Savage love: Sloppy siblings Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney must deal with their aging father in

Capsules

The Savages
Directed by Tamara Jenkins
B+
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., Dec. 21

Grimly funny and brazenly unsentimental, writer/director Tamara Jenkins’ follow-up to her raucous 1998 dysfunctional family comedy Slums of Beverly Hills stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as Jon and Wendy Savage, sourpuss siblings forced to face some difficult decisions once their estranged abusive father (Philip Bosco) takes a turn toward dementia. But if you think this is going to be a sweet comedy of familial reconciliation, take another look at that surname.

Hoffman’s an emotionally stunted slobbo lit professor in Buffalo, while Linney’s an aspiring Greenwich Village playwright (she’s actually a temp, living off a FEMA 9/11 grant) carrying on a pathetic affair with her married neighbor. Both seem stuck in a sort of adolescent emotional paralysis, no doubt thanks to dear old Dad, who’s recently taken to writing obscenities on bathroom walls with his feces.

Muted in tone and visually buried beneath a brilliantly shabby bargain-basement production design (every prop in the movie looks cheap and possibly broken), The Savages has an ordinary, humdrum grit often missing even from indie movies. The actors’ hair is always messy—not as an affectation, but like it was probably combed earlier in the morning but it’s been a long day. The more unsavory aspects of contemporary eldercare are confronted in a similarly blunt, low-key fashion, as Jon and Wendy imply most of the family history with a minimum of speechifying—but nonetheless wonder how to take care of an old man who never liked them much in the first place.

Hoffman and Linney are, as usual, extraordinary. Like most siblings facing a crisis, they fall right back into the roles assigned to them in childhood. She becomes overly melodramatic and needy (not to mention kind of full of shit), while he recedes deeper into a know-it-all curmudgeonly security blanket.

There’s no grand deathbed catharsis here, and no monologues about lessons learned. When all is said and done, Jon and Wendy have merely slouched ever-so-slightly closer to adulthood, which feels a bit tougher and more true than countless Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movies on the same subject.

The world needs Walk Hard. Bio- pics have had it too good for too long, and any film that parodies the genre’s biggest crimes—plodding, this-happened-then-that-happened scripts; rampant lying in order to pound a messy life into a tidy three-act structure; and oodles of Oscar-targeted overacting—deserves accolades simply for showing up, much less with John C. Reilly in the lead and the Judd Apatow mafia behind the camera.

Specifically sending up Ray and Walk the Line, though extending its mockery to the entire vast genre, Walk Hard stars Reilly as Dewey Cox, an aw-shucks everyAmerican musician who has his first popular song at 14—when he’s already played by Reilly. The film then follows Reilly through just about every major musical genre from the last five decades. In between he gets addicted to (and quits) every possible drug, fathers a couple dozen spawn and hopelessly tries to patch things up with his estranged papa (Raymond J. Barry), who’s eternally peeved at Reilly for accidentally killing his piano-prodigy brother in a childhood machete fight.

In short, Walk Hard is exactly what you’d expect from a feature-length parody of musical biopics starring John C. Reilly. Hypothetically, that should be enough, and I suppose it is. (My ass was effectively laughed off.) But it’s hard not to be a touch miffed that it doesn’t do anything beyond what’s required, never veers off in any particularly gonzo direction. (That said, there are a good deal fewer dick jokes than you’d think.)

Still, it’d be absurd to fault Walk Hard too much for promising to decimate the biopic and then doing just that, and borderline criminal to razz on only the second film to ever put Reilly up front. Go for the premise; stay for the left-field Glen Campbell joke.

Once an incredibly annoying staple of the 1980s New York art scene, Julian Schnabel has blossomed in recent years, stepping behind the camera for a trilogy of exciting and unconventional biopics. As there’s often absolutely nothing exciting or unconventional about biopics, this is a welcome development.

By all rights, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly should be your standard Oscar-bait inspirational drivel. Mathieu Almaric (that sly Roman Polanski look-alike who stole every scene in Spielberg’s Munich) stars as Jean-Dominique Bauby, an Elle magazine editor and cad about town who suffers a sudden and debilitating stroke, finding himself completely paralyzed, save for one eye. (Write your own My Left Eyelid joke here.)

