Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:31:45 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Movies :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/movies istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/around-the-world-and-back/86634/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The noncompetitive, keenly curated New York Film Festival, which begins its two-week run Friday, is neither a far-ranging marketplace nor a prelude to an awards night. Therefore, it's tempting to look upon what is, by the increasingly popular "more is more" programming standards of Cannes, Toronto, Sundance, and Tribeca, a comparatively small slate of 28 contemporary features as a reliable bellwether of global cinematic trends. In the four decades since its creation, Lincoln Center's autumn... Associated Press http://www.nysun.com/obituaries/paul-newman-actor-succumbs-to-cancer-at-83/86722/ Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:14:24 EST WESTPORT, Conn. — Paul Newman, the Academy-Award winning superstar who personified cool as an activist, race car driver, popcorn impresario, and the anti-hero of such films as "Hud," "Cool Hand Luke" and "The Color of Money," has died. He was 83. Newman died yesterday after a long battle with cancer at his farmhouse near Westport, his publicist, Jeff Sanderson, said. He was surrounded by his family and close friends. In May, Newman he had dropped plans to direct a fall production of "Of Mice... NICOLAS RAPOLD http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-british-artist-plumbs-the-politics-of-hunger/86653/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST 'Full-bodied cinema" is one way of describing "Hunger," the extraordinary debut feature by the British artist Steve McQueen that will screen this weekend at the New York Film Festival. Often grueling but never gratuitous, the film relives the incarceration of members of the Irish Republican Army in the infamous Maze prison near Belfast, specifically the 1981 hunger strike led by Bobby Sands until his death. The immersive film, full of sensual texture and finely isolated detail, is at once... STEVE DOLLAR http://www.nysun.com/arts/barbet-schroeder-cant-be-killed/86654/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Even though his retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's BAMcinématek alludes to his "mad obsessions," Barbet Schroeder seems entirely measured and sensible. The affable and erudite Iranian filmmaker acts more like a wily anthropologist, irresistibly drawn into the unruly thicket of human nature, eyes wide open, unsure of exactly what he will find. "I take reasonable risks," the 67-year-old Mr. Schroeder said. "I know it looks crazy." Film history marks him as a key player in the French... S. JAMES SNYDER http://www.nysun.com/arts/choke-hard-to-swallow/86642/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST We keep waiting for "Choke" to up the ante, to elevate its crude antics into some kind of ethos. Instead, the story keeps asking us to search an emotional vacuum for hints of humanity that simply are not there. It's almost as if first-time director Clark Gregg failed to sit down with his cast and discuss the tone of the project. As the movie reaches for loony absurdity, the actors play their caricatures with gusto and conviction. Considering the peculiar particulars of the plot, "Choke," which... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/eagle-eye-let-it-go-to-voicemail/86639/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST If one is inclined to entertain the notion of hurling one's cell phone into traffic, immersing it in water, or doing whatever else it takes to make it stop delivering bad news, garbled messages, and unsolicited contact from without, "Eagle Eye," a new thriller from Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks creative brain trust, may be just the ticket. Within the first reel, slacker Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf) gets drawn and quartered by his phone. First, a voice belonging to Jerry's mother delivers the worst... S. JAMES SNYDER http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-lucky-ones-nothing-salves-the-soul-like/86644/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST There are so many untold stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that the intentional implausibility of "The Lucky Ones" is truly cause for concern. Have we already given up on trying to transmit any shred of reality to the big screen? Is this all we have left to expect from our filmmakers — the ongoing wars reduced to prologue, used solely to add an air of gravitas to the most routine Hollywood melodrama? Screenwriters Dirk Wittenborn and Neil Burger (the writer and director of the... STEVE DOLLAR http://www.nysun.com/arts/nights-in-rodanthe-contrived-hollywood-archetype/86645/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Nicolas Sparks is the Stephen King of the mush-brained romantic novel and, like the prolific schlockmeister of "Carrie," "Pet Sematary," and "The Stand," the author has found true love in Hollywood. Producers can't option his four-hankie epics of transformational passion fast enough. "Nights in Rodanthe" is the fourth big-screen adaptation of Mr. Sparks's work, following "The Notebook," "Message in a Bottle," and "A Walk To Remember." Like those movies, "Nights in Rodanthe" offers the kind of... NICOLAS