Continuing

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE

Michael Moore has deliberately taken on a subject -- the American propensity for violence -- that can’t be explained, just to see how close to the impossible he can get. Bowling begins, of course, with our fondness for guns, but Moore pushes past that answer, pointing fingers at retailers who offer cut-rate ammunition, at racial and economic disparities, and at a media that makes it seem like we’re more violent than we actually are..--S.A. (Roxy)

BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE

Lonely, depressed tax lawyer Steve Martin meets witty, well-read "lawyer girl" in a chat room. How surprised he is when she arrives on his doorstep: Boisterous ex-con (and executive producer) Queen Latifah wants him to help her clear her record of the felony burglary for which she was framed. And how unsurprised you are that she teaches this uptight white man to shake his booty, open up to his two kids, lust after his ex (Jean Smart) and even outsmart Latifah’s thuggish ex (Steve Harris). The broad comedy derives from standard class and race frictions, helped along by Martin’s neighbor, Betty White (fearful of "Negroes") and his no. 1 client, Joan Plowright (fond of plantation songs that remind her of childhood servants). Latifah is delightful, and as the man who wisely falls in love with her on first meeting, Eugene Levy brings a welcome dryness to the otherwise predictably soppy proceedings.--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Narberth; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

CHICAGO

Set in Depression-era, tabloid-driven Chi, Chicago splits off Kander and Ebb’s cracking songs from the rest of the story, setting them in a fantasy nightclub space that is interwoven with the real-life setting. Following in Stanley Donen’s footsteps, Rob Marshall is a choreographer turned director, and the movie’s dance sequences fall together like little bits of magic, though the faux-retro salaciousness sometimes comes off more Broadway crass than le jazz hot (and Catherine Zeta-Jones is too hippy for her high-cut costumes). Zellweger, though, proves to be an honest-to-goodness triple threat; while hardly a belter, she finds her way into Roxie’s go-getter bite, and she’s as light on her feet as any good comic actress. Who knew, what’s more, that Richard Gere had been hiding a mean lyric tenor all these years? Chicago may not rank with the classics, but it’s the best traditional movie musical in many a moon. --S.A. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Grant)

THE CORE

I know I’ve said this about other films, but this time it’s literally true: The Core is deeply ludicrous. First, you’ve got to get your head around the idea that the outer core of the Earth is spinning, and if it happens to stop -- which it totally could -- we’re all in deep doodoo: our planet’s magnetic field will start to disappear, and then it’s nothing but massive lightning storms selectively destroying famous cities and microwave radiation from the sun frying us in our cars and melting iconic bridges. That’s just great. Don’t we have enough to worry about these days? But never fear: If that happens, Hilary Swank and Aaron Eckhart will lead a team of actor/scientists deep below the surface to recreate all of your favorite scenes from all of your favorite spaceship/submarine/save-the-world movies. They will speak the scientific jargon of our times ("nuke-yu-ler"). They will call magma "lava." They will believe that one is a prime number, and that two isn’t. They will get out and walk around 1000 miles below the surface in magic spacesuits that protect them from being crushed by the weight of the Earth. Jules Verne’s version with the lakes and the dinosaurs is actually more plausible (and infinitely more entertaining), and doesn’t plumb such idiotic depths.--Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.)

DIVINE INTERVENTION

Elia Suleiman’s breathtaking film is a work of apocalyptic vaudeville, a series of blackout sketches depiciting life in occupied Palestine. Angry, funny, poetic and profound, Divine Intervention is, as its subtitle has it, "A chronicle of love and pain," less a bulletin from the front lines than a cri de coeur. The film’s intricate structure, the way the seemingly disparate anecdotes fit together, only really becomes visible on a second viewing, but its pleasures and provocations are immediate. From a Nazarene who compulsively destroys the repairs Israeli road crews make to the street outside his house to an Israeli policemen who pulls a Palestinian prisoner from the back of his van to give directions to a wayward tourist, the film is fiercely intelligent and unapologetic. It undercuts its flirtations with dogma with the image of Suleiman himself, who appears as a stone-faced, sad-eyed character whose unvoiced troubles color his cartoonishly violent revenge fantasies. Practically without precedent and currently without equal, Divine Intervention deserves a spot in the history it both reflects and rewrites.--S.A.(Ritz at the Bourse)

