Film

Film Shorts

Against a carefully rendered '70s mise en scène, a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman and his improbably beautiful wife are recruited to make Super 8 movies documenting their sex life for a supposed Scandinavian research project. Of course the "research project" turns out to be pure, old-fashioned porn, and the erstwhile "subjects" become massively popular porn stars. This much is sort of funny, if predictable, but then the salesman gets arty pretensions, and the plot slows to a grinding halt. (ANNIE WAGNER) Varsity, Fri-Sun 12:15, 4, 7:45 pm, Mon-Thurs 7:45 pm.
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Beauty Shop

I had no idea Kevin Bacon was in this movie and then--POOF!--there he was, acting all pompous and French and sporting the worst hairdo he's ever had in the history of all Kevin Bacon hairdos. It was quite exciting. The rest of the movie, though, was a lot like Barbershop except all the roles are reversed. (MEGAN SELING)

Crash

Crash, the directing debut of Million Dollar Baby screenwriter Paul Haggis, certainly doesn't want for hubris, but ultimately stands as a case of laudable ambition overwhelming still-developing narrative abilities. Although his would-be epic of race relations in Los Angeles sports a handful of genuinely searing moments, it's hard to shake the sense of someone constantly rearranging three-by-five cards behind the scenes for maximum impact. The cast, led by Don Cheadle's tragically clear-eyed central homicide cop, almost makes it fly, though, with special mention going to Ludacris (as a carjacker hilariously obsessed with the Man), and, especially, Sandra Bullock's admirably against-type portrayal of an upper-class housewife with a major chip on her shoulder. Together, they can't quite make Haggis' preachy puppet show feel entirely organic, but they certainly take some of the glare off of the strings. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Dear Frankie

The moral of the story: Don't tell your kid that his missing father is on a ship sailing around the world (and write him make-believe letters from Pop at sea) if you think there's any chance of said ship someday docking in your town.

Downfall

There are a lot of sentimental war moments in Downfall, and the conceit that we are watching through the eyes of Hitler's sheltered and therefore ignorant (and therefore blameless) secretary, is flimsy on many levels. Because the characters are Nazis, their panic and its subsequent rash of suicides and murders are deeply satisfying. Because it's a movie, however, you're left with the unpleasant prospect of watching a bunch of rats slowly drowning for two and a half hours. There are better ways to go. (SEAN NELSON)

Dust to Glory

An exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) documentary from director Dana Brown (Step Into Liquid), Dust to Glory chronicles the Tecate Score Baja 1000 race, where lunatics onboard motorcycles, cars, and even motor homes spend 32 hours blazing through 1000 miles of Baja peninsula, rolling over, crashing, and sometimes dying. Shot with over 50 cameras, the film is a definite thrill to watch, masterfully edited and littered with interesting characters. And even though the music occasionally hammers home the heroics to an absurd degree, there's no denying the ridiculous bravery--or is it psychotic lack of self-preservation?--that drives the racers, a bravery Brown manages to let himself, and his film, get caught up in. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

The scariest thing about Enron's fraudulent business plan was this: The corrupt mastermind, CEO Jeff Skilling, was likely onto the future model of the American economy. With the collapse of traditional industry, it's possible that 21st-century American companies--like Enron in the late 20th century--will be trading purely in abstractions, dealing in virtual commodities and virtual profits. Enron got caught first. And this accessible, damning documentary shows us the corporate double-speak in action. Problem is, while it's certainly a pleasure to listen in on a conference call shortly before the gig was up--where a skeptical analyst demands that Skilling cough up a balance sheet (Skilling calls the guy an asshole)--I can't help but think that Enron's subterfuge was a prescient version of our future economy. (JOSH FEIT)

Fever Pitch

People seem to love the Farrelly brothers. More specifically, people seem to love their peculiar take on love. Peter and Bobby have already directed a number of well-received quirky romantic comedies that make women giggle and swoon while guys laugh so hard they bust a nut, and now they've made Fever Pitch (based on the Nick Hornby novel), which is yet another take on two awkward people doing their best to work their way through an unconventionally warped relationship. Since it was filmed during the Sox's 2003-04 World Series-winning season, Fever Pitch includes plenty of footage from games; they even got permission to be on the field after the Sox won the series-ending game four. The bummer, though, is that it isn't as funny as other Farrelly classics. It still has that "cute as fuck" spin to it that is utterly unhateable (even if you usually don't like the whole romantic comedy thing), but no nuts will be busted this time around. (MEGAN SELING)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I am not a Hitchhiker's Guide nerd, but even I know that Ford Prefect is no American rapper, sir. Mos Def isn't the only grossly miscast actor in this adaptation of Douglas Adams' beloved novels; even the great Sam Rockwell is too much to take. The film suffers from the same problem as planet Earth: too many Americans. Still, whenever there are at least two British actors on-screen--especially Martin Freeman, AKA Tim from The Office, or the film-stealing Bill Nighy--the movie version mines big, warm, absurd laughs alongside its hyper-imaginative graphics, and quasi-mystical pop metaphysicality. How ironic that this, of all movies, would suffer from not being British enough. SEAN NELSON

House of Wax

Unsuspecting visitors to a small town (including Paris Hilton!) are waylaid and embalmed in wax (hopefully including the ever-waxy Paris Hilton!).

