At the Movies

OSS 117: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES
Running time 99 minutes
Written by Jean-François Halin
Directed by Michel Hazanavicius
Starring Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo

Michel Hazanavicius’s OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, from a screenplay by Jean-François Halin, inspired by the “OSS 117” novels by Jean Bruce, was the Audience Award winner at the Seattle International Film Festival and the Grand Prix winner at the Tokyo International Film Festival. The press release for the film describes it as “the hilariously deadpan French hit comedy and spy satire starring comic celebrity Jean Dujardin. … A cross between James Bond and Austin Powers, Jean Dujardin (star of the hit French comedy Brice de Nice) is OSS 117 (real name: Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath), a French secret agent who first saw print in 1949 as author Jean Bruce’s character, and eventually appeared in 265 novels and seven movies between 1956 and 1970.”

After recounting all this publicity fanfare, I am embarrassed to confess that I have never heard of OSS 117, Jean Dujardin or Jean Bruce. Also, I have never been a particular admirer of either James Bond or Austin Powers, and could hardly be expected to be overjoyed by a “cross between them.” Hence, I was hardly surprised when I didn’t crack a smile over the antics of Mr. Jean Dujardin as OSS 117. At least I must concede that Mr. Dujardin’s broad changes of expression always alerted me to where and when I was supposed to laugh. After a while I began to wonder why people in Paris, Seattle and Tokyo laughed at plot developments I found merely silly. One target of the satire that I thought has been long overdue in American movies was the sentimentality of male buddy-buddy bonding. First, we have two men in bathing suits playing a form of beach ball, falling and tumbling over each other and playfully wrestling. OSS-117 is beside himself with unalloyed pleasure, but his “best friend” sports a slightly more ambiguous expression, which leads to a later betrayal. It doesn’t matter since OSS 117 is indestructible and impervious to subtlety and nuance.

Another thought I had was that the series did not take France very seriously as a would-be world power, and that the babes in the film, especially an Egyptian secretary, luscious Larmina El Akmar Betouche (Bérénice Bejo), never sheds all her clothes even when she is strip-wrestling with an evil babe. Even at this late date in our collective depravity, certain taboos remain in force for certain genres. And OSS 117 is nothing if not commercially calculating.

THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS
Running time 77 minutes
Written by Maureen Medved
Directed by Bruce McDonald
Starring Ellen Page, Ari Cohen, Zie Souwand

Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments, from Maureen Medved’s screenplay, based on her novel, is much too fragmented for any emotions to emerge unscathed by the film’s excessive experimentation with time and space. But again, a virtuoso performance by Ellen Page as Tracey Berkowitz, a terminally troubled 15-year-old, gives the film a semblance of recognizable humanity in a sea of split-screen, rectangular abstractions in all sizes.

From what I could piece together, Tracey was beset with a father (Ari Cohen) who is always hectoring her, along with his brow-beaten wife (Erin McMurtry) and his apparently autistic son, Sonny (Zie Souwand), who keeps barking like a dog as his only form of communication. Mr. Berkowitz wants someone, anyone, in the family to tell him why Sonny is barking like a dog.

Meanwhile, Tracey is being hazed by other girls in the school for not having “tits.” And I am not sure that I understood these episodes correctly, since the different rectangles in the frame are not always chronologically consistent, supposedly because Tracey’s memory mechanism darts back and forth all the time.

Besides, there is little community ambiance in the film to speak of, and there is a dire shortage of authority figures aside from Mr. Berkowitz. Tracey ruminates about having a crush on a fellow student, Billy Zero (Slim Twig), who rides a motorcycle to school and keeps to himself, at least at first. Later, after he has had sex with Tracey in a car, he throws her out with her panties around her legs, and later taunts her in concert with the other guys. And this is after she has delivered soliloquies on their great love for each other.

Tracey responds to this and other setbacks by retreating into a fantasy world of her own while she looks frantically to find her little brother, Sonny, who has disappeared into the snowy wilderness that is Tracey’s slice of Canada. After she fights off a rape and ends up alone on an empty bus, wrapped only in a shower curtain, the film ends with a prolonged full frame shot of Tracey in her shower curtain, walking fiercely to who knows where.

The film’s production notes confirm the strong feeling I had that much more time was spent on the editing and reframing than on the actual shooting. The effect for me was that this 77-minute film seemed much longer than it is; it displays a graphic complexity by simply multiplying the number of discrete compositions, often of the various parts of the same body.

You have probably seen modified versions of The Tracey Fragments before in recent movies; television shows like 24; and innumerable MTV videos. As Mr. McDonald recalls his research for the film: “I called [cinematographer] Steve Cosens, who I’d met on an American TV series. We’d had a great time working together, so great in fact that it got me fired for our visual audacity, which had freaked out the network. Steve, [editor] Jeremy Munce, [producer] Sarah Timmons and I along with our designer Ingrid Jurek watched all the split screen movies we could, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Boston Strangler, the new Beastie Boys concert movie, and a video about crumping that Stevie brought in. We poured over photographs, and paintings and listened to Horses—the Patti Smith album. We used our great casting directors to secure some of the best acting talent in the land. The team was ready!”

Besides Mr. McDonald and Ms. Medved, the other indispensable members of the production included producer Ms. Timmins; executive producer Paul Barkin; editors Mr. Munce and Gareth C. Scales; casting directors Sara Kay and Jenny Lewis; production designer Ms. Jurek; and a musical score provided by Broken Social Scene, a Toronto indie rock band.

Unfortunately, the net result of all this punkish avant-garde audacity, including Julian Richings as Tracey’s transvestite psychiatrist, is to demonstrate yet again that with experimental shattering of conventions, more is less. Still, Ellen Page remains one of the few stellar newcomers who deserves to be seen in anything she chooses to do.

A PREVIOUS ENGAGEMENT
Running Time 118 minutes
Written and directed by Joan Carr-Wiggin
Starring Juliet Stevenson, Daniel Stern, Tchéky Karyo

Joan Carr-Wiggin’s A Previous Engagement, from her own screenplay, takes place entirely on the picturesque Mediterranean island of Malta as the writer-director slyly spins a romantically feminist fable with farcical flourishes that sometimes fails to deliver the desired laughs. Fortunately, the very gifted stage and screen actress Juliet Stevenson plays the central role of a middle-aged married woman and Seattle libertarian who persuades her set-in-his-ways insurance salesman husband, Jack, to take Julia and their two grown daughters to Malta for their summer vacation. What Jack and their girls don’t know is that Julia has a secret plan to keep a 25-year-old prearranged reunion with her first love, a feisty Frenchman named Alex (Tchéky Karyo).

Since the whole film was shot in Malta, the backstory has to be parceled out in bits and pieces via Ms. Stevenson’s inner monologue and increasingly frenzied facial expressions as her character is suspended in a state of panic over fear of discovery by her husband, and uncertainty about what and who she will find at the end of her long-cherished personal rainbow. Hence, the movie is slow going in its early stages while the goal posts are being laboriously constructed.

Against all odds, Alex shows up for the long delayed rendezvous more passionate than ever for Julia. For Julia, long-felt doubts about Alex’s sincerity rise to the surface, especially when he confesses to having been married and divorced four times in the interim—not to mention all his former mistresses, like Julia. Indeed, at one point, Julia is so reflexively jealous that she mistakenly suspects that Alex’s teenage daughter is his current girlfriend. The humor is thus repeatedly propelled by Julia’s tendency to jump to conclusions.

The big surprise of the film is the bizarre reaction of Julia’s husband when he learns of Julia’s deviousness. Instead of behaving like the stick-in-the-mud husband we have seen previously, he purchases a blindingly all-white touristy wardrobe topped by a jaunty white fedora and hits the town’s hot spot for female consolation. He winds up on the dance floor with ex-chorus girl Grace (Valerie Mahaffey) and performs a creditable rumba and salsa, much to Julia’s horrified amazement at this hitherto unexplored side of her hitherto humdrum husband. This is usually the standard formula for marital reconciliation. I won’t reveal what finally happens because the viewers might enjoy finding out for themselves, while savoring the middle-aged magic of Ms. Stevenson’s hyper-expressiveness. A great actress even in a not-so-great comedy is fully worth the price of admission in these far from halcyon days, both movie-wise and world-wise.

The Godard series at Film Forum continues on May 5 with Le Petit Soldat (1960), starring Anna Karina and Michel Subor, at 7:30 and 9:40; the presentation will include the short Charlotte et son Jules (1958). On May 6 and 7, Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966), with Marina Vlady, plays at 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30 and 9:30.

Pierrot Le Fou (1965), with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, plays on May 8, 9 and 10, at 1, 3:10, 5:20, 7:30 and 9:40.