DREAMCATCHER

From a Lawrence Kasdan adaptation of a Stephen King novel there’s every reason to expect sophisticated, character-rooted scares: i.e., The Very Big Chills. Dreamcatcher, however, is only horrifying in its incomprehensibility, which stems from its need to be at least six different movies simultaneously. Four lifelong friends make their annual trip to a remote Maine cabin as a snowstorm looms. They’re psychic, thanks to a Stand By Me-esque flashback wherein they befriend an otherworldly simpleton. Then they start running into people in the woods who have nasty space eels exploding out of their butts. So far, so good, actually; credit John Seale’s luminous, spooky cinematography. But then Jonesy (Damian Lewis) gets possessed by the head eel and starts having Gollum-style conversations with himself. Then Morgan Freeman shows up as a psychotic special-ops alienbuster named Colonel Kurtz -- the horror! And then, is that really Tom Sizemore and Donnie Wahlberg trying to save the world? God help us all if it comes to that. If you sit through the whole too-short-to-be-lucid, too-long-to-be-tolerable movie, you’ve earned the right to see the attached one-reeler The Final Flight of the Osiris, a sexy, high-octane animated rehash of scenarios from the first Matrix movie, sans Neo, Morpheus and Trinity. Also, there is still no spoon.--Ryan Godfrey (AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Bridge; Roxy; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.)

FRIDA

The innovative melding of art and biography grants Taymor’s film -- written by Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, and based on a biography by Hayden Herrera -- an uncanny and welcome grace. It’s well known that Frida (played by Salma Hayek) suffered mightily and throughout her life, emotionally, spiritually and physically: a 1925 trolley wreck breaks her back and leaves her in a body cast for years. This pain became the primary source of her art (her many self-portraits are her most famous legacy) as well as a dreadful, inevitable focus. Throughout Frida’s recovery, her photographer father (Roger Rees) dotes on her, while her mother (Patricia Reyes Spíndola) frets that her chance for proper marriage is over. This standard parental divide more or less sets up Frida’s lifelong investment in genderfuck: She rejects expectations that girls should stay home and cook, throwing herself into her painting and politics (she and her husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) were dedicated Communists) with bracing enthusiasm.--C.F. (Bryn Mawr)

HEAD OF STATE

From its start -- Nate Dogg in front of Mount Rushmore flanked by dancing white girls dressed in skimpy red, white and blue -- Chris Rock’s crossover dream is obvious and derivative. (Lumpy white people fo-shizzling is tired already.) Picked by party regulars to lose a race for president, D.C. alderman Rock shakes things up by running a hip-hop campaign and naming his bail bondsman brother (Bernie Mac) as his running mate. He encourages poor folks to get mad ("That ain’t right" becomes his slogan, set off against his opponent’s "God bless America, and no place else!"), flirts with adorable Tamala Jones and impresses his ostensible handlers (Dylan Baker and Lynn Whitfield) and snooty white folks with slang and song (Nelly, Jay-Z, DMX). Written by Rock and longtime collaborator Ali LeRoi, the movie is bogged down by predictable, easy jokes, so that the political points (racism is everywhere, CEOs get away with murders, kids need to get "knocked out!") look weaker than they are.--Cindy Fuchs. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Bryn Mawr; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.)

THE HOURS

Essentially three separate films, The Hoursopens on the suicide of Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), in the London suburb of Richmond, 1941. From here the film cuts back in time, to 1923, as Woolf is writing Mrs. Dalloway, visiting with her sister, Vanessa Bell (Miranda Richardson) and confronting her own evolving madness. The second story takes place in 1951 Los Angeles, where housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is reading Mrs. Dalloway and facing doubts about her marriage to gentle Dan (John C. Reilly).The third piece, set in 2001 Manhattan, follows Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) as she puts together a party for ex-lover Richard (Ed Harris), a novelist now dying of AIDS-related illness.--C.F. (Bala; Ritz 16)

THE HUNTED

Benicio Del Toro looks appropriately haunted as a hyper-trained military assassin who loses his bearings when he slices open one too many gullets. (This one belongs to a Serbian commander who has just ordered his unit to slaughter a village, so Del Toro looks like he’s doing a right thing.) When he starts killing deer hunters in Oregon, the FBI, represented by Connie Nielsen, calls in renowned deep-woods tracker and assassin trainer Tommy Lee Jones, who happens to be Del Toro’s instructor/father figure. (The movie quotes the story of Abraham’s sacrifice repeatedly.) From here William Friedkin’s movie, which begins as an indictment of turning men into killing machines, itself transforms into Rambo meets The Fugitive, and becomes more ridiculous by the minute. Reportedly, an early script had the Del Toro character camouflaging himself in downtown Portland, so that he could stand against a wall and seem invisible. Unfortunately, this sounds almost sane compared to what ended up on screen: impossible changes in location, noticeably incoherent editing, and a white wolf, befriended by Jones out in the snowy boonies, that represents freedom, individual will, perseverance, etc.--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Main St.; Ritz 16)

