On the Town

SPEED RACER
Running Time 129 minutes
Written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski
Starring Emile Hirsch, Susan Sarandon, Christina Ricci, John Goodman

Even for summer trash, this abomination by the creatively challenged Wachowski brothers is a train wreck so bad that words literally fail me, but I will say it looks like somebody ate 25 cafeteria Jello-O congealed salads and then threw up all over the sets. Happily, I was out of town for Iron Man and have no intention of catching up, but slashing whatever I.Q. points I saved was Speed Racer, an obnoxious two-hour-and-15-minute tribute to noise and Fiestaware from the muttonheads who polluted the planet with the Matrix trilogy; it’s pretty much in a garbage pile of its own. Summer isn’t even officially here yet, but for me Speed Racer fires the opening shot for what threatens to be a three-month school-vacation Marvel-comics festival of violence, stupidity, junk and unsaturated fat, aimed at morons with I.Q.’s of 40 and under, and starring assorted hulks, Spider-Men, Batmen, ninjas, robots, superheroes that are anything but super, and Adam Sandler. Few summer movies promise to be more nauseating than Speed Racer, unless you count the one with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly as siblings (you need a barf bag just for the trailers).  read more »

THE BABYSITTERS
Running Time 90 minutes
Written and directed by David Ross
Starring John Leguizamo, Cynthia Nixon, Katherine Waterston

The movies have never known how to mine the diversity of multitalented John Leguizamo, but he’s currently shining brightly in two roles as different as chipotle and cherry pie. In Brad Furman’s The Take, he plays a tough Latino armored-truck driver in gang-infested East L.A. who survives a close-range gun blast that leaves him fractured for life. In first-time director David Ross’s The Babysitters, he plays a preppy suburban Dad in cashmere sweaters and Bass Weejuns, so lonely and neglected by his boring soccer mom wife (Cynthia Nixon) that he succumbs to the seductive charms of their babysitter, an honors student named Shirley (Katherine Waterston), who responds to her nice employer’s generosity with a generous “perk” of her own. She’s so proud of her new sexual power that it inspires her to enlist her high-school girlfriends. Pretty soon she’s talked a network of sexy classmates into a profitable business that can send them all to college. Printing business cards, doing bookkeeping on their laptops, juggling appointments with all the upstanding husbands and fathers in the neighborhood, the girls are soon up to their ponytails in clients. But a good thing can only last so long. Things begin to backfire and profits plunge when one girl’s greedy sister gets in on the act and goes into business for herself. They call it earning tuition money. The law calls it statutory rape.

It’s only a matter of time before the police find out—or, even worse, every wife on the block. Until the risks turn deadly, what first appears to be a lurid romance between a responsible family man and a neighbor’s 16-year-old daughter ends up being a deliciously dark comedy about a prostitution ring of neighborhood babysitters who introduce a whole new meaning to the term “parental nightmare.” Mr. Leguizamo is too good for dirty-old-man jokes; he turns his character’s yearning for the old freewheeling bachelor days before he was tied down by family responsibilities into a justification for lust that leaves the viewer with a queasy moral discomfort. You can’t approve of his secret sex life with underage vixens in bobby socks, but you understand him—and like him anyway. It’s refreshing to see him play Everyman, with no ethnic chains at all.

The Babysitters is about more than a respectable man’s double life. When his married buddies get wind of what’s happening in all those lighted bedroom windows, they want to cut themselves in on some babysitter action, too, and with her little black book, Shirley becomes a pint-size Polly Adler. The film shows the easy sexual mores that can result from too much capitalism; the rigid Darwinian social structure of suburban high schools that ignores the students’ hormonal progress; and the tortured guilt suffered by grown-ups when it’s time to pay the piper. Pitched somewhere between dark comedy and melodrama, The Babysitters breaks rules. Like television’s Six Feet Under and the recent film Juno, it’s the perfect antidote to the dopey, butter-cream-frosted teen flicks of John Hughes—Pretty in Pink with poison sauce.

NOISE
Running Time 90 minutes
Written and directed by Henry Beam
Starring Tim Robbins, William Hurt, Bridget Moynahan, William Baldwin

Almost as an ironic companion piece, there’s an excellent new film called Noise, about the psychological impact and neurological damage that is being inflicted on the victimized population of inner cities by the interminable cacophony of ringing cell phones, blaring traffic horns, ambulance sirens, ghetto blasters and endless construction demolition. While Susan Sarandon, his other half and mother of his children, grabs the money in Speed Racer, Tim Robbins shows the dangers a movie like that can cause. In this low-budget movie with a message, he plays an ordinary Joe with a new baby who is desperate for a good night’s sleep. Traumatized and baggy-eyed from car alarms that go off so often in the middle of the night the cops don’t even pay attention anymore, he decides to take matters in his own hands—smashing car windows, flatting tires, cutting the wiring to disconnect the alarm signals, he calls himself “the Rectifier.” The mayor of New York (William Hurt) calls him a vigilante, but the public opinion polls turn him into a hero. The movie investigates the ways other battered New Yorkers cope (buying earplugs, closing their windows, turning up the AC) while the city does nothing to reduce noise pollution, but Mr. Robbins tries to right the wrongs by jotting down license plates, looking up offenders in the Department of Motor Vehicles and suing them. His wife (Bridget Moynahan) thinks since there’s nothing you can do about it, you might as well make the best of it, but Mr. Robbins is on a mission, spending so much time in court that he loses his job, as the short-tempered judges keep dismissing the cases and threatening him with jail time. The causes grow when he takes on power saws, jackhammers and police whistles. He moves to the country to escape, but the noise is not much better there, either. Think weed whackers and power mowers. Risking his career, his income and his marriage, he turns noise reduction into a calling—cutting battery cables, smashing broken apartment building intercom buzzers and collecting thousands of signatures to get his issues on the ballot of the next election. Thwarted by self-serving city officials right up to City Hall, the undaunted Mr. Robbins retaliates with the longest, loudest car alarms in town, making for some clever screenwriting and some very funny action sequences. Noise is a funny movie about a serious issue, delivered tongue in cheek but with real conviction. The superb cast, which includes Ms. Moynahan and William Baldwin, supports the always politically charged Mr. Robbins with sincerity of purpose, and writer-director Henry Beam superbly blends a unique comic vision with the real challenge of an overcrowded world where people with perfect hearing are becoming an endangered species. It’s a message worth listening to. What? Say that again. I can’t hear you.

THEN SHE FOUND ME
Running Time 100 minutes
Written and Directed by Helen Hunt
Starring Helen Hunt, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Colin Firth

Then She Found Me, directed and co-written by Helen Hunt, who also stars, is a funny and touching story about the way we create families both by blood and by choice. April Epner (Hunt) is 39 and her biological clock is sounding an alarm. When she gets dumped by her charming but adolescent husband (Matthew Broderick, who specializes in such things) as a marital mistake, one door closes, but another one bursts open. Enter Bette Midler, as a brash, overwhelming and thoroughly obnoxious talk show host named Bernice, who drops in out of the blue to declare herself April’s biological mother. The jaw-dropping cherry on top of the Sunday sundae: April is the result of a one-night stand Bernice had 40 years ago with Steve McQueen.

Both devastated and baffled, April finds an escape from her screwed-up life in the arms of Frank (Colin Firth, who steals the movie), a handsome, warm, understanding and conveniently single father whose wife deserted him and their children. Mothering a ready-made family and tackling a new relationship at the same time presents double jeopardy, but the emotional minefields really explode when April discovers she is pregnant herself! Events unfold with a quiet dramatic trajectory, interrupted by unnerving needle pricks of humor. Always there is the thread of moody, contemplative silences as affecting as two bare feet touching under a cafe table. What’s lacking in big emotional outbursts is compensated by Ms. Hunt’s desire to explore a woman’s most painful anxieties.

O.K., it’s not Barbara Stanwyck in No Man of Her Own or even Lucille Ball in Yours, Mine and Ours. But the Hunt-Firth team has a glowing chemistry; the human strain in his eyes and on his brow is unsentimental but on the verge of tears. Midler has her moments, too. Less fun since she turned from the Divine Miss M into the head of the local Hadassah, she’s still a force of nature capable of creating her own bombast, to the detriment of anybody who shares the screen. She’s a fine catalyst as the larger-than-life hurricane who forces April to question the neat, dull, cookie-cutter existence she’s ordered for herself, as if from a caterer. Debuts can be dicey, but as a director, Helen Hunt handles the reins sweetly, but with control and finesse. Actors directing themselves: Not always a good idea, but this time you go away impressed.

THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES
Running Time 90 minutes
Written by Emil Stern
Directed by Vadim Perelman
Starring Evan Rachel Wood, Uma Thurman, Eva Amurri

Thanks to the enchanting Evan Rachel Wood, half of a labored melodrama called The Life Before Her Eyes is agreeably watchable. The rest of it is dead on arrival. Still a favorite of mine after following her through 52 episodes of my favorite TV series Once and Again, she grows more into a pubescent Grace Kelly with every new role. Alas, the roles are getting sicker. In this one, she’s a 17-year-old named Diana in the high-school girl’s room, smoking forbidden cigarettes and smoothing her blush in the mirror with her best gal pal, when she hears the first shots. Then the whole school is dripping blood, and the bitter student with the machine gun bursts into the toilet. Although she miraculously survives, her life is never the same again. She is left emotionally maimed.

Years pass. Now she is Uma Thurman, a respected teacher, wife and mother with a daughter of her own. Outwardly, she seems fine. But she is paralyzed with terror, irritable, short-tempered and unable to sleep. Doomed to relive the unimaginable horrors of that Columbine-style massacre, the “real life” she dreamed of after graduation has turned out very differently than the one she hoped for. On the 16th anniversary of the tragedy, when the town stages a memorial service for both the victims and survivors, Diana refuses to attend, but keeps seeing herself at 17, on the street, in the classroom, standing where her own daughter now stands, fondling her present-day husband sexually. Clearly, she is going mad, losing touch with reality, headed for the cracker factory. To make matters more confusing, the action switches back and forth between decades, with both actresses playing Diana. Fragments of the teenage shooting blend with threads of adult life, creating concentric circles of observation and reflection. Older Diana is now in danger of passing her distrust and mourning to her own child, while younger Diana and her best friend Maureen talk about sex, religion and driver ed. The movie begins to drag. Suddenly, it becomes clear that nobody is who they seem to be. Was it straight-laced, religiously obsessed Maureen (wonderfully played by Eva Amurri) who died in a bloodbath, or precociously sexy Diana? Or, in fact, did nothing ever happen at all? Each revelation becomes another example of the film’s naïve spaz-queen literary style. The clues about what is real and what is not are less tantalizing than intended, and the movie is drenched with enough symbolism and imagery to make Wes Anderson blush (too many references to Alice in Wonderland, William Blake and Schopenhauer for a subtle viewer to endure without gagging). I liked director Vadim Perelman’s provocative first film, House of Sand and Fog, but this one is a mess. Another Columbine redux is more than I want to envision. But the switch from the horrors of newspaper headlines to probing philosophical questions (am I who I really think I am?) is not only unsatisfying but unlikely to stir the teenage demographic.

SMART PEOPLE
Running Time 95 minutes
Written by Mark Jude Poirier
Directed by Noam Murro
Starring Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Thomas Haden Church

Accidents happen. So I have decided the lukewarm reception a fine, witty and intelligent new film called Smart People has been getting is just an accident of bad timing and critical exhaustion. We waste so much time evaluating stinkers that sometimes we overlook the real deals when they come along. Smart People is the real deal. It’s the best movie about academics dancing on the lip of an ivy-covered volcano since Wonder Boys.

In a challenging change of pace that pays off handsomely, Dennis Quaid eschews his ripped and toned torso for wrinkles, circles, crow’s-feet and a 38-inch waistline to play a scruffy, bored and grumpily disillusioned professor of literature at Carnegie Mellon whose students are mundane and whose book has been rejected by every publisher. Don’t be fooled by the puffy little paunch, the shuffle in his walk and a beard that simply has to smell like stale nicotine; they just make him look like a real person for a change. He’s got a backache in Smart People, and there’s some indication of a possible knee replacement in his future, but the man is ageless. Also, enormously versatile and talented. As Professor Lawrence Wetherhold, he is up to his dewlaps in mediocrity and desperate for inspiration. He could be a movie critic.

He is also surrounded by an empyrean cast, buoyed by a savvy, pliant director (Noam Murro) and a brilliant screenplay (by Mark Jude Poirier) so skillful in its small details of character analysis that it makes even the most irritating eccentric seem interesting enough to want to know better. The movie is less about action than life. When first we meet the lonely, widowed Professor Wetherhold, he is having student problems, family problems, tenure problems and curriculum problems. The faculty hates him, and his two children regard him as a painful appendage they are forced to endure, like a bone spur. Jumping the barbed wire fence at the campus parking impoundment lot where his car has been towed, he suffers a concussion and wakes up in the hospital, ranting at the ER doctor (Sarah Jessica Parker), a former pupil he dismissed with a C, who regards him as a pompous windbag. His children are oblivious to his predicament: collegiate son James (Ashton Holmes) is an art history major running up bills on Dad’s credit card; sassy daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page) is a rabid Republican so pragmatic she donates all of her dead mother’s clothes to charity for a tax rebate. The professor’s license has been revoked, so his smelly, unreliable, bankrupt adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) moves in to play chauffeur but spends most of his time munching cereal, sleeping in the buff, flirting semi-incestuously with the precocious Vanessa and leaving the professor stranded all over town without wheels. With such a surfeit of trauma, Wetherhold’s flagging interest in teaching the Victorian novel is understandable. Clearly, he needs to get laid; Ms. Parker fills the gap and drives him around at the same time. He softens. This is a forward advance toward humanity for a man so out of touch with niceness that he considers the supreme act of compassion changing a student’s essay grade from a C to a B-. In time, everyone matures, but not with easy, formulaic Hollywood resolve. The characters are dysfunctional (the dinner table ordeals are Norman Rockwell meets the House of Dracula, and Vanessa’s Thanksgiving feast is an invitation to a peptic ulcer) but everyone copes, with a breezy mix of sarcasm and surrender. These people are normal and real, which in today’s cinema means fresh and fascinating.

No wrinkles are ironed out permanently, but in the end everyone finds enough spiritual Botox to get them through more than the next semester. The professor sells his book to a commercially crass New York publisher after renaming it You Can’t Read, the oversexed uncle finds a girlfriend, the son sells a poem, the daughter heads for college to find new recruits to political conservativism and Sarah Jessica Parker does wonders for the professor’s limp id by presenting him with a brand new baby. The actors are uniformly terrific in their collaborative confusion, and director Murro orchestrates them with the precision of a finely tuned string ensemble. After Juno, the delectable Ms. Page seemed doomed to play cynical androids, but in Smart People she is simply an adorable teen drama queen looking for love and discovering the best place to start is at home. Ms. Parker is fine, as always, but I pray that she soon removes the wart on her face that is fast becoming a grim distraction in her close-ups. Mr. Church is as outrageous as he was in Sideways, but he salves over the shocks with restraint even when he’s mooning the camera in droopy BVD’s with the flaps open. As for Mr. Quaid, it is hard to describe how charming he can be as a once-promising intellectual facing extinction, and as a bumbling, cranky narcissist who can’t find his heart. This is a new Dennis Quaid in his best role since Far From Heaven. He is fearless, and he left me cheering.

So much good work must not go overlooked. I just loved this movie because it’s witty, intellectual without being pretentious, and filled with characters who are logically stressed and anxious to connect to a world outside of themselves. Here are people who are quirky, contradictory and full of surprises, people in a daunting world searching for an epiphany. They’re smart people. They’ll figure it out. And I predict you will love them while they do.

THE VISITOR
Running Time 103 minutes
Written and directed by Tom McCarthy
Starring Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Hiam Abbass

One film worth time and attention but without a big budget to announce its arrival in full-page ads is actor-turned-writer-director Tom McCarthy’s moving, humane and life-affirming new film The Visitor. This honorable and thought-provoking follow-up to Mr. McCarthy’s highly and deservedly well-received debut feature, The Station Agent, is that rare low-budget film that is really about something more than self-indulgence. There is nothing mediocre about it, and a great deal that will make you think and feel and, yes, care about the world you live in.

