which this film is based undertook to invent a plausible back story of just how this famous painting came to exist: Jan Vermeer must have had an extraordinary model; suppose she actually belonged to the household, say, as a maid; how might the intimacy of the creative process have disturbed the domestic situation? And where did that pearl come from, anyway?

While film cannot convey the psychological depth of a novel, it does enjoy an overwhelming advantage in presenting visual detail, and the makers of this film offer us a cornucopia of haunting images. One’s breath is continually taken away when a combination of lighting, colour and figure exactly matches that of a painting by one of the Dutch masters. Most successful in this regard is the face and demeanor of Scarlett Johansson as Griet, the young woman who inspires the painting. It’s a remarkable performance that never seems like acting. Colin Firth, alas, has become so familiar in romantic comedy that we have difficulty seeing him as anything but a twentieth-century man in a silly wig. When he complains that he cannot find a subject for his next painting, Hollywood has trained us to know what to expect, and when he has trouble getting his artistic vision in order and rattles the brushes around in their container in frustration, we can only think of all the films we’ve seen about writers tearing pages out of typewriters.

With all the attention to historical detail, why could no one have remembered that in the seventeenth century nobody ever bathed and common people owned but a single change of clothing? Scene after scene gives us "authentic" costumes right out of the shop, fresh and clean with nary a smudge nor threadbare cuff. And in a film dedicated to rendering the Delft of 1655 down to its tiniest pane of glass or bucket handle, why must we be subjected to a thunderously anachronistic score by Alexandre Desplat? For one brief moment we hear a bit of harpsichord music that sounds like Sweelinck, and for that instant sound and image join in harmonious counterpoise.

What comes across with frightening accuracy is the plight of women—objects for advantageous marriage if well-born, valued below household pets if not. Griet shows more aesthetic sense than her employers, an endearing trait in a film about the visual arts, but remains utterly vulnerable to the whim of her master or his friends, and the movie makes it clear that she is no worse off than any other girl in her situation.

The ultimate judgment of this film, I think, will be what remains with you six months from now. I suspect that some of the images will have staying power.

I must acknowledge that I have just finished reading, for the second time, the Dennis Lehane novel of the same title on which this film is based. In fact, I have recently reread all of the Dennis Lehane novels featuring the private investigator team of Patrick (not Pat!) Kenzie and Angela Gennaro: they’re perfect for 13-hour flights. When you build your own mental pictures of characters in novels you’re likely to be disappointed by their movie equivalents, but my mental picture at least emerged from Lehane’s careful descriptions. Patrick Kenzie is one tough dude, not at all like the callow Casey Affleck of the film. And the Angela Gennaro of the novel is no less formidable as a partner. The film’s Michelle Monaghan shows her empathic soft side but nothing of the character’s toughness. And don’t get me started on Bubba Rogowski, a mountain of a man, someone whom even Patrick Kenzie holds in awe, portrayed in the film by just another overweight actor.

In fairness, the movie has brought some real talent to the secondary roles: Amy Madigan as Bea, the sister of the woman whose child has been abducted, summarizes all the tightness of her personality in the way her lips purse; Ed Harris, as detective Remy Broussant (mysterious altered from the novel’s Broussard), conveys the menace and cynicism of his character. Morgan Freeman, much as I adore the actor, becomes a poor choice for Lieutenant Jack Doyle, simply because of the baggage of goodness that Freeman carries, which required the smoothing out of Doyle’s rough bits, not to divulge too much of the plot.

The story centers on the abduction of a four-year-old girl from the Dorchester section of Boston. The novel well conveys the hard-drinking, hard-fighting atmosphere of these working-class neighbourhoods; the movie lets us down, notably in the set-piece at the Fillmore Bar, a place that Kenzie and Gennaro, tough as they are, visit with trepidation in the novel. In the movie, they just stroll in. The missing girl’s mother Helene McCready, brilliantly portrayed by Amy Ryan, seems to be more interested in her image on television than with the actual fate of her daughter. Her sister arranges to hire Kenzie and Gennaro to help find the girl and the police reluctantly concur in their participation. (The novel makes clear the police admiration for Kenzie’s recent work in bringing down a particularly nasty killer.)

The movie respectfully follows the book scene by scene without ever conveying the excitement or urgency of the novel. The scenes seem disconnected; you actually have the sense of the filming unit shutting down and moving to another location. The scene in the quarry, a big set-piece in the novel, looks as if it were done on the cheap. The movie takes up the moral questions about who decides who will live and die, but backs away from the really appalling parts of the book, evidence of torture and sexual abuse that would completely turn off much of the audience. As a result, the jaded attitude of the policemen makes police in general look weak rather than conveying the shell-shock of men who have seen too much of scenes that nobody should have to see.

"I need to think this through," says Justine, the eponymous character played by Jennifer Anniston, referring to the love affair fervently desired by a lad eight years her junior, who reads "The Catcher in the Rye" and calls himself "Holden." But careful thought seems to be beyond the ability of any of the characters in this film. Justine knows that she is unhappy, that she doesn't really love her husband, and that she hates her job: she is clear about her feelings, but muddy in her thinking. Justine's walk expresses the constricted circumstances of her life: she takes tiny steps, as if unable to extend her legs fully. Her level gaze suggests an intelligence far above that of her self-mutilating, puppy-eyed playmate. Yet Justine succumbs to his invitation without thinking things through. She can't get further than "maybe this is my last chance for happiness." Her husband Phil isn't really a bad guy, through his inseparable friend gives one the creeps. The main story line, despite the sympathy we feel for Justine, is basically a downer, as we watch her stumble down a path headed for catastrophe, an ending averted, basically, because Hollywood knows we wouldn't like it.

The humor in this film comes from one of Justine's colleagues at the shabby discount store where she works, a girl who throws nasty little variations into those "attention. shoppers" announcements that nobody listen to very carefully, and makes outlandish remarks to the women whose faces she "makes over" in the cosmetics department. Then there's the security guard who invites Justine to join a Bible study group. When she tries to escape by saying that she likes to keep her evenings to herself, he speculates that perhaps she'll be spending evenings with herself in eternal hellfire. So while the plotline is based on the premise that just when you thought things couldn't get worse in your life, they do, the antic decorations of the plot, including Holden's catatonic parents, keep us from utter despair. And in Justine's blue eyes lies the unrealized hope of clear thought.

How do you feel about someone who renounces self-interest to serve a greater cause? Do you admire idealism or are you suspicious of selflessness? “The Good Shepherd” examines the covert game of intelligence and counter-intelligence, information and disinformation, over the first fifteen years of the Central Intelligence Agency, enough time to show how the patriotic fervour of its founding could be corrupted by human weakness, self-interest, and the arrogance of power. We observe the cat-and-mouse game of intelligence both in the technical analysis of a consequential photograph and tape recording around the time of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 and in the exploitation of human imperfection throughout the Cold War that followed hard upon the end of World War II.

The fundamental decency of the characters played by Matt Damon and Robert DeNiro prevent us from being entirely cynical about a secret intelligence organization drawn from the “brightest and the best,” with a pool consisting largely of members of Yale’s secret Skull & Bones society. We are disappointed rather than surprised at the perversion of civilian oversight, that vestige of democratic vision in founding the CIA. We accept, even as we are puzzled by, the naïveté of the central character who single-mindedly, laconically sticks by the program.

Despite its length, this film feels lean, terse and graceful, like director Robert DeNiro’s acting style. The images remain mostly dark and shadowed, with occasional moments of breathtaking beauty. The rich ensemble cast includes Keir Dullea, Alec Baldwin, Michael Gambon, Timothy Hutton, John Turturro, Joe Pesci, William Hurt and Billy Crudup. Only Angelina Jolie seems out of place in a role that doesn’t really give her much of a chance to do anything.

A fundamental sadness runs through the film. For all those who exploit situations for their own gain there are others doing the best they can in the interest of their country. Even in the hindsight of history one has difficulty offering clear alternatives. The archival footage from World War II makes the struggle of good versus evil seem clear, but in the aftermath the picture becomes cloudy. Were the Russians a genuine threat or a myth invented by the CIA to maintain its influence? What were President Kennedy’s options in dealing with Fidel Castro? “The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep,” we read in John 10:11. The Matt Damon character represents an idealistic shepherd working for an agribusiness. The internal contradictions in that relationship have given rise to beautiful, thought-provoking film.

"Pointless," describing a big-budget, big-name stage play, suggests that one had hopes of there having been a point, but clear thinking should have warned me that a production featuring a nude scene by Kathleen Turner (does anyone really care?) and live acting by Alicia Silverstone should not have led to high expectations. But surely if you planned to turn an incredibly successful film by Mike Nichols, starring Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and Kathleen Ross, into a play, you must have brought to the enterprise a really dynamite script, or a tour de force of stagecraft, or a great example of ensemble acting! Wrong. The acting is wooden (or, in Miss Silverstone's case, shrill), the timing constantly askew, the script a dud. Perhaps "pointless" isn't the right word; perhaps "cheesy" and "exploitative" come closer.

Far from the Montreal sophistication that produced the Oscar-winning "Barbarian Invasions" lies the tiny fishing village of Harrington Harbour, Québec, a hamlet on the eastern arm of Québec province that stretches out toward the Atlantic immediately to the south of Newfoundland and Labrador. Renamed "Ste. Marie La Mauderne," in the film this little town of 150 souls typifies the plight of many similar towns subsisting entirely on welfare. A glimmer of hope appears in the form of a plastics factory which may be located in Ste. Marie if the town can offer a physician, a condition imposed by the insurance company. Alas, there hasn’t been a doctor there for a generation. The "great seduction" of the title refers to the efforts of the townspeople to attract a physician to their midst, and the humor of the film resides in the contrast between the sophistication of the Internet, satellite communication and computer databases on the one hand and the mentality of a small town on the other.

The candidate for the job has a passion for cricket, so the townspeople pretend to be cricket-lovers, basing their knowledge of the game, its rules and proper dress on documents downloaded from the Internet. The candidate likes beef stroganoff, so the local restaurant proclaims a beef stroganoff festival. The candidate wants to catch a fish so a scuba diver attaches a fish to his line. Two townswomen tap his telephone in an effort to gain more information.

The film, perfectly capturing both the incredible warmth and the provincialism of this special province, could be a poster child for the support of Canadian culture. A remarkably dear comedy. (Not only are there no car crashes—in this island community there aren’t even any cars.) See this film for the good of your soul.

A retired auto worker, veteran of the Korean War, and recent widower, takes a sour view of the transformation of his Detroit neighbourhood by an influx of Hmong people. Inflexible, racist, he becomes a neighbourhood hero by intervening when a gang attacks a neighbour. When a Hmong teen tries to steal his prized possession, a 1972 Gran Torino, and is compelled by his mother to perform a number of “service hours” in penitence, the man reluctantly becomes a substitute father for the lad and finds him a job in the construction trade. The gang persists in interfering, provoking an inevitable showdown. Clint Eastwood has said in interviews that he would not be averse to revisiting his trademark Dirty Harry character if the opportunity ever arose. “Gran Torino” provides the vehicle for a film in which the constant threat of violence hovers behind a script full of delightful politically incorrect humour. Eastwood makes movies that echo Dirty Harry’s laconic style, every scene and conversation reduced to the essentials. Don’t miss this one.

