Films in Brief II

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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Before Sunset (R, 80 mins.)


Nine years after they fell in love in Vienna, now memoirist Ethan Hawke meets Julie Delpy in her Paris hometown while on his book tour. The two are drawn to each other as if to fate itself, and the audience doesn’t breathe until it knows whether broken hearts will be broken again. Richard Linklater’s quietly spectacular real-time film is the best of the year.


The Bourne Supremacy (PG-13, 108 mins.)


Evil Russians thwart a covert CIA operation and frame former agent Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), who has been living off the grid in India – but end up wishing they hadn’t. This tightly wound thinking-man’s action movie takes us from India to Berlin and Moscow.


Bright Young Things (R, 106 mins.)


First our hero, Adam Symes (Stephen Campbell Moore) and his beloved Nina (Ms. Mortimer) are engaged, then they aren’t, then they are, and so on. Meanwhile they attend gay parties, lavish lunches, and take jaunts to the country. Director Stephen Fry’s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Vile Bodies” removes the ironic gaze on England’s effete jazz-age set, and there’s not much left.


The Brown Bunny (unrated, 92 mins.)


Writer, director, editor, and photographer Vincent Gallo stars as Bud, a motorcycle fanatic on a cross-country trip. Those who wait out Bud’s many gazes through a bug-splattered van window will be treated to Chloe Sevigny performing graphic fellatio on her co-star. Still, this one-man-band show has a pretty good tune.


Hero (PG-13, 96 mins.)


Nameless warrior (Jet Li) has a showdown with deadly assassins Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) and Broken Sword (Tony Leung), who imperil the ruthless King of Qin (Chen Dao Ming). “Hero” mounts many delights for aficionados of multidirectional digi-fu while valorizing personal sacrifice to centralized political power.


Intimate Strangers (R, 105 mins.)


Anna (Sandrine Bonnaire) races into an appointment with a psychiatrist to discuss her marital problems. Unfortunately, her appointment isn’t with Dr. Moonier, but with William Faber (Fabrice Luchini), a fussy tax attorney, whose office Anna mistakenly entered. Director Patrice Leconte’s focus on how the deceptions that follow fall apart is a paean to Hitchcock.


Maria Full of Grace (R, 101 mins.)


Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is an imaginative 17-year-old who works at a rose plantation outside her lovely small town in Colombia and longs for more from life. An acquaintance suggests that she become a drug mule. Director Joshua Marston’s debut examines the origins of ambition and the raw splendor of the American dream, which Ms. Moreno makes palpable.


Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (unrated, 135 mins.)


Metallica consented to an all-access documentary about the recording of their new album in this engaging cinema-verite portrait by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (“Brother’s Keeper,” “Paradise Lost”), which is more about the quotidian ups and downs of the group – midlife crisis, rehab, gazillionaire angst – than what makes them larger than life.


Open Water (R, 79 mins.)


Susan (Blanchard Ryan) and Daniel (Daniel Travis) head out on a not-so-carefully monitored scuba-diving expedition in the Bahamas and are left in the middle of the ocean. Soon they are surrounded by sharks. There’s an undeniable charge to this situation, and no special effects were used in filming. But the real sharks won’t scare everyone.


Red Lights (unrated, 101 mins.)


Antoine Dunant (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), an alcoholic office drone, drives with his wife Helene (Carole Bouquet) to the Basque country. They squabble, Helene disappears, and Antoine picks up a hitchhiker (Vincent Deniard). Mr. Kahn’s graceful camera maintains an odd counterpoint to the tensions onscreen in this sly film.


Remember Me, My Love (unrated, 125 mins.)


The Ristuccias are a remarkably generic unhappy Italian family. When pater familias Carlo (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) meets an old flame at about the same time that his wife Giulia (Laura Morante) considers returning to the stage, their marriage loses quite a bit of ground. But Gabriele Muccino’s film is filled with charming actors and cannot help but be charming itself.


Rosenstrasse (PG-13, 136 mins.)


Writer and director Margarethe von Trotta tells the tale of Hannah Weinstein, a New Yorker who goes to Berlin in search of her family’s past. A parallel narrative shows Lena Fischer (Katja Riemann), a German of good family, struggling to free her Jewish spouse from a Nazi prison in Berlin. The Holocaust story is gripping and poignant, but its modern counterpart is tedious and cliched.


Suspect Zero (R, 99 mins.)


Benjamin O’Ryan (Ben Kingsley) is a former FBI serial-killer-profiler turned murderer who takes an interest in disgraced Albuquerque-based FBI agent Thomas Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart), sending him cryptic faxes and leaving mutilated bodies for him to find. This is the shallowest portrait of a serial killer yet.


Tae Guk Gi (R, 140 mins.)


Kang Je-gyu’s blood-soaked epic chronicles Jin-tae Lee (Jang Dong-Gun) and his younger, educated brother Jin-seok (Won Bin), who are pressed into service with the South Korean army when war breaks out with the North. A disturbing and powerful film, “Tae Guk Gi” represents the best of the especially limited Korean War genre, but is not for the weak-stomached.


The Village (PG-13, 108 mins.)


The residents of a vaguely 19th-century, celebrity-packed village have vowed never to venture into the surrounding woodland, as monsters live there. Then one day a slightly psychic blind girl, Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard), ventures in. “The Village” is one long bamboozlement, an inept little conjob played on the audience, not for it.


We Don’t Live Here Anymore (R, 104 mins.)


Professors Jack (Mark Ruffalo) and Hank (Peter Krause) and their wives Terry (Laura Dern) and Edith (Naomi Watts) cheat on and with each other. The strongest reaction John Curran’s movie engenders is a yawn.


Wicker Park (PG-13, 115 mins.)


Young executive Matthew (Josh Hartnett) falls suddenly for blonde boho Lisa (Diane Kruger). The audience is pulled toward Lisa, then to her seemingly lesbian best friend, but if you aren’t a girl who swoons over Josh Hartnett, you won’t swoon over “Wicker Park.”


Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman (R, 116 mins.)


Compelled by his ailing wife to seek work as a “bodyguard,” a deadly ronin (Tadanobu Asano) has aligned himself with Ginzou (Ittoku Kishibe), the local gangster. At times, Takeshi Kitano’s elegant and entertaining exercise in genre classicism seems to be on the verge of shifting into a full-blown samurai musical.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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