No stars here to lend glamour and marquee value, but the central force is Richard Jenkins, best known as the funeral director patriarch in that great HBO series Six Feet Under, who pumps up the volume admirably. He plays 62-year-old Walter Vale, a bored and disillusioned Connecticut economics professor whose life since the death of his wife and companion of many years has lost its zip. Implacable, stern, set in his ways, he spends most of his time in solitude, studying piano from a kind teacher (Marian Seldes) who knows it’s a skill for which her pupil has no aptitude. One night he returns to the New York apartment he almost never uses, and finds it occupied by two black intruders—Tarek, a musician from Syria (Haaz Sleiman), and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Daina Guerira), who are victims of a bad real estate scam. First he’s fearful, then furious, but when Walter realizes the needy strangers are now homeless, he discovers in himself enough compassion to let them stay on for a few days. In appreciation, the husband gives his host free drum lessons, and the wife’s culinary skills introduce delicious new spices to his palate. As the days stretch into weeks, the shy, uptight, anal-retentive stuffed shirt finds hidden reserves of curiosity and fun he didn’t know he had. Then he gets a rude awakening to the fates that await the lives of the disadvantaged. When the poor boy is arrested for one of the million absurd charges New York cops come up with daily and turned over to the immigration authorities, Walter finds a cause. He visits the grim detention center for illegal immigrants where the terrified Tarek is held; extends his hospitality to include the boy’s mother, who arrives from Damascus; and frees the soulful spirit he’s held hostage inside by falling for the beautiful new member of his household. Before it ends, Walter is a stranger to his own friends and colleagues: eating strange cuisine, playing bongos in the subway, fighting to save his new friends from deportation and becoming an activist for the rights democracy now denies visitors who have committed no crimes. The film does not end with its problems neatly resolved, its loose ends tied in festive bows or its broken hearts easily mended. But while it opens our eyes to the plight of those who are falsely detained without counsel for as long as the U.S. government sees fit, without hope of release, it also teaches us that the unhappiest people can change and improve by opening their hearts and minds to new ideas.

Director McCarthy has a special affinity for fresh, unusual characters who are drawn together despite their differences in age, cultural background, education and personality, and in Walter he (and the wonderful Richard Jenkins) creates the kind of viable man we all know and some of us have become. The tragedy of the “visitors” expands his horizons and gives him impetus, focus and reasons to live outside his own skin. A marvelous film, small in expense but big in stature.

MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS
Running Time 90 minutes
Written and directe by Wong Kar Wai
Starring Norah Jones, Jude Law and Natalie Portman

Another undeserving new critical favorite is Chinese director Wong Kar Wai, whose films Happy Together and In the Mood for Love were like IV drips administered by an anesthesiologist. Now someone has unwisely talked him into making his first one in English. Big mistake. It all seems twice as boring, pointless and narcotic when you can understand the words. I like the title, My Blueberry Nights, which is every bit as meaningless as the rest of the movie. But in the first sentence you hear, the narration of Jude Law says, “I don’t know how to begin, ’cause this story’s been told before.” Again and again.

Without a plot or any kind of connective tissue to hold the vignettes together, nothing about My Blueberry Nights makes any kind of coherent sense as it follows Norah Jones, the recording artist, around in her acting debut. She can’t act, and I’ve got news—she’s no jazz singer, either, even though she’s managed to forge a bogus reputation as one. Still, here she is, in practically every scene, lovely to look at but so insecure and uncertain about how to speak a simple declarative sentence that she seems to be hiding in the corner of each frame. What can I tell you? Jude Law works in a New York diner as a waiter, bartender, short-order cook, or combination of all three. It’s hard to tell, since you rarely ever get a glimpse of a customer, and practically nobody ever eats there. They just waft in to leave their apartment keys in a large fishbowl. On day one (the days are all numbered, but the movie seems to go on for years, so you soon stop counting), Ms. Jones drops in and orders blueberry pie, which thrills Mr. Law because absolutely everybody hates the blueberry pie. Their eyes meet. Nothing happens. On day nine, he gives her the whole blueberry pie because nobody else wants it. After this movie, neither do I.

So she shifts around for a year with the days popping up in no particular order, which is a good thing because it saves us from being forced to live through every minute of it. Cut to Memphis, Tenn., and a waitress gig in a late-night bar, where she befriends an alcoholic, self-destructive cop (David Strathairn) and his trashy estranged wife (Rachel Weisz), who mostly just yells a lot, driving him to a suicidal car wreck. Ms. Jones occupies her time by writing hundreds of postcards to the delicatessen back in New York where Mr. Law, who has no return address, just waits, staring at the uneaten blueberries. In Las Vegas, she teams up with a bottle-blond poker player (Natalie Portman), who cons her out of her life savings and gives the best performance in the film, although she does nothing significant and says nothing worth remembering. The whole thing ends up back in the New York diner. The keys have all been returned to their original owners, but there’s still plenty of blueberry pie, which, as you might imagine, looks stale as an old Reebok by now.

What to make of all this? It runs only 90 minutes but feels like nine days. The keys are symbols of loss and the blueberries are symbols of failure, and who cares? Every scene is composed of fragments of words and camera angles that never come together. The trajectory consists of more pregnant pauses than any film should be allowed. My guess is that it’s about people who feel but never articulate, who love but never connect emotionally. Actors will do anything, but with nothing to play, they all appear to be marking time before the lunch break. Worst of all, the movie is plagued with annoying inserts showing close-ups of cream running down the sides of dishes heaped with blueberry pie. If nothing else, it should do wonders for Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers.

Coming along so shortly after we all grew delirious with tabloid joy over the “$4,300 Misunderstanding” featuring power brokers with unsatisfactory sex lives who need women in spike heels to step on their privates as a release from being control freaks themselves, the cardboard stick figures in My Blueberry Nights could use a little sex to spark up their empty lives—as well as the film. Since it began shooting in June 2006, it’s been on the shelf ever since, and you’ll instantly know why. It’s like watching ice melt.

SEX AND DEATH 101
Running Time 116 minutes
Written and Directed by Daniel Waters
Starring Simon Baker and Winona Ryder

With a stinker called Sex and Death 101, you tremble going in. Not from the title. I mean, this jejune junk was written and directed by the same Daniel Waters who went down in Hollywood slag-pit history as the man who wrote the disastrous Hudson Hawk (not to mention the insipid Batman Returns) and miraculously survived them both. Hudson Hawk has pretty much become the criterion for Hollywood bottom feeding. When interviewers get around to the inevitable question “What do you consider the worst movie ever made?”, the answer is invariably “Hudson Hawk.” The best thing that can be said about Sex and Death 101 is that it’s not quite as bad as Hudson Hawk. That is not a recommendation.

Daniel Waters is another escapee from the same refugee camp that produced David O. Russell, Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson, a few of the other hacks in the current crop of overrated purveyors of incoherent cinematic gibberish. In the film’s production notes, he describes his latest horror as “a sex farce for people who have actually had sex,” whatever that means, neglecting to add “but lost their I.Q.’s doing it.” Worse still, he calls his style “Bunuel Meets Caddyshack.” If this kind of pretentious third-grade blather doesn’t make you run for the hills, the actual movie will. Top-billed Simon Baker, the suave Australian from the defunct TV series The Guardian, plays Roderick Blank, who lives up to his name when he receives a mysterious e-mail that lists, in chronological order, the 101 names of every woman he has ever—or will ever—sleep with, and can’t remember half of them. The idea of 101 orgasms intrigues him enough to start the experiment with renewed stamina, but the fact that his current fiancée is not the final entry dooms his future to dirty games without much promise of either love or security. No matter. It gives a varied clientele a chance to get naked fast—centerfolds, schoolgirls, threesomes, a lesbian astronaut. Halfway through this routine of endless ejaculations, is it any wonder that our hero grows bags under his eyes?

While this is going on, there’s a serial killer called Death Nell on the loose, marking the dubious return of Winona Ryder. (Get the jokes? Mr. Blank? Death Nell? And don’t forget Alpha, Beta, Barbecue Brat, Bambi and Thumper.) Death Nell’s goal is to kill every man on the planet who has ever wronged, abused or deceived a member of the opposite gender. Death Nell seduces them, then stabs, poison, and guns them all down, including the entire college fraternity that invented the date-rape drug. Between violent, lip-licking mayhem, people say things like “Love is more than a sloppy fusion of genitalia” and “If someone wants to have sex with you, they’re gonna have sex with you—the rest is just dinner theater.” For anyone doomed enough to have seen Hudson Hawk—not to mention I Heart Huckabees, The Darjeeling Limited, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Solaris, Borat, Apocalypto, Lucky Number Slevin or anything with Adam Sandler—this kind of stuff starts to sound like literature.

Long story short. The 101 slot turns out to be Death Nell, but who can resist sex with a serial killer who now calls herself Gillian De Raisx (the comic wordplay is as clever as knock-knock jokes, but c’mon, don’t make me explain that one)? Neither a feminist tract nor a vulgar sex farce, this movie just lies there waiting for Tuesday and garbage collection day. Mr. Waters says in the press notes that his writing “filters out the non-believers pretty quickly.” If this is true, Sex and Death 101 should be playing to empty theaters in no time.

