Capsules

New Releases

Mad Hot Ballroom
Directed by Marilyn Agrelo
C+
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., May 20

The hot ticket at January's Slamdance Film Festival (a more indie-minded offshoot of the increasingly glitzy Sundance) was this amusing, disappointingly superficial documentary that follows three classrooms full of fifth-graders through a grueling, emotional tournament. At the end of the day only one team will rule them all-as New York City's youngest ballroom dance champs.

Yup-it's fifth-graders doing the fox trot. An odd, delightful school program, run by the American Ballroom Theater, currently boasts more than 50 N.Y.C. public schools competing annually.

As sheer spectacle, it's a riot. There's something undeniably endearing about watching a bunch of awkward 10-year-olds dolled up in semiformal wear, counting off their steps and desperately trying to forget that their opposite-sex partners "have cooties."

Which makes it all the more wonderful to witness flashes of actual grace and elegance coming from these youngsters. One of their teachers even begins blubbering: "They're turning into real ladies and gentlemen!"

Directed with a great deal of enthusiasm and a sad shortage of focus by first-timer Marilyn Agrelo, Ballroom follows a demographically diverse cross-section of kiddies from Tribeca, Bensonhurst and Washington Heights along their long and often heartbreaking road to the final competition, held outdoors at the World Financial Center.

Agrelo obviously began with the noble intention of illuminating vast cultural and economic disparities among kids the same age in the same city. She holds up ballroom dance as a sort of democratizing force-one of the few arenas left where talent still trumps social advantages.

But by doing so, Agrelo crowds Mad Hot Ballroom beyond capacity. Three teams is too many for the movie to handle with any degree of coherence. Despite brief, tantalizing interview snippets, even the most interesting children get lost in the constant shuffle on- and offstage.

A voiceover narration claims the ballroom dancing program has pulled a number of at-risk children out of potentially dangerous spirals. But a better movie might've offered some footage (or even an interview or two) to back up such an assertion.

Ballroom suffers particularly when compared to 2002's Spellbound (the movie it clearly was modeled after). That thrilling spelling-bee doc picked eight of the contestants and really let you get to know them before the competition started. Mad Hot Ballroom drops straight into the fray and spends too little time with too many people.

The kids are awfully cute, though.

3-Iron
Directed by Kim Ki-Duk
B
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., May 20

In the modern screenwriter's handbook, words are overrated. Proof comes from Kim
Ki-Duk's 3-Iron, a hushed, mysterious love story during which our two main characters utter nary a syllable to one another.

It's without a doubt the quietest movie we'll see this year (there's not even a musical score-just a CD popped in by the protagonist every once in a while), and yet the epic silences are riveting-as if the absence of aural clutter is forcing you to pay closer attention than you would've otherwise.

Taking a cue from the giddy Faye Wong sequence in Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking
Express-which found our shy heroine breaking into her dream lover's house in order to tidy the place up for him every afternoon-3-Iron stars Jae Hee as a nameless wanderer fond of harmless home invasions.

If nobody's around he's likely to slip into your place and help himself to whatever's in the fridge. Then he'll probably do some of your laundry and fix a broken appliance, or maybe he'll just goof around and sabotage stuff that already works.

But one night this trespasser miscalculates and unwittingly makes himself at home in the presence of Lee Seung-yeon's battered housewife. Theirs is an instant inexplicable connection (one made quite visceral by both performers' haunted stares), and the best part of 3-Iron finds these two drifting through the empty houses and apartments of Seoul like a couple of ghosts, wordlessly falling in love.

Alas, the picture loses a good deal of its magic during the plot-heavy (comparatively speaking) back nine. There's a thuggish revenge scheme by our lady's nasty husband, as well as a couple crooked cops and far too many characters being brutally thwacked by golf balls.

But the stillness of the film sticks with you.

Kim is a famous bad boy from the recent South Korean cinema explosion. (I was frightened off from watching his widely acclaimed The Isle thanks to the following quote from a friend: "Dude, you totally see fish hooks stuck in a vagina!")

But 3-Iron, as well as 2003's tranquil Buddhist parable Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring strike me as sincere (if a bit too formally rigorous) attempts to pare storytelling down to its barest essentials.

Kim's austere compositions and innovative sound design convey more information than most contemporary filmmakers can wring out of a five-page monologue. Even if it gets a little precious in the end, 3-Iron admirably illustrates that sometimes you can speak volumes without saying anything at all.