MISTER LONELY
Directed by Harmony Korine
Written by Avi Korine and Harmony Korine
Starring Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Werner Herzog, James Fox

Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, from a screenplay by Mr. Korine and his brother, Avi, is a more benign if comparatively overlong avant-garde enterprise than we have recently been accustomed to getting from Mr. Korine. That is to say, no blow jobs, no cat-killing, no pissing, no asphyxia-induced orgasms, no teenage violence. When he was 22, Mr. Korine wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), with its malignantly depressing 24-hour tour of New York City’s AIDS-infected, sex-crazed, booze-belting teens. He went on to write and direct Gummo (1997) and Julien Donkey Boy (1999), the former described by some mainline critics as the worst movie ever made, and the latter becoming the first American movie to officially adopt the Danish Dogma 95. Nonetheless, Mr. Korine can be credited with launching the careers of two new screen personalities, Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson.

By now you may have gathered that I am not about to write a rave review for Mister Lonely, Mr. Korine’s first film since his self-imposed, near-decade-long exile in Paris. Nor am I going to dismiss it out of hand simply because, as Hermann Göring might have said, whenever I hear the term “avant-garde” applied to the cinema, I want to reach for my revolver. Yet, as the recent Abel Gance revival on Turner Classics demonstrates, there is nothing new under the sun on either side of the movie camera.

In his Director’s Notes, Mr. Korine traces the genesis of Mister Lonely to his “Thinking Images”: “I basically started thinking in terms of images that really have nothing to do with anything. Just single images. I started dreaming about nuns flying out of airplanes and praying all the way down and surviving. Then I started to fixate upon specific images and characters. One of them was the idea of a Michael Jackson impersonator walking the streets of Paris. I had these different images although they didn’t have anything to do with one another. But I knew there was something I was trying to get out, a unified idea, but I wasn’t sure how to say it.”

Mr. Korine and his brother finally found a way to translate the director’s random images into a semi-coherent narrative about a colony of impersonators forming a commune in a castle in the Scottish highlands, and somehow performing their specialties in a poorly attended concert in an empty theater near the commune. But hope springs eternal for even the most habitually impoverished entertainers.

The picture is flooded with semi-celebrities impersonating more famous celebrities. The Mexican actor Diego Luna impersonates Michael Jackson, and is actually seen strutting his stuff on a Paris street where he runs into a Marilyn Monroe impersonator played by Samantha Morton. Her husband turns out to be Charlie Chaplin impersonated by Denis Lavant. “Marilyn” persuades “Michael” to fly to Scotland with her to join the other members of the commune.

The other impersonators in the commune, with their celebrity models, are James Fox (the Pope); Melita Morgan (Madonna); Anita Pallenberg (the Queen); Rachel Korine (Little Red Riding Hood); Richard Strange (Abe Lincoln); Michael Joel Stuart (Buckwheat); Esme Creed-Miles (Shirley Temple); Mal Whiteley, Daniel Rovai, and Nigel Cooper as the Three Stooges (Larry, Moe, Curly); Joseph Morgan (James Dean); Jason Pennycooke (Sammy Davis Jr.); and, finally, Werner Herzog as Father Umbrillo, who flies the nuns (Camille De Pazzis and Britta Gartner) to their sky-diving destinations. David Blaine plays Father Umbrillo’s priestly subordinate. Lalid Afkir plays someone called Habid in the credits, and I am not sure if either is a celebrity.

The high point of the film, I suppose, is the spectacle of all the impersonators dancing sequentially to the strains of Irving Berlin’s Astaire-Rogers classic “Dancing Cheek to Cheek.” Needless to say, I much preferred Astaire-Rogers, but that is just the hopeless classicist in me. Anyway, I didn’t mind Mr. Korine’s conceits, but I thought that at 112 minutes the movie dragged somewhat, whereas Mr. Korine’s earlier projects never ran longer than 90-plus minutes. The only memorable line for me was Marilyn Monroe’s suggestion that her husband, the foul-mouthed Chaplin figure, was closer to Hitler than to Chaplin.

I will admit that Mr. Korine knows more than his share of interesting people, notably Werner Herzog and Leos Carax, a firebrand film director, who plays the psychiatrist of “Michael Jackson.”

And, oops, I almost overlooked Mr. Korine’s screenwriting gig for Larry Clark’s Ken Park in 2002. The story is that Mr. Korine wrote the screenplay back around the time of Kids, but then Mr. Clark and Mr. Korine had a falling-out, leading to Mr. Korine’s seizing the directorial reins for Gummo. Anyway, from what I’ve read, Mr. Korine’s life is more engrossing than any of his films.

I will end with the faint praise of Mister Lonely as the least offensive of the works in the Korine canon.

XXY
Directed by Lucía Puenzo
Written by Sergio Bizzio and Lucía Puenzo
Starring Ricardo Darín, Valeria Bertuccelli, Germán Palacios, Carolina Pelleritti, Martín Piroyansky, Inés Efron

Lucía Puenzo’s XXY, from her own screenplay (in Spanish with English subtitles), is based on a short story by her husband, Sergio Bizzio. As Ms. Puenzo describes the genesis of her film, “From the moment I read the story—the sexual awakening of a young girl who has what doctors call genital ambiguity—I couldn’t take it out of my head. I began to write with that image in my head: the body of a young woman with both sexes in one same body. I was especially interested in the dilemma of inevitable choice: not only having to choose between being a man or a woman, but also having to choose that binary decision, or intersex, as an identity and not as a place of mere passage.”

XXY may be the first fictional film to deal with the “intersex”—apart from its misleading analogies with transsexuality, homosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality—by the absence of medical intervention or “mutilation” at birth. This is eventually one of the dramatic issues Ms. Puenzo brings up in the film, without even pretending to know all the answers to the perplexing questions raised by chromosomal confusion in the newborn.

Alex (Inés Efron) is a 15-year-old girl who was born and remains an intersex child, with both male and female genitalia. She lives with her parents, Kraken (Ricardo Darín) and Suli (Valeria Bertuccelli). As Alex begins to explore her strange sexuality, her mother invites guests from Buenos Aires to come for a visit to their remote home on the scenic Uruguayan shore. The visitors are not particularly welcomed by Kraken, inasmuch as he originally fled from Buenos Aires to escape idle curiosity about his daughter’s sexuality. As it happens, the visiting husband, Ramiro (Germán Palacios), is a cosmetic surgeon. His wife, Erika (Carolina Pelleritti), and their awkward adolescent son, Alvaro (Martín Piroyansky), seem agreeable enough. Still, Kraken—who has never wanted his daughter to be ashamed of her body—suspects that his own wife has a secret agenda to “normalize” their daughter’s sexual identity.

Indeed, the emotional power of the film is encapsulated in the scenes between Alex and Kraken, and between Alvaro and his own much less supportive father. XXY is thus primarily an emotional confrontation between parents and children. The interaction of the two generations is occasionally rambunctious and tumultuous, but singularly without malice. What is emphasized throughout is the unending vulnerability of the characters to the inescapable consequences of a bizarre accident of nature.

In Ms. Puenzo’s own words, her film is concerned with “the freedom of choice, identity and desire.” Toward this end, the sensitive performances, especially Mr. Darín’s as Kraken, Ms. Efron’s as Alex, and Mr. Piroyansky’s as Alvaro, contribute enormously to the success of this expedition into a troubled area of human existence. Hence, XXY fully deserves the honor it has received already as the 2008 Cannes Film Critics Week’s Grand Prix winner, and the honor it seeks to receive: Argentina’s official selection for the 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In addition to its having been invited to film festivals worldwide, XXY is a selection of MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “New Directors, New Films” series. So see it not only because it works as an exquisitely tendered emotional experience, but also because it is the first cinematic treatment in fictional form of a taboo-breaking ticklish subject.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center presented a gala tribute to Meryl Streep on Monday, April 14, 2008. It was the 36th such ceremony, all directed and edited by Wendy Keys, with a writing contribution on this occasion by Joanna Ney. Meryl and I have had our publicly aired differences over the years, but in this instance I must say that she and the evening were total triumphs. This included the many eloquently heartfelt tributes from admirers like Robert Redford, Jonathan Demme, Uma Thurman, Robert De Niro, Amy Adams, Garrison Keillor and Mike Nichols, among others. But the evening’s standout was Meryl herself with her brilliantly concluding stand-up performance, funnier, more accomplished and more intuitively in harmony with her audience than any I have seen anywhere. To put it more simply, bravo, Meryl! You were magnifico!