FLAWLESS
Running Time 105 minutes
Written by Edward Anderson
Directed by Michael Radford
Starring Michael Caine, Demi Moore

Flawless is another contrived heist flick, with Michael Caine living up to his confession in a recent interview that he’s lost so much interest in acting that he only makes movies for money now, and Demi Moore as living proof of the dangers of too much Botox. She’s stalled in her career as the first female manager who ever existed in the British diamond industry and is on the verge of being sacked. He’s the embittered old night janitor who needs retirement money. Together they embark on a highly implausible scheme to relieve the diamond vaults of two tons of jewels worth 100 million pounds, hidden in a coffee thermos. She wants revenge. He wants recompense for the years he’s spent on his hands and knees for slave wages. The details of the heist, in which snafus lurk around each marble hallway, bulge with routine bank robbery hokum. The stroke-producing horror the next day, when the corporation finds the world’s largest supply of priceless gems completely vanished beyond security guards and walls of solid steel, and the tedious investigation that follows do not exactly add up to nail-chewing excitement. While all of this happens, for no reason, in the 1960’s, Ms. Moore returns decades later in a white wig and three miles of latex wrinkles to explain what happened to the money. I must have been asleep, but I swear I thought she said she gave it all to charity. Say huh? A publicist for the film was kind enough to let me see the ending twice, and I still could not explain it at gunpoint.

The two stars don’t have enough charisma to fill a demitasse. Ms. Moore looks hard and lacquered and sculpted out of 40 miles of unpaved road, and Mr. Caine can barely keep his eyes open. We now know that when Mitchum acted with his eyes at half-mast, he was crocked. Mr. Caine is just bored. Did director Michael Radford even bother to introduce them before he yelled “Action”? Flawless is anything but.

CHAPTER 27
Running Time 84 minutes
Written and Directed by J. P. Schaefer
Starring Jared Leto and Lindsay Lohan

On the fateful, moonless night of Dec. 8, 1980, in an act of insanity that jolted the world, John Lennon was brutally and senselessly gunned down in the entrance of the Dakota, a famous apartment building on the edge of Central Park in New York City. I know something about this. I live there. I was home that night addressing Christmas cards when I heard a series of small firecrackers downstairs. Within seconds, both Leonard Bernstein and my friend Ruth Ford (a.k.a. Mrs. Zachary Scott) phoned, asking me to rush down to the basement to see if the furnace had exploded. What I saw was the bloody body of not just a revered and peace-loving Beatle, but a shy friend and neighbor as naïve and unsophisticatedly middle-class as he was celebrated. He was an odd but decent guy, and I liked him. Once, when I signed a petition to protect him from deportation during an unpleasant, overpublicized drug investigation into his life and career, he rewarded me with a thank-you note and a year’s subscription to TV Guide.

The ambulance arrived too late. I will never forget helping a shocked and sobbing Yoko and what was left of her husband into the police car in which he died, and the subsequent holocaust of global hysterics that would plague the Dakota for eternity, as a footnote to the history of the rise and fall of the rich and famous began to write itself. The thing I never saw that night was the cretinous loony responsible for plunging the world into trepidation and darkness. Mark David Chapman, the killer of John Lennon, was dragged away in handcuffs within minutes, leaving an infuriating mystery that is at least partially solved in a riveting new film, Chapter 27, with a galvanizing performance by an unrecognizable Jared Leto that can truly be called unforgettable.

Overweight, lonely, full of confusion and rage, Chapman arrived in New York on Dec. 6, 1980, from Hawaii obsessed with the character of Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s literary masterpiece, The Catcher in the Rye, a book that still affects generations of young readers the way James Dean and his red windbreaker affected rebellious teens in the 1950’s. He checked into a grim Manhattan Y.M.C.A., wandered the streets aimlessly and parked himself in front of the Dakota vainly hoping to meet his idol, jotting thoughts in a greasy notebook like “I’m too vulnerable for a world full of pain and lies and phoniness.” On Dec. 7, he moved to the Sheraton Centre, a hotel he could not afford, and lay silently on his bed watching a TV test pattern. On the third day, Dec. 8, he mused aloud that he would never see that room again, and set out in a neat line on his dressing table what was left of his life—a passport, a letter of commendation for his volunteer work with Vietnamese children, a few photos from his travels, a drawing of Frank L. Baum characters from The Wizard of Oz and a Holy Bible, and headed for the Dakota with a pistol. The day ended with the delusional act of a psychopath who idealized, envied and despised his own idol, destroying John Lennon, age 40, as an attempt to write a final, 27th chapter to The Catcher in the Rye. (J. D. Salinger ended it with 26.)

Writer-director Jarrett Schaefer condenses the facts chronologically, lending suspense to what is basically a film without much movement or action. But it is the pulverizing concentration and almost somnambulistic intensity of Jared Leto that gives the film its life and pulse. Ordering a call girl, using the pseudonym Holden Caulfield, grilling the Dakota doorman about Lennon’s whereabouts (“Is he inside? When is he coming back?”), striking indifferent conversations with a photographer (Judah Friedlander) and another autograph hound (Lindsay Lohan), it is clear he’s an accident waiting to happen. The film catalogs everything Chapman did, from copying Lennon’s eating habits (sushi, sashimi and Hershey’s with almonds) to passive resistance when taken into custody. He didn’t run, struggle or show any self-defense. In fact, Jose, the Dakota doorman who tackled him after the shots were fired, was more traumatized than Chapman. He never worked the door again, and retired soon after. Except for one appearance with Larry King in 1992 and a series of interviews with crime reporter Jack Jones, on which the movie is based, Chapman has never been seen outside the walls of Attica. Four paroles have been denied and he’s become a born-again Christian.

Neurotic and frightening in his deceptive ordinariness, Jared Leto’s every thought, value, statement, expression and gesture adds up to character revelations much bigger than they seem. It’s basically a one-man show, predictably award-worthy. An actor of pretty-boy Rob Lowe comparisons, he has submerged himself beyond recognition, gaining roughly 60 pounds for the role. He looks like a jaundiced, humongous, overripe cantaloupe, and it’s not padding, either. He takes his clothes off and the inner tube is real. I also liked the film’s realism. No movie has been filmed inside the Dakota since 1971, when Otto Preminger wrecked somebody’s apartment shooting Such Good Friends. But I guess even a fortress with stringent rules doesn’t own the street. They’ve even captured with accuracy the churning mob scenes that developed following the evening news alerts. Within hours, all entrances were blocked and West 72nd Street looked like a depressing combination of Mardi Gras, the World Series, and a candlelight vigil in Lourdes. Still, I don’t know how they got the street blocked off to show so much of the fabled building from so many angles. There’s even a shot of my own apartment.

Chapter 27 is perhaps not a monumental, earth-shattering work of art, but my personal interest is understandable, and even if you are only moderately curious about the events that led up to the pointless death of a musical icon, I think you’ll find it a film of arm-twisting fascination.

RUN, FAT BOY, RUN
Running Time 101 minutes
Written by Michael Ian Black
Directed by David Schwimmer
Starring Simon Pegg, Thandie Newton, Dylan Moran and Hank Azaria

Well, when you leave Friends, you gotta do something. Not one of the former members of that overrated sitcom has managed to knock the planet off its axis (although Jennifer Aniston did marry Brad Pitt for about 10 minutes, guaranteeing her a few roles in bad movies). Now David Schwimmer has extended his earning potential to include directing. Run, Fat Boy, Run, his feature debut behind the camera, is the kind of genial, jokey fare you’d expect an ex-Friend to helm. If only he and his screenwriter, Michael Ian Black, a fellow American, had kept their original story grounded in their own backyard, the movie might be more than just another BBC travelogue, but transporting it from New York to London makes it seem limp and labored. The laughs are few and forced.

