The Brothers Bloom

“I started with the notion of doing a character-based con movie, where the payoff at the end was an emotional one,” said writer-director Rian Johnson at a recent screening of The Brothers Bloom in New York. “The biggest challenge was making you care about the characters.”

It’s a nice idea, but the strain shows. Too slow in spots for a caper and too shallow in its too-frequent philosophizing for a deep-dish art house film, The Brothers Bloom tries so hard to be so many things that it feels like nothing at all. For all its self-consciously artful construction, it breaks up and floats away the moment it’s over, like a dandelion gone to seed in a strong gust of wind.

A story about telling stories, as the script keeps reminding us, Bloom is about two brothers who split a name between them. Orphaned as kids, they learn early on how to take care of each other and game everyone else. Stephen (a raffish Mark Ruffalo) is the mastermind, whose notebooks contain the plans for years’ worth of elaborate cons. Bloom (a broody Adrien Brody) is the younger brother who goes along to get along. He hates playing parts in his brother’s scripts, but he’s too depressed to make a life for himself.

When we first see the brothers, they’re kids who have already assumed the anachronistic uniforms they maintain throughout the movie: black-and-white clothes and black bowler hats. These early sequences, which feature amateurish child actors mouthing dialogue that’s meant to be witty and world-weary, reminded me of Brick (2005), Johnson’s first feature, a cult favorite that plays like a teenage Bugsy Malone.

Like Brick, Bloom loads up on stylistic quirks like a kid piling on Mom’s jewelry, invoking the look and feel of a lot of classic film genres. Its best moments are sheer nonsense or non sequiturs, like a Hunter Thompson-esque bit where a shambling, vaguely menacing character played by Robbie Coltrane shoots huge holes through his own front door when the brothers knock, then opens what’s left as if nothing had happened. (“I’ve been drinkin’,” he says, by way of apology.)

Johnson may have tried to make his characters likeable, but he made each such a collection of oddities that the burden rests even more squarely than usual on the actors to bring them to life. Ruffalo comes the closest, looking genuinely pained, amused, or concerned as needed while pulling off a raffish elegance. His bemused style of cool rhymes with the tough-tootsie pizzazz of his wordless sidekick, Bang Bang (the mesmerizing Rinko Kikuchi, who played a very different kind of silent girl in Babel.)

But Brody, who plays the main character, is more of a black hole than a star. His dour, one-note performance weighs down this picaresque movie like the lead on a fishhook.

As Bloom’s love interest, the beautiful, rich, and improbably cloistered Penelope, Rachel Weisz makes an inarticulate ditz seem lovable, sexy, and oddly courageous, but even she can’t strike any sparks with Brody’s sad-sack Bloom. One of Penelope’s many quirks is that she gets sexually excited by lightning, and she gets a lot more worked up by a summer storm than she ever does by Bloom.

A lot of thought and talent clearly went into making this forgettable film. Production designer Jim Clay, who also worked on Brick, found and dressed some extravagantly showy settings, most of them in old European cities like Belgrade and Prague that amplify the script’s feel of a past-haunted present. The cinematography is beautiful too, featuring lots of saturated blues, greens and grays.

But Johnson keeps poking holes in his own balloon. The shallow-dish philosophizing draws too much attention to itself: It’s clear he wants to say something about living an authentic life, but what exactly? The only genuinely thought-provoking and insightful comment – “a photograph is like a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know” – is a ripoff, an uncredited Diane Arbus quote.

The soundtrack doesn’t quite jibe either. Two familiar and lovely songs from the ‘70s – one by Bob Dylan and another by Cat Stevens – stick out from a mostly undistinguished folk-rocky soundtrack by Johnson’s cousin, Nathan Johnson, who also scored Brick. (“We’ve been making movies together since we were ten,” Johnson said at the New York screening, conjuring an image of a brothers Bloom-style collaboration.)

What stayed with me longest are the deadpan visual jokes that play out now and then in the distance, tasty little bits silhouetted against the adolescent hijinks at the center of the screen. But they seemed to belong to another story altogether, as if the ghost of Buster Keaton were filming a genuinely inventive comedy on the set of this strenuous misfire.

Management

By Elise Nakhnikian

Like Mike (Steve Zahn), its socially impaired main character, Management wants us to fall in love with its good intentions and all-too-evident sincerity despite its many – and sometimes downright disturbing – flaws. It also wants to be a madcap comedy. And it wants to be taken seriously as a relationship story, with Mike and Sue (Jennifer Aniston), the buttoned-up businesswoman he falls for, changing and growing to become true soulmates.

Some filmmakers could combine that many different colors into a work of art, but writer/director Stephen Belber just winds up with a lumpy, brownish mass that’s about as appealing as the “corporate art” Sue sells to hotels and office buildings.

This is Belber’s first attempt at comedy, and maybe it should be his last. He seems to do better with straight drama, like his three-character play Tape, which director Richard Linklater turned into a taut little movie (Belber wrote the screenplay), or The Laramie Project, the play turned TV movie about the murder of Matthew Shepard, for which he was part of a team of writers.

Here, he’s aiming to make one of those movies where a guy falls for a girl (or vice versa) who’s just not that into him and then pursues her until she falls for him too. We’ve all seen that movie a thousand times, probably because most of us like to fantasize either about landing The One That Got Away or being pursued with that kind of single-minded devotion. But Management pushes the premise too far, making it more creepy than romantic.

Mike’s not a lover: He’s a stalker with the emotional IQ of a two-year-old. It’s hard to imagine a competent adult falling for him. But this appears to be a male fantasy based on the premise that someone who looks like Jennifer Aniston could really be a mass of self-sabotaging neuroses in need of nothing more than someone who will be "sweet" to her. Under her façade of brisk efficiency, we soon learn, Sue is depressed and utterly lacking in self-confidence.

Even their meet-cute moment – which is echoed in a final clinch that feels as uncomfortable and implausible as everything else in this faintly unsettling movie – is just uncomfortable: One of them grabs the other one’s buttocks and holds on for dear life.

The rest of their early encounters feel just as desperate. Mike, the painfully geeky night manager at his parents’ cheesy motel, falls for Sue when he sees her checking in. He comes to her room at night with a bottle of wine, pretending it’s a standard gift for the guests “from management” – and asking her to share it with him. For some unfathomable reason, his exquisitely awkward come-on works, earning him a quickie in the laundry room. She’s convinced that’s the last they’ll see of each other, but he keeps pursuing her even after she leaves, sending letters, leaving voice mail messages, and showing up unannounced.

In a haiku Sue writes later, she says Mike “keeps showing up like UPS,” but he’s more like a lost puppy. Gazing up at her with bright, expectant eyes, he doesn’t seem to have a thought in his head except that he wants her to love and take care of him.

Their story alternates with a truncated and somewhat maudlin subplot involving the death of Mike’s mother (a very healthy-looking Margo Martindale) and its effect on Mike and his father. The always indelible Fred Ward is reduced to playing Mike’s sadsack dad (no wonder he looks depressed) in a handful of underwritten scenes.

Then there’s Al (a charismatic James Liao, who appears to have a gift for comedy), the friendly Chinese-American guy Mike conveniently runs into when he follows Sue to the town where she just moved in with an ex-boyfriend. Al gets Mike a job and a place to stay and becomes his instant BFF. And a good thing too, since Lord knows Mike needs help.

Sue is appropriately wary of this manchild’s obsessive attention, even getting angry with him sometimes. Yet she keeps giving in – even letting him spend the night in her house when he shows up on her doorstep with no money or ticket home.

Watching the pursued slowly succumb to the pursuer’s charms is supposed to be the appeal of movies like this, but I just kept worrying about Sue’s mental health. I felt pretty sure that Mike wasn’t going to hurt her, but how could she know? How low must her self-esteem be for her to take him seriously as a romantic prospect? And why, oh why, when she sends him home after his first unannounced visit, does she tell him he can’t see her again – for his sake? “I’m not good with people,” she says sadly. Oy vey.

Sue’s reunion with her borderline psychotic ex (Woody Harrelson, who seems to enjoy going all Gary Busey on us) is supposed to confirm how right Mike is for her. Instead, when she winds up in the final clinch with Mike, clasping his butt cheeks in that too-long embrace, all I could think was: Poor girl! I wonder how long this one will last.

Next Day Air

By Elise Nakhnikian

Next Day Air is a heist comedy about men acting tough – with an emphasis on the acting.