ROMAN DE GARE
Running time 103 minutes
Written by Claude Lelouch and Pierre Uytterhoeven
Directed by Claude Lelouch
Starring Dominique Pinon, Fanny Ardant, Audrey Dana

Claude Lelouch’s Roman De Gare, from a screenplay by Mr. Lelouch and Pierre Uytterhoeven, scores a few points as it pretends to play out as a feature-length suspense narrative of the sort adapted from paperback best sellers one picks up at the airport for supposedly light reading on the trip or at the beach. Mr. Lelouch is still best known for A Man and a Woman (1966) with Jean–Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée. That year it won both the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and the Oscar for foreign-language film. It was his eighth feature film after seven previous flops had placed his career in jeopardy. In the 40-some years since, he has made 41 feature films and countless television movies. Nonetheless, his continuing popular success is coupled with a widespread disdain among the more serious film critics. Mr. Lelouch was so aware of this disdain that he originally made Roman De Gare under a directorial pseudonym, Hervé Picard, so that his enemies in the critical establishment would not have a “Lelouch” work to denounce.

Mr. Lelouch explained his ultimately futile search for anonymity in his film’s production notes. “It’s a way to deal with fame,” he said. “I wanted to send a message to those who dismiss my work. I wanted one of my movies to be seen for what it really was, and not a Claude Lelouch film.” Did he succeed? I’m not sure, but the comparative ingenuity of the narrative places it several notches above A Man and a Woman for sheer unpredictability.

But to explain what is most surprising about the narrative, I must ask the reader not to read any further in my review until they have seen the movie for themselves or have already decided not to see it. Actually, despite all my reservations, I think it is worth seeing, though I do not approve of all the trickery involved.

The film begins near the end of its story with the police interrogation of Judith Ralitzer (Fanny Ardant), best-selling writer of Romans de Gare, about her having possibly murdered an undisclosed missing person. At about the same time, she is also being interviewed by a television moderator about her secret formula for writing best sellers. She replies with a smiling demurral to having any kind of formula.

The action then shifts to several seemingly unrelated events much earlier in the film, the first dealing with an escaped homicidal pedophile, whose murderous acts are facilitated by magic tricks he performs to lure his child targets to their doom. Presto, we are shown a singularly unattractive older man (Dominique Pinon) performing a trick with flowers for a little girl accompanied by her parents at an otherwise largely deserted automobile rest stop late at night. After the little girl and her parents have driven off, the suspicious-looking amateur magician can’t help noticing a couple screaming at each other beside a nearby car. Suddenly, the man of the couple drives off alone, leaving his girlfriend stranded. The sinister person offers the woman, Huguette (Audrey Dana) a lift, but she refuses for the longest time, even though her fiancé doesn’t answer his cell phone. Finally, she accepts the stranger’s offer, and we go, “Uh-oh.”

Meanwhile, another woman has reported that her husband, a teacher, is missing. By now we know that this woman will be shoehorned into the plot somehow. Back on the road, when Huguette’s mysterious driver stops his car at a lonely stretch of road, looks around cautiously and suggests very improbably that they go for a nice walk in the woods, we immediately expect the worst. But we breathe a sigh of relief when she refuses his invitation, and instead invites him to pose as her fiancé for her parents in the rural village to which she and her real fiancé were heading when they had their final quarrel.

Mr. Pinon’s suspected pedophile agrees, and we are soon engulfed by the ridiculously primitive Tobacco Road-like dwelling of Huguette’s parents. The parents are immediately suspicious of this old and ugly fiancé of Huguette. Nonetheless, the Pinon character is quickly invited to go trout-harvesting by Huguette’s nymphet-aged daughter. When they don’t come back for hours, we and the parents suspect the worst. And when they finally return at nightfall, loaded with trout, we begin to suspect that the Pinon character is not who we have been cued to suspect and fear he is. Not long after, a news bulletin informs us that the real serial-killer pedophile has been caught by the police.

But then who is Huguette’s driver? Is he the missing teacher-husband? The missing husband turns up only to tell his wife that he is leaving her for good. This news delights her no end, because in the meantime she has started an affair with the detective investigating her husband’s disappearance. As for her revealed brother, the still mysterious Pinon character, he takes on still another identity, as the ghost writer all these year in the guise of Ms. Ardant’s faux novelist’s secretary. His latest ghost-written masterpiece is one he has been secretly and suspiciously recording from the moment he first saw Huguette, and decided to imagine himself as the escaped pedophile.

At some point in the proceedings, I decided that enough was enough, even though the narrative became even more intrigue-ridden when the ghost writer decides to fake his own murder after he realizes that Ms. Ardant’s faux novelist intends to murder him. This subterfuge leads to her being exposed as a fraud, and committing suicide as a consequence. This leads Ms. Dana’s Huguette and the Pinon gargoyle to embrace finally as the greatest mismatch of the elective affinities since Beauty and the Beast, not to mention Fay Wray/Naomi Watts and King Kong. This, at least, is somewhat original for a movie love story.

UP THE YANGTZE
Running time 93 minutes
Written and directed by Yung Chang
Starring Yu Shui and Chen Bo Yu

Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze crosses the very thin line between fiction and nonfiction films with the use of real-life people in the massively ongoing spectacle of the largest hydroelectric project in history, the Three Gorges Dam, which is causing the displacement of three million inhabitants from the banks of the fabled Yangtze River. Mr. Yung is a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker who knows the area firsthand as his grandfather’s birthplace.

As Mr. Yung describes the genesis of this film in the production notes: “The idea was born in 2002, when I went on one of the so-called Farewell Cruises along the Yangtze with my parents and grandfather. The aim is to offer tourists the chance to visit the area before it is flooded by the Three Gorges Dam. It’s very surreal. Traveling from Canada to China was an emotional experience. We got off the 13-hour flight to Beijing, and then took a flight to Chongqing—the largest municipality in the world. They call it the new Hong Kong. It’s where the cruise begins.”

Mr. Yung chose two main characters for his real-life drama of the swirling changes in China. Yu Shui was christened “Cindy” by her employers on the cruise line. She was 16 at the time shooting began on the film, and she is shown as the eldest of three children in the Yu family, self-supporting farmers living along the Yangtze River, near Fengdu, the so-called Ghost City. Since the Yus are about to be displaced a second time by the rising waters of the Three Gorges Dam, Yu Shui is sent to wash dishes on the Cruise Line to help support the family.

By contrast, “Jerry” Chen Bo Yu, the lounge singer, is the spoiled son of a middle-class Chinese urban family; he can’t wait for the New China, with its promised new class privileges and opportunities to arise from gigantic enterprises like Three Gorges Dam. Mr. Yung respects both points of view as he ponders a puzzle that is baffling all of us. Just where is China taking us besides up the Yangtze River? Mr. Yung’s film does not even pretend to know, and that is its great strength as it plunges more deeply into the truly unknown.

The Film Forum’s monthlong tribute to United Artists ends Thursday, May 1, on a fittingly high note, with Charles Chaplin’s two finest films, City Lights (1931), with Charles Chaplin, Virginia Cherill, Harry Myers and Hank Mann, showing at 1, 4:40 and 8:20, and Modern Times (1936), with Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Chester Conklin and Stanley “Tiny” Sandford, at 2:30, 6:30 and 10:10.

Before its glorious ending, the series leads up to it with Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963), with Albert Finney, Susannah York, Hugh Griffith, Edith Evans, Diane Cilento, Joan Greenwood, David Tomlinson, Peter Bull, David Warner and Lynn Redgrave. Screenings are Thursday, April 24, at 1, 5:20 and 9:40. Fred Niblo’s The Mark of Zorro (1920), with Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Marguerite De La Motte, Noah Beery, Robert McKim and Charles Mailes, shows at 3:25 and 7:45, both with live piano accompaniment.

On Friday, April 25, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1973), with Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Maria Michi, Cathérine Allégrét, Marie-Helène Breillat, Catherine Breillat, Catherine Sola, Mauro Marchetti and Dan Diament, shows at 2, 4:30, 7 and 9:30.

Saturday, April 26, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), with Ralph Meeker, Cloris Leachman, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Wesly Addy, Nick Dennis, Maxine Cooper, Gaby Rodgers, Jack Elam and Jack Lambert, screens at 2:30, 6 and 9:30. Phil Karlson’s 99 River Street (1953), with John Payne, Evelyn Keyes, Brad Dexter, Peggie Castle, Ian Wolfe and Frank Faylen, is at 1, 4:30 and 8.

Sunday and Monday, April 27 and 28, Ken Russell’s Women in Love (1969), with Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson, Jennie Linden, Eleanor Bron, Alan Webb and Michael Gough, shows at 3:05 and 7:35 (Sunday) and 3:05 (Monday). John Schlesinger’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971), with Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch, Murray Head, Peggy Ashcroft, Tony Britton, Maurice Denham, Vivian Pickles, Frank Windsor, Bessie Love and, in a bit part, Daniel Day-Lewis, shows at 1, 5:30 and 10 (Sunday) and 1 (Monday).

