The Promise

dir. Chen Kaige

So far there are four martial-art films made by art-house Asian directors: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hero; House of Flying Daggers; and now, The Promise. The best of this growing group is Hero (directed by Zhang Yimou, photographed by Christopher Doyle), and the worst is House of Flying Daggers (also directed by Zhang, but not photographed by Doyle). The latest is The Promise (directed by Chen Kaige). The Promise is Chen's 10th film in a career that began in 1984 and peaked in 1993 with Farewell My Concubine, a film that (along with Zhang's Raise the Red Lantern) introduced the world to China's fifth generation of filmmakers.

Conceived and written by Chen, The Promise is set in the very distant past in a country that was at once Heaven and Earth. The gods were not in another world, or in the sky, but here on the ground—on the mountains, in the cities, in the palaces—with the mortals. And on a daily basis, humans saw things that were amazing—soldiers fighting on water, ancient men flying through the sky like birds. There were evil kings, princesses whose beauty could ruin entire empires, and assassins with swords made of pure gold. From this thick mythic ether, the story of The Promise takes its shape: There is a slave (Jang Dong-Kun) who can run like action hero Flash, a duke (Hiroyuki Sanada) who has killed more men than he can remember, and a princess (Cecilia Cheung) whose skin is the color of freshly fallen snow. Fate brings them together and fate tears their world apart.

The film is gorgeous, with tons of wire work, and Chen, like the Hong Kong director Tsui Hark, uses CGI special effects with no hesitance. The future of Chinese cinema is in ancient martial-art films. CHARLES MUDEDE

Read Charles Mudede's interview with Chen Kaige.

La Mujer de Mi Hermano

dir. Ricardo de Montreuil

Think of an incredibly beautiful woman. Call her Zoë. Think of her classically handsome husband, a finance executive—ripped, bespectacled, fussy, laconic, a fan of Bach, a reader of the Economist. Call him Ignacio. Ignacio, like all good attractive people, has a brother. His brother is also sexy and ripped, but swarthier than Ignacio, with three days' stubble, bolder hair, more passion, and a painting career. Let's call him Gonzalo, since that's his name in La Mujer de Mi Hermano, which translates to My Brother's Wife. Gonzalo seduces Zoë, which any man in his right mind would do (I would sleep with Zoë and I'm gay); Zoë is game. Gonzalo is hot and Zoë's marriage to Ignacio—well, Zoë and Ignacio only have sex on Saturdays. Guess who else is (secretly) gay.

The movie works because these three actors (Bárbara Mori as Zoë, Christian Meier as Ignacio, Manolo Cardona as Gonzalo) are so slammin' hot it seems plain that all they'd want to do is undress one another. All the self-entitlement at work is depressing—she and he feel like they can sleep together because her husband doesn't bang her enough, he feels like he doesn't have to sleep with his wife if it's not Saturday—and nothing is more emblematic of self-entitlement than the big, modern house that Ignacio and Zoë seem bored by. Substantively, the movie is weak, but it's entrancing. Like a superficial fling, La Mujer de mi Hermano is all texture: brushed steel, warm lights, white curtains, thick lips, cigarette smoke, high-thread-count sheets, swimming-pool water, ambient music. In one shot, Zoë and Gonzalo kiss out of focus. In focus, in the foreground, is a swooping edge of furniture, upholstered in textured tan, trimmed with metal studs. Oh, rich people and their problems. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

One Last Thing...

dir. Alex Steyermark

Okay. I'm going to tell you about this movie, One Last Thing..., and you're going to roll your eyes and say it sounds like the stupidest "coming-of-age/dying boy teaches fucked-up girl an important life lesson" piece of shit ever. It's not, though, I promise. Well, it sorta is. But not completely. Jesus, just bear with me, will you?

So there's this kid, Dylan, and his 16-year old body is growing a tumor big enough to shut down his whole system. Awesome. Because he's dying, he gets to make one wish. He was going to go fishing with a football superstar, but because he's a horny 16-year-old boy, he instead decides to ask for a weekend with the nation's hottest (and most fucked-up) supermodel.