RAPOLD http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-melting-pot/86367/ Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST This Friday, the curtain will rise on the 46th New York Film Festival with Laurent Cantet's award-winning classroom drama, "The Class." Sixteen days later, it will fall with the bloodsport climax of Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler." Smack in between, Clint Eastwood's period mystery "Changeling" will serve as the festival's centerpiece. In a way, the eye-catching range of these three tent poles signals the festival's perennial tensions between the new and the familiar, convention and... STEVE DOLLAR http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-director-creates-ballast-in-his-soul/86446/ Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Had circumstances broken another way, Lance Hammer might not have spent the past five years creating "Ballast," which opens next week at Film Forum. The film, set against the desolate yet stirring winter vistas of the Mississippi Delta, is a parable of loss and redemption that won top prizes for directing and cinematography at last year's Sundance Film Festival. It was born of an almost happenstance occasion of wanderlust and a foreseeable bout of frustration with the Hollywood machinery. "It... S. JAMES SNYDER http://www.nysun.com/arts/cantet-jumps-to-the-head-of-the-class/86366/ Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST People assign a lot of terms to the films of the French director Laurent Cantet, terms that typically point to the social themes of his stories or the naturalism of his methods. Mr. Cantet, who frequently wraps his fictional tales in documentary threads, has spent the last decade focusing chiefly on the ways in which class differences tug at the soul of a society. In 1999, Mr. Cantet made "Human Resources," which parlayed a family scuffle into a labor dispute, with a white-collar son finding... NICOLAS RAPOLD http://www.nysun.com/arts/vojt-283ch-jasnys-cinema-of-freedom/86169/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST In the 1970s, when the Czech filmmaker Vojtěch Jasný was struggling in exile from his Communist-run homeland, he came to the German writer Heinrich Böll for guidance. Böll offered a simple reminder: "He said three words: 'Patience, Vojtěch, patience,'" Mr. Jasný, 79, recalled recently. Patience was a necessity for the director, who lived through World War II, Communist rule, exile, and all the accompanying turmoil before alighting in America in 1984. Beginning Friday, Anthology Film... S. JAMES SNYDER http://www.nysun.com/arts/passing-strange-moving-on-to-life-at-ifc-center/86286/ Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST It's been a while since we've had a bona fide documentary blockbuster. But as far as Thom Powers, a documentary programmer at Toronto International Film Festival and the organizer of the weekly Stranger Than Fiction documentary series at Manhattan's IFC Center, is concerned, the rumors surrounding the genre's demise are greatly exaggerated. "There have been plenty of doom-and-gloom articles about the documentary market, but these pieces often focus on the wrong indicators, looking only at... MEGHAN KEANE http://www.nysun.com/arts/an-unspeakable-act-hounddog/86182/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Known colloquially as "The Dakota Fanning Rape Movie" since its premiere at last year's Sundance Film Festival, Deborah Kampmeier's "Hounddog" arrives in theaters Friday after a long distribution struggle with a handicap that it just can't shake. Young Ms. Fanning plays Lewellen, a motherless 12-year-old growing up poor in the Deep South circa the mid-1950s. Living with her bitter grandmother (Piper Laurie) and disturbingly callous father (David Morse), Lewellen distracts herself from the... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/fight-for-your-right-to-fight-battle-in-seattle/86180/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST One doesn't have to agree politically with a movie to appreciate the skill with which it was made or, for that matter, to enjoy it. To combine a bad film, however, with worse politics is to add insult to injury, which brings us to the topic of "Battle in Seattle," a ham-fisted, sanctimonious blend of leftist agitprop, by-the-numbers melodrama, and excruciating self-righteousness that arrives in theaters Friday. If you are currently taking orders from Rage Against the Machine, Michael Moore, or... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/buying-and-selling-justice-in-rio-elite-squad/86175/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST According to Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura), the narrator and dramatic catalyst of José Padilha's fiction film debut "Elite Squad," on the mean streets of modern-day Rio de Janeiro, "the drug gangs and the police had to work out ways to get along." The captain, leader of a cadre of the titular paramilitary cops called BOPA, initially presides over a flashy but quotidian cinematic tour of Rio after dark, rendered in a style and tone similar to the kinetic view of Brazil's urban underworld in... GRADY HENDRIX http://www.nysun.com/arts/doom-with-a-view-lakeview-terrace/86177/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Two years ago, Neil LaBute, the bad boy button-pusher of cinema who has lately been more the rage onstage than