Wyler's too conventional to make a ripple and besides, I don't particularly like movies about characters who refuse their own advice - repeatedly. Walter Huston is a terrifically restrained loose cannon, but its still not a great idea to make a film where we root for him against his own wife (knowing, still, that the wife is merely naive).

So successful at whisking us away to middle earth, so undeniably ripe and sweet with fantasy, and so deftly paced. It's no wonder I'm shaking like mad in anticipation of volume three.

A set of full figured characters make the film, as a character study, satisfying and powerful. It's borderline abstract parallels about New Yorkers' world views - pre and post September 11th - is the kind of artistic reaction that iis not only pitch perfect, but whose subtlety is but unheard of. Lee's colorful world, powered by Edward Norton's finest performance to date, is a sly, moral statement about goodness and responsibility; I blubbered full force through the last fifteen minutes. I expect it will receive its due accolades in the coming years.

Often described as possessing that ever rare childlike passion for life, Truffaut believed that as he would only live as long as human beings tend to, he would have to pick and choose the films he'd want to make with the utmost scrutiny. Only the most important stories could be told in our short
lifetime. In fact, Day For Night, one of the most purely entertaining films I've ever seen, seems to radiate with the presence of Truffaut's personality. It's alternately a highly personal reaction to his life's work and a universal dissection of an international film shoot, the hotbed (pun intended) world of troubleshooting celebrated as a unique family atmosphere. Truffaut - playing the director of the film - plays himself (essentially), the fun looving charmer whose every whim and energy breathes with the love of cinema. Day For Night - the title which refers to a filter used to give day a nighttime look - is a celebration, one that is constantly jubilant, often surprising, extremely humorous, and full of the humanity of life that seemed to strike Truffaut with more lucidity than most film directors dare to dream of.

[Good god, forgive this review. I'm totally off my game today. Which obviously hasn't deflated by ego.]

How to hate a movie about a concert pianist (played by the ever moody David Thewlis) who falls so deeply in love with his African maid (the radiant Thandie Newton), that he sells all his possessions to have her political prisoner husband released from jail and reunited with her? The rapturous cinematography, which is playful, composed, and often both - simultaneously - doesn't seem to have much to do with telling the story, rather, it feels like a showcase of its own marvelousness. With nice music over it, all you can do is snarl with fear at the occasional outbreak of story and dialogue that plugs up those precious holes in your face that you were using to enjoy the painterly camera angles and the hip world soundtrack. The principles seem to create these characters who almost too singular and focused, as if Bertolucci's one wish was that they seem credible while alone, but horribly unbelievable when they try to connect. Luckily, most of the movie is merely wily camera moves and terrific acting. Who is this Bertolucci fellow kidding?

It's bathed in the French New Wave. Unfortunately, there exists none of the humanity (or cleverness posing as humanity, as in the case of Godard) that lurked in the masters of the period's work. The Wave as seen here was long over, making this a terrifically authentic knickknack of vintage stock, but I had to completely agree with the main character - an aspiring filmmaker, at that - who contemplates chucking his collection of long montages masquerading as his personality. Extra points for the Dead Kennedy's "Holiday in Cambodia" inserted (as background noise of rebellion) carefully into a back and forth between an angry girlfriend and her trivial beau.

Probably a masterpiece in comparative terms, seeing as the novel of exciting mostly due to its prose and the film isn't a total disaster. Gilliam's visual imagination is terrific, posing degradation and beauty as one terrific chaotic notion that makes drugs a worthwhile experience to visualize the breakdown of society - and, indeed, what can be learned from it. I sound like I'm on drugs. The backbone of the film is the cartoonishly super stoned duo of Raoul Duke and his attorney, played with the fevered tick of drug mania by Johnny Depp and Benecio Del Toro (respectively). They pretend to be stoned sometimes, but most times they're too stoned to pretend. Too often, Thompson's brilliant observation gets lost in the experiment (this is the third time I've seen it, and the first time I recognized most of the flashbacks), and a numb feeling of repetition sets it. If there weren't such a fuckload to look at, you might end up saying "holy tedium"1 as long stretches of insane excess slip by. As is, Gilliam energizes the film with music, packs it with cameos and animates it with visual effects, pretty much ensuring that you won't get bored with the confines of the trip.