It’s a conventional story about Dennis, a nervous neurotic nerd (British comic Simon Pegg) who runs away on his wedding day, leaving his pregnant bride, Libby (Thandie Newton), at the altar. Five years later, working as a paunchy security guard in a women’s clothing store chasing down shoplifting drag queens who steal bras and pantyhose, he’s a real mess—out of shape and out of rent money. He’s such a loser that little children give him the middle finger on the bus. But Dennis still honors his part-time father duties with his son, and he still loves Libby, who has never forgiven him for deserting her in her white bridal gown. “Women remember that stuff,” says his doped-up slacker buddy Gordon (Irish comic Dylan Moran), who seems to be acting in a completely different, and much funnier, movie. So Dennis validates his earlier stupidity by trying to win them back by competing against Libby’s new squeeze, Whit (Hank Azaria), a rich, handsome American hedge-fund manager with six-pack abs, in a pointless 26-mile marathon. The feeble attempts by the manic, dysfunctional Dennis—hobbling through the streets of London with a beer belly, and with his overweight Pakistani landlord (who looks like a Pakistani Jabba the Hutt) wielding a kitchen spatula as his “coach”—to prove himself a more mature, responsible and manly lover than his buff rival Whit are intended to provide the film’s humor, but the notion backfires. I mean, nobody in their right mind would prefer the salami-faced Simon Pegg to the suave and muscled Hank Azaria. Still, director Schwimmer’s chief inspiration here turns out to be the casting of Mr. Pegg and Mr. Moran and the decision to let them write a lot of their own stunts. Shaped like a bowling ball, scratching his scrotum on the extended hand of a wooden department-store mannequin, sponsored in the marathon by National Erectile Dysfunction Awareness, Mr. Pegg pretty much turns Run, Fat Boy, Run into a solo turn. By the time he runs the last 11 miles with a sprained ankle, the movie turns into one of those beat-the-impossible-odds-in-excruciating-pain flicks, and there is zero chemistry between him and the luscious Thandie Newton, but it doesn’t matter. The film is about male relationships anyway. Clumsy and inept in demeanor but a whirlwind of comic energy, with an air of self-congratulatory winsomeness, Simon Pegg steals this otherwise minor but enjoyably unpretentious little comedy and pockets it like a Mars bar.

FUNNY GAMES
Running Time 107 minutes
Written by Michael Haneke
Directed by Michael Haneke
Starring Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet

You know what garbage is, but until you see Funny Games, a bucket of swill by Austrian wacko Michael Haneke, you have no idea how bad it can smell. This is the kind of pointless bloodbath nobody ever sees outside of a pretentious film festival; a repellent and totally unnecessary remake, practically scene for scene, of a load of trash first unveiled to hisses and boos at the 1997 Cannes festival. Its commercial prospects were, of course, doomed, since no sane person ever paid money to see it. Except one. Naomi Watts, a lovely and talented actress with a fatal attraction to junk who has already appeared in some of the worst movies ever made, campaigned for Mr. Haneke to reshoot his trash wallow in English with such determination that she executive-produced it herself. Bring a vomit bag.

In Funny Games, a pair of preppy psychos wearing white gloves arrive at the lake cottage of a family of innocent vacationers to borrow eggs, then proceed to drop their cell phone down the sink; kill their dog; blow a child apart with a shotgun; break the father’s legs, arms and kneecaps; and push the mother from a speedboat with a rope around her neck. Occasionally the violence and brutality is reversed with a remote control switch so the audience can see it twice. In the end, they’re arriving at another house in the resort to borrow more eggs, smiling and winking into the camera. No spoilers here; massacring everyone for fun and sport is what the movie is about. You know that going in. It’s the tortures themselves that I will let you discover for yourself. That’s the thing that sinks Funny Games to the abattoir level of the senseless Saw and Hostel dreck. When I first reviewed this assault on decency at Cannes, I described the ending and asked, “A sequel, perhaps?” No, just the same toxic waste all over again. Mr. Haneke has structured his career on this kind of perverted poison. Who could forget Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher, inspecting her mother’s genitalia before taking a single-edged razor blade to her own vagina? The lurid sickness inherent in the director’s perverse desire to shock and repel is grim enough, but worse, his movies make no sense. The characters possess no human motivation for the animal cruelty they inflict on others; the plots progress toward Nietzschean nothingness. The point of all Haneke films, and especially Funny Games, is adolescent enough to be both nasty and stupid at the same time. Violence, the director insists, is everywhere, based on ugliness and cynicism and waiting to attack us without reason. All we have to do is show up.

Subjecting the family to unspeakable humiliations, suffering and degradation only a fool or a masochist would want to sit through, the two soft-spoken sadists seem to be having a good time, but with toothy, prissy-mouthed Michael Pitt as the stronger of the two, it’s hard to tell. “Whether by knife or by gun, losing your life can sometimes be fun,” he leers, dripping drool from his bee-stung lips like a mental patient. After his critical annihilation in Silk, I thought we were rid of him for good. But he’s limped back, like a pink piglet with only one foot intact. His partner in menace, Brady Corbet, is equally incompetent. Mincing, posturing and whining while they slash their way through flesh, turning a beautiful home into a charnel house with rivers of blood streaming down the screen of the television set, they don’t even know enough about acting to make depravity intriguing. Indeed, Mr. Pitt is bad enough to make you wonder if casting couches have made a comeback. As the grown-ups, Ms. Watts and Tim Roth are more convincing, although in their botched attempts to escape, they both seem to be running a bit low on megabytes themselves.

Funny Games is as funny as the final stages of muscular dystrophy. One question diminishes all others: Why? From the press notes handed out at the critics’ screening I attended, I quote: “In the belief that explanation would be reassuring, Mr. Haneke deliberately refuses to provide any.” Then the Austrian himself adds: “I’m trying to find ways to show violence as it really is: it is not something that you can swallow. I want to show the reality of violence, the pain, the wounding of another human being.” And I want to see a tall building fall on Michael Haneke.

SLEEPWALKING
Running Time 100 minutes
Written by Zac Stanford
Directed by William Maher
Starring Charlize Theron, Nick Stahl, AnnaSophia Robb, Dennis Hopper, Woody Harrelson

What is happening to the leading ladies of the tarnished silver screen? Like hapless Naomi Watts in Funny Games, gorgeous Charlize Theron has produced her own movie, Sleepwalking. It’s a slight improvement, but not enough to write home about. Another depressing tale of the dead-end ennui of disenfranchised Americans with nothing to live for in rural wastelands that specialize in unemployment and suicide, it shows how fascinated filmmakers have become with desperation and despair in a burned-out hick-town landscape where the American dream has turned into the American nightmare. When you see how hopeless the lives of the American people have become in endless independent films that drive the movie audience away in mobs, you understand why the big, dumb action comics and sub-mental, Will Ferrell alleged comedies make all the money. Escape sells.

When her boyfriend is arrested, leaving her homeless, an irresponsible, immature single mother with a reputation as the town tramp named Joleen (a chain-smoking Ms. Theron, working hard to obliterate her beauty with wrinkles, dirt and baggy eyes) moves her 11-year-old daughter, Tara (AnnaSophia Robb), into the small rented flat of Joleen’s 30-year-old brother, James (Nick Stahl), and leaves town with another hoodlum. James is sweet and good-natured but a bit slow upstairs. He cares that the distraught adolescent has been deserted, but is in no way prepared to shoulder the total responsibility of raising a niece who is wise beyond her years and on the threshold of early womanhood. The movie is about how their relationship develops, hits rock walls and finally offers a solution for their compromised lives. The dramatic decision that changes everything comes when James loses his job, Tara faces foster care, and they invent new identities, pretending to be father and daughter, and run away together. The road leads to the rotting horse farm in Utah where James and Joleen spent their miserable childhoods, and the vicious, hard and abusive father they ran away from (played with thorny, snarling and heartless brutality by Dennis Hopper). The conflicts end in violence and bloodshed, of course, with their lives on a detour to hell.

Low-key performances and only minimal facts relayed through bare-bones dialogue by Zac Stanford, who wrote the awful Chumscrubber, give Sleepwalking a calm demeanor so devoid of human experience that it’s hard to stay alert. Whatever small attempts made by debut director William Maher to develop something resembling a plot are diluted by extraneous padding, like prolonged shots of Tara, now called “Nicole,” jumping into a motel swimming pool wearing roller skates. Sleepwalking pretty much accurately describes this movie and everything in it, including Woody Harrelson.

I don’t blame Ms. Theron for playing down and dirty, hiding her natural beauty from prying cameras, but after her turn as a lesbian serial killer in Monster, what else is she trying to prove? A little ugliness and axle grease can give you Oscars. Too much can give you hives.

