It's hard for me not to give Broomfield even more credit this time around. He's abandoned any discretion, making no bones about his methodology (that is, insert hilarious tabloid self into every shot, expose big, tough celebrities as frauds and liars, draw ultra-thin conclusions in long shots of car driving from place to place). Darn it, though, if this one's honesty is a little more forthright than in 'Kurt and Courtney' (Broomfield isn't investigating a rumor, it seems, he's more or less validating a pretty well-known fact). What's missing here is the larger-than-life characters from 'Heidi Fleiss' or 'Aileen Wuornos'. Sure, the interview with Suge Knight highlights the thug CEO's emptiness masked by a sage-like speaking quality and all - but is it really a good idea to put your slightly revelatory interview side-by-side with a far more exciting one where Suge lies about having a bullet stuck in his head, answering questions with: "Absolutely. (long pause) Not."? I laughed more, here, than in any of his previous movies. (That, I think, is the biggest tell).

It's all very stylish and remarkable (or, it bears the distinct contribution of Truffaut), but Oskar Werner is never more than just below serviceable as Montag. Hard not to enjoy it on its most base level (go books!), but it's far too easy to swallow for an oppressed-society flick.

I tire of harmless used as an apology for sufficiency I can't quite bring myself to embrace. So stridently pro-professor is The Emperor's Club - it practically plays like Department of Education-produced coming-of-age porn. Kline is an easy enough swallow, of course, as he was born to play a teacher (even one whose age is defined by the extremity of shading in his gray hair and the thickness of his old man makeup). He presides over proceedings, most of which are almost smothering: Rich boy Bell's (Emile Hirsch) senator father won't allow Kline to mold his son, so Kline repeatedly bends over backwards - between romantic interludes with Embeth Davidtz that feel flat-out disconnected - to give the boy opportunity after opportunity, only to find that...(anyway). The themes of honor and boyhood mischief (in no particular order) of the first half almost guarantee a universality which will appeal to most audiences - even if (right down to its marketing campaign) apes, without shame, the beloved American classic Dead Poets Society (Tim Bentley grits his teeth in disapproval). 'Oh Captain, My Captain', Keats and the DPS are substituted with the oft-read declaration of Shutuk Nahunte (king, sovereign of Elam, destroyer of Zipar; Its on the most notable plaque in the back of a room since the one reading the top pilot's names in Top Gun), Aristotle and a (trivia-based) Mr. Julius Caeser contest. Essentially, it's Weir's film reworked as a no-pressure affair, exclusively aimed at recreating the assured pleasure of a forever poetic Great Teacher nurturing a tight-knit group of troubled and semi-troubled boarding school students. The second half of the film finds the students gathering together to honor their aging teacher and, though it plays a bit like a lame version of the extended, drunken dinner sequence in Kurosawa's Madadayo, the focus on progressive lessons left over from the abrupt conclusion of the first half, are achieved through unnecessarily blunt means (i.e. - too much immediate gratification in the name of greater understanding of said lesson which, in itself, doesn't amount to much more than "once a spoiled two face, always a spoiled two face"). At the very least, the heavy-handed finale gives us the opportunity to relish two great, terrifically wasted performances from Mssrs. Steven Culp and Patrick Dempsey.

This thing is way dated and can't seem to qualify as a guilty pleasure, mostly because the deck is too obviously stacked in the male Kramer's (a jittery, completely brilliant Dustin Hoffman) favor. The material is meant to be challenging, but the movie sure isn't - it's the all-out custody battle as a cake-walk. I'm pretty sure it's a generation gap tilting my tone, though.

Endlessly dopey dialogue and an eleventh hour romance barely make a dent in the fun level throughout most of the film. Not a hint of staleness to be found, what makes this overlong exercise in technology warnings so cool is how brazen and self-assured it is w/r/t the specificity of its components (the leather, the sunglasses, the kung fu, the green matrix, the bullet time, the philosophical mumbo jumbo). I still think Keanu's peak as an action hero begins and ends with Speed.

My only comments regarding Nicholson's performance, after my first viewing, consisted of "flat-out terrific", but the film is about as close to being a diverting slice-of-life built around a towering, absolutely mind-blowing performance as Gangs of New York was. There was a warmth and an easy apprehension of all the players - particularly the supporting ones - this time around; Payne seems to know how to tease the nuance out of just about anything that stands still (and some things that don't). The prime objective is never stated (are we here to laugh or to cry - and why such extremes [sophisticated and broad, goopy and genuine, respectively] of both, might I ask?); Though I suspect it would have been easier to pinpoint if we weren't preoccupied with how close Warren Schmidt resembles the painfully grumpy elderly relative we all suffer through. So, there'll be laughing and maybe some crying, but mostly there'll be shuddering.

A state of balance between opposing forces or actions, you say? 1984 on crack, you say? The backgrounds look like they fell out of some warped, color-as-metaphor The Few, The Proud, The Marines commercial, you say? Yes, it's all true! The film does indeed seem to leave smooth-flowing storytelling and character developement in the wild wake of its brazen display of an alarmingly nowhere-near-sub text, which seems to be saying a couple of things about feelings and war with, you know, skipped-frame-speed, two-gun action scenes intercut with the shameless stylings of Christian Bale's glistening pectorals (in slow motion, in case you're a big blinker). It's clumbsy misuse of a preposterously implausible plot point - namely, people who can't feel (because they're fed daily doses of sedative) - doesn't even deserve to be mocked using examples of more skillfull abstraction of book burning in Farenheit 451, mind control in 1984, or, if you really want to get sticky, delusional existence in The Matrix's "real world". Aside from flat actors (please keep this straight, people - they can't feel), and the horribly not-the-good-kind-of-fake-looking computer-generated art direction and set design (from the people who brought you The Academy Award for same) - Equilibrium seems to assert itsellf as disposable, lame-o science fiction from almost minute one in how utterly blind to how silly it looks when its taking all of this so darn seriously.