Leo (Donald Faison, Scrubs’ goofily endearing Dr. Turk), a weed-addled delivery man for the Fed Ex-like Next Day Air, kicks the plot into gear by delivering several bricks of coke to the wrong South Philly apartment. The box lands in the laps of Guch (Wood Harris) and his sidekick Brody (Mike Epps), a pair of inept small-time crooks who have just botched a robbery.

Seeing the drugs as their chance at financial salvation, Guch and Brody arrange to sell them to Brody’s cousin and his sidekick. Meanwhile, the deadly dealer who sent the bricks flies in with a sidekick of his own to hook up with his South Philly connection, Jesus (Cisco Reyes), and reclaim the drugs.

This is the first feature for screenwriter Blair Cobbs and director Benny Boom, who made his bones shooting music videos for hip-hop artists. Tired of “urban” (i.e. black and Latino) comedies without any smarts or edge, they wanted to make an urban version of a Guy Ritchie/Quentin Tarantino-type movie.

I wish he'd aimed a little higher, since those two have been so widely imitated by now that even their own movies can feel derivative. Still, here’s always room for a smart, stylish crime caper that gets inside the minds of its characters — especially if it’s funny to boot. And Boom and Cobbs get close to their goal, delivering the smarts, the humor, and a Grade-A cast.

Faison’s innocent stoner and his cynical workmate Eric, who’s played by the always wonderful Mos Def, don’t get as much screen time as you might expect, if you’ve seen the trailer, but they make the most of what they get. Mos Def is especially distinctive as a world-weary ex-con whose easy charm helps him scam people just enough to get by – and gets him out of a very tense yet funny stickup.

Wood Harris, whose calculating Avon Barksdale was the cold, hard center of The Wire’s first season, shows a very different side here, playing a whole set of subtly comic variations on blustering incompetence. And Yasmin Deliz is a delight as Jesus’s take-no-prisoners girlfriend, Chita, the funniest tough-talking beauty to hit the screen since Rosie Perez.

The dialogue is good – sometimes very good—and the filmmakers amp up the energy with a Latin-flavored soundtrack and frequent cuts to flashbacks shot in high-contrast video. But they also switch the whole tone of the movie at times, and that’s not done so deftly.

Most of the time, we’re in a world of comically exaggerated criminality where everyone’s on the make and no one’s getting hurt, the kind of place where Guch’s gun jams when he tries to shoot a guard after a botched bank robbery and Leo’s truck is aswarm with people trying to steal his boxes the moment he stops to buy some weed.

These criminals work hard at being hard. Jesus practices talking trash in front of his mirror, pulling out a series of ever bigger guns until he’s satisfied that he looks scary enough. He may remind you of Travis Bickel in front of a mirror in Taxi Driver, but this dress rehearsal is funny rather than frightening because Jesus isn’t fired up by paranoia or zealotry. He just wants to make some easy money.

So does just about everyone else. Leo, who tosses around his “handle with care” express delivery boxes as if they were Frisbees, is the closest thing we get to a responsible working man. But then, it’s the women who really get things done here. We get a glimpse of the fierceness of the women in Leo’s boss (Debbie Allen) and an eyeful in Chita, who insists on going along when Jesus looks for the drugs — so she can protect him.

Making Jesus’s glossy, long-legged girlfriend the most fearless of this movie’s tough guys is one of several recurring bits – like Brody’s habit of botching jobs because he mishears Guch’s orders – that Next Day Air tosses into the pot to add a little flavor.

But just as it all starts coming together, the filmmakers throw us off by throwing in some violence so realistic it’s hard to watch. The ending is the worst offender, a protracted bloodbath that drags the movie to a near-halt, spelling out a don’t-try-this-at-home moral about not risking your life for cash – and then switching tones one last time to undermine its own message.

If only they’d stuck to character-based humor and kept the violence stylized or off-camera, the filmmakers might have created a minor cult classic. Instead, they’ve cooked up an entertaining but uneven diversion for people who don’t mind a little graphic violence.

Sullivan’s Travels

By Elise Nakhnikian

For better and for worse, Sullivan’s Travels (1941) is rooted in its time. It captures the flavor of life in the Great Depression -- without being the least bit depressing itself. It also includes some scenes with African-Americans that make me cringe. But in spite its flaws, I love it for its sly humor, its wisdom about human nature, and its running commentary on what makes us love the movies.

Sullivan’s Travels was one of the first movies directed by Preston Sturges, who was the first Hollywood screenwriter to direct his own scripts. The early 40s were this golden boy’s golden age: In just two years, he cranked out three classic American comedies, this one, The Lady Eve, and The Palm Beach Story.

Talking pictures were still relatively new when Sturges arrived on the scene. He decided great dialogue was the key to making them work, and boy, could he write dialogue. When director John Sullivan (Joel McCrea) argues with his studio bosses at the beginning of Sullivan’s Travels, their exchange makes you laugh – not because it’s jokey but because of what it reveals about their characters, starting with Sullivan’s limousine-liberal determination to tell “real” stories about poor people.

The studio turns him down, saying he doesn’t know enough about the subject. So Sullivan decides to hit the road as a tramp – suited up in a costume from the wardrobe department — to gain some “real life” experience. That leads to a series of often comic misadventures and a lesson in the value of entertainment.

Sturges definitely keeps us entertained, starting with the sweetly acerbic romance between Sullivan and a cool Veronica Lake, as The Girl (“How does the girl fit into the picture?” a cop asks Sullivan after the two are arrested. “There's always a girl in the picture,” Sullivan responds. “What's the matter, don't you go to the movies?”)

There’s also plenty of physical humor, wonderful faces to look at, and vivid minor characters to savor, most of them played by great character actors (and Sturges staples) like Eric Blore and William Demarest.

And there’s all that invigorating talk. It’s glorious stuff, that talk, and it’s democratically doled out. The central message of the movie is delivered by one of Sullivan’s butlers, in a gem of a speech that starts with: “The poor know all about poverty, and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous.” The dialogue never sounds forced or overwritten, either – except when it’s supposed to, as in Sullivan’s preachy speeches about “this cockeyed caravan.”

But Sturges is after more than mere entertainment, despite his movie’s ostensible message. By wrapping his comedy around a reminder of the travails of those “forgotten men,” he tells a story that’s more complicated, and ultimately deeper, than any Sullivan ever dreamed of.

Every so often, Sturges shifts gears too suddenly or revs his engine too hard. A stint Sullivan serves on a chain gang and a paternalistic bit in an African-American church might have been lifted from one of Sullivan’s message movies, and I find a bit of slapstick whose punch line is a black man in whiteface uncomfortable to watch.

But those moments stand out because the rest of the movie unspools so effortlessly. Often shooting on location, Sturges works the struggles of poor people into the background of his picaresque story, making his point best when he says the least about it. One long, wordless sequence in which Sullivan and The Girl walk through a shantytown is a stunner.

Like a favorite uncle, Sturges is onto your foibles and can laugh them all off. Sullivan’s Travels tells us a lot about a particular place and time, but it also has plenty to say about life here and now.

Sturges’ barbs about Sullivan’s pompous aspirations still feel pointed, since the same earnest paternalism infects Hollywood today. And his affectionately ironic take on human nature and American hokum fit right in too – as do the bits of self-reflexive business he works into this movie about making movies.

Goodbye Solo

By Elise Nakhnikian

Goodbye Solo’s Solo reminded me of Happy-Go-Lucky’s Poppy, another working-class protagonist whose cheerful kindness and persistent attempts to connect with everyone around them amount to a kind of grace. The movies seem related too, both deftly illuminating the lives of people who would only be glimpsed in the background of mainstream movies, if they were seen at all.

But Goodbye, Solo director Ramin Bahrani had another model in mind. Bahrani, whose parents emigrated to North Carolina from Iran, invokes a Persian tradition called tazmin to explain the inspiration he and cowriter Bahareh Azimi, an Iranian-born citizen of France, drew on for their second collaboration after Chop Shop.

Tazmin, Bahrani told The New York Times, is “a longstanding tradition of poets taking one line or one beat or one idea from an earlier poem, picking it up and putting it in their own poem and going on from there.” In this case, the beat he and Azimi picked up was from the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry, the story of an older man who wants to commit suicide and the young man whose help he enlists, and who tries to convince him to change his mind.