On Monday, April 28, William Beaudine’s Sparrows (1926), with Mary Pickford, Gustave von Seyffertitz, Roy Stewart, Mary Louise Miller, Charlotte Mineau and Spee O’Donnell, shows at 7:10 with live piano accompaniment. And Sam Taylor’s My Best Girl (1927), with Mary Pickford and Buddy Rogers, shows at 5:30 and 9.

On Tuesday, April 29, John Sturge’s The Magnificent Seven (1960), with Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Eli Wallach, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn and Brad Dexter, shows at 2, 4:30, 7 and 9:30. On Wednesday, April 30, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), with Elliott Gould, Sterling Hayden, Nina Van Pallandt, Henry Gibson, Mark Rydell, Jim Bouton, David Arkin and Warren Berlinger, screens at 3:15 and 7:35 (at the later show, ex-Yankee and Ball Four author Jim Bouton will give an introduction). And Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974), with Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, John Schuck, Burt Remsen, Louise Fletcher, Ann Latham and Tom Skerritt, shows at 1, 5:20 and 9:40.

If you’ve never seen Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg and Jean-Pierre Melville, it opens Godard’s ’60s series at Film Forum beginning May 2 and running through June 5. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday (May 2-4) showtimes are 1, 2:50, 4:40, 6:30, 8:20 and 10:10. On Monday the 5th, screenings are 2, 3:30 and 5:40. Don’t miss it.

Film Forum’s monthlong tribute to United Artists’ 90th anniversary is nearing its home stretch. On Thursday, April 17, there will be an action-filled double bill of Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), with Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston, Biff McGuire and Yaphet Kotto (at 1, 5:10 and 9:20), and Jules Dassin’s Topkapi (1964), with Melina Mercouri, Maximilian Schell, Peter Ustinov, Robert Morley, Akim Tamiroff and Despo Diamantidou (at 2:55 and 7:05).

On Friday and Saturday, April 18 and 19, Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964), with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Wilfred Brambell, Norman Rossington, John Junkin, Victor Spinetti and Anna Quayle, screens at 2:40, 6 and 9:20. Richard Lester’s The Knack … and How to Get It (1965), with Rita Tushingham, Michael Crawford, Ray Brooks, Donal Donnelly, Charlotte Rampling and Jacqueline Bisset, shows at 1, 4:20 and 7:40.

Sunday and Monday, April 20 and 21, brings Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), with Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, Joe E. Brown, George Raft, Pat O’Brien, Nehemia Persoff, Joan Shawlee and Mike Mazurki (Sunday at 1:30, 5:15 and 9, and Monday at 1:30), and Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman’s The General (1927), with Buster Keaton, Mario Mack, Glen Cavender, Jim Farley and Joe Keaton (Sunday at 3:45 and 7:30, and Monday at 3:45, all with live piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner).

On Monday, April 21, D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920), with Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Lowell Sherman, Burr McIntosh, Kate Bruce, Mary Hay and Creighton Hale, plays at 5:30 and 9, and Charles Reisner’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. with Buster Keaton, Ernest Torrence, Marion Byron, Tom Lewis and Tom McGuire, screens at 7:30 with live piano.

Tuesday, April 22, brings Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978), with Jane Fonda, Jon Voight, Bruce Dern, Robert Carradine, Penelope Milford and David Clennon (at 2, 4:30 and 7 with an introduction by producer Jerome Hellman, and at 9:30).

And on Wednesday April 23, Delbert Mann’s Marty (1955), with Ernest Borgnine, Betsy Blair, Joe Mantell, Joe DeSantis, Esther Minciotti, Augusta Ciolli, Karen Steele, Jerry Paris and Frank Sutton, screens at 3:45 and 7:45, and Fred Coe’s A Thousand Clowns (1965), with Jason Robards, Barbara Harris, Martin Balsam, Gene Saks and William Daniels, shows at 1:30, 5:30 and 9:30.

88 MINUTES
Running Time 108 minutes
Written by Gary Scott Thompson
Directed by Jon Avnet
Starring Al Pacino, Leelee Sobieski, Alicia Witt, Benjamin McKenzie

Jon Avnet’s 88 Minutes, from a screenplay by Gary Scott Thompson, turns out to be a noirish mystery with more red herrings than are to be found at a fishmonger’s convention. That is to say that even when the mystery is finally solved, many loose ends are left dangling, which is not at all unusual in this period of catering to the youth market’s craving for chaotic confusion. Not that it matters that much, but the production notes tell us that though the story of 88 Minutes is set in the city of Seattle, it was shot in and around the greater Vancouver area over 39 days.

It is great fun to watch the matchless Al Pacino, now visibly in his late 60s, summon all his histrionic gifts as Jack Gramm, a forensic psychiatrist and profiler for the F.B.I. who suddenly finds himself in danger, as an unknown caller tells him he has 88 minutes to live. In the course of these 88 minutes he is shot at, nearly run over by an automobile and a motorcycle, and ingeniously framed for a murder he didn’t commit. Or did he? We are never quite sure until fairly late in the film that he is as innocent of wrongdoing as he claims he is.

Besides Mr. Pacino’s presence in the cast, the other great asset of the film is the gallery of young, beautiful and competent women who surround Gramm, like moths around an illuminated light bulb, as Girl Fridays, students in his university psychiatry class, and academic and F.B.I. colleagues. Among the charismatic enchantresses who cross Gramm’s path are Alicia Witt as Kim Cummings, Leelee Sobieski as Lauren Douglas, Amy Brenneman as Shelly Barnes and Deborah Kara Unger as Carol Lynn Johnson. I mention only their names because to describe their actual functions is to give part of the trick plot away.

The main narrative begins on the eve of a serial killer’s scheduled execution for a crime that he was convicted of nine years before, when Gramm provided the clinching forensic testimony against the accused, Neil McDonough’s charismatic Jon Forster. The convicted killer’s way with women both incriminates him and enables him, even from his Death Row confinement, to orchestrate a campaign of vilification against Gramm as a lying opportunist, and even to inspire a copy-cat murder with the same modus operandi as the one for which he was convicted by a jury, despite there having been no other concrete evidence of Forster’s crime.

We are led to infer that Forster’s appeals process has taken nine years to be exhausted. Yet the new murder makes Gramm himself a possible suspect because of ingeniously planted clues by someone close to both Forster and Gramm. But who? This is the question haunting Gramm as he tracks down every lead to one dead end after another. Even the police and the F.B.I. are becoming suspicious of the drumbeat of sensational media disclosures tilted in favor of Forster and against Gramm.

Along the way, revelations concerning the betrayal of Gramm’s confidential files by an assistant’s lesbian crush; of Gramm’s notorious drinking episodes with female pickups; and the suspicions fostered among Gramm’s brightest students from their Death House interviews with Forster lead inexorably to a final perilous encounter between Gramm and his secret tormentor. When that climactic final confrontation occurs, Gramm has the last laugh on Forster after 88 minutes of excruciating escalation of Gramm’s and the audience’s paranoia.

The multiple female participants in 88 Minutes seem to have been influenced less by current American male-oriented action movies than by television serials like House M.D., Bones, Boston Legal, Grey’s Anatomy, and the three CSI and Law & Order crime shows, with their full complement of mind-over-matter attractive professional women. As for Mr. Pacino, I have been avidly following his career ever since his days and nights in an Off Broadway production of Israel Horovitz’s The Indian Wants the Bronx. In those days, fierce debates raged over the two Italian-American wunderkinds of the Off Broadway scene, Frank Langella and Mr. Pacino, and the jury is still out on that one. But as David Thomson sagely notes in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film with his largely rhapsodic commentary on Mr. Pacino, it is close to ridiculous that Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro won Oscars in Francis Coppola’s Godfather trilogy while Mr. Pacino, who both dominated and defined all three parts into a unified whole, got zilch. Then, ironically, he received his only Oscar for an inferior “stunt” simulation of blindness in Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman (1992). But then, after seven previous fruitless nominations, he had been poised to join the exclusive Richard Burton-Peter O’Toole-Deborah Kerr futility club that seems to prefer foreign-born performers over our own natives. Of course, their unjustly unrewarded predecessors, Charles Chaplin and Greta Garbo, caused the original Oscar bar to be set so high that it has become almost an honor to lose the grand prize.

In any event, 88 Minutes will add a little more luster to a career that has not been adequately appreciated perhaps because of the suspiciously seductive power of a little man with an outsize talent. On the male side of 88 Minutes, William Forsythe as Gramm’s FBI contact, and Benjamin McKenzie as a student sleuth who incurs Gramm’s wrath, deserve special mention.

