Simultaneously a tough guy and a sap, a realist and a romantic, director Michael Mann has for decades now been making movies about what it means to be a man. He chooses to tell these stories in familiar settings, setting his fairly measured character studies in the kind of testosterone-soaked milieu that has been favored by a century of manly filmmakers. Mann has made movies about cops and robbers. There's one about a cab driver and an assassin, one about a whistleblower and another about a great athlete. He's even made a supernatural horror movie set among Nazis. But he keeps returning to the subject of heroes and villains, about the role-playing that takes place when good guys go head-to-head with bad guys, and about what happens when the line between antagonist and protagonist gets blurred.

Surely one of the more repellent creations to inhabit arthouse screens this year, Raúl Peralta is a glowering brute of a man. Unemployed and undistracted in Pinochet's Chile, he's one of those desperate characters the movies are drawn to, nursing big, illusory dreams about turning his life around through a stonefaced, stiff impersonation of Tony Manero, the working-class Brooklyn dancer played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. He sits through mostly empty matinee screenings at the local cinema, then rehearses his moves on the old, rotting stage at a squalid little nightclub while putting the make on the three women in his life: the club's owner, Wilma (Elsa Poblete), his girlfriend, Cony (Amparo Noguera), and — why the hell not? — Cony's nubile daughter Pauli (Paola Lattus). And he's a rank opportunist who, as often as not, sees his countrymen each as minor obstacles between him and his next little stab at happiness.

The Hurt Locker opens in medias res, depicting a trio of soldiers working on the streets of Iraq. The movie doesn't stop to explain what they're up to or put their actions in context. The audience is left to infer the circumstance, but it's not hard to imagine the scenario. Judging from the cutting and the jumpy handheld camera style, we're looking at a tense situation. That robot rolling around by remote control, poking at a pile of refuse, is probably looking for a bomb. And when the robot breaks down and one of the men starts suiting up like Sigourney Weaver in the last scene of Alien, it's a sure bet he's about to play a game of red-wire/black-wire with a scary chunk of explosives. The tension is heightened, actually, by the fact that the movie has just begun. These characters are interchangeable and, because the movie has yet to present us with a formal protagonist, potentially expendable. That's how director Kathryn Bigelow gets way ahead of her audience in this film's very first sequence. Barely five minutes into her movie and already I was cowering in my theater seat, terrified that something was about to blow.

Either it runs in the family or Jennifer is one hell of a mimic, because there's an unmistakably Lynchian undercurrent to much of the goings-on in Surveillance, which lends some juice to a somewhat pulpy yet dry and familiar scenario. During the opening scenes, as Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond show up at a tiny police precinct wearing the kind of blue suits that denote FBI badgeholders, the younger Lynch adds an otherwordly soundtrack drone to the activity that flashed me right back to the first reel or so of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.

My review of Passengers is online at filmfreakcentral.net:

Even if you haven't read the jacket promo copy, you'll suspect Passengers is up to some kind of supernatural wish-fulfillment from its first few minutes, as a slumbering Anne Hathaway is awakened on a rainy night by a phone call from a colleague who tells her something terrible has happened requiring her presence at a nearby hospital. It's not just that Hathaway plays Dr. Claire Summers, a therapist charged with helping a group of plane-crash survivors cope with their near-death experiences and the accompanying trauma—it's that the chilly, insistently otherworldly production design strongly implies something strange (but comforting, very comforting) is going on, too.

My review of True Blood: The Complete First Season is online at FilmFreakCentral.net.

There's something refreshing about True Blood, a show that approaches the idea of loving the undead with healthy helpings of humour, viscera, eroticism, and subtext. The tongue-in-cheek storytelling and routinely bloody tableaux aren't especially remarkable, but True Blood is pretty packed with sex, even by HBO's standards. Over the course of True Blood's first 12 episodes, we learn that Bon Temps, Louisiana, and environs are home to not just a handsome Civil War vampire but also a plucky telepathic waitress and a shapechanging bartender, as well as assorted "fangbangers" (humans with a thing for screwing vampires) and addicts in thrall to V juice, the street term underscoring the intoxicating, potency-enhancing effects vampires' blood has on humans.

It's less than 10 minutes into Riptide, and already Norma Shearer is decked out in insect-woman garb, adjusting the fit of the skimpy costume and complaining that part of it must surely be missing. Mary, the easygoing city girl Shearer plays, never makes it to the masquerade ball scheduled out on Long Island. Instead, she falls easily in lust with a lonely New York swell named Lord Philip Rexford (Herbert Marshall), equally ridiculous in an unrecognizable bug costume that fits him like a suit of chain mail might, if chain mail came with bug eyes a pair of antennae. As meet cutes go, it's a terrific pre-Code absurdity — the movie hasn't even begun yet, and already the leading lady is half undressed.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie that has more sheer cinematic energy than Sam Raimi's Evil Dead. It's in the cutting and the camera moves, but also in the cacophonous, claustrophobic staging — he manages to put you in that little cabin out in the woods with the zombie girl locked in the cellar and all hell about to break loose. (The flamboyantly comic Evil Dead II, with such flourishes as its flying-eyeball tracking shot, is generally more prized by movie buffs but, Bruce Campbell signature schtick aside, I much prefer the grim original.) The first two Spider-Man movies are fine, but Raimi's traveled a long way in general from the kind of craziness that made his reputation and on which he built his career.