In weeks this bad, there’s no underestimating the calming value of cabaret. Tovah Feldshuh’s master class in versatility at Feinstein’s is called “Tovah in a Nutshell.” She means it. She’s won awards as Tallulah Bankhead, Kate Hepburn and Golda Meir. Now you feel like she’s throwing a party in her own family room and you’re invited. The night I was there, so was the family. Like a talented kid goaded by her mom to show off, she can do everything. “Dahlink, show Grandma Ada!” “Sweetheart, give ’em Sophie Tucker!” She does, separated by blackouts when she ditches the sequin jacket, pins back the hair, climbs into heels, wraps a scarf around her head—and out come the characters who’ve lived in her brain, her movies and her life. She’s a lonely old man on a retirement pension who doesn’t know what to do with himself. She’s a Spanish “Miss Subways” whose goal is to solve world hunger while scraping chewing gum off the streets. She’s a lockjawed debutante from Greenwich named “Muffy.” She’s Sylvia Chronic, a depressing radio personality who delivers monologues on how to select the proper casket. She’s Molly Kelly Kugelberg, a mixed-up 8-year-old who wants to know: If your mother is a lapsed Catholic and your father is a “cultural Jew,” what do you do on Christmas? The stage is small and the atmosphere intimate, but there’s plenty of space to showcase the many faces of Tovah. She does bawdy 1922 Sophie Tucker jokes. She sings Gershwin. She reads a poem by E. E. Cummings. The fingers move. The hands move. The legs move. You’re impressed. You’re exhausted. She’s quick, she’s funny, she’s agile, her talent is so bountiful you forget how petite she is. She gives you your money’s worth, at breakneck speed. What she doesn’t do is towel off the sweat and give you one minute of the kind of shared intimacy that can break your heart. But what the hell? It’s a party. Where are the cupcakes?

Meanwhile, everyone loves Barbara Cook, including the critics. Trouble is, we’ve run out of laudatory adjectives. She deserves them all, but no matter how loud and sustained the applause, describing what she does is beginning to read like a thesaurus. In her present six-week run at the Carlyle, the spotlight once focused on Bobby Short is centered on a warmer, more romantic set of love songs. She performs them flawlessly.

Opening with the Al Jolson evergreen “There’s a Rainbow Round My Shoulder,” she brings back the F. Scott Fitzgerald glamour and sound of a big-band party floating across the Sound in the 1949 Alan Ladd version of The Great Gatsby. Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When,” Irving Berlin’s “I Got Lost in His Arms” and an a capella “For All We Know” remind us of the greatness of the Great American Songbook and why we never tire of hearing more. But Barbara also touches the heart with the work of a talented new writer: Once you hear John Bucchino’s “If I Ever Say I’m Over You,” you’ll know why this critical discovery is heading for the reverie of the masses. A handful of people are still alive who can write songs with beauty, meaning and soul. Mr. Bucchino is one of them. For a hip-swinging change of tempo, dig what she does with “Sooner or Later,” a showstopper that was introduced by the one and only Hattie McDaniel in the Disney classic Song of the South. Clever? Been there. Unforgettable? Said that. In a class by herself? I think I printed that the last time. You can see the problem. One likes to encourage new kids on the block, but there’s safety and security in the presence of the old pros. Barbara Cook seems to be singing somewhere every night. I have the feeling she sings in bed while watching Law and Order. She does it better than anybody else, and all you can do is smile, be grateful for her ageless perfection and genuflect when she passes by.

SNOW ANGELS
Running time 106 minutes
Written by David Gordon Green and Stewart O’Nan
Directed by David Gordon Green
Starring Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale and Amy Sedaris

Sam Rockwell is such an inventive and convertible chameleon that I guess it’s obvious why he hasn’t achieved the jumbo stardom he deserves. Gently hanging back while other guys do stupid things to hog headlines; researching every role, from the historic context to the visible body language of the character he’s playing; hiding his mercurial good looks behind whatever physical peculiarities the work demands, he is, not surprisingly, continually taken for granted by audiences. He walks in and steals other people’s movies on tiptoe, and sometimes nobody even notices what he’s contributed until the scene is over. Whether he’s playing nutty, flamboyant Chuck Barris, the quietest member of the Jesse James gang, or the psychologically tortured yuppie father of a demon seed child, he crushes you with gentle, understated power. He reminds me of the beneath-the-title second stringers in the good old days: Lloyd Bridges, acting his muscles off with Kim Stanley on Playhouse 90 one week, stalking his way through High Noon the next and ending up rich on Sea Hunt—or Sterling Hayden, tall in the saddle on Monday, plotting a crime in The Asphalt Jungle on Wednesday and smacking Bette Davis around by the weekend. These are the durables. Their careers don’t end until they reach the cemetery.

And so it is with Mr. Rockwell. You’ll see what I mean if you check out David Gordon Green’s Snow Angels, an intimate tragedy of small-town anguish in which he plays Glenn, a divorced husband and failed father who can’t get his life on any kind of track that leads in the direction of responsibility. His ex-wife, Annie (Kate Beckinsale), works with her best friend, Barb (Amy Sedaris), in a Chinese restaurant where she takes a maternal interest in the town misfit (Michael Angarano), who plays trombone in the high-school band and whose father (Griffin Dunne) teaches classes on “the importance of fungus in the ecosystem.” Annie is so unhappy that against her better judgement she’s been having an affair with Barb’s husband, Nate (Nicky Katt). As their lives become more intertwined, we wait for the inevitable disasters to come. Ultimately they do, in a portrait of American ennui that culminates in one horrible, emotional train wreck of a winter’s day.

The terrific ensemble cast, like high-strung champion horses, moves in and out of unbearable situations from adultery and guilt to grief, death and suicide without a trace of mawkish sentimentality. But it is Sam Rockwell who rivets and holds attention as a man overcome with helplessness, a history of mental problems, the inability to hold down a job and a dangerous escape into born-again religious hysteria that orchestrates his eventual self-destruction. He plays weakness and desperation with a wrenching rage; he’s sad and empty, but he makes it impossible to give up on him. His performance is that memorable.

Snow Angels is hard to forget, too. It’s one of the most relentlessly honest and bleakly disturbing mirrors to American despair since American Beauty, at half the price.

MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY
Running Time 92 minutes
Written by David Magee and Simon Beaufoy
Directed by Bharat Nalluri
Starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is a trifle of a movie confection, sweet and gummy as a jelly bean—and 10 minutes later, just as forgettable. Nothing really registers here. The casting is absurdly miscalculated. Even the costumes are wrong. It’s supposed to be set in 1939 London, on the eve of the blitz, but the party clothes are straight out of the Roaring Twenties, and Frances McDormand, in the title role, is by no stretch of the imagination another Thoroughly Modern Millie. Surrounded by so much ugliness and violence, a film this giddy should be more of a relief, but Miss Pettigrew proves that light as a bubble is not always a guaranteed antidote to tedium.

Plain as a shoehorn and destined to be one of life’s luckless losers, Miss Guinevere Pettigrew is a middle-aged governess with no personality, no references, no success and no possibilities; the polar opposite of Mary Poppins. Sacked again without severance, Miss Pettigrew is a hazard waiting to happen. Even when she reaches her place at the head of the soup line, someone knocks her bowl to the pavement. Get a grip, get a life, seize the moment, turn lemons into daiquiris: Words of advice for Miss Pettigrew come in sections, and suddenly, she hears them all. Stealing a job opening from the desk of an employment agency that has given up all hope for her future, Miss Pettigrew suddenly finds herself in a penthouse gaudily overdecorated to resemble a set piece from one of those old prewar musicals by P. G. Wodehouse, where she is mistaken for the new social secretary to a flaky American actress who calls herself Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams). In the next 24 hours, the repressed, dowdy crone finds herself in a hemline-whirling, show-business swirl of people with an endless supply of loose morals and double martinis. Amid her responsibilities, Miss Pettigrew develops a fondness for her charge, a deluded chorus girl with a mouth shaped like a valentine heart who is torn between a penniless pianist and a rich sugar daddy with deep pockets, who can make her the star of a new show called Pile on the Pepper. Nobody is who they pretend to be; even Dalysia Lafosse is really Sara Grubb from the Pittsburgh steel mill Grubbs, and I don’t mean the owners.

Before it mercifully ends, the movie shows Sara the value of a man who loves her unconditionally versus a man who can advance her career, and for reasons only the writers can explain, Miss Pettigrew finds herself drenched in Art Deco pearls, the obsession of a dirty old man dedicated to spending the rest of his life drowning her in caviar. Superficial and empty, punctuated by occasional air-raid sirens and the sound of German planes flying over oblivious Mayfair partygoers who are too busy dancing the fox trot to notice, the movie is based on a book published in 1938 by Winifred Watson, who was no Evelyn Waugh. A sterling talent like Stephen Fry could have turned this caustic drollery into something unstoppably effervescent, the way he adapted Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies into the sumptuous yet poignant Bright Young Things. Alas, screenwriters David Magee (Finding Neverland) and Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty) have no feeling for the period, and the words that come out of the characters are pure Wedgwood. India-born Brit director Bharat Nalluri’s TV interpretation of the 2004 tsunami tragedy has in no way prepared him to tackle the mad, self-perpetuating and cynical world of drunken debutantes and social-climbing good-for-nothings that populated London when clouds of war darkened overhead. As versatile as Frances McDormand is, the role of an ugly duckling transformed into social-climbing swan guzzling Champagne in backless gown, a character who could only have been invented by Oscar Wilde, does not fit her comfortably. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day has all the literary nourishment of an egg white.