Brothers
Directed by Susanne Bier
A-
Reviewed by Leo
Charney
Opens Fri., May 20

This powerful Danish story of two brothers, which won the World Cinema Audience Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is like two movies in one-a war picture and a family melodrama-tied to one family dynamic.

There's the revered older brother, a major in the army, with a hot blond wife and two cute daughters; a dissolute younger brother, just out of jail; a father who idolizes one son and scorns the other; and a loving mother who's a little out of it.

Just when we think we're in for a Legends of the Fall-style soap opera about squabbling siblings, older brother Michael goes down in a plane crash and the grieving family has to rework its relationships.

But wait! He's not dead. And then everything has to change all over again.

Using intimate close-ups that put you right in the middle of the action, the movie's almost anthropological in its attention to the minute behaviors of specific people-and the domino effects that make each person part of a larger system.

If you've seen The Celebration-the 1998 Danish comedy/drama about an outrageously dysfunctional family-you've got a sense of this movie's style. It's got the intense, turn-your-eyes-away focus on emotional and psychological responses of other recent Danish movies influenced by that country's Dogme 95 film movement, like Breaking the Waves, Italian for Beginners and Dancer in the Dark.

Here, though, Susanne Bier enlarges those movies' narrow focus by tying the domestic drama to the war drama. The family's circumstances are similar to a hostage situation: Hostages and captors act out the same psychological warfare, on a wider and deadlier scale, that a nuclear family does.

Brothers proves that a movie's intimate attention to human beings can play out in a broader social and political context. It takes the Dogme (and Sundance) tradition of small-scale dramas to the next level-while implicitly rebuking them for their insular self-
absorption.

Bier doesn't pay as much attention to her women as to her men, and some of the story's events follow each other a little too conveniently. Yet overall this is one of the best movies of the year so far, as involving and convincing in small details as in large ideas.

My Mother's Smile
Directed by Marco
Bellocchio
C
Reviewed by Leo
Charney
Opens Fri., May 20

Blasphemous! That's what the Catholic Church thinks of this Italian drama. First released in 2002, it starts with a great premise-a cynical atheist named Ernesto learns his mother is up for sainthood.

He always hated her, and he hates the Church too. But now everything's going their way. His son talks to God, his family's gung-ho for sainthood and he sees his mother's smile on his own lips.

The movie's fiercely anti-Catholic. It portrays sainthood as a scam, cardinals as glad-handing politicians, and sainthood advocates as opportunistic status-seekers.

Ernesto's aunt-who runs the website for her sister's sainthood-admits she doesn't believe in God, but "just in case, I'm taking out insurance. It doesn't cost anything. If God exists, he'll forgive."

Only a young boy has pure religion. He goes off to chat with God and asks searching questions like, "How can God control 6 billion people at once?"

The hero's family knows their sainthood story is a lie, but they're riding it for status and opportunity.

"Can't you see the advantage of having a saint for a mother?" asks the viperish aunt. "Your children must return to the privileged position that your disastrous ideals reduced to ashes!"

Yes, the characters speak like that. (The film is in Italian; the dialogue is subtitled.) That's because they're not so much characters-they're stick figures in a one-sided argument against bad, bad Catholicism.

Talky and static, the movie makes the same points over and over again, forgoing discussion of other issues, such as why the Church wants to canonize this woman in the first place.

It seems that all she did was forgive a man who killed her. Is that really enough for an express train to sainthood?

We also never learn why Ernesto hates her so much. "She was stupid. She understood nothing." That's all he has to say about it, as if director Marco Bellocchio were too consumed with anti-Catholicism to dramatize his own story. It feels like he came up with a smart concept, then quit for lunch before fleshing it out.

Sometimes he throws in weird digressions to liven things up. These David Lynch-like scenes don't fit with the realistic drama, but they gave me a great idea: The whole thing's in Ernesto's head! It's all a crazy anti-Catholic hallucination.

I still think maybe that's the point-but the film's so unformed, I don't know. In any case, it would make a better movie.

Kicking & Screaming
Directed by Jesse Dylan
C
Reviewed by Steven Wells
Now showing

The best soccer movie ever is Shaolin Soccer, in which an itinerant Chinese kung-fu artiste overcomes seemingly impossible odds to transform a bunch of misfit monks into a world-beating soccer powerhouse. The worst is perhaps Soccer Dog: European Cup, in which a soccer-playing dog does much the same thing with a gaggle of Scottish school kids.