The older man in Goodbye, Solo is William (Red West), a cantankerous hill country codger with disappointment carved deep into the crevasses of his face. The young man is a sunny Senegalese cab driver named Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane). When William reserves Solo’s time for a one-way trip to Blowing Rock, an outcropping in the Smoky Mountains famous for its intense winds, the cabbie sees what he’s up to and launches a tenacious campaign to talk him out of it. Planting himself in William’s way again and again, armed with a smile and a story, Solo wins the old man’s grudging friendship while trying to solve the mystery behind the his disillusionment and depression.

Meanwhile, we see enough of Solo’s home life to know he’s in danger of losing his own family – his very pregnant wife, Quiera (Carmen Leyva) and his beloved stepdaughter Alex (a very strong Diana Franco Galindo).

Set in Bahrani’s hometown of Winston-Salem and based on a cab driver he met at a pickup soccer game while visiting his brother, Goodbye, Solo is the third in a series of Bahrani films about immigrants hustling to eke out a living in American cities. Man Push Cart (2005) centered on a Pakistani working a mobile food cart in Manhattan. Chop Shop (2007) was about a teenage brother and sister from the Dominican Republic who live and work amid a bleak row of chop shops in Willets Point, Queens.

His latest starts in the middle of a conversation between the two men in Solo’s cab, Solo’s radiant face and William’s battered mask looming large against the black backdrop of the night. For most of the movie, cinematographer Michael Simmonds, who also shot Chop Shop and Man Push Cart, stays tight on those faces, scouring them like a miner hunting for gold. In fact, the camera homes in so close on Solo that you often don’t even see the people he’s talking to.

Then Solo’s cab climbs through a dense mist into the awesome beauty of the mountains, and the camera pulls back. Rather than studying their faces, we see both men – and Alex, who Solo brings along in a last-ditch effort to woo William back from the brink – at a distance, vulnerable little figures that keep literally disappearing into the fog or the forest.

Like the end of Chop Shop, in which a flock of pigeons rises into the air in front of one of the car repair shops, Goodbye, Solo’s ending resonates deeply, heavy with mystery and an inchoate sense of hope.

Bahrani invests months in getting to know the real-life models for his characters – he spent three or four months with the cab driver who was the inspiration for Solo before starting work on this script. Then he takes almost as long to cast just the right mix of professional and non-professional actors and get them comfortable with their roles. The 12-year-old schoolboy who played the lead in Chop Shop got so good at priming and painting cars that he wound up getting paid for doing his character’s work. And Savane, who couldn’t drive when Bahrani cast him, got his license and spent several weeks before shooting began working for the real-life cab company that Solo drives for.

That attention to detail pays off in Bahrani’s movies, which just keep getting richer. In Goodbye Solo, you feel an artist coming into his own, painting a portrait of two memorable men and their prickly friendship with a mastery that makes it look easy.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell

The word "inspirational" is so overused that I generally try to leave it alone for some much-needed rest, but I have to pull it out to describe the movie I saw last Friday.

When my friend Laura invited me to a screening of Pray the Devil Back to Hell at an ABA mediation and arbitration conference she was attending, I jumped at the chance, since I'd heard great things about it. What I didn't know was that its producer would be there -- and that her comments afterward would be almost as interesting as the movie itself.

Pray the Devil is a documentary about an group of women in Liberia who, sick of the senseless civil war that had been tearing apart their country for nearly a generation, started a peace movement. The idea came to a woman named Leymah Gbowee in a dream. She took it to the women of her church, who became the core of a group that eventually numbered in the thousands.

Going up against the bloodthirsty President Charles Taylor and the rebel warlords who set hordes of boys and young men on the rampage, terrorizing the country, took the kind of guts few of us have. The women made themselves as unthreatening as possible, calling themselves the Christian Women's Peace Initiative (although, as the movie stresses, they included many Muslim women), dressing all in white, and invoking their children as their motivation.

As Gbowee says in the movie: "Liberia had been at war so long that my children had been hungry and afraid their entire lives." To shame the president and warlords who were profiting from that chaos and despair, the women just kept showing up where they knew the men would be. Holding up signs, singing songs, and presenting petitions, they served as a living reminder of all the people who wanted peace now.

Their refusal to be intimidated into hiding or going along with the status quo helped drive Taylor into exile. They also shamed the participants in the country's sham peace talks into actually hammering out an agreement and putting a transitional government in place.

And they didn't stop there. Politicized by the process and too smart to trust the warlords who had appointed themselves to key positions in the transitional government, the women stayed together after the war was over. They helped convince the warlords' troops to hand in their arms, and they were instrumental in instituting a democratic process that wound up electing the first female president in all of Africa.

It's an extraordinary story -- and it might have been lost forever if it weren't for another admirable woman, producer Abigail Disney.

In her talk after the movie ended, Disney said she went to Liberia after hearing about the women to see if there was a story there worth filming. Though this was only a couple years after they had finished their work, and though all kinds of major news media had been covering the war and elections in Liberia, Disney says she could only find bits and pieces of the story, almost all anecdotal. And while she saw hundreds of hours of footage of "boys shooting at each other, boys with AK-47s, people eating human hearts -- horrible, horrible things," she could find almost no shots of the women who had been on the scene every day for months.

One pivotal scene, of the women in a hallway outside the sham peace process, linking arms and refusing to let the men inside come out until they reach an agreement, was salvaged from a video shot by a non-journalist who happened to be there. The videotape had been used to prop open a window, so only 18 seconds of that segment was usable.

"It came to me, this is what erasure looks like," says Disney, who said she has a long-standing interest in bringing to light stories about women that have been left out of the official histories. "News reporters and photographer are writing the first draft of history, and they didn't even get into that first draft."

While she was making the movie, she says, the head of a major nonprofit human rights organization told her: "Why are you making a movie about those women? I was there. They were pathetic." For Disney, that comment summed up the arrogance and assumptions about power that make it so hard for women like the Christian Women's Peace Initiative to be heard -- and so important that we pay attention when they speak up despite all the obstacles.

If we never hear the stories of brave peacemakers like these, we're more likely to be passive ourselves if we're faced with a similar situation, Disney says. "If we go into the next war having misunderstood these women as objects rather than subjects, we're doomed to accept as inevitable the stories we've seen before about war."

Feeling that sense of hopelessness challenged is what makes it so thrilling to watch the unarmed women in Pray the Devil not just stand up to a brutal war machine but help shut it down.

It's downright inspirational.

Sugar

By Elise Nakhnikian

There are no guns or glitzy plot twists in Sugar. The second feature by husband-wife writer/directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (Half Nelson), who fly their indie freak flag high, this is the story of a charismatic young man who uses baseball as his way out of poverty in the Dominican Republic.

It’s a great idea for a movie – in fact, much the same story was masterfully told in The New Americans, a multi-part documentary that aired on PBS in 2004 and is now available through Netflix. But by observing their main character instead of getting inside his head, the filmmakers made me feel almost as uninvolved in his storyas in Cal's.

When we first meet Miguel “Sugar” Santos (Algenis Perez Soto), he’s at a U.S. baseball camp in the Dominican Republic, drilling hard every day in hopes of becoming a pro. Then he gets his big break, a chance to play in the States. “Life gives you many opportunities. Baseball, only one,” his mentor tells him. That may be the theme of this meandering movie, which follows Sugar into the minor leagues and beyond.

Soto, who went to baseball camp in the DR before giving up on becoming a ballplayer, has charisma to burn, and Sugar is an upstanding young man, so Fleck and Boden have our sympathy from the start. But they don’t do much to build on that goodwill.

The story is badly paced, spending too much time on the details of a baseball career that turns out to be just a stepping stone. It also telegraphs some important plot points, so Sugar’s decline as a ballplayer seems anticlimactic even while it’s happening. But it’s the distance the filmmakers maintain between us and Sugar that lost me.

Too many of Sugar’s actions and thoughts are opaque, and Soto plays too many scenes with the same hangdog sadness. It didn’t help that a shower scene and some shots of Soto shirtless felt gratuitous, objectifying the actor.

That distance reminded me of Half Nelson, an unconvincing story about a teenager in an urban high school who befriends her teacher, helping him kick an addiction to drugs. Shareeka Epps and Ryan Gosling were each mesmerizing on their own, but I never bought the relationship between their characters or felt like I knew what made either one tick.

I don’t doubt that Fleck and Boden mean well, and they choose interesting stories to tell. I just wish they knew their characters a little better.