Because Pixar is known for so reliably hitting balls out of the park, every time, it's hard to think of what possible angle to take in a review as its latest slugger, Up, trots merrily around the bases of the multiplex, dances its way toward the hefty box-office returns that await at home plate, and basks in the warm glow of the adoration of millions of fans. For three years now, there have been stories in the financial press alleging that Pixar's latest is due to underperform because a) nobody wants to see a silent movie about a lonely robot; b) children don't want to play with plush rats; or c) nobody loves old people and fat kids. That's one reason why it's such good sport to watch the movies rake in the dough year after year.

Ostensibly a jazzy, nonlinear short story about the emotional life of a high-end Manhattan hooker, this latest entry in The Steven Soderbergh Eclecticism Project is less a sexy confection than a sly satire on capitalism. Or, more specifically, a satire on capitalists during a recession. The film takes place in the last days of the 2008 Presidential campaign, as the first shockwaves from the current economic downturn are still resonating. Just about everyone on screen is concerned about holding down a job, from the expensive call girl "Chelsea" (contemporary porn star Sasha Grey) who frets about the new batch of hookers who might be that little bit younger, more alluring, and more obliging, to her less affluent boyfriend, a bottom-rung personal trainer who keeps looking for an entr ée to gym management (though he considers himself too special and unique a snowflake to don the company T-shirt). Even the journalist who interviews her is involved, it is clear, in a kind of commerce. And what kind of job is journalist, really, in today's economy?

Summer Hours is what's generally referred to as a "small" film, but for Olivier Assayas, it represents a comfortable return to form after several self-conscious attempts at rethinking and reinventing the boundaries of his work. Demonlover was a sort-of thriller about the international sex trade; Clean was a combination Anglo/Francophone recovery drama; and Boarding Gate was aggressively marketed as a globetrotting thriller about a girl (Asia Argento) with a gun and a paucity of clothing. I haven't seen Boarding Gate (yet), but Demonlover and Clean both felt like somewhat contrived exercises in arthouse empire-building.

Taking the reins of the Star Trek saga, producer/director J.J. Abrams’ most impressive gambit is a self-consciously clever ploy. Faced with the task of acclimating new audiences to this venerably corny space opera, he simultaneously executes a franchise reboot and nostalgia play. Thanks to the miracle of time travel — in the context of the Star Trek cosmos, such gimmick doesn't even qualify as a stretch — Star Trek functions simultaneously as sequel and prequel. That is to say, while it brings with it the return of a notably wizened Leonard Nimoy as an elderly Mr. Spock, the eyebrow-humping logician who was arguably the signature character of the original TV series, it's also full of origin stories. If you ever longed to see the Trek-ian likes of Kirk, Spock, Sulu, "Bones" McCoy, and Uhuru as fine young things studying together at Starfleet Academy, this is your chance.

Revanche begins, puzzlingly enough, as a tale of two cities. To the policeman Robert (Andreas Lust), the town of Gföhl is his workplace, the environment he's charged with protecting. He lives just outside of town with his wife, Susanne (Ursula Strauss), on a secluded, picturesque property where it seems it would take the better part of the afternoon just to mow the grass. And to Alex (Johannes Krisch), newly released from prison, Vienna is a sleazy and dangerous environment where lovely young foreigners like his Ukrainian lover, Tamara (Irina Potapenko), are drafted into the sex trade by greasy bosses who are well-versed in sexual and psychological gamesmanship. The film's second-saddest joke is the name of the brothel where both she and Alex work: Cinderella.

Mounted and directed by the legendary showman Cecil B. DeMille and photographed by the marvelously adroit cinematographer Karl Struss (Sunrise, Island of Lost Souls), The Sign of the Cross is a dispiriting epic that purports to tell the tale of Roman persecution of Christians under the reign of Nero, who is believed under some theories to have ordered his men to set fire to the city and then blamed local Christians for the damaging blaze. But despite insistently dull depictions of the monotonous lives of the true believers, who are so dumb they can't even station proper lookouts outside their secret prayer meetings, what DeMille's really into is the hedonistic habits of the Roman upper classes. The result is a film whose generous helpings of sex and violence are overwhelmed by its general air of condescension and phony piety.

New York Times critic Bosley Crowther once complained of Stanley Kubrick's harrowing and hilarious Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, "Virtually everybody turns up stupid or insane — or, what is worse, psychopathic." Crowther's concern was not just that Kubrick was making a sick joke out of the idea of nuclear war, but that he seemed (to Crowther) to be out to undermine, discredit and mock the entire American military and executive establishment, depicting the U.S.A. itself as a dangerously deranged member of the global community. Dr. Strangelove is, of course, essential satire and a stone classic. Observe and Report is more derivative and less urgent. Still, it's quite something. Watching it made me feel a little bit like Bosley Crowther fussing over the Kubrick. "Somehow, to me, it isn't funny," Crowther wrote. "It is malefic and sick."