FOUR MINUTES (VIER MINUTEN)
Running time 112 minutes
Written and Directed by Chris Kraus
Starring Monica Bleibtreu, Hannah Herzsprung, Stefan Kurt

Chris Kraus’s Four Minutes (Vier Minuten), from his own screenplay (in German with English subtitles), prospers with a much more manageable amount of time for its suspenseful climax than was afforded 88 Minutes, and is consequently a much more efficient and effective entertainment. Jenny von Loeben (Hannah Herzsprung) is a onetime child prodigy pianist who is now serving a life sentence for a particularly gruesome murder. Traude Krüger (Monica Bleibtreu) is an 80-year-old prison piano teacher whose employment will end if she is unable to recruit more than the handful of pupils that she teaches now. When Traude discovers Jenny’s secret talent, she resolves to train the ill-mannered and prone-to-violence Jenny for a forthcoming competition in the local opera house. Because Jenny’s victory would bring some favorable publicity for the maximum-security prison, Direktor Meyerbeer (Stefan Kurt) gives Traude permission to train Jenny.

But there are many obstacles for Traude to overcome before she can achieve her long-shot goal for Jenny. Right off the bat there is a recalcitrant prison guard Kowalski (Richy Müller), who refuses to cooperate with the training by insisting that Jenny be handcuffed behind her back. When Jenny demonstrates that she can play with her back to the piano, Kowalski reluctantly removes the handcuffs.

A second obstacle arises when Jenny displays a predilection for jazz compositions, which Traude dismisses as “noise” and “Negro music.” Mütze (Sven Pippig), a friendlier prison guard than Kowalski, and a fan of classical music, has meanwhile formed his own pupil-to-teacher relationship with Traude; she teaches him lines from operas for a quiz show he has entered with amusingly adverse results.

In the course of the film, Traude is compelled to confront her own ancient betrayal to the Gestapo of her lesbian sweetheart, who was then executed. Traude’s incriminating dossier is shown to her by Jenny’s incestuously guilt-ridden father, lawyer Gerhard von Loeben (Vadim Glowna), who pleads with Traude to help Jenny win the contest. Jenny’s past life is seen in a new light by Traude, but after a few more violent actions by Jenny, all seems lost until Traude convinces the authorities to give Jenny four minutes at the opera house piano before they clamp her into confinement for her presumed incorrigibility. The film’s ending is one of the most powerful I have ever seen both for its sheer unexpectedness and its behavioral nobility. Four Minutes is simply not to be missed.

The best shows in town are still the United Artists gems unfolding into May at the Film Forum. On Wednesday, April 9, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), with Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Sylvia Miles, Brenda Vaccaro, John McGiver, Barnard Hughes, Ruth White, Jennifer Salt, Gilman Rankin and Bob Balaban will screen at 1, 3:10, 5:20, 7:30 and 9:40.

Thursday, April 10, and Friday, April 11, will feature Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), with Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall, Janet Margolin and Sigourney Weaver; show times are 1, 4:25 and 7:30. Those same dates will also feature Carl Reiner’s Where’s Poppa (1970), with George Segal, Ruth Gordon, Trish Van Devere, Ron Leibman, Rae Allen, Vincent Gardenia Barnard Hughes and Rob Reiner; show times are 2:50, 6:15 and 9:40.

Saturday, April 12, will feature Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966) with Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach; it screens at 1 and 8:30.

Also on April 12, screening at 4:30 only, will be Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story (1961), with Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno, Richard Beymer, George Chakiris, Russ Tamblyn, Tucker Smith and Simon Oakland.

Screening on Sunday, April 13, and Monday, April 14, will be Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955), with Robert Mitchum, Lillian Gish, Shelley Winters, Billy Chapin, James Gleason, Sally Jane Bruce, Peter Graves and Evelyn Varden. The show times are 1:30, 5:10 and 8:50 on Sunday, and 1:30, 5:10, 9:30 on Monday.

John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962) with Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Henry Silva, James Gregory, Leslie Parrish, John McGiver and Khigh Dhiegh, will screen on Tuesday, April 15; its show times are 2, 4:30, 7 and 9:30.

Finally, screening on Wednesday, April 16, will be two of the toughest and most monstrous movies of the supposedly placid Eisenhower 50’s (actually, my favorite decade for both Hollywood and foreign films): Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957), with Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Martin Milner, Sam Levene, Barbara Nicholas, Emile Meyer, and Jeff Donnell (showing at 1:20, 5:15 and 9:20); and Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955), with Jack Palance, Rod Steiger, Ida Lupino, Shelley Winters, Everett Sloane, Jean Hagen, Wendell Corey and Wesley Addy (screening at 3:10 and 7:05).

BRA BOYS
Running Time 90 minutes
Written and Directed by Sunny Abberton
Starring Russell Crowe

Sunny Abberton’s Bra Boys (no connection to the female undergarment), written, directed and produced by Mr. Abberton and narrated by Russell Crowe and the three Abberton brothers, Sunny, Koby and Jai, introduces us to the violent world of surfing gangs in and around the inner Sydney beach-side suburbs of Maroubra. The film includes stunning footage of high-wave surfing not only in Australia but also in Hawaii and Tahiti, the Pacific coasts of which produce some of the most awesome waves on the planet. And wherever there is a camera, there is a surfer, often from the Abberton family.

Mr. Crowe’s gruffly growly narration takes us back to the cruelties of Captain Cook and his British imperial successors. The earliest of the oppressed were the genocidally afflicted Aborigines, and then the British convicts who made Australia a penal colony. Amid this cauldron of class-driven, ethnic-driven and racially driven conflicts, the Abberton brothers become charter members of a beach gang called the Bra Boys.

We are shown the newsreels of riots involving the Bra Boys, other neighborhood gangs and an always hostile police force. One of the Abberton brothers was charged with the murder of a Sydney “standover man”: a shakedown artist or extortionist, to translate from the Australian. Another Abberton brother was charged as an accessory after the fact to the murder for not cooperating with the police investigation. Both brothers were apparently acquitted, though I am not sure what ultimately happened.

In a way, the spectacular surfing footage tends to wash away the toxicity of the lower-class environment in which the Abberton brothers and their beloved “Ma” found their salvation and their redemption. For its fusion of social history and sensational athleticism, Bra Boys shapes up as one of the best nonfiction films of the year thus far, and is eminently worth seeing. Even for people who don’t get excited by the idea of surfing, the spectacle of surfing is something else entirely.

THE VISITOR
Running Time 107 minutes
Written and Directed by Tom McCarthy
Starring Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Gurira

Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor, from his own screenplay, is nothing short of a triumph for 60-year-old character actor Richard Jenkins, in his first leading role in a feature film. Mr. Jenkins has hitherto been best known as the ghostly undead undertaker in the hit cable series, Six Feet Under. Here Mr. Jenkins plays 62-year-old Walter Vale, a just-going-through-the-motions economics professor at a Connecticut college, where he teaches only one class a semester on the pretext he is working on his fourth book in his field of study, his first three presumably not having set the world on fire. He has been especially lethargic since the recent death of his wife. To fill the void in his existence, Walter has belatedly started taking piano lessons in classical music from a succession of piano teachers, each of whom has told him that he has no aptitude for music. His last teacher suggests that if he finally does give up his futile quest for a minimal proficiency, he consider selling her his piano, which he dispiritedly does in due time.

Up to this point in the narrative, Walter’s ennui has not been exaggerated to the extent that it works as either pure farce or pungent satire. He does just enough to keep up the appearance that he’s still indeed pursuing a career in education and writing—just enough, but not much more. When he is virtually ordered by a superior to read a paper at a Manhattan academic conference of economics professors, Walter reluctantly agrees, even though the paper has actually been written by an indisposed colleague.

He returns to a Manhattan apartment he and his wife used during their theater visits and off-term vacations. Walter is surprised to discover that it is now occupied by an illegal alien couple, Syrian musician Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira). The couple has been swindled by an unscrupulous real estate agent into believing that the apartment could be theirs for a small fee. After the initial misunderstanding is cleared up, the couple prepares to leave, but on an impulse Walter persuades them to stay until they can find another place of their own.

In the days that follow, Walter becomes attuned to Tarek’s beating on an African drum, and then purchases his own. Tarek offers to teach Walter; Walter begins to attend Tarek’s jam sessions with other drummers, and begins participating himself. They both visit Zainab’s sidewalk market, where she sells her handicrafts.

Then one day when Walter and Tarek are on a subway platform on the way home from a drum session, Tarek is picked up by two immigration agents and asked to show his legal documents, which he is unable to do. He is immediately taken to the nearest police precinct. When Walter finally tracks Tarek down, he assures him that he will get a lawyer for his case, which he promptly does. When Walter tells Zainab that Tarek has been arrested, she insists on moving out of the apartment for propriety’s sake, and moving to a girlfriend’s place instead. Walter asks her in vain to stay, but respects the dignity shown in her decision.