The screenplay, by Pianist scribe Ronald Harwood, plays the typical triumph-of-the-human-spirit card, focusing on Bauby’s emotional rehabilitation, eventual reconciliation with estranged loved ones and the rather awe-inspiringly laborious method he used to pen his memoirs. (An assistant recites letters of the alphabet; Bauby winks his one functioning eye whenever she gets to the right one. Any writer who has trouble with deadlines—ahem—will find these sequences astounding.)

All the expected beats are present and accounted for, including Bauby’s tearful chat with his stern, emotionally aloof father (Max Von Sydow, naturally). But The Diving Bell and the Butterfly transcends the sappy trappings thanks to Schnabel’s adventurous virtuoso direction. The first chunk of the movie is shot entirely from Bauby’s point of view, drifting in and out of focus as doctors hover over the camera discussing their diagnosis. They call it “locked-in syndrome,” and for this early terrifying stretch we feel locked in there with him, forced to contemplate the horror of being unable to move or even communicate.

Almaric’s voiceover narration provides a rascally, often randy counterpoint (of course the nurses are all babes), and the flashback sequences favor a freewheeling camera courtesy of the great cinematographer Januz Kaminski. One magnificent shot holds for a vivacious eternity on a woman’s hair as it blows wild in a speeding convertible, while U2’s “UltraViolet” plays. Julian Schnabel might be many things, but he’s definitely not locked in.

Originally set for a November release, Marc Forster’s splashy Hollywood adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel The Kite Runner wound up pushed to mid-December when news broke that three of its young Afghan stars—two of whom participate in the world’s first PG-13 rape scene—had expressed fear that the film may endanger them back home. Say what you will about a production that never properly ensures the livelihood of its cast, but it’s indicative of a certain recklessness in the film, which shoots first and thinks later.

The Kite Runner, which details life in Afghanistan through three decades of successive totalitarian regimes, deserves credit for being filmed largely in its native tongues (though China wound up standing in for Kabul for obvious reasons). But it loses most of its credibility by, for one, placing Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland) at the helm. The Michael Bay of middlebrow filmmaking, Forster pumps the film full of slick crane shots and shameless music cues—that oh-so-Afghan score comes courtesy of Spain’s Alberto Iglesias—and dumbs down Hosseini’s tale with plenty of for-the-ignorant-Westerners factoids.

The Kite Runner tells of Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi, when young), a kid so privileged his best friend Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada) is the son of his father’s servant. When Amir spies on Hassan’s violation by the local bullies without intervening, a rift grows between the boys that’s only exacerbated once Amir and his father (Homayoun Ershadi, of Abbas Kiarostami’s great A Taste of Cherry) decamp for America as the Russians roll in. Following a lengthy stint watching them adjust to life in an Afghan enclave of California, The Kite Runner sends Amir—now played by the wooden Khalid Abdalla—back home to rescue the son of the now-deceased Hassan from the dreaded Taliban.

No matter the incarnation—faux-neorealist kiddie pic, immigrant saga, actioneer—Forster’s film fails to convince or coalesce. As with far too many novel translations, it rests on the laurels of its source, hoping its fans will fill in the numerous gaps in the adaptation (performed by the usually more reliable David Benioff).

And while I can’t personally speak for Hosseini’s book, there’s something distasteful about a film that skips over the misery of one to highlight the minor growth of another. Whether thanks to the muddled script or the blandness of Abdalla, Amir’s grief over his inaction remains strictly figurative, never visceral. Let’s just say there’s a meatier lit adaptation about atonement in a nearby theater.

This could’ve been the best movie of the year. Aaron Sorkin, redeeming himself from the masturbatory dross that was Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, has penned a whip-smart, viciously funny black comedy about Texas Congressman Charles Wilson—the hard-partying, lovable letch who, in the 1980s, spearheaded U.S. efforts to covertly arm and train the Afghan mujahideen, thereby grinding down the Soviets and helping win the Cold War. It’s a good thing that never came back to bite us in the ass, isn’t it?

