Offside, like Panahi's 2001 film The Circle, operates on the presumption that repeating the same point, ad nauseum, for the entire length of the picture somehow really just, gets in there and makes the point SUPER pointy. He salvages great, wide pieces of the film with tighter, better orchestrated set pieces (the ill-fated trip to the restroom being the centerpiece, but the bus ride at close is also a humdinger) and a conceit that makes me salivate: The movie was wrought in and among Azadi Stadium's 2006 Championship game between Iran (who will "riddle [opponent] with goals") and Bahrain. Logistically, one has to tip one's hat - it captures with a vivid, edgy verite texture the joyous worship of soccer, but also the wet-necked panic of both the put-upon guards and the forbidden ladies (who, dressed like men, are herded up behind metal barriers for the duration of the game). It still seems to be bearing witness, which I still can't quite take seriously (the batch of Nationalism in this one is suspiciously contradictory to the pleading of its plight), and despite good performances all around, the film seems to work better in action than word.

While enjoyable, it occurred to me at the end of the film (when all the characters are singing and dancing around the interior of the traditional Japanese home) that Branagh could just have easily chosen at random the locale and motif, as he fails to connect the crisscross of Japanese feudal culture and British empirical meandering to Shakespeare's tale of love being stalled until philosophies are firmly cemented. The scenes in the forest are the gems, mostly because the setting is homogeneous, leaving one to put out of one's mind Branagh's aim in placing This Play in This Place. I realize his goal is to freshen up these works that have been ground into audiences far and wide for more time than anyone can remember, but he still really ought to take a stab at drawing a fair parallel between the visual and textual worlds. That said, I was hanging on pretty much every word. Lacking massive onscreen deaths, it fits the mold of a comedy - and it's pleasing and delightful to watch.

Since the turn of the millenium, Cronenberg has abandoned his penchant for bizarre, often supernatural horror tales (Crash included) in favor of overpowering lead performers (Fiennes in Spider, Mortensen in both A History of Violence and this film). Eastern Promises is rock solid and, like most Cronenberg films, does a whopper on you in your mind after you finish viewing it. Otherwise, it leans closer, and much earlier on the picture, to a traditional genre film than A History of Violence did (with the opening of that film unfolding some sort of strange, blank stare at the joyously mundane celebrations of the quintessential American small town a la David Lynch). Mortensen in impentrable hardass mode, sporting a flawless Russian accent, is very much The Big Show at hand. We never stop examining his demeanor - which is an exceedingly high compliment.  There are no "half-realized thematic observations" on violence and barely any social commentary in Eastern Promises (it touches on the sex trade). It's A History of Violence stripped down to whatever's below marrow in a bone.

My wrists still ache from the number of times I threw my hands up: Complete and utter craziness. Utterly forgettable - except for the robot who starts fucking ppeople in the middle of a scene for no reason.

Love the way sympathies are constantly shifting, being subverted or placed in unusual places; Otherwise, it's Medal of Honor the movie. Everything seems to happen on top of itself, but it moves with an energy and a melodrama that's infectious. It's also clumsy and overstated. (Yes, I'm looking in your direction, scene where actual vat of shit gets dumped on protag's head). Carice van Houten - I've decided her last name is to be pronounced Hot-en - works because she's charming, but not nearly as charming as Sebastian Koch, a soft-hearted Nazi the film actually seems to mourn. He's also quite good, playing a very different character here than in The Lives of Others which, incidentally, this film seems to be a terrific companion piece to. Both have the notion that entertainment value trumps political or historical insight and both play to their strengths. Neither of them really move us, though.

It had to be two and a half hours because they needed more time to fill all the product placement requirements. It's like a movie with fucking commercials. Special effects - like the narrative - are mostly muddied, it's a lot of smoke aand metal you can't quite make out in a story where the government recruits a charming kid (LeBouf, who has such promise - being utterly wasted here) to help them back The Autobots as The Decepticons attack the earth. Both are hell-bent on recovering an extremely large glowing cube that also turns into an extremely convenient-sized glowing cube. There are concepts that work best in cartoons - and Transformers (Spielberg blessing or no Spielberg blessing) is one of them. Live-action only underscores the silliness that exists in the space between the viewer and his robot-worship.