Once the Germans had begun to think the unthinkable and carry out the macabre operation of the Final Solution, they had to cope with the physical problems it engendered. Faced with having to dispose of a vast accumulation of human bodies, they constructed enormous crematoria, then dumped the ashes into a nearby river. They recruited the manpower for these operations from the Jews themselves. When the cattle cars arrived at the concentration camp, an orchestra of prisoners would play Strauss waltzes to calm the new deportees, prisoners would supervise their disrobing and entry into the "showers," prisoners would administer the lethal gas, remove the cadavers, transport them to the ovens, clean the gas chambers of the blood from fingers desperately trying to escape, then whitewash the walls in preparation for the next group.

Seeing these things enacted on the screen adds searing images to words from history books. Hearing the conversations among the condemned helps one address the question, "How could the Jews be persuaded to do this to their own people?" Indeed, the question becomes more personal: "What would you do, or not do, to prolong your life, or the lives of your family members, by a few weeks?" The groups of volunteers assigned to these activities were given special privileges within the concentration camp, then executed at the end of four months. All this was known in advance. Out of thirteen such groups at Birkenau, one attempted a rebellion. Women volunteers working in munitions factories managed to smuggle powder back to the concentration camp to fabricate rudimentary bombs to incapacitate the crematoria. When the Germans got wind of the plot, they tortured the leaders and, when they refused to cooperate, made them watch as innocent members of their camp were executed, one by one.

All this we see on the screen. The film, shot in colour, depicts a world of grey, dominated by the dust of the ashes of cremated bodies. Moral questions in such a nightmare world become twisted and confused, yet the participants wrestle with them daily for the rest of their shortened lives. Those who have seen the remains of concentration camps, either in person or in films such as "Shoah," know the chilling effect such images carry. The images from "The Grey Zone" close the gap between the imagined and the actual.

I stopped going to horror movies about the time that Freddie Kruger appeared on the scene. I didn't mind being frightened but didn't enjoy being disgusted. I have no objections to sudden screams, but I have no taste for sudden disembowelment or blood and viscera flying about the screen. So I've taken a pass on a whole generation of scary movies.

Now comes "The Grudge," a glorious throwback to the days of the classic horror story, but thoroughly up-dated in its details. After you watch a particular video, the telephone rings and a child's voice informs you that you have seven days to live. Then you die a horrible death.

Films like this, if they play by the rules, follow one of two paths. In one case, someone insists that there has to be a rational explanation for all the weird stuff that's happening in the movie. In the other case, supernatural forces are recognized pretty much from the outset, classically the malcontent spirit of someone who has died badly. So it is in "The Grudge," though it takes most of the movie to untangle the tale.

The filmmaker puts the audience off balance from the start, and misses no opportunity to terrify the viewers, but plays within the context of the story: there are no sudden manufactured shockers just for the sake of a few shivers. Instead the plot, the music, the slightly off aspect of the settings, work their subtle magic on our senses so that the surprise turn at the end threatens to ruin our sleep. A fine new member of the genre.

The Turing Test, named after the late British mathematician, requires a subject to determine, through a finite number of questions, whether he or she is talking to a human being or to a computer. Such a test takes place midway through “Half Life,” where the subject tricks the computer by showing that it can remember a patternless telephone number, heard once, that a human being would probably have forgotten. Forgetfulness, according to the play, is an essential part of the human condition. Our ability to forget helps us to maintain our sanity.

The play takes place in a residence for seniors, where two elderly guests are surrounded by a host of comic characters: a well-intentioned, intrusive nurse; a crabby old lady; a chaplain who manages to convey a sense of gloom with every apothegm. The man and woman have fallen in love and wish to marry, but the woman’s son, who holds a power of attorney, refuses to permit it. To be sure, she does seem a bit dotty, and has difficulty concentrating in the present moment (as we see in an amusing episode involving a game of cards), but her affection for the old man is genuine.

The dialogue keeps us laughing almost throughout the ninety minutes of the play’s duration. Only afterwards can we reflect on the fundamental sadness of the situation, as forgetfulness eventually swallows up personality. This is a beautifully-acted production of a clever, provocative play.

It’s hard to resist the energy of this film, in which Nikki Blonski plays Tracy Turnblad, a high school student with the build of a small truck and an intense desire to dance. Black students in a detention hall oddly bereft of adult supervision teach her cool moves that enable her to compete for a place on the Corny Collins TV show, but the most touching dance takes place between John Travolta, appearing in drag as Tracy’s mom, and Christopher Walken, no mean hoofer, playing her dad. Michelle Pfeiffer gives an over-the-top performance as a racist stage mom and Queen Latifah impresses both as a hostess of “Negro Day” and as leader of a street demonstration against the television station’s segregationist policies.

The film poses the conceit of equating racism with, well, bodyism, a reasonably harmless anachronism. What bothered me is the presentation of Sixties idealism by black dancers who clearly have never seen a day of unemployment. The United States can point with pride to the first presidential candidacy by a black man, but meanwhile knowing that the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department has been diverted from fighting racism to contesting imagined threats to religious freedom and that the U.S. Supreme Court has begun rolling back decades of decisions in favour of civil rights makes it painful to watch naïve predictions of racial equality.

At the beginning of a film you enter into a kind of contract with the director in which you agree to accept his premises and he agrees to present more or less the kind of film you’re expecting. A director departs from these tacit conditions only under special conditions, for example, partway through the story we may learn that the original premises were but a subset of more complete premises (classically in mysteries, we get a deepened or changed identity, as in “North by Northwest,” where we discover George Kaplan to be only a non-existent decoy). The switch takes us by surprise (as intended) but we accept the change as consistent with the original premises, and move on. Now “Hancock” has an intriguing initial premise: a bum with super-powers and an anger management problem. (We also have to suspend our disbelief about certain laws of physics, which seem to be selectively observed in the film.) Hancock saves the life of a PR agent who, determined to repay the debt, tries to redeem Hancock’s abysmal public image. All goes well for a time, for the audience as well as for Hancock, as we find ourselves engaged by this off-beat super-hero movie. Then comes the switch, followed by apparently improvised premises about the peculiarly interconnected natures of super-heroes that left me frustrated and discontent. Even comic books are supposed to play by some kind of rules. Just making it up as you go along doesn’t make for a satisfying cinematic experience (despite Will Smith’s best efforts in the lead role).

Even more distasteful than obvious evil is the perversion of good. Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel resonates with biblical phrases cruelly twisted. Poul Ruders’ operatic adaptation gives musical expression to these distorted formulas. Repeatedly we hear the handmaids sing a kind of Gregorian chant to recount the biblical words: "Rachel said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. … Behold my handmaid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her." [Genesis 30: 1-4]

In Attwood’s story a series of natural disasters, including the explosion of nuclear power plants followed by the spread of cancer and infertility, lead to political instability culminating in the assassination of the President and the machine-gunning of the entire Congress. A fundamentalist Christian faction seizes power and changes the country’s name to Gilead. Women are forbidden to hold jobs or to read and write. Those of reproductive age are forced into prison/hospitals; older ones are sent to the Colonies to die cleaning up radioactive waste.

Acts of violence against woman are always abhorrent, but faceless, institutionalized violence feels even more offensive than the personal acts of individual men. We see soldiers seize fleeing women, separate mothers from daughters and serve as jailers. In the opera, the monthly ceremony of copulation for procreation, a ritual carried out graphically and impersonally onstage, is accompanied by the music of "Amazing Grace." At one point the Commander takes a young girl to an off-limits party, with the orchestra performing a kind of demented jazz. An imaginative set and lighting design, along with dehumanizing colour-coded costumes, have a disorienting effect, but make it easy to understand the flashbacks, where the sight of people in twentieth-century garb give us a feeling of nostalgia even as we witness their panic and desperation. We see traitorous women hanged and watch the handmaids kick a traitorous guard to death. This is not an opera for the faint of heart but there is no denying its creativity and force.

For a few brief moments, the sheer technical wizardry of the computer-assisted animation held my attention. This is really impressive work. Of course, technique has to serve substance and this is where the movie lost me. Many people will enjoy this film, especially those who like the idea of watching hundreds, yea, thousands of penguins dancing to favourite songs of the 70’s. Others, captivated by the notion of Nicole Kidman, Elijah Wood and Hugh Jackman supplying voices for the flightless birds will also find much to admire. As for me, I’d suggesting locating the DVD for “March of the Penguins.”

Michael Caine delivers a memorable performance as Harry Brown, a widower and retired military officer living in an English housing project, who turns vigilante after teenage thugs kill his sole companion, drinking buddy and chess partner. The police, with the exception of a perspicuous woman detective, appear robotically stupid, as do the young hoodlums. But Caine inhabits the character so thoroughly that you’re only aware of Harry, not of Sir Michael. In one beautiful scene the passage of a cavalcade of black vehicles, on their way to some well-attended obsequies, reveals Harry Brown as the sole mourner of his slain friend. Caine observes in an interview that he came out of just this kind of housing project and he deplores the simplistic attitude of “cleaning up” the estates rather than actually dealing with the young people who constitute “the problem.”

isn't a great film, but it is a wonderful film, in the strictest sense of the word, and there's certainly a need for that once in awhile. What a pleasure to see that they "got it right" in virtually every detail: Hogwarts Castle, Diagon Alley, the Quidditch Match (my mental image had been rather more deliberate, but then I wasn't raised on video games), Hagrid, Professor Dumbledore. (Both Robby Coltrane and Richard Harris had hesitated at accepting these roles until their nieces and granddaughters had explained the consequences of refusing.) Adriana especially liked the perilous chess match and the character of Hermione, and I heartily support her judgment. (We didn't get to see the movie together, as it happened--she got to go on opening night with a birthday party.) As for the critics' objections (too much like the book, not enough visible minorities, Quidditch match incomprehensible)--I say piffle. Our only quibble was that "he who must not be named" was not nearly as frightening as our mental picture had been. But everybody in the film, which employed virtually every character actor available in England, seemed to be having a jolly good time. You will, too.

I know someone who regards the world as a hostile place peopled by the incompetent, the malicious, the manipulative and the stupid, and each passing decade of experience further confirms her perspective. I believe the world to be a joyful, hospitable place and my fellow dwellers therein to be, in the main, helpful, decent and well-intentioned, a belief that my experience reinforces. Same world, different world views.

As we read through the four volumes of Harry Potter's adventures, I asked Adriana whether it bothered her that Harry always seemed to be either in academic trouble or mortal peril. She didn't find anything unusual about this. She's too young to articulate a world view but I suspect it would be rather different from my own.

Millions of kids Adriana's age have stormed movie theatres this weekend for the latest film version of J.K.Rowling's incredibly successful books. The first film filled me with delight as set and costumer designers with a visual imagination superior to my own brought the wizardly world of Hogwarts Academy into sharp focus. I didn't feel any such elation after the second installment. To be sure, there was a special poignancy in watching Richard Harris portray Albus Dumbledore for the last time, and a good deal of comic relief in Kenneth Branagh's star turn as Gilderoy Lockhart, Hogwarts' new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, but my pleasure in watching Hermione mend Harry's glasses with a well-chosen incantation was overshadowed by my dismay at the depiction of the Whomping Willow's attack on Harry and Ron in their flying car. I guess it's all there in the text, but even in reading the words aloud to my daughter I hadn't really absorbed the image of a car roof compressed around its passengers or a branch smashing through the windshield nearly impaling them. The sheer nastiness of Harry's Muggle father, the malevolence of Draco Malfoy, and the vicious racism of his father Lucius Malfoy, quite aside from the necessary antagonist Lord Voldemort, create such an oppressive atmosphere for Harry that I found the experience of sharing his strange life for three hours not a particularly pleasant one.