The Interpreter

The Interpreter turns what could have been a smart and twisty political thriller--with heavy emphasis on political--into a bogged-down and bland mulling over of wounded souls and suppressed sexual attraction. It's hard to care about the characters played by Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, since the actors seems to care very little about the characters themselves (she hides beneath a weak accent; he is in full-blown Penn mumbling mode), and with their brooding relationship (kept chaste, thankfully) routinely burying the intricacies of the plot, interest easily wanes. Instead of a Sydney Pollack film in the Three Days of the Condor vein--paranoid, tense, intelligent--we get an ungodly spackle-job of that Redford/Dunaway classic and Pollack's last film, the abominable Random Hearts. In other words, it's a nonengaging mope-fest occasionally spurred to life by a brief flurry of intrigue. But hey, at least there's a glorious chase scene. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Kingdom of Heaven

The dance between carnage and faith is a delicate one, and it's to Ridley Scott's credit that he doesn't allow his film to be overcome with the thrills of gore. The spiritual tunnels the director mines are not terribly deep, but Kingdom of Heaven's refusal to take sides--condemning neither Christians nor Muslims--gives the film a startling strength. Some may call this decision a cop-out, or even cowardly, and it may indeed be both. But it's hard to argue that for an epic crafted around the spectacle of violence, the amount of attention Scott has given to the meaning of God (and, in the case of the film's hero, the question of God), is surprising in these polemic times. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Kung Fu Hustle

Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, in which snazzy ax-wielding mobsters find themselves thwarted by a slum in which virtually every single senior citizen possesses mad fighting skills, is a loving send-up of seemingly every martial arts convention in the book. If you're in the mood for this sort of thing, the first 40 minutes or so are close to dead-solid perfect, culminating in an extended sight gag involving snakes and misthrown butcher knives which belongs in the physical comedy Parthenon. The second half, in which Chow's sad sack gangster wannabe takes a backseat to colossal bouts of CGI combat, suffers somewhat, but only in the sense that the inspired gags slow down to one or two per frame. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Look At Me

Amid the unceasing slew of soft-focus, easily multiplexed foreign fare, director Agnes Jaoui's 2000 debut The Taste of Others was a welcome blast of unpredictable air, a razor-sharp farce that gloried in the complex nature of its characters. Jaoui's follow-up, the occasionally plodding yet mostly wonderful Look At Me, revels in a series of similarly hard-to-guess Lockhorn pairings, the most intriguing of which involves a monstrously egotistical writer (co-writer Jean-Pierre Bachri, wonderful as a cackling bastard) and his fiercely body-conscious daughter. (The director herself delivers a strong performance as a music teacher enlisted as an initially reluctant shoehorn between the two.) While the potentially hoary themes of self-worth and family foibles will no doubt have the remake police licking their chops, the breezy, hyper-literate vibe, which feels like it could peel out into pathos or screwball comedy at any moment, should prove much less replicable. Jauoi is quickly proving herself as one to keep an eye on, and possibly even more; any filmmaker who can successfully quickdraw between lilting chorals and House of Pain on the soundtrack is potentially one for the vaults. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

A Lot Like Love

The worst thing about this romantic comedy is the torturous dates the two would-be lovers (Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet) go on whenever they meet up. Since they have awful, deadening California lives, they try to recapture their shared, spontaneous Manhattan history (which, by this point in the movie, we also remember fondly) by abandoning all semblance of adult conversation. Nostalgia for the recent past blurs with nostalgia for kindergarten, and the two overgrown babies spend all their time sticking straws up their noses and spitting mouthfuls of water at each other. And when plastic walrus tusks get old, they take long-exposure photographs of themselves embracing naked on a rock in Joshua Tree National Park. They never should have left New York. (ANNIE WAGNER)

Million Dollar Baby

As sappy and Lifetime-y as the plot sounds, Clint Eastwood's skill with the performers keeps Million Dollar Baby afloat. Both Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman deliver graceful turns that mesh perfectly with Eastwood's grave brooding, and by the time the film takes a brutally tragic turn you can't help but find yourself yanked along emotionally. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

Millions

Danny Boyle has crafted a kid-friendly fable with enough sly modern-day relevance to keep adults from checking their watches. An over-imaginative 7-year-old stumbles across a huge bag of loot in the field near his new house, days before the mandatory UK changeover to the euro. While the money initially brings nothing but good fortune, dealing with the newfound stash gets steadily more complicated as the deadline approaches. Teamed again with his 28 Days cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, Boyle successfully maintains a child's eye visual sensibility throughout, in a miraculously noncloying fashion. Every blade of grass is a nuclear Jolly Rancher green, bad guys block out the sun, tract houses quick assemble around the oblivious tenants, and landscapes stretch out for eons. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Palindromes