NOWHERE IN AFRICA

The winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film, German director Caroline Link’s adaptation of Stefanie Zweig’s autobiographical novel is careful, elegiac and occasionally self-important. Still, its focus on a young girl’s understanding of traumatic events lends it an admirably narrow focus, set against a huge backdrop. A family of German Jews -- idealistic father Merab Ninidze, pampered mother Juliane Köhler, and spunky, open-hearted daughter Regina (played as a child by Lea Kurka and as a teen by Karoline Eckertz) -- flee Germany in 1938, leaving behind family, friends and dad’s career as a lawyer. In Kenya, he works someone else’s farm with a crew of black workers whom he respects; his wife, meanwhile, resents her classed descent and makes him pay by withholding sex. Regina takes immediately to her new home, befriending their loyal cook, Owuor (Sidede Onyulo), and adapting to local customs and beliefs. While her parents struggle to keep their marriage together and come to understand their own prejudices (sort of), she looks back wistfully (for 138 minutes), as an adult narrator, able to see details they missed. Her sad but youthfully hopeful story forms the basis for a Holocaust film that doesn’t show the Holocaust.--C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

THE PIANIST

A Polish Jew hiding from the Nazis in Warsaw, sometimes looked after by friendly non-Jews, Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), the titular artist, is near starving, his hair hanging in clumps off his skull, his skin pale and gray. Commanded to play something by a German officer (Thomas Kretschmann), he’s playing for his life, but it’s difficult to know exactly what that life might mean now. Yet Szpilman will survive this encounter. You know this because Roman Polanski’s film is based on his memoirs (published in 1946). Opening in September 1939, The Pianist introduces the young artist as he is playing, refusing to acknowledge that life is already changed forever, that the Germans had invaded weeks before. Tragically, Szpilman and his family stay in their apartment; they can’t quite act. And so they wait, until they too are moved to a barracks, and then taken to a camp. The film mostly takes Szpilman’s view, showing the atrocities he sees; Polanksi and cinematographer Pawel Edelman hardly linger on any of these images. Finally forced to evacuate, Szpilman spends the rest of the film keeping out of sight. While the "action," such as it is, now decreases, the film becomes almost unbearably acute, approximating the man’s psychic state, his process of internalization. This attenuation -- Szpilman’s diminished view, his simultaneous dread of seeing and need to see -- is The Pianist’s most startling effect. Brody’s physical and emotional reduction is part of it, but even more extraordinary is the paring away of the film’s self-image, its presumed capacity to elucidate and illustrate. The Pianist attends to the senses in ways that grander pictures cannot.--C.F. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

PIGLET’S BIG MOVIE

(Not reviewed.) A haiku:

Pooh's porcine pal must

have some fun and save his friends.

Stars Sandra Bullock.

(AMC Orleans; UA Grant)

THE QUIET AMERICAN

Phillip Noyce’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s avowedly "anti-American" novel makes the political personal, collapsing a pivotal moment in the history of American involvement in Vietnam into the story of two men battling over a woman. Fowler (Michael Caine) is a British journalist who’s living the good life in 1952 Saigon until Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) walks into the picture. Fowler starts to see a darker side to Pyle when he introduces him to the beautiful Phuong (The Vertical Ray of the Sun’s Do Thi Hai Yen), who’s been Fowler’s girlfriend for the last two years. Pyle seizes on the fact that Fowler cannot get a divorce from his long-estranged English wife and begins to woo Phuong, always in the name of what’s best for her, but ruthlessly all the same. However, Greene’s love-triangle allegory is so overwhelming, however, that the film loses sight of the larger questions it makes signs of addressing. We’re stuck looking through Fowler’s eyes, never getting a sense of what life was like for the Vietnamese, any more than, for all the arguing Fowler and Pyle do over what’s best for Phuong, we get a chance to hear her own thoughts on the subject.--S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