Years of experience with administrative amphigory perhaps makes me particularly sensitive to the latest threat to Hogwarts Academy: the Ministry of Magic has appointed a new professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts who, refusing to countenance the possibility of Voldemort’s return, confines her teaching to a theoretical approach to the subject. When Harry Potter, fully cognizant of the threat of Him Who Must Not Be Named, tries to carry on clandestine classes of a more practical nature, the professor issues a series of ever more restrictive injunctions on student activities. Imelda Staunton, whose pink dress clashes subversively with the traditional black robes of the Hogwarts wizards, maintains a fixed smile as she carries out her skulduggery. At least one teenaged viewer found it profoundly disturbing that teenaged truth-tellers should be dismissed by their elders. School life has never been harder for Harry, and a bleak tone covers the movie, with only a moment’s grace for the hero’s first kiss.

My first impression on seeing the first Harry Potter movie was that everything was exactly as I had imagined it, an unconscious act of self-flattery. This time I was struck by how much the young actors had grown up. Fourteen-year-olds can get into worse trouble than ten-year-olds, but also show more maturity. I was impressed by the common truths of human life that author J.K. Rowlands exposes in the uncommon environment of an academy of witchcraft. Draco Malfoy has turned into a more frightening bully now that he is physically bigger than Harry. When Malfoy teases an animal, which then turns on him, his influential father moves to have the animal destroyed. At the same time, in this film I had a better appreciation for Malfoy’s animus toward a classmate who constantly receives his teachers’ approbation.

In this episode Rowlands experiments with time travel, not the simple voyeuristic visits to an earlier age but the intricately-plotted maneuverings in which you see yourself, a couple of hours earlier. (Hermoine, distracted, exclaims, "Does my hair really look like that from the back?", the first acknowledgement I can recall that Hermoine even has a gender.) We see some new faces: Emma Thompson, in thick glasses, portrays the abstrait Professor Trelawney, the divination teacher. We get a too-brief walk-on by Julie Christie, of all people. Alan Rickman continues to be a most unsettling Professor Snape and Robbie Coltrane conveys genuine affection for his pet hippogriff, a winged horse with a bird’s head who takes Harry on a soaring ride that manages to recover anew the thrill of flying, a feat which other films have treated as a cliché. Sirius Black, the eponymous prisoner, has a dramatic impact both in human form and as a giant dog, but I found Prof. Lupin’s alter ego as a werewolf disappointing.

There has been talk of replacing Harry, Hermoine and Ron in coming films because they’ve gotten "too old." That would be a real mistake, it seems to me. An appreciation of these characters as they mature has been something the films have added to the books. In the current movie Harry has become a young teenager and in the obligatory opening scene with his loathsome Muggles family, unable to submit humbly as his foster aunt slanders his parents, he turns her into a balloon which then floats away, thereby giving enormous satisfaction to members of the audience of all ages who wish they had similar powers in comparable circumstances.

Even if you don’t care much for football, you should try to see this film (preferably as I did in a very large audience). 1968 saw active contention on numerous important issues, notably the civil rights movement and the war in Viet Nam, both of which provoked student activism in campuses across the United States. Harvard University witnessed the presence of outside police officers on Harvard Yard for the first time in its history. Against this backdrop came what Ivy Leaguers refer to as The Game, the annual match between Harvard and Yale, in 1968 culminating undefeated seasons for both teams, the first time this had occurred since 1909. Yale had Brian Dowling (the model for B.D. in Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury strip), Calvin Hill who went on to a celebrated career in the NFL, and an outstanding coach. Harvard had grit and determination but was scoreless, down by three touchdowns at the end of the first half. The director interviews players from both teams, including actor Tommy Lee Jones, roommate of Al Gore at Harvard, and Mike Bouscaren, the “heavy” from Yale, whose appearance on-screen eventually provoked laughter from the audience as he candidly admitted various offenses, including his late face-masking of the Harvard quarterback in an effort to put him out of the game. Even when the title reveals the final score, you have trouble believing the actual game footage that left everybody in the theatre rooting for Harvard, down by 16 points with three minutes to play.

When Polish film director Krzysztof Kieslowski died, he left a legacy of memorable films, including a trilogy entitled "Red", "White" and "Blue" in which colour blended hauntingly with structure and story. He also left the screenplay for the first in another projected trilogy. Realizing this project might be considered a task for the daring or the foolish, yet his colleague Tom Tykwer has produced a film in every way worthy of the master.

A teacher, attempting to end the life of a drug lord, inadvertently causes the death of several innocent people. The bulk of the film portrays her flight, assisted by a policeman who has fallen in love with her. Several friends and family members put loyalty ahead of justice to aid the fugitives.

Is heaven a final escape from earthly travail? The camera suggests that it may be, with repeated aerial shots in which human concerns disappear within a larger, more placid landscape. Midway through the film, a sustained shot of the end of a tunnel, seen from the train, presages a note of hopefulness. Toward the end, on their last evening together, the protagonists come together on a hilltop in the most romantic image I have ever seen on the screen, culminating a union that began with the coincidence of names (Filippo and Philippa) and enhanced by their identical haircuts and attire.

At the beginning of the film, as Filippo operates a flight simulator, his instructor tells him," You can't just take a helicopter higher and higher." "How high can you go?" Filippo demands. The answer comes in the final shot, viewed from the ground, as the helicopter rises higher and higher and finally vanishes. This is a film for cineastes to savor.

David Mamet's fascination with the artistry of the con, subject of "House of Games" and "The Spanish Prisoner," receives an exuberant, virtuoso treatment in "Heist." Compelled by Danny deVito to take on a cocky young assistant in the theft of Swiss gold, Gene Hackman and his gang spend most of the film pulling the wool over the young man's eyes. Hackman gives one of the best performances of his career, settling into "Mamet-speak" as if he'd been doing it for years. If you listen carefully, you'll hear him inflect the lines a little bit differently when he's lying. The real subject of the film is the relationship between Hackman and his partners, so that we feel chilled when, at the end of the film, we recall Hackman's words "Gold makes the world go round." "I thought that was love," one partner objects. "Love of gold," comes the answer. So perhaps we've been conned, too.

This play offers a theatrical tour de force: our imaginations, harnessed by the playwright, turn a tiny stage into an unnamed mid-East city. We feel its heat, traverse its scenes of war-destroyed buildings, reconstruction, and tiny back alleys. We feel the press of crowds, the frenzy of traffic; we visualize the columns of a ruined temple by the sea. Two skilled actors conduct us through this world, one a woman visitor from an unnamed Scandinavian country, the other a man who plays a variety of roles--taxi driver, building foreman, merchant, mourning mother. Yet the brilliance of staging and acting cannot overcome the play's inherent weaknesses--a preachiness about the injustice of inequality in the world and a manipulation of the audience through revelations meant to impress us with sudden transitions from the superficial to the profound. You're just not supposed to notice the mechanics of a play while you’re seeing it, and its message shouldn't come across as a sermon. (As Billy Wilder once observed about the movies, "If you have to send a message, call Western Union.")

Another movie about a comic-book hero—and a monster, yet. No thanks, I thought. Then the New York Times gave the film its highest rating (one star), likewise the Toronto Star (four stars), and I thought maybe I should see it. The film opens splendidly in 1944. The Nazis, their backs against the wall, have turned to the paranormal, and during a brief opening of the gateway to the Other Side, a tiny devil-like creature appears. The Allies manage to shut the gateway and then adopt the little critter, which they call Hellboy. Visions of the future as imagined in the 1940’s have a quaint charm—gadgets with enormous vacuum tubes, for example—a charm that consistently permeates Terry Gilliam’s classic "Brazil." Alas, "Hellboy" moves to the present and, with the exception of a few lovely moments—the red Hellboy against the black-and-white of a Russian cemetery; a sea of black umbrellas at a funeral, evoking Hitchcock’s famous shot in "Foreign Correspondent"; a subterranean pathway to doom borrowed from the "Indiana Jones" movies—the film falls victim to the clichés of the genre: good monster versus evil monster with humans as helpless spectators. The efforts to make the monster lovable seem to backfire. Perhaps we’ve just heard this theme too many times before, in "Shrek" or "Monsters, Inc.," for example, but the subplot devoted to the question of who will get the girl—the engaging young FBI agent or the horned monster—just seems embarrassing. Dyed-in the-wool comic-book movie fans may enjoy "Hellboy." If not, "Spiderman II" comes to the silver screen this summer.

At intermission, I said the play was about love; a companion said it was about consumerism. She turned out to be right. This brittle, brilliant musical assaults the audience with a torrent of words describing Yuppie life, but words wickedly bent to leave you laughing aloud at the satire. In the midst of a milieu devoted to marketing consumer goods, a young couple meet and fall in love. The sentimental among us at intermission see the triumph of love over materialism. But in the second act, their baby, ridiculously small, does not thrive and eventually disappears and the young woman, never quite in tune with this world, finally commits suicide via a most trendy piece of jewellery, a tiny pendant full of poison (including just enough morphine to prevent pain). It sounds grim, but the mordant wit keeps you laughing until the end. As a side note, I might mention that the instrumental accompaniment comes from a machine capable of the most elegant fakery, the perfect medium for a musical dedicated to the culture of the ersatz.

Just as the Beatles’ "Sgt. Pepper" album made a lot of musicians take a more serious look at rock music, so "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" attracted viewers who would never previously have considered watching a martial arts film (much less a film with subtitles). "Hero" is an extraordinarily beautiful film, not only for its remarkable photography but also for its willingness to take myth seriously. In English, we say "the pen is mightier than the sword" quite casually. You’ll never think of that epigram the same way after seeing "Hero," in which one warrior analyzes another’s pictogram in order to discern his fighting style, and in which the aged head of a calligraphy school invokes the magical powers of calligraphy to ward off a dead attack of arrows. You’ll never forget a duel between two women in which whirling balletic movements conjure turbulent storms of autumn leaves, nor a duel between two men skimming the surface of a lake.

The narrative structure recalls "Rashomon" or "The Usual Suspects." A Qun warrior approaches the emperor to explain how he has dispatched the emperor’s three most feared enemies. The emperor listens impassively and then tells what he thinks really happened, with a dramatic use of colour distinguishing the two accounts. A lovely musical score supports the film, including some instrumental music performed as part of the action, and the majestic pacing contrasts slow, vast crowd scenes with mercurial, intimate duels. If any of these words touch you, don’t miss this film, whose visual splendor goes well beyond the power of my words to capture.

Anyone who enjoyed Douglas Adams’ book won’t want to miss this movie. I suppose the film won’t be to everyone’s taste—it’s been described as a cross between “Star Wars” and Monty Python—but it would be a shame to overlook one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. Everything works: the tongue-in-cheek humour, the special effects, the well-balanced ensemble cast: Arthur Dent, the bewildered earthling who bumbles through the entire film in a bathrobe; the suave Ford, who guides and instructs Arthur in the ways of the galaxy; the outrageous Zaphrod Beetlebrox (president of the galaxy), who combines amazing charisma with alarming stupidity (and whose intonations and gestures suspiciously evoke George W. Bush), the spunky Trish/Trillium, who gets to deliver the single best line of the movie with reference to a powerful gun which makes an enemy understand your point of view. And how could I forget the manic/depressive robot Marvin (a kind of 21^st-century Eeyore), or the terrifying Vogons, British bureaucrats blown up to obscene proportions, who torture their prisoners by reading them the third worst poetry in the galaxy, or the talking on-board computer who cheerfully announces that thermonuclear missiles have locked onto the ship.