MARRIED LIFE
Running Time 90 minutes
Written by Ira Sachs and Oren Moverman
Directed by Ira Sachs
Starring Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams and Pierce Brosnan

The masks we all wear to hide our true intentions in matters of the heart are cannily exposed in Ira Sachs’ compactly directed, superbly acted Married Life. In this postwar period piece replete with great 1940’s cars, clothes and suburban organdy, domestic bliss is discreetly balanced with a simmering tale of jealousy, betrayal, adultery and murderous plans most foul. Four wonderful actors form a stylish equation as finely tuned as a string quartet.

In a lovely departure from his usual roles as rough-hewn neurotics whose faces need sanding, Chris Cooper plays Harry, a nerdy, middle-aged husband in the grip of male menopause whose happy marriage to his doting wife, Pat (the fabulous Patricia Clarkson), goes stale when he meets Kay, a gorgeous blonde 30 years younger (Rachel McAdams, who looks great in a June Allyson pageboy). Cowardly Harry wants to get rid of Pat without hurting her feelings, so he turns for advice to his carefree Manhattan bachelor pal Rich (Pierce Brosnan), who has been down every road before, and always knows the detours. Rich makes a couple of discoveries of his own: one is an accidental visit to the country that catches the loyal Pat in the arms of another man, the other is Kay. One look at this soulful Clairol ad and Rich is in love himself. Pat wouldn’t mind ridding herself of marriage, either, but spares Harry the pain of divorce. Rich, who is head over heels for Kay, would like to get rid of them both. The two buddies find themselves driven to villainy by their desire for the same woman. Murder is the only answer, and since Pat suffers from chronic indigestion, replacing her stomach powder with an overdose of aspirin could be fatal. Clearly, we are heading into Hitchcock territory.

This is interesting, since the very same story (based on a pulp novel by John Bingham) was a 1962 installment of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour called “The Tender Poisoner” with Dan Dailey, Jan Sterling and Howard Duff; it used photo-developing chemicals instead of aspirin. But the basic plot twists remain the same. After naïve Harry makes the dumb mistake of leaving lonely Kay in a remote cottage in the care of dashing, roguish Rich, she dumps him, and he’s got to beat the clock to get home before Pat swallows the lethal dose. Meanwhile, brainy, indestructible Pat, who is not as lovable and devoted as everyone thinks, has duplicitous plans of her own. What happens next is humorous, suspenseful and very entertaining. The accomplished actors are flawless: as one of the two competing lotharios, Mr. Cooper obscures a volcano of conflicting obsessions and tortured emotions behind a facade of nobility; Mr. Brosnan, a far cry from 007, is wry, suave and jealous to the verge of lunacy. Ms. McAdams, who bowled me over in the underrated Christmas movie The Family Stone, is a dream walking, and the always unpredictable Ms. Clarkson raises the tension level several notches on her own as she adroitly handles a myriad of deceptions with beguiling cool. Mr. Sachs directs them all with a keen appreciation of the space they need for character evaluation, and his script (co-written with Oren Moverman) makes even the lengthy dialogue scenes plausible and natural. Classic clips from My Favorite Husband and Martin Kane, Private Eye lend period flavor, and the soundtrack by Kay Starr, Doris Day and Offenbach’s “Barcarolle” doesn’t hurt, either. Stylish without being overly stylized, intelligent without being boring, Married Life is a classy throwback to the good old days when subtlety meant something at the movies and watching Hitchcock was a good reason to stay home.

BONNEVILLE
Running Time 93 minutes
Written by Daniel Davis
Directed by Christopher Rowley
Starring Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates and Joan Allen

Star power is very much in evidence in Bonneville, a pleasant, inconsequential trifle that’s been sitting on the shelf gathering dust for nearly two years. It was first unveiled at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival to very little fanfare, but the three stars made up for the lack of attention with reams of chummy photo ops. They are Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates and Joan Allen, and the talent factor is self-evident. The importance of the film itself is somewhat less so.

Helmed by Christopher Rowley, making his feature film debut, Bonneville is a character piece not unlike an old Ladies Home Journal short story. It follows three Mormon ladies from Pocatello, Idaho, on a cross-country road trip to California in a vintage Pontiac Bonneville convertible. After her husband Joe dies on a trip to Borneo, Arvilla (Lange) has his ashes shipped home, but while she’s still in shock, her mourning is interrupted by the awful, mean-spirited daughter from Joe’s first marriage, a pickle named Francine (played with her usual acid-reflux scowl by Christine Baranski). Francine demands that her father’s remains be buried next to his first wife in the family plot in Santa Barbara, and threatens to sell the house Joe and Arvilla lived in for their entire married life right out from under her. Since Arvilla cannot find Joe’s last will and testament, she doesn’t know what to do, what she has inherited or what her legal rights are. So poor, befuddled Arvilla scoops up Joe’s remains, plus her two best gal pals, Margene (Bates) and Carol (Allen), and hits the road in her old convertible. Their pilgrimage of self-discovery transforms them all.

They have a flat tire in the Utah salt flats. In Vegas, morally self-righteous Carol drinks vodka and wins triple at the slots, yelling “Oh, my heck!” Crusty, salty Margene finds her own excitement with a truck driver (Tom Skerritt) who buys them dinner and then provides the kind of sexy all-night adventure she has only read about in Barbara Cartland novels. And Arvilla finds joy in the memories of the past instead of regret. More important, they each find something inside themselves they didn’t know was there, and best of all, they discover the value of trust, laughter, friendship and female bonding.

Open the big cinema floodgates and Bonneville is just a trickle of Poland Spring, but the trio of ladies are always watchable; they seem to actually enjoy each other unselfishly and without reservation (nobody hogs the camera); and the script by Daniel Davis is full of warmth, tears and humorous zingers. It’s a chick flick for senior chicks.

THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL
Running Time 115 minutes
Written by Peter Morgan
Directed by Justin Chadwick
Starring Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman, Eric Bana and Kristin Scott-Thomas

Nobody does costume epics like the British, and when it comes to bringing their own violent, bloody political history to the screen, they lose their heads. Anne Boleyn certainly lost hers, and The Other Boleyn Girl, a sexy Tudor soap opera about the beautiful, sensual and tragic second wife of Henry VIII, provides a new reason why. A tale of intrigue, ambition and betrayal at court in the 1500’s, it’s not only about the notorious Anne (Natalie Portman), who married the king and became one of England’s most glamorous victims, but also her younger sister Mary (Scarlett Johansson), who competed for the affection of the king and bore him a child. Call it sibling revelry.

I always knew there was a younger sister named Mary, who eclipsed Anne by marrying first, but none of the literary or cinematic works about lusty Henry VIII and his six wives ever dealt with her story until the acclaimed novel by Philippa Gregory, from which this film is adapted. It is quite a story: lusty, passionate and nasty. The three Boleyn children—Anne, Mary and their brother George—are shown from the start as happy, cherubic, innocent and totally devoted to each other, romping hand in hand through the wheat fields with mischief and affection. Then, when word spreads that the king (Eric Bana) has lost interest in his wife, Katherine of Aragon, because she cannot produce the son he craves, Sir Thomas Boleyn (Mark Rylance) mutters “To get ahead in this world, you need more than fair looks and a kind heart” and, with the manipulation of her ambitious uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, pimps Anne out to become the king’s mistress. (These were the days when beautiful virgins happily allowed—even encouraged—their parents to barter them off as profitable sex lures to bring their families money and power.) Clever and ambitious, Anne will settle for nothing less than the crown, so the king banishes her. During Anne’s exile in France, sister Mary moves into the king’s bed even though she is already married to a man she doesn’t love; develops a warm and sincere attachment to her lover; and bears him a child. Alas, it’s a daughter named Catherine. Besotted with Mary but still longing for a male heir, Henry banishes Katherine of Aragon, breaks with the pope, and becomes head of the new Protestant Church of England, declaring war with Rome—all for the love of Anne. You couldn’t call it an unrequited love, because the fearless and arrogant Anne spends most of her time rutting, but alas, she cannot produce a son either, and the audience sits by nervously, waiting for Anne’s inevitable date with the executioner’s axe. Despite the heartbreak the mother (Kristin Scott-Thomas) shows as she tries to save her children from the greed that has ruined their lives, it is ironically her own brother and Anne’s own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey), who seals her doom in court. Nobody had any power in the 16th century, especially women.