SPUN

The first feature from music video director Jonas Åkerlund (Madonna’s "Music," Metallica’s "Turn the Page") all but begs you to hate it, opening with a frenetic scene of meth addicts in action, every movement splintered into its component parts and reassembled in the most eye-grabbing fashion. (Literally: The film actually devises an effect for the sound of eyes swiveling rapidly in their sockets.) But despite a few genuinely nasty moments -- speed freak Ross (Jason Schwartzman) cuffing his stripper girlfriend to the bed, then duct taping her eyes and mouth while he runs errands shoots to the top of that list -- Spun is stupidly likeable, as must any movie be that features John Leguizamo jumping around the house in nothing but a sock. Don’t get me wrong: Brittany Murphy should still be taken out back and shot, and they can throw Eric Roberts (whose lisping caricature of a gay drug lord is too clumsy to be offensive) on the pile for good measure. But at heart, Spun can’t be as nasty as it wants to be -- it’s certainly not as loathsome as The Acid House -- and its failure turns out to be a good thing.--S.A. (Ritz Five)

TALK TO HER

It’s notable that Michael Cunningham’s The Hours shows up on a bedside table in Pedro Almodóvar’s newest movie, because in a way, it more fully seizes the notion of improbable emotional connections than the novel’s upcoming movie adaptation. The plot takes so many turns, it’s unfair to reveal too much, but its basis is the relationship that develops between two men -- Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Marco (Darío Grandinetti) -- who are both attached to comatose women, the former professionally, the latter romantically. In fact, they first connect while watching a dance performance, when Benigno notices Marco tearing up, and it’s a key clue to Almodóvar’s real subject: the way fictions, either those created for us or the ones we create ourselves, fill the gaps between people, for good or for ill. Repeatedly making nods to other types of art -- including a mesmerizing silent-film interlude, filmed by the director, which is transportingly beautiful but hides a sinister meaning -- Talk to Her perhaps spreads itself too thin, but it’s a movie about passions, so if they overrun, it’s almost appropriate.--S.A. (Ritz Five)

VIEW FROM THE TOP

Bruno Barreto’s romantic romp puts Gwyneth Paltrow, Kelly Preston and Christina Applegate in tight, short flight attendant uniforms and then pitches the plane about so they scramble and skitter. Problems in the film start early: Paltrow’s cast as a Nevada trailer girl who aspires to the Paris--New York run, emulating celebrity author stew Candice Bergen and learning all she needs to know from cock-eyed stew trainer Mike Myers (whose rowdy, big-dimension performance looks like it’s in another movie). When Paltrow falls in love with perfect, sensitive lawyer Mark Ruffalo (who also has a loving and supportive family), she believes she can’t fly and commit at the same time. The movie pokes along until she figures out she has other options. She’s either really slow on the uptake or stuck in a time warp. Come to think of it, those plane pitches do resemble old Star Trek episodes.--Cindy Fuchs (Baederwood; Ritz 16; UA Grant)

WILLARD

The ghost of the original Willard looms literally over James Wong and Glen Morgan’s remake, in the form of a portrait of Bruce Davison, star of the 1971 original. Here, though, he’s only a painting of the deceased father of Willard Stiles (Crispin Glover), a hyperbolically maladjusted (not-so) young man with a fashion sense tending towards the funereal. Harangued by his mother, abused by his boss (R. Lee Ermey, with a James Traficant ’do), Willard has no one to turn to, until he strikes up a friendship with the rats in his basement, who repay his friendship by doing his bidding, with increasingly toothsome results. Morgan and Wong, the X-Files team who also helmed Final Destination, show real skill with details, from the red-rimmed, ratlike eyes of Willard’s decrepit mother to the determination with which Willard initially seeks out rat traps that won’t force him to confront their dead bodies. (If you think his unwillingness to get his hands dirty at this point is suggestive, just wait until he turns to "Tora Bora Rodent Destroya.") But if the details are right, the devil is elsewhere, namely with Glover, who starts off acting so crazy that you forget it’s supposed to mean something when his character actually does go nuts. The movie is heavy with references, from a massacre scored to the theme from Ben to several blatant lifts from Psycho -- so heavy, in fact, that it starts to occur to you that it’s never going to take off on its own. Hampered by a rushed and incoherent climax, Willard starts much more promisingly than you’d think, and ends just about as you’d expect.--S.A. (Cinemagic; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham)

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