Kicking & Screaming doesn't deviate from this template.
Will Ferrell plays a coach who transforms a bunch of goofball losers into a pint-sized Manchester United. In doing so he and the boys learn not only about themselves but also about what it means to be American. Or something.

This barely disguised Bad News Bears rip-off is given an Oedipal twist by the fact that the evil rival coach, played by Robert Duvall, is also the hero's dad. And then there's Ferrell's demented spiral into the hellish pits of espresso addiction.

But these quirks aside, even the lack of monks or dogs won't fool you into thinking you haven't seen this movie a hundred times already. Kicking & Screaming is a puckless Mighty Ducks.

The positive if stereotypical portrayal of a pair of lesbian soccer moms (which drew a burst of recognition laughter from the preview audience of Philly soccer brats) and a heavily hammered anti-elitist "sport for all" moral probably means that we can count Kicking as a goal for culture-war good guys. Hurrah!

The downside is that it's a half-arsed bollock-fest of a movie. This is heralded by the entirely unnecessary casting (as himself) of one Mike Ditka-who apparently once coached a "football" team to victory in a globally irrelevant sporting nonevent known as the "Super Bowl." His annoying presence suggests a certain lack of confidence in the movie's subject matter.

The same second-guessed hesitancy is apparent in the sometimes clunky editing and a script that veers from baby-boomer ribaldry to prepubescent tomfoolery like a staggering drunk.

And then there are Will Ferrell's eyes. On the poster he has them tightly shut-and with good reason. Ferrell's tiny-eyed stare might look winsome on TV, but when blown up and projected onto a cinema screen, he looks like a psychotic hamster with a Ritalin habit.

That said, the soccer-playing small person in your family will probably think Kicking & Screaming is a hoot-assuming they don't have an irrational fear of giant amphetamined rodents.

Ongoing

Beautiful Boxer
Asanee Suwan brings a shy sweetness to real-life athlete Nong Toom, who used his ass-kicking skills to earn enough money to have a sex-change operation at 19. You might think having a drag queen at the center of the story would give director Ekachai Uekrongtham the inspiration to deliver some vamped-up style to the film. But with its workout montages and plentiful but brief fight scenes, Boxer might as well be a Karate Kid sequel. C+ (Dan Buskirk)

Crash
For a film itching to examine the truth about America's simmering racism, writer/director Paul Haggis' script has a propensity for turning its characters into stereotypes. In an opening scene two African-American twentysomethings discuss how white people unfairly see them as thugs-only to interrupt the conversation to carjack a district attorney and his wife. It's believable that race would play a part in all of the film's interactions, but Haggis, screenwriter of Best Picture-winner Million Dollar Baby, can't resist making every clash a verbal punch-out. C+ (D.B.)

Death of a Dynasty
Supposedly based on hip-hop mogul Damon Dash's exploits as one of the brains behind Roc-A-Fella Records, Dynasty tells the story of David Katz (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), an inexperienced hip-hop journalist assigned to uncover unrest at Dash's outfit. As Katz becomes closer to Dash (played by rapper Capone), his knowledge of the label's secrets leads him to a lucrative deal spilling information to a gossip newspaper. The stories spark a feud between Dash and Jay-Z (Robert Stapleton), which threatens to end the life of Roc-A-Fella Records. F (Emily Brochin)

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
A drama is only as good as its villains, and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room has some of the slimiest. The trio of Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow may have been piloting Enron's ship, but their greed brought out the worst in their crew of energy pirates-right down to the giggling traders seen rejoicing in the rolling blackouts that hit California in 2001. B (D.B.)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
For the few who remain uninitiated regarding this cult that began as a radio play in 1978: It's basically a Python-esque take on Star Wars with everyman Arthur Dent, who's dragged in his bathrobe, pissing and moaning across the universe, after earth is destroyed to make way for a new intergalactic freeway. Creator Douglas Adams' main gag seemed to be that all the mundane, bureaucratic annoyances and miscommunications of modern life are only multiplied exponentially when amplified across the stars. It's a conceit that comes through too seldom in this busy, overproduced blockbuster. C (S.B.)

The Holy Girl
The Holy Girl's protagonist, the dewy-skinned Amalia (Maria Alché), lives in a crumbling hotel run by her uncle and her divorced mother Helena (Mercedes Morán). The hotel hosts a conference of doctors, one of whom rubs up against Amalia while watching a street performance. The girl's almost orgasmic devotion to Catholicism leads her to seek the man out and try to save him. An overarching sense of doom is present from the beginning, but unlike the gruesome ending of director Lucrecia Martel's La Ciénaga, Holy Girl's conclusion is more vague, and ultimately more evolved. A- (E.B.)