[ Yes. I brought the toys down from the attic. Sue me. ]

The film keeps trying to get us to believe that this is a HUGE cloak of wool he's somehow pulled over everyone's eyes, but actually, it's not all that unbelievable:  Hughes lore was always easy for the masses to get caught up in and Irving also knew that Hughes' eccentricity would make it easy to bend lies to his favor. In addition, the goodwill of people is routinely mixed with a sense of skepticism that they suppress in the name of money. The terrifically charming Clifford Irving character escapes the bear traps, routinely, rotely and far too easily, which allows the film to veer into biopic territory, sensationilizing and fictionalizing things, essentially making up things about a faker who faked stuff (which has an interesting quality). Hallstrom, however, seems to want to include every detail so badly that he makes the film move at light speed, never stopping to revel or soak. Never stopping to give us a sense of how long it took things to happen or whether anybody enjoyed it, always right there loading up the next con. A better choice might have been Richard Kwietniowski, whose similar Owning Mahoney, lingered longer and more convincingly over a financial Sword of Damacles.  Incidentally, Gere looks a great deal like Irving, so the casting seems sort of predetermined. (At any rate, he's just fine in the film.) By the end, I simply yearned to watch 'F' is for Fake again.

It seems to take place somewhere between the casual routine of 80s wealthmongering and 90s Grisham (sic) potboilers, an unnamed time period which, in and of itself, is a curiosity tickler. The film proceeds rut-set in its worldview of lawyers keeping dirty work clean than nearly any I've seen. Milking big corporations while doing the horrible work of finding legal loopholes to keep them afloat is not only commonplace, bit its got its own department head: The fixer. Clooney's Clayton exists between the lines of surface law work; His job description is summed up in three words: Put out fires. (A terrific montage finds him doing just that; His tool is the phone, his workshop a sprawling corner office and a menacing company Beamer). Alas, Michael Clayton's tale is as rote as they come - mirroring Erin Brockovich and The Firm somewhat openly - but the sheer bravado of its execution iss what's important. Par example: It opens with an immeasurable promise on a crazed non sequitur of a rant by Tom Wilkinson over a mash-up of locale and texture, which bleeds into Clooney playing cards intercut with Sydney Pollack asserting his lofty stature in one phone call with the press. Clooney gives a burnt out speech (with definite tones of Mametspeak) to Denis O'Hare's uber-panicked hit and run perpetrator, speeds off in frustration, then mysteriously leaves his soon-to-explode car to more closely examine three horses. (I thought: Holy shit.) It starts getting to the point after this - with the time shifting left to sift somewhere without a solid continuity - and gradually stays just south of riveting, introducing a poisonous emotional center it simply cannot be bothered with (i.e. - all of Clooney's familial ties). Though the scenes with his son are flat-out embarrassing, the understated Clooney performance continues unevaded; He's a terrific sad sack carrying his moral baggage with him in one hand and his dusty, semi-forgotten conscience in the other. I probably took to its milieu far more enthusiastically than the film intended: Michael Clayton is hardly about atmosphere and barely about culture. It - like the profession it showcases - is about the payoff and the payoff is all about itself. Which seems somehow both fitting and annoying at the same time.

Leconte can give even the most ham fisted of premises a classy, almost-repaired lining, camouflaging the bluntest of social commentaries and the most outrageous of contrivances. There's a screwball lightness to the first third of this tale of a myopic antiques dealer (Daniel Auteuil) forced to make a friend after a drubbing by his bourgeoisie entourage, who correctly accuse him of being friendless. Tedious plot arrangements follow. He wagers an expensive vase with his partner. He happens to have a daughter with asthma. The friend he makes is the most unlikely of acquaintances (a trivia obsessed cabbie with A PAST). And so on. And so forth. Auteuil is stiff, but not quietly wretched (as in Cache). He's a bore, but not really a conniving bore. Some protagonist. He seems silly running around in this maze of modern ambiguity: Is it him, or is it the professional world that has forced him to trust only those his business dictates? The film jams its touchy feely puzzle pieces into their places without much care, with an offputtingly forced interlocking. Then it gets all sappy-go-emotive, putting us less in mind of a wildly exaggerated wit (as with its first act farcical leanings) than a film as (gulp) straight-lipped and genuine as it appears.