1 - courtesy of E. Matt Prigge, used to describe a local feature unfortunately titled RT Herwig's The Good Thief.

Somehow I feel the need to blame all the critics who stood behind this (forgive the pun, please) train wreck (Particularly Harlan Jacobsen). A technologically challenged version of Speed, if you can imagine that heart racing film focused more on the psychology of the characters than the endlessly entertaining parameters of their predicament, (in this case, a train unable to stop and gaining speed as it steams across the Alaskan wilderness). Seemingly incapable of any sort of cleverness, there's plenty of lazy set pieces to fill in the gaps - such as the climactic moment when Jon Voight won't let prattling, grating Eric Roberts back inside the train until he's fixed something or other. Annoyingly loud and rambunctious, Voight and Roberts overshoot their respective caricatures of mean, rambling convicts, the former at war with the world and the latter a mouthy prima donna. And somehow, at the end, when Voight and the evil warden are finally face to face, for some reason, a quote from Richard III is inserted. Imagine Shakespeare used as a segue into the end credits on Speed. (This is where it would be if I weren't so darn lazy).

The perfect antidote of purely satisfying storytelling for everyone hell-bent on holding the admittedly super cool, but fatally episodic Spirited Away out to be the master's masterwork (hey, for sure that word pairing is a major cheat). Couldn't even begin to rattle off the intricate doozy of a plotline, but rest assured that it's a healthy mix of Miyazaki's usual themes of nature, child-like wonder and purity of heart. What you may find most striking about Castle in the Sky, though, is just how beautifully Miyazaki seems to find the necessity in being an animator; To be sure, his mise en scene is nearly identical to that of live action cinema, but the grandeur and scope of his imagination can only be properly represented with hand drawn cells. He makes an the miracle of an ambitious pay-off look so easy.

Quite simply put, it's the best prison break movie I've ever seen, present company including - without express regret - The Shawshank Redemption, The Great Escape, and even A Man Escaped, a film that reportedly (and obviously) influenced this one a great deal. Satisfaction via extensive methodics recalls - and I'm damning all consequences here - Steven Spielberg; Humanity's strange reach between these inmates - each of them a significantly larger personality than ninety percent of modern film characters - and snap-crackle-pop pacing must be seen to be believed (and I dare you - as we're talking now about a French language film that's one hundred thirty-one minutes long). The camerawork is, for the most part, thankfully unobtrusive, a strange counterpart to a film never, for an instant, feels remotely stale.

Though it opens with a terrific sequence set to Tom Waits' 'Jockey Full of Bourbon' and closes with the equally brilliant tune 'Tango Till You're Sore', the music hardly complements the tone of Jarmusch's categorically uneven goober of a film. Slicing his three acts cleanly, and separating them not only by setting but by progressive quality, the director dilutes the casual formula that made 'Stranger than Paradise' such an entertaining slice-of-lethargy, and seems to be making a stab at (gulp) conventional staging. The first act finds the principles (John Lurie, Tom Waits) leading noble-challenged lives and subsequently - between bouts of improvisational dawdling - being picked up as scapegoats; All of it is taken far too seriously to swallow, crippled by awkward acting (the late Billie Neal in particular) and flat characterization. The second act, wherein Waits and Lurie find themselves confined to the New Orleans Parish Prison - with Roberto Benigni in tow - is a jolt, mostly because it's marvelous. So sharp is this middle section at illustrating the progression of Waits' and Lurie's relationship (as well as then-unknown/now-thoroughly-tiresome Benigni, whose trademark of hilarious broken English actually sounds as if engineered to be funny), you'll actively wonder how Jarmusch managed to fumble the film in the third act as the characters embark on a three day jaunt in the wilds of Louisiana's bayou country. By the time the painstakingly too-perfect final frame is set up, our interest in these characters has already been permanently disabled by confused moments of relapse into earlier clunkiness. What little that is funny can almost exclusively be attributed to Benigni (unless you count the film's unintentionally ironic tagline: "It's not where you start - it's where you start again").