State of Play

By Elise Nakhnikian

I love a good newspaper movie. By that I mean a smart, fast-moving story with lots of moving parts, like The Paper (1994), The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), or His Girl Friday (1940). Movies that capture that odd mix of cynicism and idealism that fuels a healthy newspaper, not to mention the verbal jousting, the friendly and not-so-friendly competition, and the sense that getting the story right really matters.

But those movies have something else in common: The most recent one is 15 years old. When this century’s 24-hour news cycle ended the reign of newsprint, newspaper movies became old news— and that’s one of the problems with State of Play.

The filmmakers try hard to make their story relevant. They pair Cal (Russell Crowe), the old-school reporter on the print side of a powerful Washington, D.C. newspaper, with Della (Rachel McAdams), a young woman who blogs for the paper, so the two can exchange some superficial banter about old media vs. new. They also link the death Cal and Della are investigating to a private military contractor whose goal is “the privatization of homeland security.” But you’ve seen everything here done before – and probably better.

Director Kevin MacDonald knows how to make a story compelling. Touching the Void, his 2003 documentary about two mountain climbers who narrowly avoid death in the Peruvian Andes, made skillful use of recreations to dramatize the survivors’ stories, and The Last King of Scotland, a fictionalized tale about Idi Amin, was suffused with a mounting sense of dread. But he’s lost his mojo here.

The score is so intrusive and ineffective that Ben Affleck joked about when he plugged the movie on The Daily Show. The dialogue feels recycled, and the closest we get to character development is watching scruffy, puffy Cal scarf down junk food while cranking up an Irish drinking song in his old Saab.

Maybe because it’s based on a British miniseries with more time to spin the story, the movie is stuffed with underdeveloped plot twists. Not only is Cal reporting on the death of a congressman’s assistant, but he’s protecting the congressman, Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), who happens to be an old roommate. What’s more, Cal once slept with Collins’ wife, and Collins was having an affair with the dead assistant. Then there are killings related to the case, that defense contractor, and dirty dealings as Congress caters to corporate interests.

Rather than being pulled into the action as Cal and Della race to piece it all together, I just wanted to get out of the way while the kitchen sink hurtled past.

Sin Nombre

By Elise Nakhnikian

Traditionally, immigrants in our movies have stayed in the background while native-born Americans took center stage, in much the same way that African-American characters used to play supporting roles in stories about white people. But the drama inherent in leaving home for a strange land where you don’t even speak the language – especially when you add the risks involved in emigrating illegally – makes those background stories tilt a lot of movies off their axes.

The two women smuggling immigrants for cash in Frozen River were desperate, but how much worse off were the people huddled in their trunk? The middle-aged professor in The Visitor was depressed, but the troubles of the young illegal immigrant who befriends him put his into perspective. And of all the stories twisted together in Fast Food Nation to illustrate the evils of our beef processing business, the one that stuck with me is the tale of Raul, a hopeful young man who makes it across the Mexican border only to get caught in the jaws of a slaughterhouse grinder.

Maybe that’s why more immigrant stories are finally making their way to the forefront. Or maybe it’s because new residents are pouring into 21st-century America, especially from south of the Mexican border, at a rate not seen since the turn of the last century. Whatever the reason, a new genre of immigration movie seems to be emerging, and the latest example is Sin Nombre.

Like Maria Full of Grace (2004), the story of a Colombian girl who becomes a drug mule and winds up in New York, and Trade (2007), the story of a Mexican girl who’s kidnapped by sex traffickers and brought to New Jersey, Sin Nombre spices up the story of a good-looking young emigrant or two by mixing in something more sensationalistic. This time around, the extra something is a gang called the Mara Salvatrucha.

Director Cary Joji Fukunaga stumbled onto his subject while studying film at New York University. Victoria Para Chino (2004), a short film he made about a group of immigrants left for dead in the back of a truck, which was inspired by a story he read in the New York Times, won him a lot of attention and an opportunity to workshop a feature-length script at Sundance.

“It is what every film student dreams for, the proverbial jackpot,” he told Indiewire. “And because of that, something about it all felt wrong. I didn’t think this was my story to tell.” So he went to work researching his story, riding the trains that his characters ride toward the border, interviewing gang members in prison, and visiting the shelters emigrants stop at along the way.

You have to give the guy an A for effort. Trouble is, you feel every bit of that effort in this beautifully shot but overdetermined assemblage of scenes.

I could easily believe that the look of Sin Nombre’s sets and setups, as well as a lot of the individual actions, were rooted in research. The perils of riding north on the top of a fast-moving train? Check. The sudden panic of running from La Migra? Check. The unpredictable reactions of the people you pass, some of whom throw up packets of food and some of whom hurl insults and stones? Check.

But – aside from two or three vivid characters, who seemed to step out from an alternate universe – none of Fukunaga’s people feel real, and the melodramatic action and thinly developed relationships (dialogue is not Fukunaga’s strong point) kept me at arm’s length from the story.

This is the kind of movie where a gang doesn’t just kill a rival gang member but feeds him to its dogs, and a young gangster’s protégé must become his killer. There are a lot of gunfights and deaths, and almost every one feels stagey, more shocking than tragic or terrifying.

The best thing going for Sin Nombre is the beauty of its languid landscapes. Fukunaga’s model was the cinematography in Terence Malick’s movies, and the saturated blues and greens and reds of his widescreen compositions come close to achieving it.

That’s an impressive achievement for a first-time filmmaker – yet there’s something unsettling about it too. When a filmmaker uses that kind of beauty to tell a grim story and can’t match it with an equally powerful narrative, he runs the risk of creating an ugly kind of armchair tourism.

“I get frustrated with certain filmmakers who stand under a banner of altruism with their sociopolitical stories that I think sometimes border on the exploitative,” Fukunaga told Indiewire. “I guess I feel that the filmmakers had to sacrifice little to make it, and once done, never again revisit the subject but reap all the benefits from others’ misery.”

Exactly, dude.

Adventureland

By Elise Nakhnikian

Whoever marketed Adventureland owes Greg Mottola an apology. The trailer leans heavily on laughs and gross-out humor to appeal to fans of Superbad, the last movie Mottola directed. That may have pulled people into theaters on opening weekend, but it also spurred a lot of backlash from Superbad fans who complain that Adventureland is no Superbad.

They’re right: It’s much better.

Superbad’s a sweet movie, but it’s thin: a wish-fulfillment fantasy by and for adolescent boys (Seth Rogan and his best friend wrote the first draft while they were still in high school.) Mottola based Adventureland on a summer he spent working at an amusement park, and it shows: The world he creates has the immediacy and unpredictability of real life.

What’s more, Mottola is looking back at adolescence from the perspective of adulthood. That gives this movie a wry humor and a contemplative tone that make it a lot more moving – and more memorable – than Superbad’s hyped-up hijinks.

In fact, Adventureland is good enough to join the ranks of great American coming-of-age movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and American Graffiti. Like them, it faithfully recreates the look and feel of a certain place and time, but its real subject is that emotionally charged yet inherently comic condition known as American adolescence.

This time around, we’re in an amusement park outside Pittsburgh, and it’s 1987. Yes, that means there are lots of bright and shiny color-coordinated outfits, and lots of big hair, big earrings, and David Bowie posters. But the set dressing stays in the background, and the clothes never wear the people.

Instead, you focus on James (Jesse Eisenberg), a newly minted college graduate trying to save up for grad school, and the people he meets at Adventureland, the amusement park where he’s working for the summer. Eisenberg plays essentially the same painfully sensitive soul he played in Roger Dodger, The Squid and the Whale, and The Education of Charlie Banks – an overeducated naïf who tries to get a cashier job by telling his interviewer that he got 770 on his math SAT.

At first, he’s downright annoying. Then Eisenberg shows us the nice kid under the façade, and his attempts to seem sophisticated start to look touchingly awkward – and funny. When James’ crush, Em (Kristen Stewart) first drives him home from work, we feel the potent mix of excitement and embarrassment that pulses through James as he sits next to her, thrilled to be there but too self-conscious to do more than grin and crank up the radio.

I was about to give up on Stewart after Twilight, in which her character seemed every bit as dead as her vampire boyfriend. But she regains the charm and cool-girl cred she displayed in Into the Wild with this well-directed performance.