All the most important details from the book have been lovingly preserved on the screen, starting with a production number, over the opening credits, of dolphins performing “So long, and thanks for all the fish,” and ending with a visit to the “spare Earth,” preserved in the department of custom planet design. I hope I’ve offered enough detail so that those who think this sounds unbelievably stupid will be warned away. As you can tell, I loved it. Patti says she hasn’t known anyone else who laughs aloud at the movies. I had a terrific time and hope you will, too.

Those with old-fashioned ideas about "The Disney Version" may want to think twice about taking the young ones to see "Holes," Disney’s exceedingly faithful film rendition of Louis Sachar’s award-winning novel about young boys trapped in a detention centre in the middle of the desert and compelled each day to dig a hole five feet deep and five feet in diameter, under the supervision of a sadistic foreman and maniacal camp director.

Stanley Yelnats, caught in a junior Kafkaesque plight, arrives at the camp to discover that the inmates have their own system of injustice. Up to this point, Yelnats has accepted whatever misfortune or indignity befalls him as the inevitable working out of a family curse, but when his friend Zero runs away, Yelnats takes off after him.

The contemporary drama is interwoven with an earlier legend of injustice, a schoolteacher who turns into a murderous bank robber when a local lynch mob kills the black man whom she has befriended. In fact, Adriana considers "Kissing Kate Barlow" (played by Patricia Arquette) to be the only attractive adult in the film. Jon Voight and Sigourney Weaver obviously enjoy playing villains (you can almost hear the director saying, "Okay, do it again, but this time make it nastier"), but the film belongs to the previously unknown boys who play the inmates in the camp, and particularly to the interracial friendship between Stanley and Zero which replicates that of the schoolteacher and handyman of the century previous.

Unlike most films intended for children, this story pulls no punches and sidesteps every opportunity for cuteness or mitigation. The New York Times calls it the best film to come out of a major American studio this year and I find no reason to disagree.

For years I would eagerly anticipate Woody Allen's annual film and leave the theatre happy to be a fan of such an intelligent movie-maker. In recent years it's been more difficult to keep the faith but I still went to "Hollywood Ending" hoping for wit and charm and left in disappointment and regret. Allen starts with the idea of an over-the-hill director, struck with pathological blindness just when he finally gets to work on a major film, who must somehow prevent the producers and actors from learning of his condition. The premise might work as a short story but turns out to be surprisingly lame as the basis for a movie. From the start, the actors seem to be speaking lines, an artificiality you'd accept if the lines were funny, but Woody Allen's fabled humor as a stand-up comic seems to have failed him here. Aside from a few moments of really good physical comedy the film left me cold, and I even had to agree with reviewers who felt uncomfortable seeing the 66-year-old Allen kissing the comely young leading actress. Ah well, we'll always have "Manhattan" and "Annie Hall."

Fans of Harrison Ford will want to catch him in "Hollywood Homicide," in which he plays a police detective who dabbles in real estate on the side. (Those who detest cell phones will have ample cause for irritation or amusement.) Ford manages to remain laid back in a film which seems to want to pack every cliché into one movie: the car chases go on too long, too many police cars fly into the air, the Internal Affairs investigation of Ford and his partner seems too heavy-handed. But Ford’s ironic stance allows us to take these excesses in stride. His partner, a would-be actor with a sideline as a yoga instructor, seems to have studied the mannerisms of Tommy Lee Jones in detail. One could do worse. The plot, for once, doesn’t revolve around drug dealers. This time we’re talking about bad vibes in the music industry. Ford started his career in American Graffiti and I guess I date myself by saying that I preferred the rock music in that film to the rap music that accompanies this one. But this movie is

something worth seeing while we wait for Ford to team up with Sean Connery again in the next Indiana Jones installment.

Okay, I was warned. But I’ve always harboured a secret admiration for Bruce Willis and I figured, how bad can it be? Here’s the deal: a Los Angeles hostage negotiator quits the force and moves to a small town after a situation goes bad and a little boy and his mother are killed. Then three local yahoos, one of them a truly bad dude, take offense when a local teenager gives them the finger. They follow her to her fortress home, take her hostage, along with her father and brother, realize they’re in big trouble, and call for a helicopter to exchange their freedom for the release of the family. But it turns out that the dad is an accountant for an unnamed mob, who takes the Willis character’s wife and daughter hostage to insure his cooperation. Everybody still with me? With the situation escalating beyond the capability of the tiny local police force, the county police come in and soon the fortress home is surrounded by sharpshooters, SWAT teams, ambulances, television cameras, and what-all. The two brother yahoos try to negotiate their way out but the truly bad dude has another plan, “Burn it.” The room burns, the house burns, the town burns, the whole world burns. No wait, I’m getting it mixed up with Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung.” All I know is, there are an awful lot of flames. The truly bad dude comes into the living room and confronts the disarmed Bruce Willis, along with the brother and sister, with two Molotov cocktails. He hurls one into a corner of the room and more flames erupt. He’s about to throw the other at the helpless trio when the camera catches the girl with a wet towel over her head and holds the shot until even the slowest member of the audience catches on: she’s a Madonna figure! The truly bad dude, whose sole pleasure in life up to this point has been watching people die, just can’t burn the mother of our Lord. Instead, he raises his hand in a self-sacrificial gesture and consummates his own immolation. But wait: the story can’t be over yet. We still have to rescue the Bruce Willis family. If you’ve managed to sit through the film to this point, I wouldn’t want to give away the surprise ending. I’d give this film the standard SAC Film Society rating: “We’ve seen worse.”

In 1929 several women in a small Hungarian village were convicted of murdering their husbands. This documentary interviews their descendants to expose a story at once sad and funny. The village midwife appears to be have the first to discover the possibility of removing arsenic from flypaper as a source of poison. Two months of arsenic, always in small quantities, seemed to be sufficient to dispatch an adult male. Although only a handful of women were convicted, 140 men in the village lost their lives to the method. One interviewee complained about the unfairness of singling out their village, because the same thing took place in half a dozen other villages.

How did such a thing happen? During this period women endured arranged marriages, frequently to men they could not abide. In the absence of any other diversion, the men drank, usually heavily, and abused their wives both by beating them and by rendering themselves incapable of doing any work. The women seized arsenic as relatively easy relief from an intolerable existence. From time to time during the film we see folk dancing by women, partnering each other in the absence of men—a colourful metaphor for the old scandal.

When the government of a small Romanian town exercises its power of eminent domain, inhabitants have to leave their houses so that lakeside apartment buildings can be constructed on the site. All go peaceably except for one old man, Moszny, who grazes his cattle on a small piece of public ground between the two sections of the development, and leads the cows every day past the apartment buildings toward a makeshift barn and shack he has constructed. The incongruity of cows grazing beside sunbathers with large construction machinery in the background, produces an amusing sight, while the stubbornness of one individual who won’t surrender to the system arouses mixed feeling of admiration and perplexity: surely he must know that he cannot get away with it indefinitely. But humanity resides with the old man (accompanied by cows and dogs), not with the machinery or the nondescript buildings.

125 women (virtually the entire village) participate in a project of producing hand-knit socks for the European Union. 78 minutes may seem a bit long for a movie about socks, but many incidental details contribute additional interest: a great stork’s nest atop a chimney, deep springtime mud in roads used by cattle as well as people, the communal interaction of women in a village whose men have been unemployed since the state-owned farm was shut down, and the evident bleakness of village life relieved by harnessing traditional craft to the demands of a modern market.

Two developmentally handicapped, verbally articulate, young people on a date try to imitate what they have observed in other dating couples— what they should eat, what they should talk about, the proper progression from dating to marriage—all in a quirky and charming nine-minute documentary.

A man who has very gradually lost his sight over fifteen years makes an excursion to Germany to hear a chord change in a strange composition by John Cage whose execution time exceeds six hundred years. The man’s ability to retain his sense of humour under these circumstances delights and dismays. (The man, appearing with the director at the Q&A following the screening, evinced these same qualities in person.) One keeps wondering how the documentary could have been made, and the director described the vilification he received from German citizens who regarded the filmmaker as inhumane as he carried out his task behind the camera. Phrases such as “triumph of the human spirit” get bandied about easily these days, but I found this film to be a thoroughly positive experience.

A marriage of sixty-five years is threatened when a man decides, over his wife’s objections, to hang a hideous pattern of flowers and birds as wallpaper for a “feature wall.” This film stretches the notion of documentary a bit, as the original participants necessarily had to recreate the incident for the filmmaker, but the good humour underlying their long relationship turns this small Swedish vignette into a memorable experience.

A huge audience gathered to see this filmed record of the collaboration between the Beatles corporation and the Cirque du Soleil. Ex-Beatles producer George Martin plays a starring role, along with his son and Cirque director Domenic Champagne shows admirable restraint in dealing with the intrusive, self-serving antics of Yoko Ono. After seeing the documentary, the album “Love” (the soundtrack for the Cirque du Soleil production of that name) makes a lot more sense.

A strange kind of documentary in which the subject, an independent filmmaker, continually insists on drawing the documentary filmmaker into the film. The subject originally intended to show how his family invented “fast food” well before McDonald’s, but the whole process goes awry, as we see in this engaging, quirky film.

Nelson Mandela has said that we measure a society by how it treats its children. “Rough Aunties” shows how a group of white and black South African women, collectively called Bobbi Bear, have taken up the cause of abused children:

· A special needs teenager, unschooled, who has essentially been raped her entire life;

· A girl, frightened because her rapist, living next door, has been released after a bribe paid to the police;

· A mother, distraught at the drowning death of her young son in a river now full of deep pits after illegal removal of sand by an industrial firm.

The women who make up Bobbi Bear, showing amazing commitment to their cause and to their common bond, take on hospitals, corrupt police forces, inept social workers (who send victims back to their abusers), and negligent parents. Despite the enormity of the problem of child abuse, the film offers a measure of hope.

Perhaps because I’ve been affected by the story of the American Revolution since an early age, I’m reluctant to accept the notion that ruthless military might can always crush a rebellion. The military junta in Burma, maintaining an unrelenting hold on the country, has put down rebellions in 1988 and 2007, and even prevented the distribution of humanitarian aid after the typhoons there. Only sending images to the outside gives hope that change may take place. (The director of the film, in response to my question, said that change would have to come from Beijing.)

This documentary consists of frantic footage taken surreptitiously with hand-held cameras by members of the DVB (Democratic Voice of Burma), filming the methodical suppression of the uprising led by Buddhist monks. A sobering film.

Two neighbours in the Danish province of Jutland have not exchanged words in twenty years but have built a huge double hedge between their properties, with a nine-foot-wide no-man’s land between the barriers. The son of the one of the men, an inquisitive filmmaker, delves into the mystery of the disagreement, interviewing both men in an effort to understand their alienation.

