RED LIGHTS
unrated, 101 mins.

Deceptively calm, Cedric Kahn’s psychological thriller “Red Lights” opens with some of the most sly filmmaking in recent memory. Antoine Dunant (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), an office drone, is preparing to drive with his wife, Helene (Carole Bouquet), to the Basque country. Waiting for her at a cafe, he downs three beers. Finally she arrives, but only after he spies her bidding farewell to another man. As the couple prepares for their trip, the increasingly jealous Antoine sneaks in a double scotch at a local bar. When they hit the road, the silent tension between them is overwhelming.

Antoine, now behind the wheel, shows signs of being soused. But the otherworldly tranquility of Mr. Kahn’s style continues unabated: Where most filmmakers would try to heighten the anxiety with cinematic trickery, Mr. Kahn’s graceful camera maintains an odd counterpoint to the tensions onscreen. Only a few brief but telling hints – a slow zoom towards a television reporting the dangers awaiting motorists, a quick radio warning about an escaped convict on the loose – at the perils to come.

Antoine and Helene squabble, Helene disappears, and while searching for her, Antoine runs into a strange man (Vincent Deniard), who may or may not be the aforementioned convict. Driving through the night with the man beside him, Antoine is forced to take charge of his life and to try to find his way back to his wife – both physically and symbolically.

Based on a novel by Georges Simenon, “Red Lights” is a domestic drama, a road movie, and an exercise in surreal suspense. It’s as if someone crossbred “Eyes Wide Shut” and W.C. Fields’s classic “The Fatal Glass of Beer.” But despite its expertly woven suspense, this is ultimately a dark fairy tale about adulthood.

“I feel like a young man in love on his first date,” Antoine types in an email in the first scene, and there’s something childlike in his petulant agitation throughout the film. He can’t face the reality of his disintegrating marriage, any more than he can admit that he took a wrong turn at the last exit. This combination of contemporary road thriller and haunting marital fable gives “Red Lights” its considerable power: There are monsters lurking in the long night of the soul, and they can be fatal.

– Bilge Ebiri

REMEMBER ME, MY LOVE
unrated, 125 mins.

Someone must not have told writer-director Gabriele Muccino about Tolstoy’s truism that happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhap py in its own way. The Ristuccias – the unhappy Italian family at the center of Mr. Muccino’s “Remember Me, My Love” – are remarkably generic. There’s Carlo (Fabrizio Bentivoglio), the vacillating pater familias; Giulia (Laura Morante), his wife, a shrewish former actress who would just as soon eat her young as tend to them; Valentina (Nicoletta Romanoff), their vapid daughter, and their ineffectual son, Paolo (Silvio Muccino, the filmmaker’s younger brother).

Carlo and Giulia lead lives so separate their fights count as quality time. So when Carlo meets an old flame, Alessia (Monica Bellucci), at about the same time that Giulia considers returning to the stage, you anticipate their marriage crumbling. Valentina and Paolo face more commonplace struggles: She wants to be a go-go dancer on television; he’ll settle for being liked by girls.

Aside from its unnecessary length, there are several extraordinary things about Mr. Muccino’s movie, which was co-written with Heidrun Schleef. The most striking is the pulchritude of the actors, each one smartly dressed, impeccably coiffed, and in excellent physical shape. (Must be all that mineral water.) Almost as remarkable is the self-involvement of the main characters, who all suffer ceaselessly from paralyzing self-doubt.

Is Mr. Muccino suggesting that the Ristuccias are emblematic of modern Italians? If so, one can only fear for the land of Michelangelo and Verdi. As this film has it, these people need more than a good shaking-up; they need a conservator.

– David Mermelstein

WARRIORS OF HEAVEN & EARTH
R, 119 mins.

Lai Xi (Nakai Kiichi), a sort-of exclusive bounty hunter for the Chinese Emperor, is given the opportunity to go home to his native Japan, if he can hunt and kill renegade soldier Lieutenant Li (Jiang Wen). Xi

sets out to find Li, who along with his group of loyal, exiled soldiers, is escorting a monk to Changan.

The two have a confrontation early on and, after a spectacular fight scene (the two fight, quite literally through the walls of a house), find themselves in a stalemate. Li’s not such a bad guy; once loyal to the throne, he fell out of favor with the emperor when he refused orders to kill a group of women and children. As Li wishes to see the monk he is escorting to safety, he convinces Xi to wait to finish their fight until Li finishes his task. But soon he’s set upon by Turkish forces, and Xi, as a man of honor, teams up with Li – all so they can complete their predetermined duel (“I won’t let you die before we reach the capital!” Xi exclaims several times as he saves Li’s life).

There is something inherently interesting about these enemies temporarily working together, and He Ping’s film is at its strongest when focused on them. But though we are informed in the prologue that “this is the story of two people,” it’s really the story of seven or eight. That proves to be a problem, as there is an intimacy that is missing. And the film’s climax is unsatisfying and downright silly, not to mention alarmingly similar to “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

– Eddie Goldberger

TAE GUK GI
R, 140 mins.

A disturbing but powerful war film, “Tae Guk Gi” represents the best of the especially limited Korean War genre. 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. Both are traumatized at being torn from their family, but Jin-tae is told that if he wins a medal of honor the army will send his brother home. Jin-tae volunteers for every dangerous mission he can, quickly moving up the ranks. But as he continues to be promoted, Jin-tae loses focus on his goal to get his brother out of danger, and declines into a quiet madness.

“Tae Guk Gi” is not for the weak-stomached. The impressively shot battle scenes prove to be long, intense, and unrelenting, culminating in some of the most realistic screen violence I’ve seen. No doubt there will be comparisons to “Saving Private Ryan,” but I found the carnage to be more raw and unsettling here. Death is draped onto characters even when battles are not raging (as when an injured soldier wakes to find a colony of maggots crawling inside the open wounds in his stomach). It is to the director’s credit that the violence, while persistent and inescapable, never becomes numbing, and we are never allowed to become complacent.

The film does not escape cliche. The Soldier Who Carries A Photo of His Wife and Newborn Son always has a place in movies such as these, and that trend continues here. But these moments are easily overlooked; the movie is a searing, dramatic, and forceful experience.

– E.G.