Simply being a solid Epic Western is significant (they've gone extinct, you see), but this is the sort of film you know is special without adding things up. James' charms may actually be taller than most of the tales told about him and then - wait, who was this Ford fellow? Both Pitt and Affleck breath their opposing ambitions, the former squirmingly ominous and the latter deviant, childlike and finally, bitter with self-pity. (The epilogue to the events depicted in the film's title has the dirty snow-splattered expansion look of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, a jarringly far cry from the rest of the film's sharp-yet-dreamy visage.) It sounds terrific, too, culling dialogue both hyper-colloquial and snappy, dolled out by an impeccable supporting cast over a haunting Nick Cave and Warren Ellis score. Langourously yet clearly, TAoJJbtCRF also employs a time disconnect that unfolds with subtle staging (longer facial hair, status of wounds) and lingering narration. The voice over is one of the best uses of such in recent memory, allowing a natural outpour - urgency of exposition be damned. The straightforward Hugh Ross-voiced ruminations on everything and nothing seem down-to-earth and straight, but the mass of the film seems to be rooted in some sort of miraculously congruent highlight reel which - while not of the sensationalist variety - scarcely uncoils with a confessional texture. Is it a definitive revisionist statement on the oft-tackled subject or another longspun yarn? Largely unimportant. It whiles in a magical place, kowtailing to our every squint of the softest cinemascope beauty; One breathtaking set-up after another. Miraculously, its scope never overtakes its intimacy, masterfully carving out cold, inside spaces and character gradation with the same precision taken to blur out one side of the screen, mimicking a scape of snowy mountains seen through imperfect frontier glass. Although it couldn't be a more different vision than Dominik's outstanding Chopper, this film also seems preoccupied with a bewildered fascination at romanticized villainy.

Repeating himself like a mantra in context-less snatches of heartache and insurance company betrayal, Moore is milking it big time, jettisoning any shred of his audacious entertainment in favor of ill-conceived trips to Cuba and invasive, downright bad filmmaking. Oh, no - wait - did I say Filmmaking? I meant Afternoon Talk Show Theatrics. It's official: He's lazing about, gravy-training his place as the rebel who gets everyone talking, but has nothing to say himself. I walked away from Sicko thinking that America itself is contorting in the throes of a greedy downward spiral - a descent each of the profiled Countries of Supreme and Righteous Benefit probably had many hundreds of years ago. He never once acknowledges how old France or Great Britain are, nor the greased track America's role as Supreme Leader of the Free World is. No drawbacks to socialized medicine are given the nod (Tony Wilson's death anyone?), nor are there suggestions for how to replace our current healthcare system or what a good or likely plan might look like. Plenty of shots of Hilary as they discuss her plan's rise and fall, though. As if Moore could influence an election (see: Farenheit 9/11 or, rather, don't.) This is embarrassing.

Von Trier bookends the film, as pretentiously as the actor in the center ring of it all, by telling us that we are not to read the ensuing "comedy" in the typically intellectual terms we'd nearly trip over ourselves to apply to one of his films. No, in point of fact, he's arrested his own control by using Automavision, a process that allows a computer to select camera angles and movements at random and apply them (the idea being, much like the concept of his Dogme films, to free art from its oversimulated shackles). The result is an aggressively obtuse visage, almost purposefully artsy - without being purposeful, of course - and nothing if not a rider, tacked on to the butt of the joke. Ostensibly making his presence known to show that he's not only reserved the right to laugh at highbrow expectation (by making the surface, without question, "the boss of it all"), but that he, himself - Von Trier -  is still The Boss of It All simply because (just as the actor in the film) he has chosen to play that role. The "acting" is almost stilted with improvisation (some of it out-and-out hilarious), but it never seems to escape being mere fascination (or, at least curiousity). Of course, in the end, the whole thing plays to a sliver of open eyes: It's a stunt designed to take the piss out of both convention and its defiance, leaving only those of us who get a kick out of his constant play to up the ante and refresh the medium. A point, to be sure, that he'd revel in taking offense to.

Unfortunately, the movie's spirit would have been better matched to its Jester of the Airwaves' main character, Petey Green. As it stands, this perfectly servicable, respectably solid exercise in safe mode behaves like the other protagonist: The innovative marketing man struggling to cope with the fact that his ambition has muted his blackness. (Or has it?) (Groan.)

A superb and disturbing chronicle of All Things Iraqi Freedom, which I found particularly valuable, given that I formed an opinion at the beginning of the war and generally tuned out of its day-to-day events. No End In Sight isn't just a fine film because it fills you in, it also examines the war as if it were something winnable and deconstructs the seemingly nonstop flood of failures by elected officials to gain control. It's a sober affair in that way.