Tom Hanks relaxes magnificently into the debauched rep’s whiskey- slurred come-ons, and Philip Seymour Hoffman (what a year he’s having!) is even better as the tightly wound, potty-mouthed CIA agent whose crackerjack competence is concealed only by his slovenly social maladjustment. It’s a joy to watch these two actors spitting out Sorkin’s cynical, staccato riffs, miraculously getting things done in D.C. through an undeniably hilarious mix of bullshit, flattery and cutthroat savvy.

The underlying material is so sharp, Charlie Wilson’s War easily could’ve rivaled Three Kings for sickly comic realpolitik shock. So sad then that Mike Nichols has directed it more like a sequel to Ishtar, softening the script’s poli-sci body blows with cartoonishly broad sight gags, loud costumes, silly wigs and a puzzlingly jaunty tone. Even more disastrous is his casting of Julia Roberts as a hawkish Southern man-eating millionaire. She’s too young, sexless and brittle for a role Susan Sarandon was obviously born to play.

Recent reports of behind-the-scenes legal maneuvers by some of the surviving participants may account for the weirdly neutered final reels. (Sorkin’s original ending has surfaced online. Hint: It flashes forward a few years to a certain Tuesday in September.) Pulling the logical punchline and thereby stranded without a climax, Nichols subs with a baffling self-congratulatory awards ceremony that swells with feel-good patriotic music, banal speeches and the nagging notion that your director hasn’t been paying attention to any of the dialogue during the preceding 90 minutes. Infuriating.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and with all this goodwill toward man floating around it’s tough to hate on a movie whose central message is about heartwarming things. Friends. Family. Love. A fat man struggling to put on a fat suit.

Darn it all, Perfect Holiday, why couldn’t you have tried harder?

All Nancy (cute Gabrielle Union)—mother of three creepily precocious children and ex-wife of crass rap mogul J. Jizzy (Charlie Murphy)—wants for Christmas is a compliment from a nice man who isn’t trying to get in her pants. Overhearing this, creepily precocious daughter asks Mall Santa to grant her mom’s wish. Mall Santa, fortunately, is the day job of smoking-hot songwriter Benjamin (Morris Chestnut), and thus begins a Rube Goldberg romance with enough plot contrivances to rival a comedy by Shakespeare’s concussed little brother.

The characterization is extremely lazy, practically giving the characters nametags such as Overweight Comic Relief or Resentful Potential Stepson. We know J. Jizzy is a cad when he skips out on a custodial visit, leaving his children waiting on the porch in the snow. We know Benjamin is a good guy because the first time we meet him, he gives both his scarf and his last $5 to a homeless person.

The homeless person turns out to be a disguised Queen Latifah, who pops up fewer times than her billing would lead one to expect as the Spirit of Christmas or something, another unforgivably lazy move on the part of the writers. Whenever the plot paints itself into a corner, Latifah, a yuletide special agent intent on a happy ending, uses her Christmas magic to prod things along.

And although the name does resemble that of another rapper/mogul in a sort-of-clever way (the music video we see involves getting that dirt off his shoulder), “Jizzy” was perhaps not the best name for Murphy’s character. Unless they were hoping to bring joy to the world of stoned kids who wandered into the theater by accident, in which case Perfect Holiday is a perfect success.

Not Reviewed

The Great Debaters
Based on the true story of Melvin B. Tolson (Denzel Washington), a college professor in the segregated 1930s South who leads his debate team to the national championships. (Opens Tues., Dec. 25.)

National Treasure: Book of Secrets
Nicolas Cage is back as treasure hunter Benjamin Franklin Gates, this time looking to uncover the truth about Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. (Opens Fri., Dec. 21.)

P.S. I Love You
Hilary Swank plays a young widow whose dead husband (Gerard Butler) leaves her 10 messages over the course of a year with the goal of helping her move on. (Opens Fri., Dec. 25.)

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep
A young Scottish boy (Alex Etel) finds an egg, which hatches into the mythical creature that inspired the legend of the Loch Ness Monster. (Opens Tues., Dec. 25.)

Ongoing

Hoodie rats: Alvin and his chipmunk bros get a

Alvin and the Chipmunks
A film version of the ’80s cartoon, with CGI chipmunks and Jason Lee as Dave. (Not reviewed.)