A young Iranian lad who has lost his mother is treated harshly by his father, who requires him to take the role of an adult cowherd. We see the boy through the cycle of an entire year as he must undertake tasks at the limits of his physical strength, dealing with the physical demands of tending the herd in all kinds of weather and feeding himself, along with the psychological burden of intense loneliness. The filmmaker tries to alleviate the harsh reality of the boy’s life through a poetic use of the camera, fulfilling one of cinema’s basic obligations: compelling, memorable images. The film earned a UNESCO award for “outstanding contribution to the promotion and preservation of cultural diversity through film.” Unfortunately, the director explained in the Q&A following the screening, he has not been able to do anything to ease the boy’s plight, and it seems likely that the boy will never even see the film.

The construction of the Berlin wall created a wide swath of land in which rabbits were free to eat, frolic and procreate without predators. This documentary offers a rabbit’s-eye perspective of the Cold War, its humour at times a bit arch but mostly charming. In retrospect one realizes that the bulk of the film had to be assembled from archival rabbit footage, surely a challenge for the filmmaker.

Actor Morgan Freeman comes from the tiny town of Charleston, Mississippi. Although the U.S. Supreme Court declared an end to segregation in American school in 1954, Charleston didn’t get around to integrating its schools until 1970. And even after the town’s only high school was integrated, it still held two graduation proms, one for whites, and one for blacks. In 2003 Freeman offered to pay for an integrated prom and was turned down. In 2008 he tried again. The senior class said it would be happy with an integrated prom but that the school board and the parents wouldn’t stand for it. After some negotiation the class was allowed to take Freeman up on his offer. I guess one shouldn’t have been surprised that a number of parents organized a whites-only prom of their own (not many attended), and hired a lawyer to prevent the documentary film-makers from coming anywhere near the site, or attempting to interview any of the parents involved. The filmmakers got plenty of information from the students, who talked about how their parents discouraged interracial friendships (let alone interracial dating). But the event came off, and as portrayed on film it was a joyous, as well as historic, occasion. In the Q&A the director said that the school had just held its second interracial prom, so it sounds as if the new tradition has been established. Morgan Freeman comes across as a man of deep feeling and striking dignity. If you get a chance to see this film, I recommend it highly.

Let me say from the start that both the New York Times and the New Yorker recommended this film, which is why I went to see it, so I’m not going to argue that it’s a bad film, only to say that I didn’t like it. Here’s the plot: a gung-ho, relatively humourless young British police officer runs up so many arrests in the city that his record makes everyone else look bad and his superiors send him to a quiet village where strange things happen but nobody in the police department seems the slightest bit concerned. When a local actor and his mistress with an annoying laugh turn up beheaded on the highway, it’s dismissed as an accident. “It could have happened to anybody.” When you see the film, you’ll say, “It’s a parody, Art.” Indeed, the film is meant to be a send-up of every cop movie you’ve seen. But how do you parody the senseless violence and excessive gunplay of cop movies? By exaggerated quantities of senseless violence and excessive gunplay. After what seemed like half an hour of continuous gunfire, I was glad to leave the theatre. Others may like it.

Every time I read The Diary of Anne Frank I watch the dates at the head of each entry and compare them with what I know about the end of World War II. “Just hold on,” I keep murmuring to the main character. “The Allies will be there soon.” Of course, the Allies do not arrive soon enough and Anne disappears into a concentration camp and death. In the case of the genocide in Rwanda, by contrast, the Allies never arrive. As Nick Nolte, the self-loathing head of the United Nations “peacekeeping” force tells the main character Paul, “Nobody’s going to help you. You’re black. You’re not even a nigger; you’re African.”

We look back at the time before World War II and judge the way our leaders turned a blind eye to reports of atrocities against the Jews and continued to ignore evidence of the concentration camps until millions had already died. The tragedy in Rwanda, by contrast, took place on our watch. In 1994 we were adults, living in a world of much faster communication than in 1940. We knew about Rwanda yet did nothing.

“Hotel Rwanda” leaves one puzzled about the rationale of the genocide. The distinction between Hutu and Tutsi seems so artificial. Members of the Tutsi were chosen by Dutch colonialists to operate a kind of feudal system in the Rwanda, with the Hutu as serfs, yet when asked to define physical characteristics that might distinguish the two groups, even members of the two groups seemed unable to give really satisfactory responses. It required inspection of internal passports to determine whether a particular person was chosen to live or die. An estimated million Tutsi’s died in the genocide while the United States and the United Nations dithered over terminology, a pattern currently being repeated in the Sudan.

Amid so much carnage, what difference can saving a few lives make? Yet we celebrate the efforts of a person who takes seriously the philosophy expressed by Helen Keller: “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.” Like the main character in “Schindler’s List,” Paul, the manager of the Mille Collines hotel in Rigala, manages to save more than 1700 lives through a combination of political acumen, resourcefulness and sheer determination. Calling in favours stored up over more than a decade, Paul buys enough time to transfer those in his care to a refugee camp and from there to safety outside the country. We admire his courage while we suffer the shame of watching United Nations personnel evacuating white people from the country then standing by as the slaughter of blacks commences. This is an important film.

I have seldom seen as rich a film as this: a strong screenplay by David Hare, powerful performances by Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman, with a fine supporting cast including Ed Harris, a musical score by Philip Glass whose repetitious motifs suit the subtle dementia portrayed here, photography centering on the expressiveness of the human face, and clever editing insistently maintaining the integrity of the dramatic structure.

The complex story interweaves three eras and locales: England in 1941 in the days leading up to Virginia Woolf’s death by suicide; Los Angeles in 1951 and New York in 2001. In order to appreciative the movie completely you need to be thoroughly familiar with Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Immediately after leaving the theatre I headed for the bookstore only to find that I had been preceded by many others in quest of enlightenment: the volume had sold out.

So bountiful a feast of acting and images made me clamour to shut down my conscious mind so that I could just absorb all the details of gesture and expression. At one point we see a moving van and a family moving out, a fleeting incidental detail and yet how appropriate for a film about departing this life. The film overflows with such details, such as the book on Picasso on Woolf’s bookcase, the New York Review of Books in the poet’s studio, the image of Meryl Streep, viewed from above as she rides an elevator to visit the poet dying of AIDS, the fragility of Julianne Moore whose very face fills us with unexplained anxiety.

Eventually the individual strands of the tapestry come together and we reluctantly watch the movie come to an end. We should be glad, I suppose, to leave off viewing exquisite pain in three different decades, but a story so hypnotically related, drawing on the full resources of cinema, makes us sad to leave this sadness. I look forward to locating a copy of Mrs. Dalloway somewhere then going back to see the film again.

Two family therapists decide to divorce after a long marriage without physical intimacy. But if they’re really done with each other why do they go to such lengths to make each other jealous by moving new lovers into the house they still share? Connections with the Estonian mob further complicate the proceedings. Black comedy leavens incredibly abusive language, at least up to a point. I found it unrealistic that such verbal cruelty could ever be forgiven, but Patti assures me from her experience as a couples counselor that people who grow up in verbally abusive situations become desensitized to vile language. Sensible ears, be warned (even if the abuse takes place in Finnish).

Suppose we take the territory over which the Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting and make it a house, say a talking house. Then let’s place an Israeli Army general and a Palestinian writer in the house and let them wrestle out their respective claims of ownership. Let’s give the general a 15-year-old son, who calls his plan for ending the centuries-old conflict the Cunnilingus Manifesto. Let’s give the writer an adolescent daughter who suffers epileptic fits when she becomes too emotional. And for good measure let’s throw in a talking camel. Playwright Jonathan Garfinkel has created a fertile basis for a play and has matched it with first-rate dialogue and ingenious dramatic development. Would that the national groups represented by these characters shared their zest for negotiation and their pragmatism in accepting its limitations. “House of Many Tongues” assists our imaginations in portraying its various locales with simple changes of lighting or the occasional projection. Like the best dramas, it requests the loan of our minds for a couple of hours and then generously rewards the effort.

Anyone who enjoyed this movie or looks forward to enjoying it should stop reading at this point. Here’s the theme: a somewhat spaced-out young woman, living in the house she inherited from her deceased father, is evicted when she fails to correct an error made by the local tax office. An Iranian army colonel, recently become an American citizen, working on a construction crew to support his family, buys the house at auction for a fraction of its value, and makes immediate improvements preparatory to selling it for a substantial profit. Now you can imagine a number of ways of treating this theme, including soap opera and ham-handed comedy. The makers of "House of Sand and Fog" have decided to go for portentous symbolism. You might appreciate the subtlety of casting Jennifer Connelly as the young woman and an Iranian actress of very similar colouring as the colonel’s wife. What you are less likely to appreciate is being beaten over the head by parallels: first the colonel and his wife make love; then the young woman and her policeman boyfriend make love; the colonel and his wife enjoy the sunset on their U-shaped widow’s walk; cut to the young woman walking to the end of a U-shaped pier. "Wow, this sounds really heavy!" you can imagine a leftover hippy exclaiming. Now swamp the scene with moody music by James Horner (of "Titanic" fame). Do you get the impression that I hated it? The saving grace came in the final ten minutes: a recorded message blared loudly through speakers within the theatre: "An event has taken place at the Charles Street entrance. Authorities are on the scene. Please stand by for further information." What were we supposed to do? The same message came on at least eight times.

If you do happen to see the film, there’s a lot to admire in the performance of Ben Kingsley as the colonel, combining military bearing and the expectation of obedience, a canny knowledge of chains of command (when the policeman boyfriend abuses his authority, the colonel gets him thrown off the force), and the traditional Middle Eastern veneration of the status of guest (the young woman keeps returning to the property, first accidentally stepping on a nail [did I forget to say that she’s always barefoot?], then attempting to commit suicide.

But the house is supposed to be a symbol, some will protest. Consider the bare cabin where the policeman and the young woman camp out—hardly a home. Consider the suburban bungalow (and wife and kids) that the policeman abandons in order to help the young woman (he bungles it badly). Everything in the picture is fraught with meaning. I can only take recourse in the reply of Miss Jean Brodie when asked for her opinion of the Boy Scouts: "For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they will generally like."

If you believe that romantic comedy is dead, if you hold the opposite sex in low esteem, if you enjoy manipulation and cruelty, if words like "trust" and "honesty" make you frown and gag and say, "Excuse me; what planet are you from?", if you can watch all the expressions and mannerisms you associate with Goldie Hawn in her daughter Kate Hudson without recognizing their source, you are probably a member of the target audience for "How to Lose a Man in Ten Days," one of the nastiest pictures I’ve seen in a long time. Don’t get me wrong, this is a skilfully made, well acted, cleverly written movie based entirely on moral premises that I reject. You’ve seen the previews: a woman writer for a magazine based on "Cosmopolitan" takes the assignment of first causing a man to fall in love with her and then causing him to dump her, by deliberately making relationship mistakes that other women make unwittingly; a male advertising executive, in order to win an important account, accepts a bet that he can make a given woman fall in love with him and declare that love within ten days. The two become each other’s targets and Cupid fires poisoned darts. The movie has much to amuse and very little to admire.

in IMAX at the Ontario Science Centre. If your experience resembles mine, your knowledge of the human body has gone through a number of different stages during your life, as new technology offered both new knowledge and new ways of presenting that knowledge. Gone are the days when a skeleton would be the basis for an anatomy lesson. Nowadays, young children can assemble "The Visible Man (or Woman)" and learn more about the human body than we probably knew in university.