on-screen, unveiled a remake of Robin Hardy's 1973 men-versus-women thriller "The Wicker Man." Cast largely with small-time actors, Mr. LaBute's version nonetheless starred Nicolas Cage, who wound up digging a ham hole so deep that the entire movie slid down with him and became a giggle-inducing exercise in high camp. Now Mr. LaBute is back with another hot-button thriller, this time... NICOLAS RAPOLD http://www.nysun.com/arts/how-the-west-was-lost-appaloosa/86176/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Whenever more than two movies set in the Old West come out, reflexive discussions about the rebirth of the Western sprout up like mining towns and just as quickly fade away. It certainly happened last fall, when "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," "3:10 to Yuma," and "There Will Be Blood" offered three worthwhile entries in the genre. A year later, that Western surge is still too fresh in the collective mind for this year's fall previews to make much fuss over Ed... S. JAMES SNYDER http://www.nysun.com/arts/seeing-things-for-the-first-time-ghost-town/86174/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Love may be a many-splendored thing, but when it comes to capturing the euphoria of new romance on the silver screen, it can be a hard sell. We all know the flashy love epics, where seduction occurs naturally and effortlessly between two impossibly beautiful people, usually via love at first sight. But what of the movies in which two ordinary humans scratch and claw their way through a maze of neuroses, foibles, and missed opportunities to find that love is possible even for the distinctly less... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-good-the-bad-and-the-beautiful-the-duchess/86173/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Barely more than a decade after that tragic dash through Paris and the unhinged, hysterical carnival of lamentation that followed, it is no great surprise that Princess Diana continues to cast a shadow over popular culture, particularly in the country where she once seemed destined to be queen. It is, nonetheless, disappointing to detect that elements of her tawdry, strip-mined melodrama have been slipped into Saul Dibb's new film "The Duchess," which arrives in theaters Friday. The British... NICOLAS RAPOLD http://www.nysun.com/arts/spike-lee-goes-to-war/86172/ Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST According to the standard hubbub that greets each new Spike Lee movie, the director makes controversies for a living instead of films. To be sure, Mr. Lee, one of the most fearless voices in contemporary American cinema, is quotably outspoken. But when he talked recently about "Miracle at St. Anna," his forthcoming film about a group of black soldiers hiding in an Italian village during World War II, the first topic wasn't wars of words but war movies. "I've always wanted to do one, I just... ANDREW STUTTAFORD http://www.nysun.com/arts/dragging-kennedy-into-a-new-fight/85870/ Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST At its best, counterfactual or "virtual" history (to use Harvard historian Niall Ferguson's term), the exploration of what might have happened if history had not taken a certain turn, can be a fascinating intellectual exercise, a "what if" that illuminates what did happen. Unfortunately, "Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived," which begins a two-week run at Film Forum tomorrow, is neither fascinating nor illuminating. Helmed by first-time director Koji Masutani, and featuring Brown... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/lean-spirited/85698/ Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST "Nothing lasts, really," Laura Jesson, the guilt-hobbled heroine played by Celia Johnson, laments in director David Lean's 1945 film "Brief Encounter." "Not happiness, not despair, not even life lasts very long." Though inspired by Noël Coward's play "Still Life," Laura's musing (delivered, like much of her dialogue, in voice-over) was co-scripted by the British-born Lean (1908-91). Indeed, that resigned assessment of the impermanence of things would make sense delivered by nearly anyone in the... S. JAMES SNYDER http://www.nysun.com/arts/ifp-runs-on-platform-of-change/85799/ Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST For those even casually familiar with America's independent filmmaking scene, it's clear that these are times of profound change. In fact, it's so obvious to Michelle Byrd, executive director of New York's Independent Feature Project, that she can't help but draw parallels between the shifting sands of the movie industry and the "change"-oriented rhetoric that has come to define the current presidential campaign. "This is a time of new models, of new ways of thinking," Ms. Byrd said, adopting... NICOLAS RAPOLD http://www.nysun.com/arts/burn-after-reading-this-movie-will-self-destruct/85699/ Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Who can begrudge the Coen brothers a breather after the slowly strangulating suspense of "No Country for Old Men"? A comedy of persistent idiocy like "Burn After Reading" is a logical, and healthy, response both to the frightening world depicted in their Oscar-winner and to the expectant burden of their mainstream accolades. No classic for old Coen fans, their new film, which arrives in theaters Friday, is nonetheless a perfectly enjoyable yarn. It's a little like observing mice in tutus and... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/righteous-kill-the-case-of-the-vanishing-legacies/85695/ Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST In a heavily circulated bootleg tape of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis recording radio spots for their 1953 Paramount film, "The Caddy," Martin mangles the ad copy they've been given and mispronounces one piece of hyperbole as "righteous" instead of "riotous." "'Righteous'? Where the f--- do you see 'righteous,'" Mr. Lewis demands, ad-libbing. "What is this, a religious picture?" Both actors then descend into an exchange of barbs even less printable in a family newspaper. Each time I've read or... GARY GIDDINS http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-dark-knight-orson-welless-don-quixote/85402/ Tue, 9 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST One of the highlights of the 35th Telluride Film Festival, which took place over the Labor Day weekend, was the documentary "Prodigal Sons," by Kimberly Reed, who endeavored to film the reaction of her family and friends as she returned to Helena, Mont., for her 20th high school reunion. Her hometown had known her as Paul, the school's star quarterback. Other than her rivalrous and mentally impaired adopted brother Marc, no one seemed fazed by her "transition." Ms. Reed, however, had a shock in... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/robert-downeys-no-budget-genius/85404/ Tue, 9 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Since its founding by director Martin Scorsese in 1990, the nonprofit preservation organization the Film Foundation has provided support and funding for restorations of key works by filmmakers as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Satyajit Ray, David Lynch, Jean Renoir, and John Casavettes. The foundation's wide-ranging efforts have also broadened to include experimental and underground cinema artists such as George and Mike Kuchar and Jonas Mekas. Beginning Friday, Anthology Film Archives will... NICOLAS RAPOLD http://www.nysun.com/arts/this-old-house-godfrey-cheshires-family-history/85219/ Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Soon after Christmas in 2002, the Manhattan-based film critic Godfrey Cheshire, a North Carolina native, learned that his cousins in Raleigh were moving. Not earth-shattering news at first glance, except that his relatives, Charlie and Dena Silver, lived in the family's ancestral home. Midway, a bona fide plantation house, was built on land first acquired in the 18th century and had been home to generations. This would be a move in the most literal sense. The Silvers were planning to pick up... S. JAMES SNYDER http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-spirit-of-robert-flaherty-lives-at-bam/85306/ Mon, 8 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST For more than half a century, documentary films existed only at the margins of cinema, embraced by a small filmmaking community and remaining relatively unnoticed in the mainstream. That's why many moviegoers are unaware of the genre's long and storied history, assuming, as they do, that most docs look and sound like "March of the Penguins." It's probably a surprise, then, that the first breakthrough documentary was filmed in 1922 by Robert Flaherty, the director generally considered the father... S. JAMES SNYDER http://www.nysun.com/arts/alan-ball-is-looking-for-trouble/85220/ Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST For anyone out there who thinks that Alan Ball's only concern these days is the reception of his new HBO series "True Blood," festival audiences and Hollywood executives might let them in on the avalanche of controversy barreling toward the creator of "American Beauty" and HBO's "Six Feet Under." Mr. Ball's directorial debut, "Towelhead," about a 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl who struggles with sexual obsession, an aggressive and bigoted neighbor, and her strict father, is set to arrive on... MARTIN TSAI http://www.nysun.com/arts/latinbeart-2008-the-heart-of-latin-america-is/85225/ Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Latinbeat, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual survey of Latin American cinema, kicks off its 11th annual edition on Friday with a program of 28 films from 11 countries. Also included in the series are a handful of sidebars, including Spotlight on Chile, the centennial celebration of the Brazilian author Machado de Assis, and a tribute to the Oscar-nominated Puerto Rican filmmaker Jacobo Morales. In some regards, the event is larger in scale than the New York Film Festival, which... STEVE DOLLAR http://www.nysun.com/arts/mister-foe-the-boy-who-cried-mother/85229/ Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST With its endearingly misfit teenage antihero, peppy-wistful soundtrack featuring Franz Ferdinand and other indigenous small-label Scottish pop, cult-novel source material, and an absurdist fixation on social taboos (in this case, incestuous frolic and Peeping Tomism), "Mister Foe" could have been hatched by the Quirky Indie Hit Simulator. Traces of everything from "The Graduate" to "Spanking the Monkey," and from Bill Forsyth's shaggy-underdog romances to the darker fringes of "Mister Foe"... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/everybody-wants-to-be-italian-love-is-never/85230/ Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST In the eight years since he was dumped by his girlfriend, Jake (Jay Jablonski), the ardent but clueless hero of the new romantic comedy "Everybody Wants to Be Italian," has worked overtime to keep from moving on. Even the fact that Isabella (Marisa Petroro) is now a married mother of three cannot persuade her former beau to let go of the past. Undaunted, Jake continues to fruitlessly woo his ex to the combined irritation, embarrassment, and amusement of Isabella, her husband, and their children... STEVE DOLLAR http://www.nysun.com/arts/august-evening-a-repressed-family-in-the-land/85228/ Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Suspended between the lyrical and the gritty, "August Evening," which opens in the city on Friday, aspires to a kind of ambient eloquence, one in which everyday vistas and incidental moments acquire the clarity of insight. At least, that's how it appears to work for the characters, members of a Mexican family living north of the border and struggling with difficult transitions as they stall at their various personal crossroads. Jaime (Pedro Castaneda) is a handsomely gray 60-something laborer... MEGHAN KEANE http://www.nysun.com/arts/save-me-nothing-a-little-praying-cant-fix/85227/ Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST When a film about an ex-gay Christian ministry begins with drug-addled homosexual sex, it's pretty clear where it's going to end up. Robert Cary's redemption tale "Save Me," which opens in the city on Friday, spends a lot of time flirting with a subsection of evangelical Christianity, but from the beginning it's clear that the relationship isn't going anywhere. Robert Desiderio's screenplay tries to paint its fictional ex-gay ministry in an empathetic light, but the story's clear rejection of... NICOLAS RAPOLD http://www.nysun.com/arts/ping-pong-playa-balls-of-mild-frustration/85226/ Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Jessica Yu's "Ping Pong Playa" made its premiere at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, shortly after another table-tennis-based comedy, "Balls of Fury," bounced through mainstream theaters. Both movies attempt to wring humor from the Sino-ping-pong axis: "Balls of Fury" tapped kung-fu clichés and enrobed Christopher Walken in silk brocade; "Ping Pong Playa" pits a trash-talking Chinese-American slouch against his parents' expectations of high achievement. Ms. Yu, who also directed... S. JAMES SNYDER http://www.nysun.com/arts/pacino-de-niro-circle-back-to-each-other/85224/ Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The scene lasts only five minutes and 23 seconds, and it couldn't be more understated: Two guys sit in a California diner and size each other up as they talk about their dreams and their jobs. In most other movies, it would be a throwaway sequence, but in 1995's "Heat," Michael Mann's epic tale of cops and robbers, it was a landmark: the first time Robert De Niro and Al Pacino shared a movie screen. Given their explosive personalities, this quick scene (they appeared briefly together at the end... NICOLAS RAPOLD http://www.nysun.com/arts/shoot-the-piano-player-sing-us-a-song-of-doubt/85223/ Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST 'All I wanted was the pleasure of mixing things together to see whether or not they were miscible," François Truffaut once said of his 1960 film "Shoot the Piano Player," which followed his enormously successful feature debut and New Wave standard-bearer "The 400 Blows." His second film boldly set cheeky antics alongside downcast regret, darting chases next to chatty strolls, and grim art-house melodrama beside loosey-goosey hand-holding. It's hard to imagine who besides Truffaut could have... S. JAMES SNYDER http://www.nysun.com/arts/giant-steps-for-alfred-hitchcock/85222/ Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST To venture into Alfred Hitchcock's mysterious and mischievous "The 39 Steps" is to take a leisurely stroll through the director's favorite storytelling devices. Everything is here, in perhaps the most densely packed of his pre-war accomplishments: the deep focus, the overlapping sound design, the blond heroine, the man-against-the-world adventure story. Even in the title we have the classic Hitchcock MacGuffin: 39 steps to what? Richard (Robert Donat) doesn't know, and it doesn't much matter... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/sukiyaki-western-django-imitation-takes-the-form/84866/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The Italian-produced, Spanish-shot, and internationally cast cowboy movies of the 1960s, known on these shores as spaghetti Westerns, have been admired and appreciated by Japanese film buffs (who refer to them as "macaroni Westerns") for four decades. The fact that Sergio Leone's initial international success, 1964's "A Fistful of Dollars," was lifted from Japanese filmmaking maestro Akira Kurosawa's 1961 "Yojimbo" (Kurosawa had borrowed his own influential both-sides-against-the-middle plot... STEVE DOLLAR http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-pool-life-is-better-in-the-water/84969/ Tue, 2 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST There is nothing quite like the subtle pleasure of close but seemingly casual observation in a medium that often forgets how much natural grace, levity, and melancholy exists in the spontaneous actions of human