American Gangster
Denzel Washington stars as real-life Harlem heroin kingpin Frank Lucas, a straight-laced, uptight family man savvy enough to apply corporate business models to the smack trade. From the mid-’60s through the fall of Saigon, Lucas’ shady contacts were smuggling uncut dope into the U.S. inside the caskets of dead soldiers. But don’t think any of this escaped the notice of Garden State cop Richie Roberts, a doggedly single-minded detective portrayed here by Russell Crowe. Director Ridley Scott seemingly never saw a scene he couldn’t flutter-cut into ribbons, turning on the smoke machines and over- aestheticizing everything into a glossy perfume commercial. So the biggest shock is how plainly and unobtrusively he’s helmed American Gangster. After a couple of hours, Denzel’s silky-smooth, cold-blooded killer finally comes face-to-face with Crowe’s twitchy lawman, in the kind of larger-than-life face-off that makes going to the movies worthwhile. B (S.B.)

Atonement
Adapted by playwright Christopher Hampton from Ian McEwan’s breathlessly acclaimed, doom-laden love story spanning WWII and beyond, Atonement’s first hour is masterfully assembled, zipping breathlessly back and forth in time throughout the seemingly innocuous events of one languid summer’s day in 1935. Keira Knightley stars as Cecilia Tallis, glowing yet again as a brittle poor-little-rich-girl who can’t shake her hankering for the housekeeper’s son Robbie (James McAvoy). Cecilia’s baby sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan) also has a bit of a bug for this goofy young gardener. By the end of the day, Briony has done a bad, bad thing. Then suddenly we leap forward a few years into the thick of WWII, and Atonement never recovers. But even as you feel the movie ebbing away, it’s still impossible not to marvel at director Joe Wright’s technical virtuosity. B (S.B.)

August Rush
A single night of rooftop booty between cellist Lyla (Keri Russell) and rock guitarist Louis (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) leaves Lyla pregnant. Her father thinks a baby will ruin her career, so after Lyla gets hit by a car, he puts the kid up for adoption and tells her it’s dead. Eleven years later Evan (Freddie Highmore) runs away from the orphanage to find his parents. The stilted contrivances that move the story forward range from the hoary—a telephone number lost to a gust of wind! A dying father’s confession!—to flat-out unbelievable. A real passion for music is August Rush’s one redeeming aspect. But it’s not nearly enough. D- (Nadine Kavanaugh)

Awake
In a dramatization of “aesthetic awareness,” a condition in which a patient is conscious during an operation but cannot move, Hayden Christensen plays a man who wakes up during heart surgery. A thriller then unfolds around him and his young wife Jessica Alba. (Not reviewed.)

Beowulf
A retelling of the classic story, with Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie in soul-sucking CGI. (Not reviewed.)

Blade Runner
In 1992 Ridley Scott’s dystopian box office bomb Blade Runner became one of the first films to be theatrically re-released in a “director’s cut.” Ironically, Scott, busy at the time with Thelma & Louise, was only partly involved in the director’s cutting, and has expressed discomfort with the cut that earned it its rep. Hence, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, an assembly that reveals Scott as a hopelessly fussy OCD type who’ll never be content with anything. The Final Cut merely redoes some special effects, trims down some of the 2001-style oohing and ahhing and reinstates the gore from the original video version (chiefly Joe Turkel’s head-crush). They’re all decent face-lifts (except for the loss of Rutger Hauer’s classic, “I want more life, fucker”—now a lame “I want more life, father”), but the world wouldn’t be terribly different had they never happened. A- (M.P.)

Enchanted
Amy Adams plays a cartoon fairy-tale princess banished to real-world Manhattan by an evil queen (Susan Sarandon). Patrick Dempsey’s divorce lawyer and James Marsden’s prince charming duke it out for her affections. (Not reviewed.)

The Golden Compass
Compass is the film adaptation of the first part of Philip Pullman’s children’s trilogy His Dark Materials. And Materials is not only better than the combined works of Tolkien, C.S Lewis and J.K. Rowling, it’s also massively more enlightened. While fizzing with the fantastic, Materials is a profoundly anti-superstitious work. The baddies are unmistakably the priests, mullahs and rabbis of organized religion, and this is what has upset some Christians. You can see their point. But sane parents of a religious disposition should fear not. Pullman’s warm, thoughtful, socialistic atheism is a backdrop to a story where the baddies just happen to be sexually twisted and power-crazed bigots—just like in The Adventures of Robin Hood and every other adventure movie that’s worth a damn. B (Steven Wells)

Hitman
Timothy Olyphant plays a professional assassin who must figure out who set him up when he gets chased through Eastern Europe by both the Russian military and Interpol. (Not reviewed.)

