[ Scott actually uses the musical theme from Man on Fire, giving Domino - with its reality television mirror where celebrities play themselves playing themselves - a sense of recycled culture that's so viivid, its almost suspiciously boring: Is there more going on here than meets the eye? Somehow I doubt it. Although I can't possibly endorse a film this busy or chaotic (in the first five minutes, I could be quoted as saying "I'm getting a seizure" for the second time) that parades its emotion deepening scenes with the utmost of isolation (scenes where anyone feels anything feel stilted and alien, although that may be the point). A bunch of unknowns, really. A great example of how the film makes with the cool, but can't avoid flashing its Big Studio Strings is the reversed sequences (an event takes place, but is subsequently shown in reverse because, actually, it didn't really take place), as voiced through the ol' unreliable narrator (Domino Harvey) as she plays Ususal Suspects debriefing with a catty Lucy Liu. Keira Knightley is inspired casting, - despite her one-note reliance on her accent to do all the acting for her; She sounds like Sarah Nixey of Black Box Recorder singing the infamous "Child Psychology". Stuffed tight with cliches, Domino tells a cartoonishly violent story that culminates in a Mexican standoff sequence that's so reminiscent of nearly every other Tony Scott film I can call to mind (save the exceptions that I'm intentionally not thinking of), its inclusion almost makes you wonder if Scott isn't simply parodying himself at this point. The prospect sounds so harmless, I feel nearly drawn to dissect it.

Wildest, most insanely bad miscasting since The Last Samurai. Why not just cast an actual blind American? How does one explain the horrible slip of such a great thespian? Oversculpted, horribly vague story with all the scenes I totally expected: Blind Todd being lost in a sea of people without a guide or a cane, Mother and Daughter split up in the mad dash to leave Shanghai and, of course, Todd taking a rage-filled swing at a guy who is hitting on The White Countess herself (Richardson, milking that accent almost as cartoonishly as Fiennes' American accent which - more than once, mind - reminded me of Apu in the "Proposition 24" episode as he's faking an American accent in order to appear more naturalized).

A tad smaller than it probably expected itself to be, The Ice Harvest's best moments are the incidental ones that don't have very much to do with crime (i.e. - Oliver Platt's priceless turn as John Cusack's drunk friend who stole Cusack's wife and failed at the marriage besides - but its okay, they're cool). Too much emphasis on another generic slimeball performance by Billy Bob Thornton (each one makes me want to go back and rewatch One False Move), too much bluntness in the bumbling cops and a femme fatale subplot that barely surfaces (I was in the minority, but I'm going on record to say that Connie Nielsen is uglified to no real end here). The air of stale Coen lingers in a belabored double cross. (But there is a visual pun involving a trunk not fitting in a trunk. Depth.)

I saw someone refer to Memories of Murder as moody. They meant it literally, by my count; Bong's film changes moods repeatedly and, sometimes, without warning: One minute a parody of investigation dramas, one minute a kooky slapstick number with bumbling local cops brawling like drunken masters, next a viscerally cruel challenge as a man with down's syndrome is tortured for days, then a bittersweet memoir but, above all, a treatise on frustration with natural, uncontrollable, every day chaos. There are a ton of really great things going on here - in the end, its really a collection of setpieces overruled by a (probably) too ambitious flashback frame (likely the closest connection with the real life case that exists in the film) - but there are also way too many flying leap kicks and bar fights.

I liked it insomuch as it carries an air of lightness about it such that even scenes brimming with faux-suspense - e.g., when the two principals were about to be hanged (but not really because its an American film) - are so openly predetermined, so very much in the spirit of the film, that Hallstrom genuinely seems only to be embracing, unpretentiously, a lark. A very clear, metonymical example of this warmth and whimsy is Oliver Platt's wonderfully calculated, over-the-top candor. So replete with an inappropriate, cartoonish demure during a similar time period in Venice in Dangerous Beauty, it's as if he's dragging that same breezy caricature into a more apropos affair, hilariously, as penance. Watching him flaunt it with just the right measure of hulking dimness is not only a great pleasure, but defines the atmosphere of the film, surprisingly, for the better. That said, Casanova is certainly not a great film by any stretch of the imagination (because it's wildly predictable, contains far too much digi and, for pity's sake, because it purports to openly allow Jeremy Irons to parody himself). Ranks #3 out of #4 in the unofficial Best Heath Ledger Performances of 2005 Poll being taken by my "metrosexual" (wink, wink) brothers.

When she's making jokes, she's very funny. When the taboos are being broken without witty verbage, she's merely hot. The songs and the broken third wall framing device thingey are only intermittently chuckle-worthy. If that. Did I by any chance mention how fucking hot she is? Oh, right. I did. Hot.

Fascinating conundrum of a film: At once incredibly free-flowing and and at ease with itself, yet intricately woven not to merely flow into itself with doublespeak and plotline figure-eights, but to both lovingly evoke noir at its pulpiest while simultaneously sending up 80s noir at its dingiest. Downey, Jr. and Kilmer are both entirely game with Black's spit-shot dialogue that, for the first half-hour, plays like a His Girl Friday routine set in the world of collapsable narrative.

Black comedy that raises the stakes from Alfredo Garcia's head to Melquiades Estrada's body? Complex tale of redemption with constant religious overtones? John Ford by way of Inarritu starring Sling Blade's Karl as The Exterminating Angel? A leftist argument against the death penalty? To be sure - however tonally confused - it is all of these things. There are far more interesting moments than maddening ones, but the best thing seems to overrule the lot: Three Burials is a film that preaches, in a roundabout way, a whole heap of hope. In the perpetually cynical moviegoing atmosphere, something this sincere - despite its conceit involving an overland trek with a rotting corpse - seems almost welcome. Commence with the comments about how cornball I am. Just go ahead and commence.

Extraordinarily loose on its feet, likely a blend of the constantly moving, pleasantly fluid camerawork and its genuine handle on the goofy verbage, Joe Wright's take on Austen's penultimate social satire of frustrated love and freewheelin' women makes all the same connections Clueless did, keeping the whole affair nearly as light and airy as that film.

Indulges every whim - be it rock n' roll indexing (as Brosnan shows Kinnear How Best To Kill), tender domestic scenes, even what feels like latent parody (or at least an FU in the direction of Brosnan's now elapsed 007 persona) - which makes for a great deal of short attention span theater pieces (its a very easy movie to watch), but very little in the way of substance or character depth. I'd go so far as to peg it somewhere near how Claire Denis justified The Intruder, in so much as both films are generic, simple films we've seen in some capacity before, spinning their wheels on stylistic riffs and fragmented storytelling. Kinnear and Brosnan take great pleasure in their respective schlubs - the former wearing his sensitivity on his sleeve, the latter revealing his in perhaps in the film's most glaring of ironies, as he forces his unpeeled layers of loneliness on Kinnear, explaining that he'd never even heard of being "burnt out". Brosnan also milks an unpredictability which, in the film's strongest measure, continues to give him the upper hand over everyone, even as he's heaped in a corner, bawling his eyes out. The vision itself feels mildly focused, but mostly on itself: The Matador knows its a movie from start to finish.  The edgy Right Fucking Now tone seems to both anticipate doom (in Brosnan's quandry) and look back at doom (in Kinnear's loss), but Shepard is distracted with the moment (to the tune of bacchanal quick cuts in a sex club, a preoccupation with bright colors and open space [everyone feels small in this big world], the gigantic-font intertitles and varied music selections [from The Cramps to Asia]); Consequently, we feel the whole affair changing gears, but we never really arrive anywhere.