Meanwhile, Tarek’s beautiful Palestinian mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass), arrives from Michigan to see her son and his girlfriend, whom she had never met. She is a little surprised to see the African darkness of her skin, but the two women embrace emotionally over their mutual loss of Tarek. Walter takes a leave of absence from his college to arrange all these meetings and other details. He also develops a romantic interest in Mouna, which she reciprocates. A life of lethargy has by now been transformed into one of rejuvenating commitment to the cause of illegal aliens in our midst, at the mercy of ruthless immigration officials with only minimal restraint.

Yet despite Walter’s efforts, Tarek is quickly deported back to Senegal, from which Tarek and Zainab had previously been denied asylum. And despite her love for Walter, Mouna decides that she must follow her son to Senegal. Walter accepts her decision and then makes one final act to affirm that the course of his life has changed irrevocably.

Mr. McCarthy, who has previously won critical and festival plaudits as the writer-director of The Station Agent (2003), has also worked as an actor in Flags of Our Fathers, Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck, Year of the Dog and Meet the Parents. He was also featured in the final season of HBO’s series The Wire.

The Visitor is the second feature film that plays as if it were meant to serve as a rebuke to Lou Dobbs, the popular cable news commentator, who has made himself the media focus for a tougher policy toward illegal aliens. The earlier seemingly anti-Dobbsian cinematic statement was Patricia Riggen’s Under the Same Moon, with a screenplay by Ligiah Villalobos (in English and Spanish with English subtitles). That it set a first-week box-office record for a subtitled film is not surprising in view of its shamelessly sentimental soap-opera story, about a Mexican mother (Kate del Castillo), an illegal alien working in L.A., literally mooning over her little boy left behind in Mexico. When the little boy (the angelic Adrian Alonso) sets out to cross the border in search of his mother, and succeeds in overcoming the most fearsome obstacles, mostly immigration agents, to hug his mother at the final fade-out, the moon itself begins to mist over with tears. My considered advice is to skip Under the Same Moon, and, by all means, see The Visitor, if only for its comparative restraint.

SEX AND DEATH 101
Running time 100 minutes
Written and Directed by Daniel Waters
Starring Winona Ryder and Simon Baker

Daniel Waters’ Sex and Death 101, from his own screenplay, reunites the screenwriter of Michael Lehmann’s Heathers (1989) with its then-teenage star, Winona Ryder. Now, almost 20 years later for Mr. Waters and Ms. Ryder, they try their best to make plausible a supernatural sex farce in which Australian-born Simon Baker has much the largest part as Roderick Blank, the womanizing executive who must confront the meaning of a bizarre e-mail that lists the names of 101 women with whom he has either fornicated in the past or will do so in the future. Roderick has two immediate problems with the list. Not only is the woman he is to marry in a week not the last name on the list, but no fewer than 72 names come after her.

In an almost blindingly white-glowing office, men in white apparel explain to Roderick the significance of the e-mail list. It seems that a mysteriously infallible and prophetic machine dispenses these lists, and Roderick might just as well get on with the program immediately and indefinitely. After breaking his engagement, Roderick subsequently falls in love with a Dr. Miranda Stone (Leslie Bibb) and wants to marry her inasmuch as he believes that she is No. 66 on the e-mail list, only to discover to this horror that it is not Miranda, but a loathsome Dr. Mirabella Stone who is No. 66 on the e-mail list. When Miranda suddenly dies in a freak accident in the kitchen, Roderick begins to fear the proven prescience of the machine and its infernal e-mail list.

I frankly found it difficult to keep track of all the characters—42 on the credit list of cast members—and all the complications faced by Roderick as he kept trying to check his list, which his concerned secretary kept hidden away from him. Indeed, the film is thereby too copiously complicated to be anywhere nearly as funny as Mr. Waters’ would-be model, Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day (1993), with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. Of course, Simon Baker is no Bill Murray, but the script of Sex and Death 101 is an even larger part of the problem when you compare it to the marvelously inventive script for Groundhog Day.

There are oodles and oodles of babes on display for Mr. Baker to ogle or not to ogle as his mood dictates. But except for Ms. Ryder and Ms. Bibb, they tend to get lost in the shuffle. The film has its moments of wit and lucidity, but these are few and far between. Perhaps when sex is quantified to triple digits, the quality is diluted to the point of a sharp decline in eroticism, not to mention humor.

Mr. Baker does the best he can with an impossible role, and Ms. Ryder is back projecting her distinctive personality, and I am glad to see that she has finally surmounted all the self-imposed obstacles to her career. And that is reason enough to see this movie over most these days.

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS
Running Time 90 minutes
Written by Wong Kar Wai and Lawrence Block
Directed by Wong Kar Wai
Starring Natalie Portman, Jude Law, David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz

Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, from a screenplay by Wong and Lawrence Block, from a story by Wong, marks Wong’s first English-language feature in a 20-year, eight-feature and two-segment career that has won him critical plaudits and festival prizes around the world. Fortunately, Mr. Wong has made the perilous journey into a new language without sacrificing his artistic soul and very personal visual style. Hence, My Blueberry Nights strikes me as beguiling enough and bewitching enough even at this early date to make my list of the 10 best English-language films of 2008.

Indeed, My Blueberry Nights fully succeeds in achieving the objectives that its auteur hoped to reach, as he explained in a statement: “Sometimes the tangible distance between two persons can be quite small but the emotional distance can be miles. My Blueberry Nights is a look at those distances from various angles. I wanted to explore these expanses both figuratively and literally, and the lengths it takes to overcome them.”

Wong is aided in no small measure in this simultaneously intimate and expansive endeavor by his co-writer, Mr. Block, a veteran crime novelist with the necessary good ear for dialogue demanded by the mystery genre. The film is also well served by a free-spirited cast headed by a newcomer to the screen, pop music sensation Norah Jones as Elizabeth, who begins the film with a broken heart, and travels across America trying to mend it. Her character, however, is a waitress, not a singer, except on the soundtrack; there she joins with many others in a succession of torchy ballads reinforcing the movie’s main theme of an endless yearning for that one true love that seldom seems to materialize right away.

Elizabeth explodes with anger and tears in a cafe one night when she sees her boyfriend (Chad Davis) with another woman (Katya Blumenberg). The cafe’s whimsical owner, Jeremy (Jude Law), tries to console her, but she keeps returning to the street corner that looks up to her boyfriend’s apartment, where he is now entertaining her successor.

As she gets to know Jeremy better, he shows her a large jar full of keys left by spurned lovers, hoping that the owners will come back to retrieve them, but they never do, Jeremy tells Elizabeth. Jeremy himself has a set of keys in the jar, but he has just about given up hope that his former beloved will return to break the dismal spell of the jar. In the course of one of their conversations, Jeremy reveals that nobody ever orders the blueberry pie because all his customers are hooked on other pastries. Elizabeth then experimentally orders a serving of blueberry pie, and we watch her eat every bite with a mixture of pleasure and surprise. By this time, the director of In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004), has shown his stylistic hand in shifts of focus and angle as Elizabeth blithely devours the blueberry pie. She then falls into a deep sleep on the counter, and Jeremy delicately caresses the hair straying over her forehead.

But we are only in the first third of the movie, and Elizabeth has a long way to go as an observer and a participant in two other life stories, one in Memphis and the other in Nevada, before she can return to Jeremy in New York as an emotionally confident woman. Wong believes literally in the long distances his characters must travel, and for his first American movie, why not avail himself of virtually the entire American continent?

In a Memphis bar diner where Elizabeth has been hired as a waitress by the stern but strangely compassionate manager (John Malloy), she comes into contact with Arnie (David Strathairn), an off-duty cop trying to drink his way out of his despair over his separation from his wife, Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz). Elizabeth watches helplessly as a hopeless situation ends worse for Arnie than for the more emotionally resilient Sue Lynne.

This episode in the movie plays out in a dangerously maudlin manner, and if Elizabeth’s next adventure, in Nevada, was in the same key, the entire movie would slide downhill. Instead, a beautiful and perky poker player named Leslie (Natalie Portman) single-handedly lifts up the whole movie with her sassy, swaggering manner, and her amusingly shameless attempts to manipulate Elizabeth into surrendering her life’s savings for the promise of a car, so that Leslie can reenter a poker game in which she has previously gambled and lost everything in one winner-take-all hand.

In the meantime, Elizabeth has kept in touch with Jeremy, via postcards and cell-phone conversations. The stage is set for a final reunion, and another large serving of blueberry pie. The point is that the blueberry pie is palpably much more than a metaphor. Mr. Wong treats it as the tasty stuff of life and memory in a compellingly elongated torch-carrying love story.

One can say that Wong has only one story to tell, but whether it takes place in Hong Kong and Singapore, or in New York, Memphis and Nevada, it is ultimately the most important story the cinema can tell, and Wong does it beautifully and passionately.