How to Cook Your Life
Zen master Edward Espe Brown teams up with a cookbook author to unite Buddhism and cooking. (Not reviewed.)

Iron Will: Smith and his trusty sidekick hit the empty

I Am Legend
There’s an incredible sense of loneliness and despair in director Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend, which for a good portion of its running time proves to be a surprisingly hard-edged and intelligent science-fiction thriller. This is the third big-screen adaptation of Richard Matheson’s cult fave 1954 novel, this time starring Will Smith as Dr. Robert Neville, apparently the sole survivor of a vicious virus that’s transformed the rest of the population into ghost-white, drooling zombie-ish creatures. The film is so good for so long, and Lawrence so adept at dragging out the tension of ingeniously devised, small-scaled suspense sequences, not even a massive flurry of explosions, fake-looking CGI and treacly Hollywood nonsense can undo the goodwill. B (S.B.)

I’m Not There
Todd Haynes’ astoundingly dense, certifiably insane, preposterously entertaining attempted portrait of the ever-elusive Bob Dylan isn’t just the greatest celebrity biography ever made—it’s also a full-frontal formalist assault on the very concept of biopics. Haynes finds his way around all the stale bio-chestnuts by casting a half-dozen drastically different Dylans and overlapping their separate sagas in a freewheeling pattern of concentric circles, jarringly juxtaposed in contradictory cinematic styles and contrasting color schemes, allowing I’m Not There to drift and riff on contradictions, shock edits and an obstinate, thrilling refusal to pigeonhole the protagonist. But what you’ll come away talking about is Cate Blanchett’s incendiary, eerily convincing turn as the rock ’n’ roll, mid-’60s speed-freak Bob. A (S.B.)

Belly gaffe: Ellen Page talks with accidental

Juno
Juno starts off questionable, even off-putting, before heading off in an unexpectedly decent direction. Just try not to wince when the title character, a suburban 16-year-old who’s inseminated by meek running fanatic pal Michael Cera, responds to a dire turn of events during the film’s second half with, “Just do me this one solid.” Juno herself is quite a lot like Diablo Cody’s script (directed by Jason Reitman, calming down considerably after the barndoor-broad Thank You for Smoking). Both are desperate to prove themselves and can be a touch shrill at first encounter, but given time they grow and deepen. It’s a relief, for instance, that the couple to whom Juno decides to donate her spawn (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) become more than just an easy yuppie parody. B- (M.P.)

Lions for Lambs
Robert Redford stars as a California college professor who calls in a slacker student and tells him the tale of his two favorite former students (Derek Luke and Michael Peña), who were so revved-up to change the world that they ran off and enlisted in the Army. At this exact same moment our two brilliant young soldiers are shot out of a helicopter, stranded, wounded and pinned down by Taliban fire somewhere on a snowy ridge in Afghanistan. Meanwhile hotshot Republican Sen. Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise) is laying out his audacious plan to win the war on terror once and for all in an exclusive interview with a harried, washed-up reporter portrayed quite badly by Meryl Streep. It’s obvious Redford has the best of intentions. He desperately wants to tell the audience to wake up and engage with the world. But there’ve got to be a million better ways to do so than sitting yourself behind a desk, staring into the camera and actually saying out loud: “Wake up! Engage with the world!” D (S.B.)

Love in the Time of Cholera
A retelling of the classic story by Gabríel Gárcia Marquez. (Not reviewed.)

Margot at the Wedding
Nicole Kidman stars as the worst mother since Livia Soprano. A hopelessly neurotic bundle of nerves, she drags her androgynous, deeply confused adolescent son Claude (Zane Pais) along for an ill-advised reunion with estranged sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) at their former childhood home on a gray Northeastern island. A semifamous writer who cannibalizes family secrets as fodder for New Yorker short stories, Margot is a hideous creation, incapable of opening her mouth without casually insulting everybody else in the room, and somehow dragging every conversation back around into her own solipsistic circle of self-aggrandizement. Gratingly unpleasant yet often undeniably hilarious, Noah Baumbach’s film mines the grim comedy of embarrassment to a point where you’re squirming even harder than you’re laughing. B+ (S.B.)