Why do lesbian love stories scratch the satisfying emotional Relevatory Transcendence (or whatever you call it) itch so much better than the ones that feature heterosexuals? In fact, this film features both teams playing on both sides - and it doesn't matter much which team is which, as the real treasure is the accurate ear Moodyson's script has for the romanticized, edgy blisters of the teenage experience. There's a snazzy wink in how the chocolate milk-dousing, love-hate relationship between siblings parallels the rigid, often blunt highs and lows of an outcasted lesbian who has only one friend: a pity case, referred to as a "palsied cripple" by the bi-curious sweet sixteen . ("The most boring thing I've done lately is watching wheelchair basketball.") This description belies a certain false viewpoint of things as possible plot candidates for an empathy-drained Todd Solondz film. Nothing could be less true. Moodyson, whose first film is even more snappy and soaked-in than his follow-up, 2001's Together (I can't wait to see Lilya 4-Ever, by the way), continually invests a bonafied interest with the added bonus of a trustworthy voice (i.e. - it's going somewhere). The young acresses (and actors) who participate in the cliquey antics of adolescence are nothing short of brilliant, instantly trumping any American teenage saga which might still be languishing in my recent memory. (So, then - good luck How to Deal.)

Amin's past: A trained general who overthrew the former dictator of Uganda. Amin's future: After attacking Tanzania - and losing - flees to Syria, before being exiled to Saudi Arabia. Amin's present (in 1974): Waxing poetic about the destruction of Israel (and organizing mock war games invasion of same), spewing utter contradiction in a cabinet meeting (where he first characterizes women as "weak" and then suggests that they run his largest international hotels), and cheating - quite barbarically - at a race in a swimming pool, before excclaiming, deadpan, "I won" (though we doubt anyone interested in not being dragged from their home in the middle of the night and murdered would try to beat him). But what of Barbet Schroeder, the filmmaker whose brazen conquest of objectivity brings us the often ludicrously transparent ramblings of the infamous dictator who speaks horribly broken English, as if to appeal to the Western world? The French director's vision is so spare, so carefully peppered with glances (and the ever rare commentary) on General Amin's eccentricity, one can almost picture Schroeder and his crew stifling a giggle as the dictator boasts about his clairvoyance (he claimed to know the exact date of his death) - or perhaps debating in hushed whispers whether or not to intervene when a doctor challenges (to the dictator's face) the political policies. Candid and deeply revealing, Schroeder's film is especially distinctive as the rare, successful portraiture of the charismatic personality type of an otherwise off limits eminence ("If only it were the first in a series", I thought). A strange balance of fear and fraud weaves into the atmosphere as Amin, we come to realize, can only be taken at face value if we're also willing to take him with a grain of salt (as we must, especially when he tells us that he's structured his (sic) government with the best parts of both capitalism and socialism). What Shroeder has created is the ultimate dichotomy of viewpoints: Are we viewing the capable whims of an evil dictator, or the collapsible whimsy of an ambitious general-turned-president-for-life?

A reminder that once upon a time the youth of cinema (or reality) weren't dangerous merely to serve their own self reflexive trend. One of the great, quintessential Dennis Hopper wack-o's, surely; But also the best performance Crispin Glover has ever given. If you don't blink, you'll probably get a sense of the pre-Grunge atmosphere lurking beneath the Are-we-metal-or-are-we-hippies? jumble.

That its all but advertised with the previously pooh-pooh'ed tinkering of real life drama (A Beautiful Mind) makes it all the more ironic that Antwone Fisher is as guiltily pleasureable as that film - but not as widely seen. (Probably because it's the kind of movie you expect to catch volleyed around the word "honor" - in every other scene.) That it's exactly the opposite of that type of film - characters are driven, they don't (over)) drive themselves(, Cuba) - is what matters as you watch it, because the storyline pretty much leads you to believe that it will be overrun with mechanical cliches at their most heinous. And yes, there are some staggeringly underdeveloped plot lines (Washington and wife's "secret" reason for quarreling, for instance) - and thorny fudging (anger catalysts for the title character might as well have blinking lights on their heads when they enter the scene - but it can barely slow down the feel-good cinematic locomotive, which comes in one size of pro-Navy, we-shall-overcome proportions. Derek Luke is particularly strong, by which I mean the brother has some big muscles. (Acting muscles, that is.)

2002's most grievously underrated, under appreciated and under seen film. (Previous winners include Ali, The Virgin Suicides, Limbo, The Thin Red Line, The Game and Jackie Brown). Leave it to Spike Lee - who always delights in confronting unpopular social topics - to draw such a haunting parallel betweenn the anxiety of a post-9/11 New York City and the embracing of unavoidable change which stings just a bit while you kiss the real world goodbye on your way to the cooler.

The emotional punch that originally had me assigning it an 'A' may linger, but Moore's film is never more than a sewn together "Answer a question with a question"  stunt (of PT Barnum proportions), so in its own debt that it's often willing to stoop down low in order to manipulate its audience. Moore's most vividly realized and well publicized film deserves all merit due, though, simply because it was made to be worth the gumption of its convictions which put under the cross hairs several issues I, quite honestly, feel rather strongly about (To summarize: Agree - good; Disagree - bad). Moore may be selff-important and, worse (for a documentation) - self indulgent - but in the end, he lets everybody know that 1) people kill people; 2) evening news + commercials = Orwellian control; and 3) marching into corporate headquarters - even after you've done it enough times to fill a two hour running time (see: The Big One) - can still pay off. Certainly a hoot to wwatch. Obviously full of valuable information. Lopsided as a man with one leg.