The five-week, 54-film festival at Film Forum from March 28 to May 1 celebrates the 90th anniversary of United Artists, and it resumes this week with John Huston’s The Misfits (1961), from Arthur Miller’s screenplay, with Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter, Eli Wallach, James Barton and Estelle Winwood. At best, it’s a spectacular misfire, but it’s a must-see if you have a certain morbid interest in the movie swan songs of Gable (1901-1960) and Monroe (1926-1962), and the continuing decline of Clift (1920-1966), after an automobile accident left him slightly disfigured around the time of Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree County (1957). It screens on April 3 at 2, 4:30, 7 and 9:30.

A James Bond vehicle for Sean Connery and a lesser Billy Wilder picture follow on Friday, April 4, with Terence Young’s From Russia With Love (1963), with Mr. Connery, Lotte Lenya, Robert Shaw, Daniela Bianchi, Pedro Armendáriz, Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell, showing at 1, 5:10 and 9:20. Billy Wilder’s much too frantic One, Two, Three, with James Cagney (doing his hilarious “Is this the end of Rico?” imitation of his early 30’s gangster flick rival, Edward G. Robinson), Arlene Francis, Horst Buchholz, Pamela Tiffin, Lilo Pulver, Howard St. John, Hans Lothar and Red Buttons, screens at 3:10 and 7:20

Then on Friday, April 5, Guy Hamilton’s Goldfinger (1964), with Mr. Connery, Gert Fröbe, Honor Blackman, Shirley Eaton, Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell, Harold Sakata and Tania Mallet, shows at 1, 5:15 and 9:30, and Terence Young’s Dr. No (1962), with Mr. Connery, Ursula Andress, Joseph Wiseman, Jack Lord, Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell, is at 3:10 and 7:25. On Sunday and Monday, April 6 and 7, there’s Billy Wilder’s Oscar-winning The Apartment (1960), with Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston, Jack Kruschen, David Lewis and Joan Shawlee. Ms. MacLaine should also have won the Oscar that year over Elizabeth Taylor, who scored for her thesping in Daniel Mann’s abysmal Butterfield 8. The Apartment screens on Sunday at 3:15 and 7, and on Monday at 3:15. Also, Jules Dassin’s Never on Sunday (1960), with Melina Mercouri, Mr. Dassin and Giorgos Foundas, screens on Sunday at 1:30, 5:35 and 9:40, and on Monday at 1:30 and 5:35.

That Monday also brings Orphans of the Storm (1922), with Lillian and Dorothy Gish, at 8:10 (live piano accompaniment by Steve Sterner). On Tuesday, April 8, John Sturges’ The Great Escape (1963), with Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Garner, David McCallum, Donald Pleasence, James Donald, Gordon Jackson and Nigel Stock, screens at 1, 4:10 and 7:20.

The United Artists 90th anniversary has been imaginatively programmed by Bruce Goldstein, the Film Forum’s director of repertory programming. The festival begins on an unusually high note, with Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), with Robert De Niro, Cathy Moriarty and Joe Pesci giving the performances of their lives (March 28 and 29, at 1, 5:10 and 9:20). Raging Bull shows along with the “second feature,” Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), still my favorite of all his films, with Allen, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Michael Murphy, Mariel Hemingway, Anne Byrne and Tisa Farrow (March 28 and 29, at 3:20 and 7:30).

These are followed by Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), with Kirk Douglas (March 30, at 1, 4:20 and 7:40, and March 31, at 1 and 4:20), and The Killing (1956), with Sterling Hayden, Elisha Cook Jr., Marie Windsor, Timothy Casey, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen and Ted de Corsia (March 30, at 2:40, 6 and 9:20, and March 31, at 2:40, 6 and 10:30). Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers take center stage on Tuesday, April 1, with 1968’s The Party (at 1:30, 5:20 and 9:10) and 1964’s A Shot in the Dark (at 3:25 and 7:15).

Two of the greatest westerns of all time play on Wednesday, April 2: John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), with John Wayne, Claire Trevor, John Carradine, Andy Devine, Thomas Mitchell, Louise Platt, Donald Meek, George Bancroft, Berton Churchill and Tim Holt (at 3:25 and 7:45); and Howard Hawks’ Red River (1948), with John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru, John Ireland, Walter Brennan, Coleen Gray, Noah Beery, Jr., Harry Carey Jr. and Harry Carey Sr. (at 1, 5:15 and 9:35).

Note: On Monday, March 31, Raoul Walsh’s silent film The Thief of Bagdad (1924) will be accompanied by a live piano. The Killing will be shown as a single feature at 10:30.

MY BROTHER IS AN ONLY CHILD
Running time 100 minutes
Written by Sandro Petralia, Stefano Fulli and Daniele Luchetti
Directed by Daniele Luchetti
Starring Riccardo Scamarcio, Elio Germano, Diane Fleri

Daniele Luchetti’s My Brother Is an Only Child, from a screenplay (in Italian with English subtitles) by Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli and Mr. Luchetti, is based on Antonio Pennacchi’s novel Il Fasciocomunista, the title of which explains almost everything in the narrative.

Two brothers, Accio (Elio Germano) and Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio), set out to change the world, the elder Manrico from the left or Communist side and the younger, rebellious Accio from the right or fascist side. Out of the fraternal rift, a portrait of ever-warring factions in the 60’s and the 70’s, emerges a very conscious homage to that period’s political film classics such as Before the Revolution, Fist in the Pocket and China Is Near, from the early careers of Bernardo Bertolucci and Marco Bellocchio.

One cannot help wondering if Italy today is any freer of factional divisions than it was 30 or 40 years ago. Mr. Luchetti does not really take a stand on this issue; instead he evades it with this statement of purpose: “My Brother Is an Only Child is not a political film, but rather it is a film where human beings talk about politics. The film does not take a political stand; it talks about people who take stands.”

Anyway, the film begins during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Accio is only 12 years old and played by Vittorio Emanuele Propizio. His older brother, Manrico, is already a driving force in the local Communist Party, which was a much more significant force in Italian politics after the end of World War II than it ever was in the United States. The stormy sibling rivalry continues well into Accio’s adulthood. Both brothers fall in love with the same woman, Francesca (Diane Fleri), but deep down Accio loves his brother too much ever to betray him, and Manrico fully reciprocates this love. The difference between the two brothers is that Accio soon outgrows his extremist politics, and Manrico doesn’t, with fatal results.

The acting is all first-rate, and the local ambience is well rendered. At a time in American politics when the right and the left are at such bewildering cross-purposes in their ping-pong games with the media, and presidential politics have become a witch’s brew, it is almost a relief to find some ideological clarity in a film that unfortunately ends in complete political disillusionment on all sides.

SHINE A LIGHT
Running time 120 minutes
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Starring Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Ron Wood and others

Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light, featuring the Rolling Stones onstage with their talented friends—including Christina Aguilera, Byrdie Bell, Buddy Guy, Kimberley Magness and Jack White—rattled my old bones to nirvana and beyond as I searched for superlatives adequate to describe the rapturous vibes let loose by the performers. And this was only a screening, mostly consisting of a Stones concert at Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre in the fall of 2006. Mick and Keith were both in their 60’s, and the energy they exuded and expended was little short of miraculous.

When I was teaching at the School of Visual Arts in 1965, all the students seemed to be fanatical Stones fans, listening to their songs incessantly on the cafeteria jukebox. They seemed determined to make me see how wrong I was to prefer the Beatles, as I had implied in 1964 in The Village Voice (I had raved about A Hard Day’s Night, which I designated as “the Citizen Kane of juke-box musicals”). I still like the Beatles, but to put it as brutally as possible, where are they now?

Mr. Scorsese begins sedately enough: Bill and Hillary Clinton are on hand very briefly to dedicate the concert to the cause of Global Warming Awareness. There are also brief clips from concerts held in cities across America and Canada from 2005 to 2007, concurrently with the release of their latest album, A Bigger Bang. In one of the clips, a young Keith Richards scoffs at Dick Cavett’s question of continuing his strenuous performance into his 60’s. Or perhaps it was Mick Jagger scoffing, as he often did in his drug-ridden, jail-time-serving wild younger days.

Still, it’s a long way from Liverpool to London, as far as comparing the sweeter and more melodious Beatles to the rock-strewn rhythm-and-blues frenzies of the Stones. Inasmuch as I have never in my life attended a live concert of either the Beatles or the Stones, perhaps I speak with the authority of almost complete ignorance, as I often do. But now that I have seen Mr. Scorsese’s amazingly graphic and fluid rendition of a full-fledged Stones concert, all bets are off, at least on the performing level. Shine a Light makes me feel as if I had never really seen the Stones before in their 45-year career, including their extensive screen exposure.