James and Em aren’t the only people who grow close over the summer. The two hang out with the perpetually depressed Joel (a scene-stealing Martin Starr), whose mournful gaze makes his loneliness palpable even in the middle of a crowd. They also develop surprisingly close relationships with Connell (Ryan Reynolds), a full-fledged adult who works at the park every summer. A married man who preys on a new crop of gullible girls each year, you might expect Connell to be a bad guy or a figure of fun, and he is a little of each. But Reynolds and Mottola make sure we also see his appeal – and his vulnerability.

The same goes for Lisa P. (Margarita Leveiva), the Madonna wannabe who is Adventureland’s universal object of desire. Refreshingly, she’s treated without the egregious ogling or spurned-suitor venom male filmmakers tend to revert to when portraying girls like this. Instead, James gets close enough to discover that she’s a perfectly nice girl whose looks are the most interesting thing about her.

We also get a sense of daily life in the park, including the scams the employees play to keep the customers from winning. We get a very funny Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as the park’s owner/manager and his girlfriend; an excellent soundtrack that reminded me how much ‘80s music I actually liked; and at least one line that deserves to become a catchphrase: “Don’t ever eat the corn dogs.”

And then there are those potent moments that crystallize the characters’ feelings, which are the best part of a pretty great movie. Watching James and Joel drink beers and talk on a hillside at dusk while another friend runs around in the background, shouting and shooting off Roman candles, tells you all you need to know about the agitated state of suspended animation that is adolescence, American-style.

Sunshine Cleaning

By Elise Nakhnikian

Sunshine Cleaning is so pleased with its own smug noncomformity and sometimes strenuous quirkiness, you’d think it would be painful to watch. Actually, I liked it well enough, thanks to the excellent cast. But the more I think about this paint-by-numbers indie, the less I want to.

As you probably know if you know anything about it at all, Sunshine Cleaning was produced by several of the producers of Little Miss Sunshine – and the similarity doesn’t end with the title.

This time around, another adorable grade-school-age kid, Oscar Lorkowski (Jason Spevack), sets what there is of a plot in motion. Oscar has to leave school because of a string of vaguely defined incidents (It seems he is so very quirky that only his semi-bohemian extended family can appreciate him), so his single mom, Rose (Amy Adams) decides to get a better-paying job so she can send him to private school. Instead of cleaning regular homes, which is what she’d been doing, she starts specializing in ones where someone has died – and enlists her sister to help.

This sets the stage for some odd-couple antics as Rose, the conscientious sister who always worries about what people think, pairs up with the rebel-without-a-cause Norah (Emily Blunt). Rose frets when some of her old high school friends, who used to see her as an equal – or better (she was the head cheerleader -- condescend to her because of her job. But Norah’s not having any of that. “You’re better than they are, Rose,” she says.

The Lorkowski girls’ crusty but loyal father (Alan Arkin) doesn’t care what anyone else thinks either. He’s Oscar’s biggest fan and ally, scoffing at the teachers and principals who can’t see that his grandkid is “an imaginative kid, that’s all!” In short, he’s basically the grandpa from the other Sunshine transplanted into this one. He’s even played by the same actor. (Though to be fair, if you could get Alan Arkin to play that part, would you turn him down?)

The actors really are wonderful. Adams seems skinless as a smiling-through-tears, underappreciated good girl. After her guileless Southern housewife in Junebug and her oppressed junior nun in Doubt, she runs the risk of getting typecast this way. That would be a shame, since she’s got tremendous range – just look at her charmingly sunny ditz in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day or her savvy political aide in Charlie Wilson’s War. But she is great at playing soulful vulnerability. When she lets Rose’s humiliation slowly redden her transparent skin or tighten the corners of her mouth, you can’t help but feel her pain.

Blunt is equally moving as the sister who slides through life behind a shield of tough-guy detachment. I could have done without the scene where she goes “trestling,” climbing up beneath an elevated train track to scream and then cry as the train roars by overhead, not just because it feels so contrived but also because Blunt does such a good job of showing us the emotions her character is repressing that we don’t need to see her release them.

There are a lot of teary confrontations and melodramatic moments, most of which you can see barreling toward you, like so many trucks on a desert highway. Rose meets a nice cleaning supplies salesman, Winston (a quietly alert Clifton Collins Jr. in a role that's as truncated as Winston’s amputated arm), who looks like a romantic prospect. Norah becomes embroiled in an ambiguous relationship with Lynn (the endearingly awkward Mary Jane Rajskub), the daughter of a suicide they cleaned up after. Winston bonds with Oscar. A salesman tells Oscar that the CB in the van for their cleaning business transmits “right up to Heaven,” so Rose uses it to have a teary chat with her dead mother. Rose leaves Norah alone on a job, where she messes up in a spectacular way.

The whole thing doesn’t quite hang together, roaring from one episode to the next and finally just stopping rather than reaching a conclusion.

Maybe leaving things unresolved was supposed to be proof of the movie’s indie cred, but I found it frustrating. After all, the point of a movie like this is to empathize with the characters -- and to get a kick out of watching them. Arkin and Adams and Blunt and Collins Jr. made that work, so by the end of the movie, I cared enough about their characters to want to know they’d be okay. Would Rose and that nice Winston get together? Where were Norah and her cat heading off to? And whatever happened with Oscar’s school, anyhow?

On second thought, never mind. I could really care less.

Duplicity

By Elise Nakhnikian

Why don’t we have more screwball comedies these days? It was during the Great Depression that they first flowered in Hollywood and, as a recent Breadlines & Champagne lineup of movies from that era at New York’s Film Forum reminded us, we could use that same kind of smart escapism today.

In her 2007 book, The Star Machine, Jeanine Basinger blamed the lack of modern-day screwball comedies on the talent pool. “It’s not, as everyone supposes, that they can’t write them; it’s that there’s no one to play in them,” she said.

I beg to differ. George Clooney came as close as any mere mortal could to nailing the Cary Grant role in movies like Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven, playing an impossibly suave, inhumanly handsome, occasionally larcenous leading man who loves his female costar but doesn’t take anything else all that seriously – including himself. And wouldn't you like to see Will Smith take a break from saving the world, or Robert Downey Jr. take a break from soul-searching intensity, to star in a good screwball comedy?

As for women, how about Amy Adams or Anna Faris as a Carole Lombard/Jean Harlow-style glorious ditz? Téa Leoni as Katharine Hepburn without the tony accent: an intelligent, athletic, eminently capable beauty who can also play the fool? And I wish I could have seen what Meryl Streep or Emma Thompson could have done with the kinds of roles Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy used to get.

But forget speculation. If you want proof that there are actors alive who can do screwball comedy, go see Duplicity.

Julia Roberts and Clive Owen are gloriously confident in Duplicity’s leading roles. Their two-hour sparring match is a lightfooted blend of irresistible attraction, prickly defensiveness, and reluctant respect. And, thanks to a refreshingly witty script, their weapon of choice is words.

Ray (Owen) and Claire (Roberts) are former government spies now working for rival corporations. The absurdity of using computers with better encryption coding than the Pentagon’s to steal formulas for hand lotion sets the tone nicely. So does our introduction to the two CEOs, Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson) and Richard Garsik (Paul Giamatti), who we first see as they get into an awkward fist-fight, clashing in slow motion like a pair of aging bull elephants on the Discovery channel.

Writer-director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) leads us through a Hitchcockian series of twists, turns, and switchbacks as Claire and Ray labor to uncover the secret formula Tully is working on. They’re intent on cashing in on it, though all we really care about is whether the two of them will wind up together.

The movie jumps back and forth in time, doling out the story of how Claire and Ray hatched their plot – and the answer to a question that never stops haunting them both: Are they just gaming the CEOs who hired them, or is one of them playing the other one?

Their bipolar romance can switch moods in a moment: They’re forever starting to make love, then stopping to accuse one another of betrayal. Ironically, the paranoia is part of the attraction, an essential trait they have in common. But will they be able to get past it?

An overhead shot of Ray early in the movie shows him striding through the streets of New York with an athlete’s grace and speed. He never lets up, focusing on Claire with seductive intensity and never stopping his pursuit even as she keeps knocking him off balance.

But she does keep knocking him back. Ray may have the upper hand in the game they play out in public, but Claire pulls the strings behind the scenes. You could always sense Roberts’ intelligence, even when she played lightweights, but Gilroy brings it to the surface: You never doubt that Claire could not only seduce but outmaneuver Ray, and it’s fun to watch her glory in that power. Roberts hauls out her famously wide-mouthed laugh once or twice in Duplicity, but she’s much more inclined to smirk – or to cut the smile altogether, using those big brown eyes like lasers to bore through someone’s defenses.