My review of I've Love You So Long is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

Even in stillness and silence, Kristin Scott Thomas manages to exude a great sadness; and sadness is what I've Loved You So Long is all about .... But if there's a lot to look at along the way, the film holds few genuine surprises.

In the opening shot of Hunger, a small army of protesters — hunger-strikers, perhaps — is bringing the noise by banging empty soup bowls loudly against the ground. That scene is followed, lyrically, by a scene depicting an older, staid-looking gentleman eating his breakfast, tiny crumbs tumbling from his fork onto the napkin tucked away on his lap and then getting brushed away. He heads out to his car, looks up and down the street, and then falls to his knees and peers carefully at the car's undercarriage before opening the door and getting in. His wife watches from the front-room window, the tension on her face easing slightly as the car roars to life and her husband drives away. This man turns out to be a guard at a prison in Northern Ireland. We see this man washing blood from his knuckles, which have been torn raw by the force of some blunt impact. It's only later that we're shown the sadistic behavior that earned him those scars. In a scene that toys with an audience's mounting sense of dread, we see him taking a smoke break outside the prison walls, enjoying the tactile sensation of a light snowfall before heading back inside to do, we suspect, his worst. It's a tense, expertly fraught study in contrasts that dramatizes the difference between the haves and the have-nots — the fed and the hungry.

Notably only for a first act that credibly depicts a three-way — and, eventually, four-way — relationship among friends and lovers without tilting embarrassingly toward titillation and/or soap opera, the blandly titled The Edge of Love is only incidentally a Dylan Thomas biopic. Welshman Matthew Rhys (currently on American television in Brothers & Sisters) plays the poet, and although the film draws on Thomas' writings in voiceover (some of them the famous archival recordings in the poet's own voice), he's never the center of the drama. The film opens close in on a shot of Keira Knightley, playing Vera Phillips, a singer in a London nightclub during World War II. She meets Thomas, apparently an old childhood friend, and is charmed — but surprised when the poet's wife, Caitlin (Sienna Miller), arrives on the scene. The three of them — starving artist, wife and, perhaps, muse — move in under one roof. Vera also catches the eye of William Killick (Cillian Murphy), a good-looking but perhaps too earnest solider who's preparing to return to the front lines, and would like to take a wife before he goes back. She agrees, which makes Killick forever a member of this dysfunctional group.

Update 3/23/09: Via The House Next Door comes word that The Virgin Spring is available for free, legal online viewing.

In case you're unfamiliar with the film or its reputation, let me give you an idea of just how disreputable the 1972 Wes Craven version of The Last House on the Left really is. I saw it in film school, in a horror-film class that was being taught by a professor who had stepped in at the last minute, after the one who had actually programmed the syllabus fell ill, so he was unfamiliar with some of the films that had been scheduled. The semester went pretty well went pretty well until the day we screened The Last House on the Left. The prof — a fine teacher and an expert in film in his own right — stood in front of the class afterward and declared that he had always considered himself a First Amendment absolutist. Until that day. Screening Last House for the first time, he said, had convinced him that there was a good case to be made for censorship. His argument was essentially that the film was sadistic and utterly worthless, the product of very small minds, a debasement of not just its cast and crew but of the audience members as well. I complicated matters somewhat by raising my hand and noting that The Last House on the Left was based on an Ingmar Bergman film, The Virgin Spring. As a defense of the film goes, I admit now that's pretty weak sauce, but it's what I had. And it worked, to a degree. I don't think it necessarily changed his mind about the film, but it altered the tenor of discussion. Slightly.

When the original Watchmen comic-book series began publishing, with a cover date of September 1986, the Cold War was still reality. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, a battleground where it faced off against the U.S.-armed mujahideeen, was still grinding on, and the threat of nuclear annihilation was nightmare material for anyone who lived near a big city in the U.S. The so-called "Doomsday Clock," a symbolic creation of atomic scientists that attempted to quantify the likelihood of global nuclear war, was set at three minutes to midnight. I was a teenager in Pueblo, Colorado, living about 35 miles from the NORAD facility inside Cheyenne Mountain, where the military kept an eye out for a Soviet nuclear-missile attack. Movies like Dr. Strangelove and War Games, which were partly set inside NORAD's war room, had a special resonance on the Colorado's Front Range. So did Watchmen.

I stared at a blank screen for a long time before I started typing this review, mainly because it was hard to think of how much I could possibly say about Sunshine Cleaning that would make it sound any different from or more substantial than the hundreds of other quirky American indie dramatic comedies and comedic dramas that clog the festival circuit each year. And it’s true this sounds deadly precious on paper. It’s the story of a single mom, dreams dashed, who’s having a tough time making ends meet while taking care of her impulsive, socially awkward son and keeping tabs on her lovably dotty father. She eventually pools resources with her sister to start a business dealing in death, which leads to a whole new perspective on life. It all sounds pretty banal. And then I had a realization: It’s the performances, dummy.