dir. Douglas McGrathDirected by Douglas McGrath--who has appeared in several Woody Allen films and who cowrote Bullets Over Broadway--this adaptation of Charles Dickens' 800-page novel Nicholas Nickleby is simply entertaining. This is the substance of the film: It has funny moments, dramatic moments, Victorian costumes, and convincing street scenes of bustling 19th-century London; the English is often proper and lyrical; there are jocular people, loathsome people, and loving people, and their world is filled to the brim with pleasant music. As I've never read the book (and don't intend to), I can't determine what was removed and what was preserved in this adaptation, or know how such changes affected the original content or purpose of the story. Nevertheless, at times the film does feel a bit rushed. But this is not entirely a bad thing; a slower version of this film would certainly have been more painful than the present hurried one. Besides, the fastish pace captures a sense of the general giddiness of the time--the excitement and uncertainty of a period that should be called the Birth of Everything: the arrival of impersonal crimes, mass consumption, fluid urban realities and experiences, the raw exploitation of the newly industrialized poor, and so on. It's all here, packed a little uncomfortably into two hours of film time. CHARLES MUDEDE

Two Weeks Notice

dir. Marc Lawrence

Now playing at various theaters.Everyone says I take after my dad, but unlike that sweet-hearted man, I have, on several occasions, found the steel to detest a romantic comedy here and there. Last Christmas as Kate & Leopold came to a close, I caught my pops sniffling while I was concealing gag fits of vitriol. So when I walked into the theater to watch the non-chemistry of Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant try to make an audience weep with happiness in Two Weeks Notice, I was absolutely positive my shell could not be cracked. Well, I didn't cry, but I'm still ashamed to admit that I actually liked Two Weeks Notice, mostly because there is no "rescuing" going on in the movie--just a rich guy and a dedicated lawyer trying like hell not to fall in love with each other. If that's some form of rescuing, so be it. I'm going to call my dad and discuss. KATHLEEN WILSON

Beauty and the Beast

dir. Jean Cocteau

Fri Jan 3-Thurs Jan 9 at the Grand Illusion.Before this fairy tale was bludgeoned into mediocre musical whimsy by the hacks and whores of Walt Disney Studios, it inspired a film of conspicuous beauty and ambivalent uplift from the pan-talented artist Jean Cocteau. In Disney's version, the story of a monster ennobled by the love of a fair maiden is all computer-graphic surfaces and obvious transformations, with a clear-cut message that ugliness can be redeemed by the grace of beauty. For Cocteau, a sensualist with surreal sensibilities, the story of the Beast's gradual taming is packed with fragile ironies that float through its fairy-tale landscape like the strands of a spider web. The Beast's nobility is part and parcel with his gruesomeness, and the love to which his Beauty eventually yields brings with it questions of sacrifice and compromise that contemporary fables have entirely forgotten how to grapple with. Cocteau's story is tied up in the Beast's searing, defining agony--the agony of displacement, and of humanity locked behind a disfigured façade. The climactic transformation, in which we finally see the handsome face of Jean Marais (Cocteau's lover) alongside the angelic Josette Day, registers as a loss just as much as a romantic triumph. It's hokey to say that we too have fallen in love with the Beast, but that hokiness doesn't keep us from feeling haunted by the palpable swoon of this gorgeous piece of filmmaking. In French, with subtitles, naturellement. SEAN NELSON

Intacto

dir. Juan Carlos FresnadilloI'm not sure whether Intacto was enigmatic or just confusing, but the film is shot with such panache that I didn't care a whit. The story follows Tomás (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the sole survivor of an airplane crash. He learns from the mysterious Federico (Eusebio Poncela) that he has "the gift"--and is impervious to the laws of probability.

Writer/director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo wants to work out all the implications of his clever plot device. Many of the twists, however, seem arbitrary rather than deep.

Sometimes they succeed, though, particularly with the character of Samuel (Max von Sydow), the luckiest man of all, who embodies the idea that to cheat death is also to be cheated of life.

The "Huh?" moments don't matter much, because the film is a gripping exercise in visual style. The quick cuts make for more than the usual seizure-inducing mush; instead, like a great comic book, each frame sucks you deeper into the story. After the plane crash, the camera pulls back from Tomás' face to reveal the wreckage around him. His character's journey, the emotional reality of the moment, and the movie's theme come together in a single image, and that's what movies are all about. MATT FONTAINE

Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser

dir. Charlotte Zwerin

Wed Jan 8 at the Experience Music Project.Even though I have very little time in my life for jazz, that aesthetic graveyard of American musical expression and mausoleum of the intelligentsia, I will always have time for Thelonious Monk. This 1989 documentary about the great jazz piano innovator features lots of interviews with fellow musicians, family members, and admirers--in addition to copious scratchy black-and-white archival footage of Monk himself, playing in smoky jazz bars, spinning around in circles, and generally running rings around his contemporaries (and fans). As a player and a composer, Monk was untouchable. As a man, he was defiant, inscrutable, fun-loving, and troubled. As a documentary subject, he's positively stunning. SEAN NELSON