She's an alcoholic, she's a bitch—she's completely ruining her career. So how wonderful that the otherwise vapid whore decides to make a dying kid's wish come true by taking full advantage of this possible career-saving photo op. She shows up for five minutes, shakes his hand, gives him a coy hug, and then bolts. What a fucker. Cancer kid ain't giving up yet, though. His dead dad told him to go after the woman you love, so he takes his sick ass and his horny friends to New York to find the girl.

Traveling as a quasi-celebrity in the big city (word travels when you're a dying teenager who asks to boink a supermodel), he sees a lot of good times—then cancer starts to win and it turns into puking, nose bleeds, and passing out. Just as you start to lose hope, though... Well, that's when the fire alarm went off in the theater during the screening. One Last Thing... wasn't bad; until that point, it was actually sorta funny. And the kid, a bit cynical and packing a "laugh in the face of death" attitude, was charming. Anyway, I could've stuck around to try to get back into the theater and see how it ends, but don't we all know how it's gonna end? I think we do. MEGAN SELING

Commune

dir. Jonathan Berman

For a documentary about the '60s counterculture, Commune plays it too straight. Hundreds of people lived, at one time or another, on the remote Black Bear Ranch Commune in Siskiyou County, California, which was founded in 1968 by an artist named Elsa Marley and funded in large part by rock stars of her acquaintance. There are, obviously, hundreds of stories that could be told about the settlement, some rather dull (getting along with people is hard! promiscuous sex isn't as easy as it looks!) and some darkly interesting (what happens when kids are raised by a flock of thoroughly distracted guardians?). Director Jonathan Berman spends a lot of time with the aging hippies, who look back on their time on the ranch with nostalgia and mild regret. But the real story here isn't warm or touchy-feely. In fact, it's sensationally weird. The feral kids at Black Bear Ranch were like a "tribe," one of its now-grown members recalls, and like the children in Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," they were often entrusted with big decisions they weren't equipped to make. When a little girl named Tesilya is asked whether she wants to leave the commune with a child-worshipping cult called the Shiva Lila (her mother is a member), she says yes. Essentially she is kidnapped. It's a mind-blowing episode, and in Berman's big-picture documentary, it gets glossed over too fast. ANNIE WAGNER

Hoot

dir. Wil Shriner

Hoot, based on the novel by Carl Hiaasen, is a movie about evil pancakes, tiny endangered subterranean owls, and a shoeless teenage environmentalist vigilante named Mullet Fingers. It glides along on a laidback soundtrack by Jimmy Buffett—who also produced, and stars as a beclogged hippie science teacher. Luke Wilson rides around in a tiny car. The whole thing is even weirder and less interesting than it sounds.

Roy Eberhardt (Logan Lerman) just can't catch a break. His dad's itinerant Justice Department job has bounced him through six different schools in eight years, and now he's forced to move again—this time to Coconut Cove, Florida, land of majestic eagles, fat rednecks, and miles of green swampy stuff. Almost immediately, Roy falls in with a pair of misfits—Beatrice the Bear, who's actually a hot girl, and her brother, the aforementioned Mullet Fingers—and their desperate crusade against the insidious Mother Paula's Pancake House.

You see, Mother Paula's is planning to open a franchise right there in Coconut Cove (bringing "over 12 new jobs!" says Mayor Robert Wagner), but oops! Their proposed building site is the nesting ground for hundreds of tiny hole-dwelling baby owls. If all goes as planned, the owls will be bulldozed and the soil will ooze red with their adorable, fluffy blood.

Roy—the Martin Luther King Jr. of baby-owl liberation to Mullet Fingers' Malcolm X (Mullet Fingers advocates property destruction and sacks full of poisonous snakes!)—saves the day, of course. But one can't help thinking that the filmmakers missed an obvious point—which is that pancakes are delicious, but a baby owl in a hole is just a dumb baby owl sitting in a fucking hole. Mmmmm, pancakes. LINDY WEST