Movies In Brief
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.

FIRST DAUGHTER
PG, 104 mins.
The most amusing thing about “First Daughter” is its one connection to reality. When President Mackenzie (Michael Keaton) takes his teenage daughter (Katie Holmes) to college, he wears a tan, suede jacket – a spot-on copy of what Vice President Cheney wears when he’s campaigning in casual mode. Beyond that, “First Daughter” should be voted out of the box office.
The movie takes its structure from “Roman Holiday,” and director Forest Whitaker gives it a deliberately fairy-tale feel. The first daughter is Samantha Mackenzie, a sweet, naive girl whose father was first a governor, then president. She went through an awkward stage (a la Chelsea Clinton), but wants to have a normal college experience. No chance.
Samantha has grown up under the watchful eye of Secret Servicemen, and she has to sneak out to shake them. Her roommate is the fun, brazen, and sexy Mia (Amerie Rogers); her resident adviser the beefy but caring James (Marc Blucas). Sam falls for James, but just like Audrey Hepburn falling for Cary Grant, there’s a catch. James turns out to be an undercover Secret Service agent, and when she discovers this, she feels betrayed. After a drunken binge, she gets her photo on the cover of the tabloids.
It’s fair to say that the film’s politics are not overbearing. This is a father-daughter bonding story set in the world of politics and campaigns. When Sam sneaks down to the kitchen on the night before she leaves for college, she takes a slice of chocolate cake from the walk-in refrigerator. She takes out two forks because she knows dad will be along – and he shows up on cue. Awww. It’s a sticky-sweet moment, which this film has no shortage of.
The very presence of Ms. Holmes – with her read-my-face-like-a-book cuteness – sets the sweetness quotient absurdly high. But that face points up one of the more remarkable aspects of the film, at least to my mind: the makeup. All the female leads looked stunning, their colors perfectly selected and applied with a delicate hand. This may be the first movie in which the cosmetologists stole the show.
– Pia Catton
INFERNAL AFFAIRS
R, 97 mins .
Fans of Hong Kong crime thrillers have lamented the genre’s dissolution into self-parody and drab hackwork. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s “Infernal Affairs” should give them newfound hope. Though it’s not the kind of roller-coaster ride John Woo and Tsui Hark specialized in, its mature approach to action and character suggests the influential genre may finally be coming of age.
The film unspools as a cloak-and-dagger face-off between opposing moles: Yan (Tony Leung) is an undercover police officer who infiltrated the triads 10 years ago, at the behest of his chief (Anthony Wong), the only person who knows of his identity. Ming (Tony Lau, unrelated to the co-director), is a dirty cop working for the other side; he has built a sham veneer of respectability, complete with a writer wife and a spiffy new home, and worked his way to a position of importance within the force.
The concept is so solid (a remake with Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio is already in the works) that the story could write itself. But directors Lau and Mak have a keen sense of narrative drive, and they give the characters some genuine twists. We see Ming not as an evil spy, but a man fast falling in love with the legit life. Yan’s years undercover, on the other hand, have worn away his sense of self, making him a mere vessel for passing on information. When he sees a shrink, he goes to sleep; it’s as if he has no life worth exploring.
“Infernal Affairs” pulls off existential soul-searching without slowing its breakneck pace. The action scenes themselves contain sublime moments of grandeur and suspense, not because the directors have piled on style, but because the characters are so compelling that we actually care what happens to them – a remarkable accomplishment for a contemporary action movie.
– Bilge Ebiri
SEPTEMBER TAPES
R, 95 mins ..
A “Blair Witch Project” for the post-September 11 world, Christian Johnson’s “September Tapes” has the kind of gimmick that makes you wince at first: It’s a mockumentary about a gung-ho American journalist who heads to Afghanistan to go inside the war, and maybe even get to Osama bin Laden himself. The filmmakers actually traveled to Afghanistan, and they incorporate real footage, with real shooting; the film is a fake documentary and a real documentary all in one.
Al Qaeda is not an imaginary bogeyman lurking in the Maryland woods, and pulling this sort of thing off requires some tact. Mr. Johnson is up to the task. The central character, Don Larson (George Calil), starts off as a classic American, out of touch with the foreign soil he’s landed on, but, as his journey becomes more dangerous, he transforms into a surprisingly complicated figure. The footage, too, is at times remarkable, providing a real sense of menace with striking verite immediacy.
– Bilge Ebiri
BURN
Film Forum
An imperial nation manipulates and incites a Third-World country to revolution; 10 years later that same nation returns when the revolutionaries fail to behave themselves as expected. “Burn,” directed in 1969 by Gillo Pontecorvo, is a haunting political allegory. It’s also a terrific, entertaining film, one that the late Marlon Brando referred to as his own favorite piece of work.
Film Forum is again doing what it does best, showing this classic work in its complete, previously unseen 132-minute Italian-language glory, including 20 minutes of restored footage. Brando stars in blond curls and a plummy, reaching British accent, preens in a magnificent show of imperial arrogance that is startlingly similar to his Fletcher Christian in “Mutiny on the Bounty.”
It’s the mid-1800s on an island in the Caribbean, and Brando’s agent chooses an illiterate sugarcane cutter as his revolutionary against the interests of the Portuguese sugar monopoly. (His costar, Evaristo Marquez, was himself an illiterate sugarcane cutter at the time of casting, who had never seen a film.) Having successfully opened up the sugar trade, Marquez’s revolutionary turns against the interests of the British, and so Brando’s agent returns to destroy him.
Revolution is presented not as passionate individualism but something carefully orchestrated, imperially designed, and inevitable. It is also something that needs to be suppressed, and so the politics become a struggle between the two men. The film is a brilliant, vivid evocation of colonial struggle. That “Burn” is a spectacular entertainment renders it more insidiously political than Pontecorvo’s “Battle of Algiers.” The set pieces, glorious color montages, and atmosphere only heighten the sense of struggle between might and right.
– William Georgiades