Poised with a spareness that harmonizes with the spryness of its storytelling, Joel and Ethan Coen's existential nightmare seems epic and small all at the same time. Carrying far less weight about it, its world dolling out information only as it must, the hyper-colloquial fetish that seems so rich and funny in most of their canon hides on the borders, allowing a tight yet formless tale - mano-a-mano across Texas over $2M with the aging sheriff on their trail - of no particular spice, to play out like a John Ford western as directed by Terence Malick. There's no wanting for great, towering performances - all three principles are exceptional - but it is, without a doubt, the oxygen-tank brandishing bagman - Anton Chigurh - who seems to linger in meemory: He is at once as terrifying a presence as the seen-from-afar Michael Myers in Halloween and as calmly, reasonably menacing as a quieter version of Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter. I'm drooling, on a regular basis, to go out and experience it again. So there's that on top of that.

If nothing else, prepare to be blindsided by a film whose premise concerns a black, backwoods Tennessee farmer who chains up a White Trash nympho in his home in order to tame her wildfire ways. How could this premise equal this genuinely moving portrait of confronted demons and self preservation? Ever eschewing cynicism for the throes of real, actual hope, Craig Brewer downplays otherwise wrenching or cruel realities,  preoccupying himself with feeling the pulse and rhythm of the poor and religious of the American South. Something about his voice seems to filter the grit from these worlds of depravity, unspooling big, terrifically likable antiheros. Lazarus, the drunken, greatly torn Bluesman at the center of Black Snake Moan, is a far meatier character than Jackson has allowed himself in the last ten years and its his performance - his best since Jackie Brown - thatt gives the film such a fiercely watchable edge.

Put aside Travolta's Edna Turnblad (who is tangibly distracting in every scene in which (s)he appears). Put aside its John Waters root. Even in the hands of Adam Shankman (of Bringing Down the House and The Pacifier fame), Hairspray's flirtation with camp in the presence of unabashed Broadlywooding should work, but for some reason it comes off as glossy and overwrought: A too-rounded, oversaturated work of absurdist nostalgia. Most of it seems to be an opportunity for merryment - making it a happy and unoffending affair - but does it really need to exist?
 

Never clearly supporting, decrying, sympathizing or finger wagging, Asger Leth and Milos Loncarevic are clearly caught up in the 2004 saga of brother Billy and 2Pac, inexperienced gang leaders at the head of The Chimeras, who were armed and payrolled by former President Aristide to suppress the growing dissent on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Highly influenced by American rap culture, the brothers reign supreme in a shanty ghetto called Cité Soleil (or, as the UN calls it, "the most dangerous place on earth"). Fashioned more like a documentary posing as a docudrama (they don't just bait the camera, it's to the point where they're appropriating moviespeak), Ghosts of Cité Soleil has threads that make it seem like a portrait of the faceless baddies in films like Black Hawk Down (here's how the screaming cot-addicts chucking ginormous bags of rice out of the back of a truck feel) or a non-fiction reversal of City of God. But it works more passionately as a sort of beaming message, spotlighting the existence of places like this in the very world we inhabit. And it worms its way into your head with nonstop questions: Should these men be pitied? Are they abominable? Are they a product of a system that's abominable? Is there a peacekeeping solution? How did such unprecedented access not result in the death of the filmmakers? Why in God's name would Lele the French Aid Worker get sexually mixed up with either of these unpredictable, insanely dangerous men in a country Michael Worobey called "the stepping stone [HIV] took when it left central Africa and started its sweep around the world"?

Fellow perpetrators of The Grand Theory of The Auteur take note - Halloween is the one where it becomes gospel that Rob Zombie has a clearly defined, markedly recognizable style of filmmaking. Whether its reveling in tense, confrontational sequences of verbal abuse or miring in subject matter that's uncommonly disturbing, Zombie seems to be stylizing violence to play like professional sleaze. Halloween would seem to be an interesting experiment - and in some ways it is - but the picture's spinoff tales (the pre-Michael Myers saga and a reimagining of the events near the end of his rampage) are padded with craggy, improvised muck. They would easily fit into his canon if not attached to the film's second act (the most intriguing part of the film), a section that feels like a gushingly awestruck homage. Whether it's casting the "muse" of Zombie's trashy world, Sid Haig, in the minor but arcanely inclusive role as Chester Chesterfield the Gravedigger or Malcolm McDowell's spot-on parody of Donald Pleasance's out-of-sync, hyper-alarmed Dr. Samuel Loomis or simply that he wanted to reflect his own love for the film, this narrative bridge is easily the best work Zombie has done to date.