Michael Clayton
Another hit in exec producer George Clooney’s recent run of politically savvy pictures, Michael Clayton provides the Cloonster with his meatiest role yet, as a slick fixer for a massive Manhattan law firm—the kind of smiling, shadowy figure who works behind the scenes and cleans up the mess before it makes the papers. But when an esteemed colleague (the terrific Tom Wilkinson) goes off his meds, grows a conscience and threatens to botch a massive class-action suit regarding a carcinogen-laced weed-killing spray, Clayton finds his loyalties tested, and for the first time starts wondering how he let himself become a smooth-talking janitor for the powerful. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a movie star. B+ (S.B.)

The Mist
Professional Stephen King-adapter Frank Darabont set his sights on a slender, gimmicky King novella that he’s still somehow absurdly managed to drag out for more than two hours. The setup is ripe for a kicky little genre picture: A demographically inclusive cross-section of Maine folks find themselves trapped inside a supermarket after a strange, otherworldly mist engulfs their cozy little town. Visibility is zero, but there’s definitely something out there, and it seems to be eating anybody who tries to leave. Lacking any shred of common sense or internal logic, The Mist instead goes for hamfisted social commentary, positioning Marcia Gay Harden as a psycho Jesus freak delivering endless, grinding monologues that somehow convert these terrified supermarket patrons into bloodthirsty soldiers of God pitted against one another. The ending differs radically from the one in the book, and is the most ghastly, nihilistic, completely unearned, depressing finale ever seen in a tedious movie about giant spiders. D (S.B.)

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium
Screenwriting wunderkind Zach Helm’s directorial debut, in which 243-year-old eccentric toy store owner Dustin Hoffman bestows his magical shop upon manager Natalie Portman. Trouble ensues. (Not reviewed.)

No Country for Old Men
Joel and Ethan Coen have at last gone back to their roots, infusing their astonishing adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel with the clockwork meticulousness and parched landscapes of their 1984 debut Blood Simple. Doggedly faithful to its source, the film follows Josh Brolin’s Llwelyn Moss, a resourceful young man who makes the rather unwise decision to run off with a suitcase full of cash he stumbled upon in the desert. A drug deal went bad, and now several interested parties sure would like to get that $2 million back, and some poor sap has just hired Anton Chigurh (the incredible Javier Bardem) to clean up the mess. Tommy Lee Jones’ weary sheriff invariably arrives on the scene a day late and a dollar short, surveying the damage and tallying the ruined lives. The simple saga eventually blossoms into something far more delicate, contemplative and almost mythical. A (S.B.)

The Red Balloon/White Mane
Albert Lamorisse’s legendary, near-wordless 1956 children’s film about an adorable moppet and the sentient bag of helium that follows him around Paris is anything but cloying. Indeed, even before the grisly Christ overtones kick in, it’s hard to imagine any contemporary children’s film being so grim. The balloon’s mere redness is an invigorating invasion, and its destruction by a group of bullies—in a lengthy silent shot that seems to last forever—is a tragedy that feels like more than a mere rite of passage. White Mane, from three years earlier, is even grimmer and more mysterious. The arc is similar: A boy befriends a white stallion pursued by a group of ranchers. The narration (written by James Agee) lends it a storybook feel, but Lamorisse films it live-action, feeding off the disparity between the tale and the elemental, documentary-like footage of an actual equine, who’s allowed to be an animal and not a human with hooves à la Disney. B+/A- (M.P.)

Revolver
Guy Ritchie’s tale of an audacious gambler (Jason Statham) who beats the wrong man and must go on the run. (Not reviewed.)