House of Wax
This shitty horror remake has precious little to do with its 1953 Andre de Toth-directed 3-D namesake and everything to do with the delicious promise of watching Paris Hilton suffer a grisly death-which isn't a spoiler, but a selling point. D (S.B.)

The Interpreter
One night Silvia Broome (Nicole Kidman) just so happens to be going back to work to pick up a bag she just so happened to forget in one of the U.N. listening booths, and she just so happens to overhear an assassination plot that just so happens to be discussed in the language that she's one of maybe five people in America who can just so happen to understand. To his credit, Secret Service agent Tobin Keller (Sean Penn) thinks Silvia's story sounds a little fishy. Still reeling from the car-accident death of his wife two weeks prior, Keller spends a lot of time getting drunk and listening to Lyle Lovett before heading back to work, where he's immediately and illogically placed in charge of a potentially globe-altering international conflict. C- (S.B.)

Intimate Stories
The main problem with this dry Argentine drama is it's not intimate enough. This story of three isolated people in the remote town of Fitz Roy doesn't offer much in the way of character development or narrative action. It just follows its characters as they travel to San Julian, the big city more than 200 miles away. This movie isn't uninteresting, unpleasant or poorly acted. But it's so impersonal that it left me baffled as to why it was made. Don't the writer and director have anything they're burning to say? B- (L.C.)

King's Ransom
Anthony Anderson stars as a filthy rich businessman who tries to thwart his soon-to-be-ex-wife's gold-digging ways by masterminding his own kidnapping. But things soon go awry. (Not reviewed.)

Kingdom of Heaven
Set in 1186, during what appears to be a bit of a timeout between the second and third Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven stars blank-eyed teen heartthrob Orlando Bloom as a tempestuous blacksmith named Balian. We begin as Balian is reunited with his long-lost father (Liam Neeson), a legendary knight who, having something of a midlife crisis, suddenly wants to get to know his bastard son and bring the boy into the family crusading business. C (S.B.)

Kung Fu Hustle
In an unspecified time that looks like the Old West but boasts '50s cars and modern neon signs, the hardworking, poverty-stricken residents of Pig Sty Alley must band together to stave off the mob tactics of the Axe Gang, a top-hatted, snazzily dressed pack of tap-dancing goons. Yes, this is silly, often repetitive stuff. But as films like this, Hero and House of Flying Daggers continue to demonstrate that martial arts have relocated from the grind houses to the art houses, I'll take Hong Kong director Stephen Chow's goofball exuberance over Zhang Yimou's stilted Merchant-Ivory Fu any day of the week. B (S.B.)

Le Grand Role
This odd yet affecting French comedy/drama plays like a hybrid of Diner (male buddies), Love Story (pretty girl's pretty death) and The Last Metro (French-Jewish actors). It starts as a larky buddy movie, as Maurice Kurz and his four actor friends are all up for parts in a Yiddish-language version of The Merchant of Venice to be directed in Paris by a famous American director (Peter Coyote) who wants to use his clout to bring back Yiddish movies. Maurice gets cast as Shylock, then he's uncast in favor of a bigger star. But he's already told his wife, who turns out to be dying. B- (L.C.)

Look at Me
Sort of like a Hannah and Her Sisters-era Woody Allen dramedy transposed to Paris, Look at Me stars co-writer and director Agnès Jaoui as a stuffy classical choral teacher who spends most of her time making excuses not to spend an extra second with her overweight, needy student Lolita (a remarkable Marilou Berry). But that's before she discovers the ironically named Lolita's father just so happens to be famous author/publisher Étienne Cassard (co-writer Jean-Pierre Bacri). B+ (S.B.)

Millions
Seven-year-old Damian (played by the absurdly endearing Alex Etel) is hanging out by the train tracks when a giant bag of money drops out of the sky. We later find out there was a train robbery nearby, but young Damian thinks the money's a present from God-or maybe from his mum, who died recently. Danny Boyle's bouncy, touching Millions is on one level a farce about what a couple of schoolboys would do with a giant sack of cash, but it quickly digs deeper to reveal that sadness isn't always something you can buy your way out of. B+ (S.B.)