The first 11 minutes are fawesome - possibly the most exhilirating thing I've seen all year. That crap where the mom returns and the dad seeks her out and gets infected and then goes after his kids - who, as protagonists, could put coffee too sleep - sours a film that actually seems worthy of its topical tones of lockdown and enemy identity.

Time shift is neato and I really enjoy the family dynamic, but its about a third as funny as the show was, works awkwardly in "feature" length and seems guilty of cramming everything but the kitchen sink into a film that really ought to be straight up whimsy. (Although, there was that episode where Fry gets his dog back from the past that's positively heartbreaking...)

A soft mush of a kaleidoscope that comes at us from all sides; The best kind of sensory overload; An experience more than a film. It would be cliche, at this point, to mention that the text encapsulates Dylan's many-faced persona, but it does, and with such imagination and energy. If only Haynes had the benefit of such confidence/clarity of thought when he made Velvet Goldmine.

A period picture that finds so many great, exhilirating moments: The first gush of oil, the savage finale, Daniel realizing he's been betrayed by his "brother", Daniel's baptism, the first 15 minutes, etc. Day-Lewis is, yet again, the eerily compelling villian at the center of a variety of turf wars; He embodies the sly grizzle of charming wrongheadedness, a man of strong codes (none of them including honesty) and a man tortured by a load bearing baggage called "family". Its monumental in its scope, because it probes so unselfconsciously, with no call to soften or mythologize Little Boston's Frontier fumes. It takes place in that great, bruised world of old fashioned manners and naive rubes - but it also takes place in a blossoming Corporate America where conglomeretes own the product and the means to move it, merely schnookering from a more removed, business-as-usual angle. "I look at people and I see nothing worth liking" is not merely Daniel's drunken campfire "confessional", but the attitude of the film, which allegorizes (by close) the most blunt - however conveniently simplified - revelations on Religion's inseparable rellationship/eternal struggle with Capitalism. Anderson's confidence is so key to this coming off; He tells the story without an ounce of hurry, leaving it to sprawl appropriately and satisfyingly.

For my money, it fails to duplicate the magical symbiosis of Tropical Malady's 2 acts, a trick it's only faulted for because, well, it's execution is so similar; It just seems more straightforward, though, as if conceived prior to that film (its more natural segue, methinks). Which is not to say its experience is unwarranted. I watched Blissfully Yours last week and enjoyed Syndromes and a Century for the same reason, if only to maintain The Haze, my established coin for the post-film stupor Weersethakul's films lull you into.

Boasts an edgy, effectively ambiguous sense of dread and holds it like a pro; Even its eventual docking at precisely the port you expect (i.e. - title character's act of murder) is forgivable. Rockwell prances around in a tired state of The Eternal Good Sport (until he doesn't, that is) and Farmiga seems to be wearing the stale perfume of Bitch (at first, we're unsure whether she's the central character - a nifty trick in a film titled thusly). RRatliff gets another sharp swipe in, too. He paints the snarling Evangelical Christian grandparents in broader strokes than he presented in Hell House, giving the film its identity undertone (that, and the obsession with Egyptian art, which also underlines themes of mythology). It subverts and makes unique material rife with plot chasms, cliches and great chunks of The Shining and Rosemary's Baby.

Not sure how much I care for the whip-bang shakycam here; The action sequences are beautifully orchestrated, but ineffectively executed. There's great imagery, but too much speedcutting for the eye to decode everything while we're watching it (as if to hide inconsistencies with confusion). The shifting loyalties of the characters (Julia Stiles, Joan Allen and Edgar Ramirez all turn coat) are what's most terrific about it, showing that it has a depth beyond its running time, but this poses another problem altogether, as the latent sympathy we're clearly meant to project on Bourne never feels as strong as it could be (unless you watch the other two films right before seeing this). The film relies on inane flashbackery to fill in the casual viewer, with Bourne seeming so remote as to be a supporting character in a film about the corrupt U.S. Government. Even its America-is-the-Evil-Empire bent, however, couldn't sway me: Ultimatum is on par with Identity in being an overdramatized alternative for a generation who were waiting out Pierce Brosnan's imminent exit as a nigh obsolete 007.

There's a tinge of goof to To's openly hyperdramatized but smooth-as-silk stylizations, themselves so boldly and carefully crafted as to inspire glinting eyes and slowly gaping jaws. It plays like a Stephen Chow movie that's attempting a parody of the modern Hong Kong gangster flick. Candy, plain and simple.