In classic screwball comedy fashion, Duplicity also reserves some choice parts for supporting characters, and the actors make the most of the opportunity. Carrie Preston is endearingly gullible as the corporate travel agent Ray seduces in the line of duty, and the excellent Kathleen Chalfant (the original angel from Broadway’s Angels in America) has as much fun with her role as part of Ray’s surveillance team as Tilda Swinton did with another nontraditional part for a middle-aged woman in Michael Clayton.

Add in the vicarious pleasure of watching beautiful people blow obscene sums of money in beautiful settings, and you’ve got a thoroughly satisfying distraction for these tough times.

Girls Can Play

I bought this poster in a used bookstore in Corpus Christi in the early '80s. It may have been the best 5 dollars I ever spent; it's been up every place I've lived in since.

I've never seen the movie, but that's okay; stories about dying beauties aren't exactly my thing. But I love that 1930s design, and I love the title.

The Depression years were my favorite period for Hollywood movies. It's partly the sense of style -- the dresses, the clean geometric lines of those Deco sets, the melodramatic intensity of movie posters like this. But mostly I love the fast-talking couples in the great screwball and remarriage comedies of the '30s and early '40s.

Cary Grant and Roz Russell in His Girl Friday, Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Holiday and Philadelphia Story, Irene Dunne and Grant again in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife, Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert in Palm Beach Story, Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man, Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Adam's Rib, Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve... If you've seen these movies, you know what I mean. If you haven't, go find them; you're in for a treat.

Those girls could play.

The Race to Witch Mountain

By Elise Nakhnikian

Crammed full of shock-and-awe music, Glock-toting SWAT teams, Road Warrior-lite car chases, and Darth Vader-looking alien assassins, Race to Witch Mountain is a Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay–style testosterone fest on training wheels. Would someone please tell me who decided it’s okay to have that much violence in a movie for kids?

And while we’re on the subject, what exactly makes this a children’s film? Is it the fact that there’s no sex or swearing? Is it because the closest we come to nudity is the way the sleeves of the Rock’s T shirt keep inching up his arm, nudged aside by those cartoonishly bulging biceps? Or could it be that the violence is all video-game spectacle, with none of the good guys getting the least bit hurt?

Jack Bruno (the always likeable Rock, who’s now using his real name, Dwayne Johnson), is a Las Vegas cab driver who’s already having a bad day when a teenage brother and sister pair, Sarah (AnnaSophia Robb) and Seth (Alexander Ludwig), materialize in his backseat. The two trigger the first of several games of high-speed bumper cars in what’s basically a movie-long chase scene.

See, the kids are aliens from a planet hundreds of light years away, come to Earth to save their dying world. There’s a vague ecological message and a lot of talk about science, which is mainly invoked as “proof” that UFOs are real.

The kids are, as one character puts it, “humanoid in form” – much like the Rock himself. But the stiffly formal diction and weird powers of this towheaded Aryan twosome (Sarah can read thoughts and move objects with her mind; Seth can pass through any barrier and set up force fields powerful enough to deflect bullets) make them seem a little fishy.

The kids are after some special device that looks a lot like one of those things they give you at busy restaurants to light up when your table is ready. We never get a good look at it, though, or at any of the scary alien assassins or amazing alien hardware – probably because the special effects are surprisingly cheesy.

Jack appoints himself the kids’ father figure, following them into danger even as he warns himself aloud: “Don’t go into the pimped-out frig, Jack.” Newsflash to screenwriters: heroes who crack wise about the clichés in your script are a cliché themselves. Maybe that’s why none of Jack’s “funny” lines got even a giggle at the screening I went to.

It doesn’t help that the dialogue is so wooden (Sarah keeps saying things like: “If you abandon us now, our mission will be in serious jeopardy” and “Maybe you need help too, Jack Bruno”), or that the acting is no better. Johnson’s range of emotion runs from mildly concerned to annoyed, while Robb wears out the look of worried supplication she overused in Because of Winn Dixie, and Ludwig simply looks robotic.

Something about this movie makes even good actors turn bad. Ciarán Hinds is so stilted as the head of the government agency in charge of dealing with a whole new kind of illegal alien that I was convinced he was going to turn out to be an alien double agent. And the usually tough and tender Carla Gugino is stripped of her usual intensity as UFO expert Alex Friedman, a pillow-lipped PhD who winds up playing mommy to Jack’s daddy in this wholesome insta-family. They even adopt a dog – though Junkyard disappears for long stretches, as if the screenwriters had forgotten he was there.

That’s typical of this sloppy script, which doesn’t even bother to follow its own internal logic. The movie was adapted from a book, so maybe the screenwriters just tried to fit in too much and left out crucial connective tissue. But not having read the novel, I was left to wonder why two kids who can deflect bullets or make things explode spend so much time running from guys with guns. And, if Sarah can read minds, why does it take them so long to realize they can trust Jack?

About halfway through Race, Jack drops off his battered cab with a mechanic (Cheech Marin), telling him he has an hour to give it a major overhaul. Race to Witch Mountain feels like it was thrown together in about as much time, using spare parts from a dozen other films.

This deeply cynical movie is not just lifeless; it is anti-life, both a product of and a promotion for the military industrial complex.

But, hey, it must be good, right? It was tops at the box office last week!

Gomorrah

By Elise Nakhnikian

Based on a novel about the camorra, a criminal underground that apparently has a pretty effective stranglehold on Naples, Gomorrah is a whole new kind of mafia movie. Beautifully shot but bleak, this naturalistic tale of relentless brutality makes the Godfather series look like a romantic fantasy. Compared to the goombahs of Gomorrah, even Tony Soprano looks tony.

Roberto Saviano, who cowrote the screenplay, must have struck dangerously close to the truth in his 2006 novel: He’s been under constant police protection since the book was published. Director Matteo Garrone, who is a painter as well as a filmmaker, artfully translates the novel’s grim intensity to the screen. He creates a world as visceral as a kick in the gut and as claustrophobic as the tanning booths that cocoon a group of paunchy men in the opening scene, bathing them in an eerie blue light.

We never do learn who those men are or why they get slaughtered like so many penned cattle, but as Gomorrah layers scene upon scene, their gory ending becomes part of the fabric of this bloody society.

Gomorrah’s hand-held camera joins people in mid-activity, simply following one individual or group for a while before switching to another. Before the main characters emerge from the crowd, you get a sense of their world and the rules they live by.

And what a world it is. Men kill each other with dull, emotionless efficiency while boys watch and girls and women hole up in their apartments, locking their doors in midday. Everyone – even housewives and children – must choose a side in this perpetual war. Wads of money are constantly being counted and passed off – yet nobody ever seems to enjoy his earnings. There’s no release to be found, even in nature, from the limited horizons of this gang-ruled gulag. And while the kids are beautiful and full of life, the grown-ups generally look either drawn and defeated or coarse and cruel.

Much of the action takes place in one teeming apartment complex, a multi-layered maze of dwellings and walkways that functions almost as a city within the city. Everyone seems to know everyone else’s business, and the most private things get played out in public – sometimes all at once. In one particularly memorable scene, a wedding party parades through one passageway while gangsters wage a gunfight from the next tier up.

Saviano grew up in Naples, which may explain why so much of the focus is on boys and young men. We spend enough time with Marco (Marco Macor) and his skinny friend Ciro (Ciro Petrone), wannabe gangsters foolish enough to think they can operate independently, to grow fond of the half-feral knuckleheads. Their eventual destruction by the gang feels as inevitable, and weighs as heavily, as any classic tragic ending. So does the catch-22 that traps Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese), an even younger boy who gets adopted by one of the gangs after returning a pistol they lost in a gunfight.

The boys – like many of the adults in the film – are played by nonprofessional actors from the area. The filmmakers direct and shoot them masterfully, making it easy to forget that they’re acting. When a few boys serve as crash test dummies for bulletproof vests, testing them by getting shot at point-blank, Garrone shows just enough of the fear on their faces and the vulnerability of their small bodies disappearing into the dark of the cave where the gangsters are waiting for them. You ache for these little guys, who believe what they’re told about this dark passageway being the route to manhood.

The stories of a couple of grown men expand the picture, showing how the camorra’s tentacles reach into the bowels of the global economy.