Consider, for instance, One plus One/Sympathy for the Devil, a British-made curiosity from 1968 I chanced across in my relentless pursuit of Jean-Luc Godard’s career through his lean Maoist years with Jean-Paul Gorin. There I bumped into the Stones setting up for a future play date as Godard’s circularly moving camera followed the group. I particularly recall that one could see the comparatively good-looking Brian Jones, the ill-fated guitarist and original founder of the Stones, only from behind. He was later fired and found dead in his private swimming pool. It is now widely believed that the drug-addicted and foulmouthed Jones was actually murdered by the short-tempered workers on his estate.

At one point in the film, the ever-impish Mick Jagger acknowledges the unseen Godard on the mobile camera stand with a jaunty rhetorical question, “Ça va?” It doesn’t require an audible answer, and it doesn’t get one.

Documentarians Albert and David Maysles created a stir in 1970 with Gimme Shelter, their controversial account of a free 1969 concert at the Altamont Speedway in California, where the Stones shared the bill with Jefferson Airplane. Here the Stones became unwilling participants in an on-camera murder melodrama involving the Hell’s Angels bikers, who had set themselves up on the stage as guardians of public order. The performance of some of the best Stones songs—“Sympathy for the Devil,” “Brown Sugar,” “Satisfaction,” and “Under My Thumb,” among others—was overshadowed after the murder took all the steam out of the occasion by its solemn-faced imputation of something wrong with the youthful rock scene.

The point is that I never really “got” the Stones, partly because my infatuation for the Beatles left me unresponsive to everything else on the pop scene, and partly because I was a complete stranger to the live rock music world. What impressed me most about Shine a Light was its sheer exuberance in projecting feelings of joy, love, comradeship and mutual admiration. I am told that some Stones concerts last four hours, and I can believe it. I have also been told that Keith Richards has remained the driving force keeping the group functioning all these years, as Mick Jagger’s frequent flirtations with going solo are well documented. But in the context of the Stones, Jagger is quite simply a force of nature, energizing a whole stage with his seemingly ageless vitality and emotional connection with all his colleagues and every member of the audience. At times, he can be sung off the stage by a Buddy Guy or a Jack White, but he keeps coming back more determined than ever to keep the carnival in full swing.

Mr. Scorsese has been in this groove before, with 1978’s undervalued The Last Waltz covering the final concert of the Band. The same generosity of spirit was present then as in Shine a Light now. Yet it would be a mistake to say that Mr. Scorsese just let things happen in either instance. What he does especially well is to place the viewer in a privileged position denied even to the members of the live audience. We enjoy the close-ups of the artists, the sudden swoops of the camera as it captures the jolting energy of Jagger jumping-jack. Ultimately, however, the Rolling Stones are to be exalted above all for all the enormous effort they have made for so long to entertain us. It’s hard work, and they have not used their advanced ages as an excuse to shirk it.

IRINA PALM
Running Time 103 minutes
Written by Martin Herron and Philippe Blasband
Directed by Sam Gabarski
Starring Marianne Faithfull, Kevin Bishop, Siobhan Hewlett

Sam Gabarski’s Irina Palm, from a screenplay by Martin Herron and Philippe Blasband, is based on an original script by Mr. Blasband, and one of its basic premises has placed me in an embarrassing critical bind. Let me explain as delicately as I can. I have no idea whether there are any sex clubs in Paris or anywhere else in which a male customer can walk up to a wall with a hole through which he can insert his member to obtain what is vulgarly termed a “hand job” at the hand, or, rather, the palm of an accommodating female on the other side of the hole. I do not consider myself an expert in all the sexual vices and practices of the world. In the context of Irina Palm, I found the idea hilarious, perhaps as a result of my ignorance. When I lectured recently in Providence, R.I., at the Rhode Island School of Design, I digressed a bit, as is my wont, to mention my problem with Irina Palm, whereupon a female student assured me with a knowing air that there were indeed such commercial masturbatory facilities around the world without the person-to-person contact of lap-dancing.

Anyway, Marianne Faithfull, a 40-year veteran of avant-garde movies, plays, musicals and TV shows, plays Londoner Maggie, a warmhearted grandmother whose beloved grandson is slowly dying from a mysterious and ruinously expensive illness that requires more money for a life-saving treatment than her son, Tom (Kevin Bishop), and daughter-in-law, Sarah (Siobhan Hewlett), can possibly raise. Maggie has sold her own home to help with the expenses, and even that is not enough.

Maggie tries to get a job, but without any employment history, even at her advanced age, she finds it impossible to qualify for gainful employment. We learn gradually that Maggie married at 18, and led a very dull and sheltered life with a husband who had died only recently. In desperation, she naïvely walks into a sex club with a “hostess wanted” sign outside. She is interviewed by the sex-club owner, Miki (Miki Manojlovic), who offers her a job servicing his male customers. She would not have to look at her “clients,” he assures her.

Maggie’s first impulse is to walk out of the sex shop in disgust, but she quickly reconsiders her desperate need for quick money and begins her duties, at which she proves to be so proficient that she becomes famous throughout Paris as Irina Palm. She makes a great deal of money, for both herself and Miki. She gives her earnings to her son without explaining where, and how, she got it. She constantly worries that her family and neighbors will find out her secret. Fortunately, she lives in a Paris suburb far from the city’s red-light district where she works.

But eventually Maggie is followed by Tom to her sordid place of employment, and he demands that she quit her job immediately because, he screams censoriously, he won’t tolerate his mother working as a “whore.” Miki is distressed when Maggie calls him to tell him that she is quitting. Miki can hear Tom screaming in the background, but realizes that there is nothing he can do. A definite attraction had developed between Miki and Maggie during the period of her employment. In the end, Maggie is reconciled with Tom as he and Sarah take their child away for further treatment. Maggie stays behind to consummate her relationship with an enthusiastic Miki. There is an absurdist dimension to the film in that Maggie finally takes great pride in doing what she does so well. The sentimentality of the narrative would have been excruciating without the absurdist activity at its core.

Ms. Faithfull turns out to be another actress of a certain age who is well used in a film to which she lends dignity, compassion and gravitas. In her long career she has served such masters of minimalism as William S. Burroughs, Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard. She makes Irina Palm a cinematic event worth catching.

BOARDING GATE
Running Time 106 minutes
Written and directed by Olivier Assayas
Starring Asia Argento, Michael Madsen

Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate, from his own screenplay, continues his trangressively exotic filmmaking—previously exemplified most vividly in Demonlover (2002) and Irma Vep (1996)—in a disenchanted form of film noir, combining violence, intrigue, eroticism, horror, international financial shenanigans and the more ruthless exercises of capitalistic power. Indeed, Mr. Assayas has fashioned at times an unbearably cold world in which no one can be trusted, and a universal obsession with self-interest rules the roost.

Boarding Gate takes our ex-prostitute heroine, Sandra (Asia Argento, daughter of famed Italian horror film director Dario Argento), from the violent aftermath of an S&M session with her ex-lover and dangerously debt-ridden money launderer, Miles (Michael Madsen), in London, all the way to Hong Kong in search of a promised new life with a local Asian couple, Lester (Carl Ng) and Sue (Kelly Lin). Instead, she finds herself in a mysterious trap in which her best and only friend, Lisa (Joana Preiss), is murdered in the mistaken belief that she was Sandra. I suppose that to Asian mobsters all Western women look alike, to rework an old racist joke about the Chinese.

As Mr. Assayas explains the genesis of this peculiar project in the production notes: “A news brief caught my eye about the murder of French financier Eduard Stern during an S & M session. It seemed like something right out of my film Demonlover. This triggered in my mind the story of a murder involving an ambiguous sexual relationship and the world of modern finance. I also thought about a woman on the run trying to escape the murder and the past. So the first part of the story ended up being centered around the confrontation between a man and a woman, their cat-and-mouse game. I wanted the second part to be about her being desperate and on the move. I knew the first part could take place in any Western city. But the second part had to be Hong Kong. I knew that city well, but I had never filmed there before. I had been dreaming about it a long time … In March 2006, I scouted locations for Boarding Gate, followed by Paris pre-production to start shooting in July 2006. We shot for six weeks, three in and around Paris and three in Hong Kong. The film ended up costing less than 2 million Euros.”

Ms. Argento’s Sandra is, fittingly for the genre, a completely self-sufficient heroine, as comfortable with and confident in the use of a gun as any male action hero. Her unvarying facial expressions of doubt and distrust serve her well in the ever-treacherous world from which she eventually escapes, but not before she has made a fateful decision not to follow through on a final revenge-seeking murder.

This movie is largely in English and Chinese with English subtitles, though there is little time in this fast-paced thriller for much subtlety and expansiveness in either language. Hence, we never learn much about Sandra’s inner life or anyone else’s. Mr. Assayas seems obsessed by the workaday world of Hong Kong with its mass insouciance as a crossroads of international, interlingual and interracial commerce and industry, which leaves it little time to pause and notice a desperate European woman running for her life. If this is the effect Mr. Assayas wanted to achieve, he has succeeded admirably.