beings. The gentle, gradual unfolding of circumstances and characters in "The Pool" is a quietly stirring reminder of how it can be done. The new fictional feature by Wisconsin native Chris Smith, who is best known for his independently shot documentaries about wannabe Midwestern horror... DARRELL HARTMAN http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-secret-never-safe/84968/ Tue, 2 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST "A Secret," the French director Claude Miller's new film, opens with a mesmerizing little scene set in the summer of 1955. A skinny, squinting boy (Valentin Vigourt) trails his mother, Tania (Cécile de France), across the lawn of a posh country club outside Paris. A goddess in a white bathing cap, she slices toward the pool through the crowd of bronzed bodies. She climbs the ladder up to the diving board, and as he watches her from below, she dives, as easily and elegantly as she might let down... BRUCE BENNETT http://www.nysun.com/arts/charlton-heston-at-lincoln-center-the-man-of/84869/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST When word arrived in April that Charlton Heston had succumbed to pneumonia at 84, the first image from the Illinois-born actor's deep gallery of outsized roles that came to my mind was not one that was excerpted in the news coverage announcing his passing. Heston's Oscar-winning part in "Ben Hur," his turn as a scowling Mexican policeman in Orson Welles's "Touch of Evil," his ultimate ride into history and eternity in "El Cid," his climactic disclosure of precisely what ingredients made up the... NICOLAS RAPOLD http://www.nysun.com/arts/i-served-the-king-of-england-czechs-and-balances/84865/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST In 1966, the Czechoslovakian filmmaker Jiri Menzel played his part in his country's New Wave with "Closely Watched Trains," his Oscar-winning movie about a hopeless railroad worker during the Nazi occupation who volunteers for a suicide mission. Based on a novel by Bohumil Hrabal, it was in fact a comedy, in accordance with a national strain of black humor that would meet a failed suicide attempt with a wry smile. For his new film, "I Served the King of England," the 70-year-old Mr. Menzel has... NICOLAS RAPOLD http://www.nysun.com/arts/chris-smith-american-director/84858/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Ten years ago, "American Movie," the first feature-length documentary by indie stalwart Chris Smith, introduced audiences to another indefatigable filmmaker: Wisconsin's Mark Borchardt, the would-be director of "Northwestern," was a long-haired part-timer, and a young-looking father of three with a love of beer and horror movies. A decade later, "American Movie" remains one of those 1990s art-house word-of-mouth hits that everyone seems to know. At the time, many treated the documentary, which... MARTIN TSAI http://www.nysun.com/arts/lifetimes-to-go-in-old-mexico-my-mexican-shivah/84860/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST 'My Mexican Shivah" is a surprisingly universal story, even if its title implies otherwise. John Sayles serves as an executive producer, but the film is unlike his Spanish-language "Men With Guns" or any mainstream Latin-American films in recent memory. In fact, it's somewhat difficult to place — unmistakably about the Jewish Diaspora but also conjuring elements from the particular brand of familial hysteria found in so many Latin-American comedies. Director Alejandro Springall's sophomore... Staff Reporter of the Sun http://www.nysun.com/arts/also-opening-this-weekend-ben-x/84861/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Ben (Greg Timmermans), an autistic teenager at the mercy of bullies in his school, is different, to say the least. His life is a universe unto itself. In the hallways and classrooms, his Asperger's syndrome prevents him from communicating with his peers and earning the respect of his shortsighted teachers. But on the computer, he is a courageous hero known as Ben X in the fantasy online gaming world. Not surprisingly, given his social success there, this world consumes him. But when the... Satff Reporter of the Sun http://www.nysun.com/arts/also-opening-this-weekend-college/84862/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST In this gross-out comedy from director Deb Hagan, three high school seniors (Drake Bell, Andrew Caldwell, and Kevin Covais) visit a college campus with visions of the best weekend of their lives dancing in their heads. Once there, the rowdiest fraternity on campus decides to recruit the boys as pledges, subjecting them to endless humiliations in return for granting them access to the no-holds-barred college party scene. But once the boys catch the eye of some of the older sorority girls, the... S. JAMES SNYDER http://www.nysun.com/arts/year-of-the-fish-were-not-in-disneyland-anymore/84859/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Conflicting artistic agendas swamp the would-be fairy tale "Year of the Fish," David Kaplan's confused and ultimately irksome Cinderella concoction that seems promising before becoming weighed down by stilted characterizations and disastrous editing. The film adapts Tuan Ch'eng-Shih's Chinese version of the Cinderella fable from 860 C.E., in which the young heroine befriends a fish that becomes the catalyst for her redemption. The story line shares the basic elements of the degradation-reward...