The latest summary of knowledge on the subject, the IMAX presentation at the Ontario Science Centre, is a real stunner: imagine viewing red blood cells the size of basketballs, or watching a drop of water descend the esophagus as viewed from the bottom of that tube, or see a sperm cell actually transferring genetic data to the fertilized egg, or an x-ray movie of a boy riding a bicycle. The two ten-year-old girls I took to the film enjoyed it as much as I did. Highly recommended.

The writer of "Being John Malkovich" has come up with a single-joke movie whose heavy-handed execution stands in marked contrast to the quirky appeal of the earlier film. The cast, including Patricia Arquette and Tim Robbins, never seems to interact as an ensemble. Ideas which seem funny on paper (like the transfusion-drainage joke in "Catch-22") sometimes become leaden when translated to the screen. The finest scene in the movie--an attempt to use operant condition to inhibit sexuality--seems merely cruel in retrospect. A disappointing film.

Women don’t come off well in this kind of movie. They mostly serve as victims or onlookers. I mean, what’s the point of casting a woman as the chief FBI field agent in a story based on the futility of massed forces, be they FBI, local police or SWAT teams, in trying to capture a survival expert?

No, this picture belongs to two men: Benicio Del Toro, playing a trained killer, and Tommy Lee Jones, playing the man who trained him and the only one capable of finding and subduing him.

Guns prove to be ineffectual, be they assault weapons used to hunt moose or machine guns, sniper rifles or pistols directed against a wily fugitive. The weapon of choice is the knife and both hunter and hunted prove capable of manufacturing their own weapons from scratch if need be.

The movie takes the form a protracted chase on two levels, one noisy, crowded and inutile, the other solitary, silent and deadly, the latter fascinating, the former a bore. Watch Benicio Del Toro’s eyes, resourceful, cunning, ruthless. Watch Tommy Lee Jones’ posture, relaxed and at home in the wild, ill at ease indoors like an animal in captivity.

In summary, a feeble storyline, forgettable dialogue, superfluous supporting actors, but a compelling game between two well-matched adversaries.

You could read about serving in the U.S. Army’s bomb squad in Iraq; you could read about roadside bombs concealed inside abandoned automobiles or human corpses; you could read about Iraqi spectators to the defusing, perhaps innocent citizens but perhaps snipers, or that butcher with the cellphone who could be detonating the bomb as you approach. You could imagine that the spectators include insurgents studying your tactics in order to counter them in the next explosive device. But even the most graphic writing probably will not carry the visceral impact of this film, which felt to me like a documentary for nearly half its length.

A documentary probably would not explore the human interactions among members of Bravo Company when they discover that the recklessness of their new commanding officer may imperil their chances of leaving Baghdad alive when their tour of duty ends in a mere 38 days. In teenage horror movies you silently beg the protagonist not to go down into the cellar, knowing all the while that it’s only a movie. No such reassurance relieves the tension as you watch the squadron leader trying to locate the proper wire to cut, knowing that the deadly bomb represents only one source of danger. This is a remarkable film.

For fifty years Charlotte von Mahlsdorf managed to survive first the Nazi and then the Communist regimes in East Berlin, along the way maintaining an extraordinary museum of antiques from the era of the Weimar Republic in the late 19^th century, an act of historical preservation for which she was awarded a medal by the German government. She also operated a clandestine meeting-place for the city’s gay and lesbian population, groups repressed by both the Nazis and the Communists. Charlotte’s courageous survival is all the more unlikely for her being a man, living openly as a transvestite in a political atmosphere thoroughly hostile to such a person. “I Am My Own Wife” tells this story in the form of a one-man play by Doug Wright, in which the actor Stephen Ouimette speaks for both Charlotte and the newspaperman covering her story. The first half of the play establishes Charlotte’s remarkable history of survival; the second investigates the unsavoury rumours of collaboration and betrayal that ultimately drove Charlotte to move to Stockholm toward the end of her life. The success of the play depends on the remarkable acting of Stephen Ouimette on a simple set depicting Charlotte’s living room. The contents of her museum, concealed behind a scrim, are revealed from time to time by effective changes in lighting. Less effective, even intrusive, are lighting changes on the main part of the set, apparently intended to mark changes of time or place, when the text and the actor’s voice entirely suffice to make this clear. This play requires a good deal of effort on the part of the audience, but I found its demands entirely rewarding.

I love going to the movies. I love sitting in front of the giant silver screen and surrendering to the sound and the images. Okay, so often I’m disappointed, but then comes a film like "I (Heart) Huckabees" that makes me laugh with delight at sound and images combined in such deliciously unexpected ways. Not everyone is going to like this film. Quick litmus test: Did you enjoy Dustin Hoffman in "Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?" Didn’t see the film? Haven’t even heard of the film? Okay. How about "Being John Malkovich?" Do you treasure the paintings of René Magritte? Do you dig the Firesign Theatre?

If so, read on: this film is for you. A poor shmuck who writes poems in hopes of stopping a predatory Wall-Mart-like chain from bulldozing a wetlands to build a superstore finds himself troubled by the basic questions of existence: Why am I here? Does life matter? What’s it all about?

Bothered by recurring appearances of a tall Sudanese man in his life, he consults Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman, existential detectives, who espouse a philosophy that everything is connected and meaningful. (These actors, in perfect command of the rhythms of the ludicrous, hijack every scene in which they appear.) Jude Law (the cyber-gigolo in "A.I., Artificial Intelligence") and Naomoi Watts (the wide-eyed innocent from "Mulholland Drive"), both the epitome of cosmetic perfection, represent the public face of Huckabee’s, a corporation content to co-opt the tree-huggers to perfect its image. Throw into the mix Isabelle Huppert, exponent of a nihilistic philosophy of cruelty, manipulation and exploitation, Mark Wahlberg, a fireman obsessed with a hatred for the petroleum industry who rides to fires on a bicycle, and Tippi Hedren (remember Hitchcock’s "The Birds"?), whose family owned the controversial wetlands, and you have an ensemble of gifted actors completely dedicated to this outrageously loony story.

Those who like this kind of film will wriggle in joy, but as noted above, it definitely isn’t everybody’s cup of tea.

I’ve never felt so strange opening my computer as to type this review, or to see the words I type appear on the screen (as I look behind me to see if something is looking over my shoulder). Anyone who feels paranoiac about technology will feel vindicated in "I, Robot."

I’ve also never felt so much the subjectivity of writing words about movies. For this film in particular, the act seems so purely artificial: if you had a good time, you write nice words; if you didn’t, you write critical words. For the record, I had a good time. (The reviewer from The Toronto Star evidently did not.)

Basically, it’s your standard movie plot—the good guy saves the girl from forces of destruction that no one else is willing to acknowledge. The reason you’ve seen this plot so many times is that it’s a powerful way to make a movie. The fun is seeing how a particular movie handles it. So here we have Will Smith, a black man, harboring a monumental prejudice against robots. Now everyone knows robots can’t hurt humans. After all, it’s built into their operating system: Rule I: A robot cannot injure a human. Rule II: A robot must obey human instructions except when they conflict with Rule I. Rule III: A robot must protect itself except when this would conflict with the first two rules.

Individual robots carry out all the basic tasks of society in Chicago 2035. (I liked the idea that Will Smith’s grandmother would still live in an old-fashioned apartment. Too many futuristic films presuppose a blanket transformation of society. It’s much more realistic to imagine at least a few people living the old way, just as I am the only person I know who refuses to own a cell phone.) But all the robots hook up to the central operating system at U.S. Robotics. This central system, named VIKI, taking the three rules to heart, so to speak, concludes that to protect human beings means to prevent letting them damage themselves by carrying on wars, befouling the planet, etc., and that the only way to carry out this protection on a grand scale is a robot revolution. Complacent in their confidence in the three rules, the rest of humanity refuses to believe the Will Smith character, who has come to the conclusion that the death of the robots’ inventor, at the opening of the film, is not suicide but homicide. ("Robots can’t kill; it’s not in their program.") Confiding only in the inventor’s female assistant, a woman apparently totally lacking in emotion, and, against his better judgment, in a robot designied to have emotions, Will Smith, who already saved the world twice (see "Men in Black," and "Independence Day,") does the job again.

In addition to the issue of human feelings vs. robotic emotionless comes the revelation that Will Smith has a bionic arm, thanks to the inventor at U.S. Robotics. As with all films of this type, you don’t want to think too hard about the logic, but I found it an entertaining and reasonably original adventure film. But as indicated above, if you don’t like it, The Toronto Star will give you plenty of ammunition.

A cartoon in the contemporary style, with sophisticated humor to placate adults obliged to accompany their children. I liked the film's lesson that altruism can (occasionally) overcome treachery. Critics have complained that the pace of the film resembles that of the wooly mammoth who serves as its main character, and if you require things exploding in your face every ten seconds, you may concur. I enjoyed the film. Adriana liked it, but said she preferred "Monsters, Inc." You decide..

Just when you thought that all the possible changes had been rung on the theme of romantic comedy, along comes "If By Chance," a charming Italian film in which Tommaso, an advertising executive, and Stefania, a makeup artist, although not religious, decide to hold their wedding in a remote chapel. The young priest, pleased to preside over the first nuptial Mass in the chapel but concerned that the young couple has not undertaken the required marriage preparation, slyly conducts the preparation in the course of the ceremony. To say more would give away the film’s gimmick but suffice it to say that I have not seen a more ambiguous happy ending since "The Graduate."

The film offers much to delight the eye, quite aside from the story of two attractive people coming together. When pressed by the priest for an image to incorporate their goals in marriage, the couple proposes that of two skaters executing a dance on a slippery surface and the film offers us a beautiful and prolonged ice dance performed at night against a backdrop of tiny lights that evoke a pointillistic scene by Seurat.

The deterioration of the marriage is presented with as much convincing detail at the romance leading up to it, a distressing experience for the viewer who has identified so thoroughly with the participants. The arrival of a child places inevitable strains on the relationship but other marriages have survived children. At the end of the film we can appreciate that fairy tale and nightmare form parts of the same illusion and return to our own lives to wonder where we may be deceiving ourselves. The film rings true with a fidelity that only an elaborately constructed artifice can provide.

“THE ILLUSIONIST”

Pity the plight of the poor commoner who falls in love with royalty. It matters little that his love is requited; it remains hopeless. And yet. Suppose he spends more than a decade in the mysterious Orient learning the magical arts. No, we’re not talking Harry Potter wizardry here: I mean illusions, deceptions that delight the eye. Such a humble man might then become a worthy adversary for a mighty potentate, in this case the Crown Prince of Austria who intends to depose his father, marry a princess, and seize control of the mightiest empire on earth in the last generation of the 19th century. Edward Norton plays the illusionist perfectly: a man of modest demeanour but unswerving in his dedication to a single quest. His nightly performances become a thorn in the side to the prince, who commands the chief of police (played by Paul Giamatti) to do something about. “But what law has he broken?” asks the priest. “You’ll find a way,” demands the prince. “That’s what I pay you for.” The film resonates with fairy tale themes and biblical allusions. One thinks of Herodias, whose obsession with the critical preaching of John the Baptist, leads her, through her daughter Salome, to demand his head. Or Pilate, summoning Jesus, as the chief of police summons the magician, to ask, in effect, “Know ye not that I have the power of life and death over you?” The magic remains relatively understated, in the style of Ricky Jay, the professional magician engaged as a consultant for the film, but all the more effective for its lack of pretension. Midway through the movie, the illusionist warns that “things are not what they seem,” and the wary film-goer has been given due warning. Anyone who has ever been frustrated by encounters with seemingly all-powerful adversaries will find considerable satisfaction in this story, as well as anyone who admires an effort to return magic to movies without the aid of computer graphics.

“THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS”

A strangely top-heavy horse-drawn conveyance lumbers into a London square and halts. A large side panel opens to form a stage. Lights come on and we see a young man dressed as Mercury, a young woman in ballet garb, a dwarf and an old man sitting in a trance on a pedestal (Christopher Plummer), a marvelous spectacle right out of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately this is the twenty-first century and few passersby show any interest. The loss is theirs for this ramshackle carnival show includes a unique feature: anyone passing through the onstage mirror while the old man remains in a trance enters an imaginary realm tailored in some fantastic way to the mind of the traveler. Into this peculiar world comes a stranger who offers his promotional talents to update the show and thereby attract real audiences. Heath Ledger, the actor who plays the stranger, died during the production of the film, and three other actors—Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell—stepped in to complete the missing scenes. Terry Gilliam, whose cartoons enlivened the Monty Python series, directed the film and supplied the phantasmagoric landscapes of the Imaginarium. Three main plots provide a forward impetus: a long-standing contest between Dr. Parnassus and the devil (Tom Waits); a romance between the inarticulate young man and the mysterious young girl, intruded upon by the stranger; and the story of the stranger’s questionable past catching up with him. I look in vain for films with which to compare this—perhaps “Pan’s Labyrinth.” This is an extraordinary piece of film-making; don’t miss it.

Any movie version of Oscar Wilde's classic play must contend with the superb 1952 film with Michael Redgrave, Dame Edith Evans, Margaret Rutherford, and others, an unabashedly theatrical piece of cinema which even begins with the lifting of a richly brocaded curtain. The current version, which I saw in a sneak preview in which I was the youngest person in the overflow audience, takes a decidedly anti-theatrical approach to the play, embracing a delightful succession of London and country sets including a music hall, a hot air balloon and a boat ride along a stream, all the while remaining faithful to Wilde's text.

Judy Dench, of course, was born to play this kind of comedy of manners, and anyone who has seen Colin Firth can hardly doubt his suitability for thee part of Earnest Worthington, but Reese Witherspoon, having successfully thrown herself back to the Fifties in "Pleasantville," displays surprising skill with Wilde's epigrams in the role of Cecily. A delightful film.

Films depicting an adult world from a child's perspective represent a relatively rare and precious genre, stories that truly capture the way children invest ordinary events with magic or mystery. One thinks of Fellini's "Amarcord," Truffaut's "Argent de poche," Saura's "Cria cuerva," Bergman's "Fanny and Alexandra," in which children, wide-eyed but silent, take in everything and make such sense as they can out of grown-up existence. ("To Kill a Mockingbird" is the only American film I can think of in this category.)

"The Impure Glance," set in post-war Italy, has a ten-year-old boy as its protagonist. The film has the look of early movies, as if to suggest a story imperfectly remembered years after the fact. We see details in great clarity (even to the clinking sound of an aunt's false teeth being dropped into a glass for the night), but the way they fit together remains intentionally vague, conveying a child's imperfect comprehension of the world. The deliberate pace and the complete absence of sentimentality separate this fine Italian film from the view of childhood we've been trained to accept.

W.C. Fields once remarked, "Any man who hates children and dogs can’t be all bad." It would take a real curmudgeon not to be won over by "In America," the story of an Irish family coming to New York City in the hope of making a better life after the death of their young son. The two little girls in their joyfully innocent view of their new home show us that, gosh, junkies are people too. An angry black artist dying of AIDS (an Oscar-nominated performance) turns out to be a saviour in disguise, whose final suffering is mitigated by the love of the children he has befriended. Their adorable cuteness can be counted on to melt the heart of the audience, at least most of the audience. A tone of foreboding hangs over the film from its first scene, as the family is stopped at the border by U.S. customs officials. But one look at those girls and the agents’ suspicious faces melt into smiles. Later in the film the younger girl asks her sister, "What’s a transvestite?" "A man who dresses up in women’s clothes," answers the older girl. "For Halloween?" asks the younger. "No; all the time," comes the answer. "That’s just how they do it here." And can there be a dry eye in the house when the older sister bravely donates blood to save the live of her little baby sister, born prematurely, whose blue face finally turns a healthy shade just as the black artist, in another part of the same hospital, utters some magic words and breathes his last? People who enjoyed "Amelie" (another film I hated) will find a lot to give them pleasure in "In America." And afterwards perhaps they can rent "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg." But how can you be so callous? some may ask. After all, the award-winning screenplay was written by a man and his two daughters and dedicated to the memory of their little brother, who died of a brain tumor just like the little boy in the story. This isn’t just Hollywood treacle; it’s genuine, authentic treacle, even if it does expropriate the moon imagery from Spielberg’s masterpiece, "E.T", and beat you over the head with it. I say, welcome to it. As for me, I’ll side with W.C. Fields.

"In the Bedroom" refers to a lobsterman's term--three lobsters in a trap cause mayhem, especially two males and a female. [In the prologue to the film, a young man on the brink of entering university is killed by the ex-husband of the woman he's been seeing.] A tiny detail, but sometimes truth lies in the details, and I have seldom seen a film that treats its details with such care: details of scenery, such as the mechanism of a swing bridge, or the processing line of a fish cannery; details of music--simple sounds, simple chords, but always apposite; details of mourning--denial, escape into work, anger; details of relationships, oh, and here this beautiful film becomes hard to watch, because while other films may be attentive to details of scenery or music or even grief, few films ever get the details of relationships right. When a couple hasn't practiced the art of talking deeply, the relationship cannot withstand calamity, and the intermittent success of the couple on the screen at trying to connect become even more painful to witness than their failures. "In the Bedroom" reminds us that life resides in these details, every interaction that either strengthens a bond or does not. Only afterwards do you realize how skillfully Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson have portrayed their characters. Just as the camera, by dwelling on details we might otherwise overlook, allows us to appreciate them, so a film like this, by enacting scenes we otherwise might not see at all, allows us better to esteem our human condition, and grieve its imperfections. There aren't many films like this.

Al Gore says that he has probably presented his slide show on global warming more than a thousand times. It’s a compelling show with remarkable pictorial and graphic displays, presented by someone who has been privileged to make personal visits to critical areas such as the Arctic, Antarctica, and the Amazon rainforest. From time to time the film cuts away from the slide show to hear Gore muse on the campaign he has waged; my attention would have been riveted even if the camera had simply planted itself in the audience for the duration. In math classes I would show students graphs of the exponential curve, which sits quietly for what seems like an interminable period then suddenly erupts. I usually present the curve in the context of compound interest, encouraging students’ patience in investing. One of the most compelling exponential curves in the Gore presentation comes towards the end when we see how the earth’s population, essentially stagnant for ten thousand generations, has now hit the eruption phase.

After seeing the film I purchased a copy of the New York Times, which had a front page article on the world’s first carbon-free coal-fired power station, “which pales next to the eight coal-fired power stations Germany plans to build for commercial use between now and 2011—none of them carbon-free.” The Science Times for the same day explored the implications of global warming, and the accompanying rise in sea levels, on ocean-front property. Awareness of the problem is certainly rising, but chilling reality showed up on page 11, at the conclusion of an article on the politics of global warming. The paper quotes the chairman of a coalition of energy experts: “There’s a Goldilocks problems with energy issues. … Bills are usually too hot or too cold. They’re almost never just right to legislate.” As Al Gore points out, while there is no single solution to the crisis of global warming, we have the technology to bring about the eight-part solution. Unfortunately, we lack the political will. For example, today’s New York Times disclosed that the U.S. Congress is phasing out the tax credits for electric cars—it seems that the credits are benefiting non-U.S. companies. See this movie. Get your friends to see this movie. Then visit www.climatecrisis.net.

I so wanted to like this film. My heart rose at the sight of Harrison Ford in the trademark fedora and the long-awaited reappearance of Karen Allen, the retro diagram of an airplane moving across an old-fashioned map, and my heart stirred with the familiar strains of John Williams’ theme music. Alas, I proved unsuccessful in my attempt to persuade myself that this film might prove a worthy successor to the three earlier Indy films. The witty, caring interplay between Ford and Sean Connery that made the third film such a delight is conspicuously absent in the relationship between Ford and the young man who may be his son, and while Cate Blanchett makes a fine villain, the film sags under the weight of tired special effects and the absence of a decent script. What a disappointment!

Who would have thought that two filmmakers would decide, independently, to make movies about Truman Capote during the period when he wrote “In Cold Blood,” the celebrated “non-fiction novel” about the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas in the early 1960’s? “Capote” arrived on the screens first and earned an Oscar for Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose remarkable performance made audiences forget that he bore little physical resemblance to the diminutive writer, just as Anthony Hopkins made us believe his portrayal of Richard Nixon, to whom he bore little physical similarity.

Now comes a second film, likely to be overlooked as an also-ran. Toby Jones captures not only Capote’s physical persona, unearthly voice, and colossal self-absorption, but also his strange mixture of sympathy and manipulation, generosity and duplicity. The performance seems peculiarly mannered, as do those of Sigourney Weaver, Juliet Stevenson and Hope Davis, Capote’s society friends, as well as that of Sandra Bullock, playing author Harper Lee.

But the prison scenes between Capote and convicted killer Perry Miller go deep in revealing the vulnerability of both men and the way in which they use each other for professional and personal reasons. The movie suggests that Capote invested more of himself in this novel than in any of his other works and that the delay in its publication for several years, until all the appeals from the killers had been exhausted and their hanging could bring closure to the story, destroyed the writer’s creativity.

"THE INFORMANT"
When someone tells you, "Not all the statements I made earlier were completely truthful," you tend to assume that (1) most of the statements were truthful; and (2) what he's telling you now is the truth. And when a director has a character deliver an interior monologue as a voice-over, particularly when the information presented is incredibly mundane, even mindless, you tend to assume that you are getting an accurate glimpse into the mind of the character. All these assumptions turn out to be false at the hands of director Stephen Soderbergh. "The Informant!" presents a tale that you would reject out of hand as fanciful and unbelievable were it not based on an actual incident: a high official in a company offering to the FBI to go undercover in his own company in order to expose corporate misdoings and then, incredibly, embezzling the company throughout the surveillance operation. It boggles the mind. Matt Damon plays the "informant:" in question (the exclamation point in the title was borrowed from "Airplane!" which should give you a clue right off), and you've never seen a man look less like Jason Bourne, the franchise character upon which Damon has built his reputation to date. I found this film to be confusing, weird and, in a way, entertaining, which I suspect is what Soderbergh desired.

Fans of Christopher Nolan's "Memento" will find much to admire in "Insomnia": the opening plane ride across the jagged surface of Alaska; a scene of pursuit in the fog; a terrifying scene in which the Al Pacino character, unable to sleep because of the endless light of Alaska's summer, finds himself trapped under a logjam, desperately seeking the light that will bring him air; the moral question of whether the end of convicting a guilty criminal justifies the means of manufacturing evidence as the only means of gaining a conviction; the issue of what constitutes an accidental death.