It's hard to know which facet of Palindromes is the most disquieting. Is it the fable-like atmosphere? Is it the sexual activity of the young girl? Is it the sexual activity of her partners? Is it the funny/sick dramatization of the pro-choice agenda? Is it the funny/sick dramatization of the Christian agenda? The nervous laughter that punctuates every scene? Yes, on all counts. Solondz' gift lies in refusing to flinch at the collision of wild paradoxes. Aviva's options, which Solondz recently characterized as "a pro-choice family that offers no choice at all, and a pro-life family that kills," spell out a hopeless course for a girl who, at bottom, only wants what every kid wants: to be loved unconditionally. To get there, she suffers through all the cant, hypocrisy, and profound loneliness that contemporary life is made of. That the film can envision her journey as a folktale--in which poetic sequences like Aviva trudging with her wheelie suitcase across a glowing field of spinach trade off with the Swiftian satire of the Sunshine family--doesn't diminish its power. On the contrary, it makes the point that the beef between the warring factions of 21st-century America is so irreconcilable as to constitute a kind of fantasy world. (SEAN NELSON)

Sahara

Thankfully, only the barest plot and character elements are held over from Clive Cussler's virtually unreadable doorstop of a novel, which is the kind of tech-heavy, mondo-macho potboiler that stewardesses must get tired of sweeping up after every flight. What still remains: Matthew McConaughey is the wonderfully named Dirk Pitt, a ludicrously rad underwater explorer/rare-car enthusiast/secret agent/master of languages/all-around stud who, along with faithful companion/hetero life partner Steve Zahn, gets caught up in a sinister desert plot involving Civil War battleships, ocean-killing water pollution, toxic waste, slithery French industrialists, feuding generals, and Lord knows what else. McConaughey's THC-saturated, lounge-lizardy persona may be far from the standard Man of Action template, but it adds a wobbly nonchalance to his various acts of over the top derring-do. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela

In just over 80 minutes, the documentary Short Cut to Nirvana, by Maurizio Benazzo and Nick Day, offers what amounts to a snapshot of the infinite. The Kumbh Mela (the largest religious festival in the world) that is documented happened in 2001, and one imagines that the filmmakers' first problem was finding a point to enter it, and then, once inside the spiritual city, locating an exit. The directors were rescued by a young monk, Swami Krishnanand, who wears wire-rimmed glasses and guides them through the gurus and their followers, the musical and theatrical performances, the street dancers, the dust, the heat, the cold, the tents, the religious robots, the Internet kiosks, the babble, chanting, singing, preaching, praying, and the burying of live persons. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

Sin City

To call the film an adaptation is a massive understatement; this isn't a translation, it's a cut-and-paste job, bringing Miller's twisted vision directly to the screen in all its unfiltered glory. The result is one of the most daring and beautifully made films you'll ever see--too bad, then, that it's as thin as the pages the comic was printed on. (BRADLEY STEINBACHER)

The Upside of Anger

Secretly sleazy yuppies, oversexed teens, upscale infighting--as a cinematic subject, the exploration of suburbia's dark underbelly could stand to spend some serious time in the ground. The Upside of Anger makes an all-too-blatant grab for the award-friendly glory road well plowed by the likes of American Beauty and Terms of Endearment, yet is nearly redeemed by a cast that wrings out every last bit of potential from the formula. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

On paper, this documentary about the five-year relationship between a gentle, sporadically homeless hippie with no visible means of support and an unruly flock of birds sounds like a recipe for instant tooth decay. Darned if it doesn't work, though. Despite a few unfortunately syrupy music cues and an occasional drift into the land of the overly cutes, director/photographer Judy Irving's film is a refreshingly nonjudgmental, beautifully shot look at a genuine original, and the San Franciscan community that affectionately supports his decidedly unusual drumbeat. Mild tonal sputtering aside, this word-of-mouth art house phenom is the rare movie that honestly earns its sentimentality, with a Zapruderish photographic reveal in the final act that's seriously the most affecting thing I've seen all year. Stock up on Kleenex and take the folks. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

Winter Solstice

Sundance bait from the word go, Josh Sternfeld's downbeat character study Winter Solstice glories in the moments between conflicts which most films take great pains to dispose of. Flashy it certainly ain't, but there's no discounting the value of a decent story well told, especially these days. Set in a sleepy Jersey suburb, the narrative centers on widowed landscaper Jim Winters (Anthony LaPaglia, whose character's surname thankfully represents the movie's one and only case of the cutes). With one son straining to leave the coop and head to Florida, and another seemingly content to spend the rest of his days languishing in summer school, he strikes up a tentative romance with a housesitter down the block (the always welcome Allison Janney). Nothing much else happens, which is probably both the film's greatest strength and commercial weakness. (ANDREW WRIGHT)

XXX: State of the Union

Ice Cube takes over for Vin Diesel as a special agent, blah, blah, blah, nation's capital, blah, blah, blah, BOOM.