Pasquale, a gifted tailor who has been virtually enslaved since boyhood by his connected boss, sneaks out at night to coach the workers at a rival sweatshop. His story is a grim illustration of how the camorra deals with competition. We also get a sense of how far their business dealings extend, as we watch Scarlett Johansson spin on a red carpet in a dress made by Pasquale.

We also get a window into another camorra-controlled business – and the damage they’re doing to the land around Naples and the people who live there – when a young man named Roberto (Carmine Pasternoster) is apprenticed to a slick operator who manages the dumping of toxic waste in the area. “We solve problems created by others,” Roberto’s boss says of their waste-dumping scam.

That may be a rationalization, but it contains an uncomfortable dose of the truth.

Waltz With Bashir

“My basic thought in life is that suppression is not that bad. It might help you live your life,” said Ari Folman at a Q&A after a screening of Waltz With Bashir last December.

For individuals, that is. When it comes to nations, the writer, director, and “protagonist” of Waltz With Bashir is clearly no fan of denial. This may be an animated movie, but it’s definitely not kid stuff.

In 1982, thousands of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp were murdered over a two-day period. The camp was outside Beirut, and the killings were carried out by Lebanese troops: Christian Phalangists who were loyal to Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel. Waltz is an explosive exploration of that notorious incident.

The camps were under the control of the Israeli army and ringed by Israeli troops – including Folman himself. Those soldiers stood by during the two days of the massacre, sometimes catching glimpses of the horror but unsure of what they were seeing, and under orders from their superiors not to intervene.

The movie starts by literally unleashing the dogs of war, while a friend of Folman’s describes a nightmare he’s been having about the time he served in Lebanon. As the two sit in a bar late at night, we see the dream played out, and it’s terrifying: 26 ferocious dogs gallop through the streets of a city, eyes and fangs aglow as they snarl and snap at the people they pass.

Folman has suppressed his memories of his own time in Lebanon, which is by now about 20 years in the past. But that night he dreams about it, seeing an eerie image of young soldiers emerging slowly from the ocean and putting on their uniforms as if in a trance. That dream – or it is a memory? – prompts him to look into what happened when he was stationed in Lebanon.

Just as he did in real life, the movie’s Folman (the filmmaker and most of the other characters provide their own voices) seeks out other now-middle-aged men who served there at the same time, all of whom he either knew or is connected with by one or two degrees of separation. He also consults a couple of psychologists for perspective on how soldiers deal with post-traumatic stress, piecing together his own suppressed past like a detective investigating a crime. As he hears his former comrades’ vivid stories and he starts to remember his own, we see it all play out, in hand-drawn animation that changes its look to fit the tone of each scene.

This is Folman’s first animated film (before Waltz, he directed two live-action features and wrote for the original, Israeli version of In Treatment), and it was a smart choice. “Memory is dynamic; it’s alive,” he says in his voice-over. That’s one of this movie’s key themes, and animation helps make it concrete.

The drawing also turbo-charges reality, from the young soldiers’ panic to the middle-aged witnesses’ taut self-control and fevered dreams. Key memories are imbued with a pathos or horror that would be hard to achieve with live action, and characters are drawn to subtly emphasize key traits, like the haunted hazel eyes of Carmi, a former soldier turned falafel king.

The animators focus our attention on details that pull us in, like smoke slowly drifting upward from a shared joint or the juddering weight of a tank as it lumbers down a city street. And they make the soldiers’ nightmares and fantasies so vivid that certain images, like the slavering dogs of that opening scene, burrow their way into our own memories.

But animation has its limits. At the end of the film, Folman shifts from animated scenes of the few surviving refugees as they flee the carnage on foot, passing corpses of little children, to news footage of the same scene. The videotape serves a documentary function that Folman found “essential,” proving that the story he has told was “more than just my personal story, my memories.”

The Israeli government submitted Waltz as its contender for the Best Foreign Film Oscar (it was one of the five nominees) and sent Folman all over the world to flak it. Folman, who said he’s surprised to have written “this thing that the establishment just loves,” thinks Israelis embraced the film partly because nearly everyone can relate to post-traumatic stress in a country where military service is mandatory. “I think they thought: ‘He’s one of us. He’s a little bit freaked out, but it’s okay.’” But he wonders if the government also latched onto it the movie because it could help clear up the common misconception that it the Israelis killed the refugees.

In other words, the film Folman made to remind people of the massacre and the responsibility Israel shares for it could serve as propaganda for a government looking to absolve itself. If that’s so, it’s a bitter irony.

Folman’s film is a powerful anti-war story about what happens when middle-aged men with opaque motives throw clueless young men into battle. “I think this [story] could be told by anyone who woke up one morning in a distant place and is getting shot at and thinks: ‘What am I doing here? It has nothing to do with my life,’” he said.

This is hardly the first time that story’s been told, and it won’t be the last. But it’s a rare treat to see it done so well.

Two Lovers

By Elise Nakhnikian

James Gray's latest and perhaps best feature, Two Lovers, is a clear-eyed, unromantic movie about romance. (His first, Little Odessa, won a Silver Lion at the 1994 Venice Film Festival.)

Gray respects all his characters and lets us in on everyone’s motivation, so nobody comes off as a bad guy. And yet, in this Midsummer Night’s Dream of a story, one person’s happiness is inevitably another person’s pain.

Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) is a hulking bipolar bear of a manchild, old enough to live on his own but living with his parents in a claustropobic but beautifully shot Brighton Beach.

Leonard loves women. He lights up when he flirts, showing flashes of humor and attentiveness that make it plausible – just barely – that the lovely Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) would be drawn to him. But when he’s in shutdown mode, as he usually is, he’s as awkward as Quasimodo, hulking about in the shadows of his own bedroom to spy on his glamorous neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow).

Michelle is a shiksa goddess right out of a Woody Allen movie – in fact, at first she seems to be channeling the Mia Farrow of Crimes and Misdemeanors. A frail blond beauty who seems girlishly undefended, she assumes center stage from the moment she wanders into Leonard’s life, displacing Sandra, the nice Jewish girl his parents want him to marry. Michelle has no romantic interest in Leonard — she’s got a smarmy married lover at the law firm where she works – but she likes keeping him around as an adoring sidekick.

Phoenix, a Gray regular who starred in We Own the Night and played a key role in The Yards, is painfully vulnerable as Leonard. You cringe when Leonard goes to a fancy restaurant and tries to cover up his unease by ordering a girly drink, then trying to suck it up through a swizzle stick. And you brace yourself for something bad to come of the feverish happiness that emerges as he starts spending more time with Michelle— and stops taking his meds.

As Leonard’s parents, the elegant Israeli actor Moni Moshonov and the always sympathetic Isabella Rossellini exude waves of quiet empathy. Everyone in this daisy chain – from Leonard’s parents to Leonard to Sandra to Michelle to her lover – seems to mean well. They all want to take care of each other, but they just keep getting in one another’s way.

Two Lovers mines the gap between what we want for ourselves and what others want from us.

The Class

By Elise Nakhnikian

French writer-director Laurent Cantet is one of the best filmmakers alive. Working in the tradition of Robert Bresson, he shows how forces like class, race, and gender can warp lives, and he does it without preaching or pyrotechnics.

His deceptively simple yet engrossing stories contain too many levels of truth to be summed up in one pitch-friendly phrase. They also have an almost documentary sense of reality, partly because Cantet works mainly with nonprofessional actors. Workshopping the script with them for months before shooting, he helps them develop characters who are based on themselves or people they know.

Cantet’s Time Out (2001) is the story of a man too ashamed to tell his family he’s been laid off, who slides into a shadowy secret life parallel to – but increasingly removed from – the comfortable routine his wife and kids still follow. Human Resources (1999) looks at the gulf between blue-collar and white-collar workers through the eyes of a young man, the first in his family to go to college, who takes a summer job in the HR department of the factory where his father has labored for years. Heading South (2006) follows a group of white, middle-class North American women at a Haitian resort, where their relative wealth and the color of their skin makes them the inadvertent oppressors of the local men who serve as their companions – an imbalance we barely bat an eye at when the sexual tourists are men.

Cantet’s latest, The Class, recreates life inside a multicultural Parisian high school to look at what it means to become acculturated and what kids really learn in school. Cantet, whose parents were both schoolteachers, was working on the script when he met François Bégaudeau, a teacher who had written a novel based on his experience at a multiracial Parisian school. The two rewrote the screenplay, merging their stories with the help of frequent Cantet collaborator Robin Campillo.