But the cat-and-mouse game between Al Pacino and Robin Williams seems singularly lacking in tension; the scene in which the Al Pacino character bares his soul to a hotel barmaid seems awkward and contrived; and in general, the film lacks the tight narrative control that made "Memento" so effective. All in all, a disappointing film.

Six characters—four women and two men—create the world of the black experience in New York around 1905. Esther, an unmarried seamstress who has just turned thirty-five, begins an epistolary romance with a laborer on the Panama Canal. Despite the negative examples all around her—a rich white woman whose husband disdains her for being childless; a boarding house proprietress, widowed after a loveless marriage; a prostitute abused in various ways by the men she serves; a tailor waiting for an arranged marriage—Esther holds the dream of romantic love, and believes her dream to be fulfilled when her distant unmet friend proposes marriage and comes to New York to that end. Things do not turn out well, but the ways in which Esther tries to maintain her dignity while abasing herself in a vain attempt to hold onto her husband, create a palpable web of support from the audience. Act II contains a heartbreaking moment in which Esther tears apart a quilt to get at her life savings sewn into it. This is a remarkable play—see it if you can.

The Coen brothers’ latest opus has been compared to the screwball comedies of the 30’s, with which it shares rapid pace, improbable plot elements, and an antagonistic relationship between the male and female leads. You’ll laugh a lot in "Intolerable Cruelty," but I doubt very much whether you’ll emerge from the theatre with the satisfaction you get from seeing Hepburn & Grant in "Bringing up Baby," Gable & Lombard in "It Happened One Night," or Grant & Rosalind Russell in "His Girl Friday," just to name a few of the more memorable classic comedies. To begin with, George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones don’t have the easy mastery of the genre’s conventions, and the script, composed by four writers, lacks the consistency of the great screwball comedies. At several points, notably Clooney’s keynote address to a convention of divorce lawyers, the action simply dies embarrassingly. For a screwball comedy to work, the audience needs to like the main characters in order to be amused rather than turned off by their foibles and errors. I’ve mostly enjoyed George Clooney on the screen, but this performance in my book goes with "Solaris" into the reject bin, while I found myself wholly incapable of liking Catherine Zeta-Jones in her role.

Most of us know about Nelson Mandela’s release after thirty years in prison and his subsequent presidency of post-apartheid South Africa, and we could probably imagine the difficulties he faced in leading a country whose white minority, still holding the technological experience and wealth, hated him as a symbol of their disempowerment. How Mandela dealt with this situation remains less well-known, and the film takes a simple episode to illustrate the political adroitness of this remarkable man. The Springbok rugby team, a symbol of the old white supremacist tradition, would seem to be an unlikely source for building national unity. In addition to being almost completely white, the team was also inept on the field. Yet Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, formed an alliance with the team captain, played by Matt Damon, and found a way to use sort as a political force. As usual, Clint Eastwood creates the most powerful scenes with little or no dialogue: the team captain’s visit to Mandela’s prison cell; a sports clinic joining white rugby plays with poor black youths; a lovely humorous (and textless) series of interactions between a black boy and two white police officers; extended sequences of actual rugby-playing. Morgan Freeman sacrifices his natural physical gracefulness to portray the physically ravaged leader while Matt Damon adopts the tricky Afrikaner dialect most convincingly. Despite being bound by the conventions of a predictable outcome, Eastwood avoids clichés and infuses this inspirational story with dramatic integrity. A first-rate film.

This movie has been described as “to the American economy what ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was to the environment.” Patrick Creadon’s documentary attempts to explain the four deficits that have put the U.S.A. in such a parlous state. (The film was released well before the current economic meltdown.) The sale of American assets to foreign interests leaves the country open to the kind of financial blackmail that the U.S. itself used against Great Britain to resolve the Suez crisis. The increasing size of the national debt as a proportion of the gross national product has devastating consequences for the future. The transformation of the national mentality from “save up for it” to “charge it,” amusingly portrayed in a sequence with Steve Martin, has alarming implications. And the leadership deficit—the unwillingness of anyone in charge to face the facts and explain them frankly to the American people—gives little hope that anyone will address the problem. I won’t live to see the U.S. go bankrupt, and my daughter may not either, but after that all bets are off.

Is there anything you're uncomfortable seeing in the movies? I found myself feeling uncomfortable watching the intimate details of a relationship between English novelist Iris Murdoch and her husband philosopher John Bayley, each portrayed by two sets of actors to cover young adult and late adult life. It seemed to me that even had the details been true to fact, it wasn't proper to have actors display them, that decency dictated people being left some areas of privacy.

I didn't realize that this uncovering of private lives was merely to prepare us for a much more unsettling subject, the dementia accompanying Alzheimer's disease. I lost a friend and mentor to this disease. When I saw him a year before his death, I was shocked and saddened to find the sharp critical mind I had known replaced by a polite, benign presence. But I had no inkling of the horrible experience endured by his wife, who had to watch the daily disintegration and disappearance of the person she loved. Now I think I understand, and this isn't knowledge I really wanted to have. Judi Dench, Kate Winslet, Jim Broadbent and Hugh Bonneville give brilliant portrayals of a life's eccentricities and indignities and their effect on loved ones in a film that many viewers will find profoundly disquieting.

History teaches us (as “Iron Man” reminds us) that technological superiority can have a devastating impact on military conflict, at least until the enemy figures out how to copy it. In the Middle Ages William the Conqueror’s possession of cavalry when the English had none helped bring about his victory in the Battle of Hastings and changed the course of English history. The atomic bomb produced a Japanese surrender that might have otherwise been delayed by years. Another lesson, also illustrated in “Iron Man,” is that there will always be a traitor ready to betray secrets to the enemy. Cynics would say (and “Iron Man” would hardly be the first film to suggest) that arms manufacturers don’t really care who gets the weapons so long as business prospers. Thus we see Stark Industries demonstrating a breathtaking new weapon for the U.S. Army while a traitor supplies the same weapon to the terrorists.

Enter Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), a brilliant bastard of an inventor, a legendary “merchant of death,” who undergoes a massive change of heart after spending several weeks in captivity in terrorist hands. An ingeniously improvised escape plan leads to a commitment to rid the world of terrible weapons. (Okay, so it’s a comic book mentality, but Downey carries it off.) Gwyneth Paltrow plays his loyal personal assistant, Jeff Bridges his trusted colleague, and let’s not forget an array of robots whose “personalities” bring to mind R2D2 and C3PO. The action bits come off satisfactorily but Downey’s star power really carries the picture.

Imagine being a young boy growing up in a home for the elderly, some of whom die, others of whom linger on indefinitely in various stages of dementia. Imagine being an elderly widower, forced to reside in such a place, bitter at the circumstances that have brought him there. Though each separates himself with a wall of anger, eventually they become allies of a sort. The old man, played artfully by Michael Caine, once enjoyed modest success as The Great Clarence, a magician assisted by his wife. Now he attempts to draw the boy away from his morbid curiosity about what happens after we die. The question of the title applies most directly to the séance that the magician holds on the boy’s behalf, but could as easily refer to the semi-consciousness of the elderly inmates or the boy’s lonely situation in life. The humour remains bittersweet, including the funniest failed magic trick I’ve ever seen. Definitely a film worth seeing.

Quick. What Danish films have you seen since "Babette's Feast" (1987)? Too early in the day for such a tough question? Okay. While you're thinking about it, make plans to see "Italian For Beginners." Those who like romantic comedies will be charmed, those who don't, seduced. I should say "romantic comedy not involving teenagers," and if you're of a certain age you’ll think Meg Ryan, a few years older, Goldie Hawn or Diane Keaton, right? Now visualize the scenes and you can almost see the mike boom just above the actors' heads and the set designer putting one more appropriate object in place, right? That's romantic comedy, Hollywood style, the kind we've all gotten so used to we don't even think about it as a cliché unless it's really awful or unless we get to see something quite different, say, a Danish romantic comedy.

Now imagine a young Lutheran minister who has recently lost his wife, and tries to manage a parish despite the obstinate presence of the old minister, who has been suspended for throwing his organist off a balcony for playing the hymn wrong (happily, we don't actually see this); picture a restaurant manager who can't stop insulting his patrons, or a baker's assistant who keeps dropping the pastry. For all I know, "Italian For Beginners" may be as old hat to the Danish as "Father of the Bride, Part II" is to us, but to North-American eyes, this romantic comedy of six single adults gradually getting together is fresh and original if not in its premise--all romantic comedy has the same premise--certainly in its cinematic rhythms, the vulnerability of its characters, the tenderness with which it treats even the tiny details of human life.

In common with "Babette's Feast," this film allows a little bit of magic to enter the cold, hard Scandinavian lives of its characters--in the case of "Babette," a French feast; in the case of "Italian," an actual trip to Venice. But you’ll end up cheering the success of people you've come to care about and leave the theatre singing happily to yourself. (This may seem like a nauseating prospect on a Monday morning, but come Friday night, you may change your tune.)

What a difference it makes when a romantic comedy is written by a woman! I don’t just mean that a man would never use the word “vaginoplasty” in a screenplay. Or that only a woman writer would have a cosmetic surgeon describe what women actually experience rather than the conventional promises. Rather, the relationships come with greater depth and subtlety. A man might say “Make up your mind” where mind has minimal relevance in relationship questions. Ten years ago the leading character (Meryl Streep) divorced her husband (Alec Baldwin) after he had an affair with a much younger woman (whom he subsequently married). Their son’s college graduation brings the divorced couple to the same hotel and they end up in bed. He’s delighted: the relationship with the bimbo isn’t going that well (she already has one obnoxious kid and wants another) and sex with his former wife has never been better. She’s not so sure, but it has been a long time and there is still a certain spark. Enter the architect (Steve Martin) for an addition she’s building to her house: sensitive, intelligent, did I say sensitive?, quiet (at least until he gets stoned). The contrast between the two men could not be greater: the Alec Baldwin character takes up a lot of space (and not just his physical size), but can be charming so long as he gets his own way. The Steve Martin character shies away from conflict. Beneath the wittiness of the screenplay lies genuine insight into the long-term effects of divorce on children, the complicated nature of relationships (with the additionally complicating factor of sex), and the striking difference between a woman who draws on the support of friends and a man who goes it alone. The film allows us to see below the surface of its characters gradually, the way one does in actual relationships, and leaves us matters of substance to chew over after the entertainment has ended. I enjoyed this film a lot.

If I quoted the French title, “Il y a longtemps que je t’aime,” many singers would recognize it as a line from a favourite French children’s song, “Au clair de la lune,” which serves as an important plot element in this remarkable film. A woman (Kristen Scott Thomas) released from prison after serving a fifteen-year sentence for murder, upon finding a temporary home with her younger sister, discovers that her existence has been virtually erased: the parents insisted she never be mentioned and introduced the younger sister to all new acquaintances as an only child. The peculiar circumstances surrounding the woman’s incarceration have led her to become extremely guarded, an attitude in conflict with the well-meaning desire of social worker, employer and parole officer for her to “open up” and reintegrate into society. The sister’s young daughters keep asking questions about the “trip” their aunt has supposedly been on for all these years; her husband expresses his discomfort with having a murderess in the house. Only a new acquaintance with a similar story can provide the necessary understanding. The film moves efficiently from one episode to the next with none of the heavy momentum of American cinematic narrative style. Although not the central point of the film, the ineffective communication between husband and wife and between parent and child comes across as a potent expression of human pain. I recommend this film highly.