Mindhunters
Christian Slater, LL Cool J and assorted TV talent are FBI detectives training at a spooky abandoned Army facility on an island off North Carolina. Val Kilmer plays their hard-nosed taskmaster. During his first exercise events turn deadly, leaving one team member's body to be sent home in separate packages. Now the unknown assailant begins offing the detectives one by one, their times of death foretold by broken wristwatches found at the murder scenes. B- (D.B.)

Monster-in-Law
Jane Fonda rips into her role as every bride-to-be's worst nightmare with a manic energy that borders on psychotic, and Jennifer Lopez headlines as yet another one of those immaculate wallflowers that her ludicrous super-stardom seems to have trapped her in. Once Lopez is engaged to Michael Vartan's blank-slate surgeon stud, it's time to settle in for the main event: J. Lo vs. J. Fo. The bout ain't much during the early rounds, as Lopez at first tries to be accommodating and kind to her obviously troubled new mother-in-law. But things get seriously funny once the fiancee starts fighting dirty. B- (S.B.)

Music From the Inside Out
While the members of the Philadelphia Orchestra are the nominal stars of Daniel Ankers' lightly probing documentary Music From the Inside Out, the subjects could hail from any orchestral outfit. The doc is a discourse on the orchestral art form itself, with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra serving merely as the internationally renowned experts on the subject. At its best, Music makes you focus intensely on one aspect of the art. It'll certainly wind up in junior high music classes in the not-too-distant future, but its target audience is anyone with a set of ears. B (Matt Prigge)

Mystery of the Nile
In this IMAX film a group of explorers make their way down the 3,260-mile river, which takes them 114 days. (Not reviewed.)

Sahara
Matthew McConaughey goes through the motions as Dirk Pitt, a deep-sea bounty hunter ensnared in both an African water-poisoning plot and an obscure Civil War coin plot. There's a germ of an original thriller idea here about the perils of globalization. "The problem is no longer ours. It's our neighbor's downstream," sneers a warlord about his toxic water. Mostly, though, Sahara is like a clone of an action movie with clones for its leads. C- (L.C.)

Unleashed
Jet Li stars as a man who was raised to be a fighting machine by an evil Bob Hoskins. After he gets into a car accident, he loses his memory and is taken in by Morgan Freeman's benevolent piano teacher. (Not reviewed.)The Voyage Home
In fifth-century Rome the idealistic but weary prefect Claudio Rutilio Namaziano (Elia Schilton) takes it upon himself to breathe newer, better life into the waning Roman Empire by going on a trek to locate the last emperor (who's in hiding) and persuade him to return to the Eternal City. And so begins a soporific, frustratingly aimless odyssey, sporadically enlivened by vicious ne'er-do-wells, mutinous nautical crews and rock-throwing Christian hermits who skulk along the seaside cliffs like the Jawas from Star Wars. C (M.P.)

Walk on Water
Diagnosed as psychiatrically unsound after his wife's suicide, Eyal-the top hit man for the Israeli spy service Mossad-is given the low-key duty of spying on a visiting German brother and sister whose grandfather is an elderly Nazi war criminal still at large. Eyal is surprised to find his terse exterior melting as he befriends this couple while secretly observing them. The strawberry blond Caroline Peters is so natural on-screen as the sister Pia, it's a shame director Eytan Fox hasn't given her more to do. Instead Fox is interested in playing the brother's gay liberal politics against Eyal's macho Israeli heartlessness in a smart and talky buddy flick. B- (D.B.)

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is an uplifting documentary by Judy Irving that tells the story of Mark Bittner, a ponytailed '60s dropout who spends his days squatting in one of San Francisco's chichi enclaves, feeding and doting on a weird batch of non-indigenous parrots. Drama arises when the Bay Area's real estate prices finally budge Bittner from his squatting quarters. What will become of his birds? The movie may sound like a feast of a pet owner's desperate emotional projections, but Irving's up-close footage delivers the goods. B+ (S.B.)

XXX: State of the Union
This thoroughly preposterous yet satisfyingly acerbic sequel to 2002's dunderheaded XXX finds Sam Jackson's shadowy NSA operative on the run from a breathtakingly elaborate frame-up job by the sinister secretary of defense (a deliberately Rumsfeldian Willem Dafoe). It seems our wishy-washy president wants to fight "a more sensitive war on terror," prompting Dafoe and his cabal of neocon hawks to plot a massive assassination/coup attempt during the State of the Union address. So it goes without saying that the only person who can save the republic is Ice Cube. B- (S.B.)