In the movie, which was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, Bégaudeau plays Francois Marin, a version of himself. The other teachers are all played by actual teachers, and the kids are students from Belleville, a district much like the one where Bégaudeau taught. Cantet filmed almost entirely inside the school, mostly staying in Marin’s classroom as he teaches French – or tries to. Three digital cameras were always running, one capturing unscripted things kids did when they didn’t think the camera was on them.

Marin uses a kind of Socratic method of teaching, peppering his students with questions to get them to think about what they’re learning and why. The students respond in kind, forcing him to confront some of his own assumptions as his frustration bubbles up, cracking his cool façade. Cultural differences keep getting in the way of communication, and Marin winds up in a toxic standoff with Souleymane (Franck Keita), an alienated Malian immigrant; the rebellious and outspoken Esmeralda (Esmeralda Ouertani), and her quiet but equally strong-willed friend Khoumba (Rachel Regulier). For a while, Marin’s job appears to be in jeopardy, but when Souleymane winds up taking the fall, you wonder if he ever really had a chance.

Cantet says he wanted to make a movie that upends the false pieties of Hollywood films like Dead Poets Society, "where the teacher is always a guru figure, always says exactly the right thing. Our teacher is the opposite of the Robin Williams character – he takes risks, gets it wrong sometimes, asks questions more than he provides answers.”

Mission accomplished.

The International

By Elise Nakhnikian

At the end of The International, Interpol investigator Lou Salinger (Clive Owen) draws a bead on bad-guy Jonas Skarssen (Ulrich Thomsen), a banker who thrives on creating chaos. Skarssen's bank, IBBC, funds insurgencies, buys up missile guidance systems, and blithely assassinates whoever gets in the way of its nefarious plan to control the debt produced by wars worldwide.

Salinger has spent years trying to hold the bank to account for its evil ways, so this showdown should be his moment. But The International apparently aspires to be more than just a travelogue studded with shoot-em-up showdowns. And so, instead of pulling out an RPG or pleading for his life, Skarssen tries to calmly talk Salinger out of killing him. Shooting me won't solve a thing, he says. Another banker will just take my place, and business will go on as usual.

He's right, of course. You can't fix a corrupt system by blowing away a few head guys and henchmen. But by pointing out the futility of Salinger's quest, director Tom Twyker and screenwriter Eric Warren Singer undermine their own narrative, making their hero's attempt to hunt down the people behind the bank look dumb or deluded -- or worse. After all, Salinger's personal jihad causes a lot of what someone in the film actually refers to as "collateral damage."

What really cuts the legs out from under this story is its hamfisted dialogue and almost total lack of character development. Salinger, his allies, and his enemies are the flattest set of characters I've seen in a long time. Were the filmmakers trying to prove Skarssen's point about individuals being interchangeable or is this just bad writing?

The scene where Salinger interrogates Skarssen's right-hand man Wilhelm Wexler (Armin Mueller-Stahl) highlights one problem with that approach. Since we know almost nothing about Wexler, the movie has to grind to a halt while Salinger delivers a long, lumpy speech about Wexler's background and motivation and the role he has played in fomenting mayhem for IBBC.

The other problem, of course, is that you don’t really care what happens to someone if you don't have some idea of what makes him tick.

If there were a law against wasting acting talent, Twyker would be locked up for years for this movie. Owen works hard to give Salinger heft, frowning and fretting and throwing the occasional tantrum. Naomi Watts swathes her neck in scarves to show that she's tightly wound as Ella, Salinger's colleague in the Manhattan DA's office. Brian O'Byrne and Mueller-Stahl make a mesmerizing if opaque hitman-handler pair, and Thomsen's icy Nordic banker is so composed he seems almost embalmed. You can't take your eyes off any of them, but they have so little to work with that you can't do much besides ogle them, as the caressing close-ups invite you to do.

The International does some things well -- the showy shootout at the Guggenheim Museum is very good in spots, though you'd think they could have done more with that setting. But even the things it does best, like its travelogue-style shots of cities like Berlin, Milan, and Istanbul, feel as rote as its undistinguished soundtrack.

By trying to be more than "just" a genre piece, The International winds up being much less than international chase films with soul, like the Bourne series or the Daniel Craig version of Casino Royale. Instead, it's just an x-ray of a movie: all structure and no substance.

Coraline

By Elise Nakhnikian

From the needle-thin metal fingers that rip apart a rag doll and sew it back together over the opening credits to the flying Scottie dogs that zoom over the audience during the ones at the end, the 3-D version of Coraline makes us all Alices in a stop-motion wonderland.

Based on an award-winning children’s book by Neil Gaiman, Coraline spins a fanciful story on classic fairy tale foundation: Coraline is a resourceful little girl who has to rely on courage, wit, and a little help from her friends to defeat a dangerous witch, who disguises herself at first as an ally. A door in Coraline’s house that usually opens onto a brick wall sometimes becomes the portal to a magical parallel world. And Coraline keeps going repeating her journey, but her reasons for going and her actions once there change as she figures out what’s going on under the surface.

Coraline and her parents (she’s an only child) have just moved halfway across the country, to a rambling old house in Oregon. Her parents are preoccupied with work, leaving Coraline to her own devices. She drops in on the eccentric neighbors, explores the surrounding woods, and befriends a shy neighbor boy, Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.), and the semi-feral black cat (voiced by Keith David) who shadows them both. And she goes through that door in the wall, of course, where she finds a world that’s almost exactly like her own, only better. Or is it?

The house Coraline finds on the other side of the door is better decorated, brighter, and cosier than her real home. Even the parents she finds there seem better at first. Her “other mother” is all cooing attention and perfectly roasted chicken. Her other dad is suave where her real dad is embarrassingly geeky, crooning away like Bing Crosby. Even the stuff there is cooler: her toys talk and move, and some of the furniture is alive.

Coraline’s world pulls us in because, surreal as it is, it always feels real enough to touch. The 3-D helps, since it’s used not so much to shock and awe as to place you right into the middle of the set. Director Harry Selick specializes in moody, emotionally complex animated fairy tales (he also directed The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach), and he makes Coraline’s worlds – particularly the one she enters through the door in her wall -- feel more vivid than our own. You can practically feel the damp chill of the big empty rooms in Coraline’s house, the spongy floor of the tunnel she crawls through to the other world, and the warmth of the other mother’s kitchen.

Selick recorded his Coraline script before shooting the movie, capturing vocal performance by an excellent cast that includes Dakota Fanning as Coraline and John Hodgman and Teri Hatcher as her parents. The handmade sets and puppets were then filmed to match the dialogue, creating what its press release calls “the biggest animated feature production ever to be made in stop-motion animation, and the first to be made in stereoscopic 3-D.” It’s amazing to see how much feeling and life this laborious process generates.

Coraline is a pistol. Brave and funny, curious and ingenious, capable and vivacious, she’s one of the most memorable heroines to appear in a year that was studded with great female movie roles. Wybie is charming too, with his kind heart and nervous motor mouth.

There are also a lot of nice moments where the filmmakers remind us about things like how suddenly lighthearted play can turn scary in childhood, the instant friendships that can form, the almost brutal honesty that’s part of daily conversation between friends, and the things kids notice that grownups look right through.

The faces are amazingly expressive, too – so mobile you almost forget that they’re not real people. The filmmakers created thousands of subtle variations by using so-called replacement animation, making computer models based on drawings created by a 2-D animator. These were then printed out on 3-D printers, hand-painted, and placed on the puppets.

But using puppets in place of actors lets the filmmakers exaggerate body language enough to make it comical – while keeping it accurate enough to be eloquent. Coraline’s affable but ineffectual father, for instance, is so used to hunching over his laptop that his neck extends like a giraffe’s, and Coraline sometimes flings her body around in an exaggerated version of that thing kids do when they’re bored. And every time I see my cat cock her head to look at something, I think about the cat in Coraline, whose head sometimes tilts so far to one side you half expect him to tip over.

The animation also lends itself to equisitively atmospheric creepiness. When Coraline catches on to the witch's game and the witch lets her true self emege, it's like a children's nightmare come to life as she morphs from a prettier, cuddlier version of Coraline’s mother to a skeletal monster, more spider than witch.

Moments like that may be too scary for very little kids, but the preteen Coraline fans sitting behind me last weekend approved of this movie, and it definitely delighted this particular post-teen.