This story has been told before, most effectively in the brilliant Maxwell Anderson play Anne of the Thousand Days, which was turned into a stunning film in 1969 with Richard Burton and Genevieve Bujold. What gives The Other Boleyn Girl a fresh slant is the wrongful accusations leading up to Anne’s downfall. When it looks as though her inability to produce a son will lead to inescapable extermination, she tries one last desperate attempt, enlisting the aid of her own dear, loyal and distraught brother George, while her sister Mary helps to undress them both. The act is never consummated, but George’s scheming wife lies to the king, and Anne is wrongly convicted of adultery, incest and treason—three charges of which she is not guilty. True, or poetic license? Who knows. But one thing is certain: It makes for a juicy and shocking footnote.

The credentials are impressive. The writer is acclaimed Oscar winner Peter Morgan (The Queen, The Last King of Scotland and the stage success Frost/Nixon). The director is Justin Chadwick, whose series adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House has won countless television awards. The sumptuous and detailed Tudor costumes were designed by Sandy Powell, who won Oscars for Shakespeare in Love and The Aviator. And the cast works hard, if somewhat erratically. Ms. Johansson’s celebrity unbalances the equation; she’s not Anne Boleyn, yet she gets more attention in the smaller role of “the other Boleyn girl” than the ill-fated queen. As the calamitous Anne, Ms. Portman comes nowhere near the passion and poetry of Ms. Bujold. As the famously excessive, pulchritudinous and syphilitic Henry VIII, Mr. Bana, the Australian hunk, is not in the same class as the great Charles Laughton, who branded the role more than once, most memorably in Young Bess (1953). The sets encompass many of the great estates of England in a breathtaking tour guide that must have heaped a lot of coins in the coffers of the British Land Trust.

For what it’s worth, although the tyrannical and sexually insatiable hypocrite Henry VIII was succeeded by one 9-year-old son who died six years later, none of his six wives ever produced a male heir who outlived him by the time he died in 1547, at age 56. The final irony is Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth, reigned for 45 years. But that, as you know too well, is another story.

PENELOPE
Running Time 102 minutes
Written by Leslie Caveny
Directed by Mark Palansky
Starring Christina Ricci, Catherine O’Hara, Peter Dinklage and James McEvoy

Penelope is another first feature, directed by Mark Palansky, produced by Reese Witherspoon and starring Christina Ricci as a fairy-tale heroine plagued by an ancient witch’s curse: She was born with a pig snout. As romantic fables go, this one may go faster than an oink, but you can’t say it lacks imagination. This is how it goes: Centuries ago, a witch proclaimed that the next girl born to the aristocratic Wilhern family would have a porcine nose. Generations pass, until a new Wilhern family (Catherine O’Hara and Richard E. Grant) lose the sorcery lottery, and their otherwise lovely daughter Penelope makes Miss Piggy look like Bardot. After the trashy London tabloids, led by a ferocious cub reporter named Lemon (Peter Dinklage), print a scary photo of the sweet girl, her parents lock her away in a beautiful, isolated mansion. The curse can be lifted, it is said, if Penelope married a man of her own class, but despite their enormous wealth, her parents cannot find a suitor. Enter Max (played by Atonement’s James McEvoy)—a blue blood addicted to gambling, with a sad heart and a mischievous arrogance. He has a dastardly ulterior motive for winning over the gullible and desperate Penelope, but to everyone’s surprise they become a friendly odd couple, and in the film’s second half, another unlikely confidante and morale booster materializes in the form of a tough-as-nails delivery girl named Annie, played with riotous pluck by producer Reese Witherspoon herself. Penelope is on her way.

For a film that is basically about a hip, New Wave fairy princess, Penelope has both old-fashioned charm and a freshly modern approach to the subject of media manipulation and celebrity culture. The biggest surprise is Christina Ricci, whose portrayal of a shy, insecure and awkward ugly duckling goes against her familiar hard, swaggering image. Not just your everyday pig in a poke, if you ask me.

CHARLIE BARTLETT
Running Time 97 minutes
Written by Gustin Nash
Directed by Jon Poll
Starring Anton Yelchin, Hope Davis, Robert Downey Jr.

One positive note about the movie business: As reliable as it is at guaranteeing a surfeit of crap, it still promises an occasional pleasant surprise. Gratefully, I salute the inventiveness, imagination and cockeyed teenage humor in a delightful new movie called Charlie Bartlett. It picks up where Juno left off.

Like Ellen Page in that irreverent new look at upbeat teenage psychosis passing itself off as normal, Anton Yelchin, the Russian-born wunderkind who established himself, when he was 12, as an all-American talent beyond his years opposite Anthony Hopkins in Hearts in Atlantis, plays a teenager finding his inner lost soul in the days before college by marching to the sound of his own off-tempo bongo beat. Charlie is brilliant, privileged, rich and so anxious to be liked in his exclusive New England prep school that he runs a laminating press in his dorm room and sells illegal driver’s licenses and other forms of identification for underage teens. He’s already been kicked out of just about every other upscale academic institution on the East Coast, so this is the last straw. Maybe he’s just a chip off the old block. Make that two old blocks. His father, who is never seen, has his own felonious problems, since he is serving time in a federal corrections facility for income tax invasion, and his flaky, pill-popping mother (hilariously well played by the versatile, polished and always reliable Hope Davis) hangs around the family mansion with a chauffeur and an endless supply of Courvoisier, humming show tunes.

Without a clue as to how to save Charlie, Mom sends him to a public high school for a lesson in discipline and civics. Of course, Charlie is the kind of handsome preppie, fresh from the barber shop, who enrages the school bully by arriving in a limousine carrying an attaché case and wearing a monogrammed blazer and rep tie. Black eyes, bloody noses and knots on his head the size of jumbo eggs become daily routines. To achieve popularity in a contemporary version of Blackboard Jungle, Charlie will try anything. He even auditions for the school play in drag, a bold move tantamount to standing blindfolded in front of a firing squad. His final coffin nail is his sudden attachment to Susan Gardner (Kat Dennings), the daughter of the school principal (Robert Downey Jr.), and a real Ellen Page clone who pretends to hate her father in order to maintain a certain popular status of her own on campus. Now, in addition to the campus thugs, it’s the principal who declares war. Charlie is doomed. He even goes home to a package from his mom that says “Ritalin in bag, dinner in oven.”

But wait. This movie is just getting started. Charlie Bartlett is so brilliant that he comes up with a master war strategy that would thrill General George S. Patton. Putting his family history of shrinks and drugs to work, Charlie becomes the school psychopharmacologist. Here’s how it works: He listens to all of the other students’ problems, describes their symptoms to a battery of shrinks paid for by his neurotic mother, collects pockets full of prescriptions and then sells the medications to his schoolmates, becoming a pint-size Dr. Feelgood overnight and even winning over his worst enemy by making him a business partner. Before you can say “Rite-Aid,” Charlie’s got the entire student body on Xanax, Prozac, Zoloft, Valium, Wellbutrin, Ecstasy and a few other things he can’t even pronounce. Never has a dark horse risen to heights of heroism so fast. At the same time, Charlie conducts free-of-charge private psychiatric counseling sessions in the school toilet, turning troubled kids into candidates for Stepford endowments.

Don’t panic. The tables turn, of course, just in time to prevent the appalled grinches and anal-retentive adults in the audience from attacking the film for promoting drugs (and missing all the fun in the process). But while it lasts, the outrage is laugh-out-loud funny and served by a perfect gang of appealing, mischievous collaborators. Ms. Davis is pluperfect as the clueless mom whose hand seems permanently attached to a glass of something intoxicating. Mr. Downey gets his best role in years as the beleaguered, befuddled and terminally bewildered principal, and he looks good, too. He’s been embalmed in so many movies that it’s nice to see him healthy and clean-cut as an aging preppie for a change. Mr. Downey’s double-entendres in his rant against drugs and alcohol are doubly amusing, if you get my drift. But the real revelation is Mr. Yelchin, who adds to his growing gallery of sweet, misunderstood, sensitive and vulnerable teenagers this portrait of a whiz kid who sings, dances, plays Cat Stevens on the piano and loses his virginity to great applause. Writer Gustin Nash and director Jon Poll blend them all into a quirky, eccentric whole. The relationships between the young ensemble cast members are clearly and believably defined, and after meeting Charlie, they all turn out to be better people than they were before. The mangy, pierced and tattooed school bully (nice work by Tyler Hilton) even ends up looking like the cover of Men’s Vogue. Call Charlie Bartlett a new definition of teenage rehab.