The New World

dir. Terrence Malick

The idea that Terrence Malick was going to tackle the story of John Smith and Pocahontas was, I have to admit, disquieting. It's one thing to aestheticize war (The Thin Red Line) and serial killings (Badlands), events that everyone knows in advance to be cruel; or to prettify a story of Biblical proportions (Days of Heaven). But giving the beauty treatment to a historical moment that's already been simplified and flattened by everyone from your elementary school teacher to Walt Disney Pictures—what exactly is the point?

Malick's The New World is indeed epic in length (the version I saw was 16 minutes longer than the one that's being released, but the film is still over two hours long) and meticulously idealized. After an opening invocation in the reconstructed Algonquin language, which is translated, the film abruptly shoves you into a Western perspective. The English is mostly modern, while the tribal tongue is unsubtitled; we're left to read the gorgeous Virginia scenery instead of human speech. Q'orianka Kilcher, a 14-year-old beauty who looks far older than—though exactly as naive as—her age would suggest, plays Pocahontas as a child attracted to John Smith (Colin Farrell) through a chaste but insatiable curiosity. (The actual Pocahontas was probably 10 or 11 when they met.) Farrell is more opaque. It's hard to tell whether he's transfixed by this persistent girl or merely bewildered. And when he freaks out and leaves Jamestown, your sympathy for Pocahontas feels more like pity for an abandoned child than identification with an adult woman.

But for every simple metaphor about virgin soil, for every beatific smile, there's a moment where the story overflows its boundaries: It's weird and great to see a film waste so many ecstatic scenes on a love story that will be displaced halfway through by another relationship. ANNIE WAGNER

Following Sean

dir. Ralph Arlyck

Joan Didion's all-time masterpiece, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," ends with the indelible scene of a San Francisco hippie family acknowledging that they fed LSD to their young child. Of all the weary metaphors for the death of the '60s dream, Didion's psychedelic toddler remains the saddest and most eloquent. True to form, the masterful essayist never comments on the tragic lapse of parental judgment, nor on its broader significance, nor on the looming despair it portends. She just observes it, documents it, and gets out of the way.

Ralph Arlyck's Following Sean begins with another late-'60s San Francisco hippie kid, this time a precocious four-year-old whose family lived in the apartment upstairs when Arlyck was a hungry film student. His 1968 interview documentary, Sean, was a film-fest circuit rider, gaining notoriety for its Didionistic portrayal of a child en route to waywardness (wee Sean claims to both smoke and eat "grass," knows how to spot a speed freak, says "shit," and never wears shoes). Thirty years later, Arlyck goes back to SF, curious to see whatever became of his young subject. Unfortunately, he seems far less interested in actually following Sean than in using him as a lens through which to regard his own navel.

Grown-up Sean is an electrical worker who doesn't seem terribly damaged by his parents' free-loving ways, except inasmuch as he likes to shoot guns in the woods and has developed a work ethic that baffles his dropout father. Though he seems like a good guy, we never really get close to him. That's because the filmmaker is too busy expounding upon his own marriage, his kids (who obviously can't stand being filmed), his artistic impulses, his comparatively straitlaced family, the Haight in '68, the difference between observing and living, and blah blah blah midlife crisis.

Frankly, I'd rather see a little kid take acid. SEAN NELSON

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World

dir. Albert Brooks

Finding Nemo may have won him a legion of gentle-minded fans, but Albert Brooks first cemented his rep with a series of films (Modern Romance, Lost in America, and especially Real Life, which absolutely pasted the reality-TV boom some two decades before the latter's inception) in which the writer/director delivered an unbeatable combination of cerebral musings and broad slapstick, all focused through the exquisitely assholish prism of his onscreen persona. Not for nothing did notorious misanthrope Stanley Kubrick publicly express his admiration. Then the '90s happened, and Brooks went puzzlingly mushy, with projects like Mother revealing a newfound craving for redemption in his characters.

Beginning with a gratuitously nasty dig at his recent work, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, Brooks's first directorial effort since 1999's The Muse, finds his kvetching, nattering persona back in force. Brooks plays, well, Albert Brooks, an underemployed actor who is enlisted by the government to deliver a 500-page report on the Muslim sense of humor. Flying coach to India and Pakistan, he promptly proceeds to drive U.S. foreign relations back to the Stone Age.

The loose (verging on shambling) structure of the film allows Brooks to hit a variety of high and low comedic targets, aided by a game supporting cast, especially the luminous Sheetal Sheth as his Hindi assistant. Ultimately, though, everything else pales before the star's genius for galactic egotism. A sequence where he bombs in front of an uncomprehending Indian audience with his already-meta comedy routine works on about 17 levels at once, each more squirmy than the last. When it comes to hysterical self-laceration, Larry David ain't got nothing on Brooks. ANDREW WRIGHT