Romance and Cigarettes
John Turturro’s whacked-out raunchy musical folly stars James Gandolfini as a horndog construction worker carrying on a torrid affair with Kate Winslet’s comically voluptuous lingerie shopgirl. All hell breaks loose when his wife (Susan Sarandon) finds a smutty love poem in his pocket, and before you know it everybody’s bellowing obscenities, while also tentatively singing along to hit tracks by Englebert Humperdinck, Janis Joplin and Tom Jones. It’s easy to see what Turturro is trying to do, contrasting the gritty, drably photographed working-class Queens milieu with the pop romanticism on the radio, and offering his sad, beaten-by-life characters overwrought arias of obscenity. It’s the kind of outrageous conceit that only a master filmmaker could pull off, and Turturro hasn’t the skill set. The movie is so shapeless and erratic you’re left admiring only the intentions. C- (S.B.)

The Rape of Europa
A documentary about the plundering of one-fifth of Europe’s art by the Nazis, The Rape of Europa is based on a nonfiction book—Lynn H. Nichols’ eponymous 500-page bestseller. It’s also a documentary that, in its way, is as exciting as any superior Hollywood product. Like Nichols’ book, Europa casts a net over a surprisingly vast and rich topic, eventually following the story into the recovery efforts, which are arguably even more fascinating. Directed by a three-person committee, it’s a stylistically dry and staid affair, but it’s also rife with anecdotes, many of them possessing the thrills and spills of a classic adventure yarn. B (M.P.)

Southland Tales
Southland Tales is set in an alternate 2008, which diverted from our reality in 2005 when terrorists nuked Abilene, Texas. Long story short, the draft was reinstated, the war eventually spread into Syria and a new, even more civil rights-gouging version of the Patriot Act was born—this one targeting cyberspace too. When we catch up the apocalypse is near, particularly in Los Angeles. There, the film’s obscenely sprawling cast of SNL vets and second-rate comic actors resides, putting on a politically charged but terminally goofball version of Short Cuts. The film is demanding, but mostly because of its lack of organization and thought. You don’t get the sense that repeated viewings will yield more insights or make the jumbled, impenetrable plot any clearer. What you see is what you get. C (M.P.)

Starting out in the Evening
Frank Langella plays an aging novelist toiling away on his latest novel. Much of his past work has slipped out of print, but that doesn’t stop Brown grad student Lauren Ambrose from making him the center of her thesis. Endlessly perky (and conspicuously clad in revealing garb), Ambrose cajoles Langella into letting her invade his apartment and eventually his bed. Evening’s stuffy verbal stylings never successfully mask the achingly rudimentary old artist/hot young fan storyline, which, for reasons that are never properly addressed, is complimented with a go-nowhere- special subplot about Langella’s daughter Lili Taylor and her desire to get preggers. Just because it’s pointy-headed doesn’t mean it’s smart. C (M.P.)

This Christmas
An earnest family dramedy about Christmas at the Whitfield household, for which the whole family has returned for the first time in years. Stars Chris Brown, Idris Elba, Regina King and Mekhi Phifer, among others. (Not reviewed.)

War Dance
War Dance depicts the ongoing atrocities in civil-war-ravaged northern Uganda by way of a competitive music and dance festival for children. It’s Mad Hot Ballroom crossed with the forthcoming Darfur Now. Directors Sean Fine and Andrea Nix devote a large chunk of running time to back-story, following a trio of children living in a displaced persons’ camp in Patongo. All have had their families torn apart to varying degrees, and they all tell their horrifying stories in beaten-down, near-robotic tones as cinematographer (and co-director) Sean Fine aestheticizes their faces with picturesque images. War Dance offers no social or political examination of what’s going on in Uganda, content to portray it as just another example of the misery going on in pockets of Africa. C+ (M.P.)

War Made Easy
This Sean Penn-narrated documentary points out, with great patience and precision, how every war starts with the Pentagon and the president lying through their teeth. And how the so-called liberal media eagerly and unquestioningly repeat these lies. And how journalists who attempt objective reporting are fired. Then comes the bombing and the images of maimed and slaughtered civilians, downplayed by a lickspittle American media more interested in the waffling of macho reporters telling us how brave and wonderful their new soldier friends are. And then the war drags on and on. War Made Easy is a well-crafted, well-meaning, incredibly well-researched but ultimately frustrating film. What are the odds it’ll be remade four years into the next war? And the one after that? B (S.W.)

What Would Jesus Buy?
Morgan Spurlock presents a humorous documentary about the commercialization of Christmas. (Not reviewed.)