Now available on DVD: "The Secret of Kells"

The Secret of Kells was the wild card in last year's Oscar animation race — the little Irish movie no one had heard of, let alone seen. Now it's available on DVD and animaniacs should be primed to happily pounce. Kells is a visually overwhelming labor of love, a hand-drawn medieval adventure tale that seeks and finds cosmic connections.

Yes, the kids will enjoy it as well. The hero of Kells is Brendan (voiced by Evan Maguire), a young boy who has been apprenticed to his forbidding uncle, the Abbott of Kells (Brendan Gleeson), and ordered never to leave the monastery. There are enough dangers out there — wolves, eldritch Celtic gods, rampaging Vikings — that the Abbott is obsessively building high walls to protect the monks and the illuminated manuscripts upon which they labor.

There’s a real Book of Kells — a 9th-century version of the New Testament renowned for its brilliant ornamentation, it’s considered Ireland’s national treasure — but it probably wasn’t created this way. The monks in The Secret of Kells are a consciously international lot and drawn by Tomm Moore with geometric glee: a big, domelike African, a toadstool-size Asian, a spherical Italian. The Abbott is a rectangular figure of authority, all corners, no curves. Brendan, blessedly, is a kid, although the lines of medieval illustration lift his face into a smile.

The appearance of Brother Aidan (Mick Lally), a puckish renegade fleeing the invaders, kicks the plot into gear. He encourages Brendan’s reckless artistic side and sends the boy out to the forest to gather materials for ink. There the movie lifts off into a Celtic eco-pantheism not far in feel from the work of Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Ponyo). Brendan befriends Aisling (Christen Mooney), a forest wild girl with mysterious connections to the animals, plants, and Druidic forces. On the plot level, then, The Secret of Kells is a kiddie adventure with twists and turns recognizable to fans of anime and the more adventurous U.S. animation.

On the visual level, the film is on a higher plane entirely. Moore roots Kells in the limited perspectives of medieval art — often to delightful effect — but the film keeps bursting into repeated patterns and motifs that dazzle the eye and that, by the climax, are consciously fractal, a vision of worlds within worlds within worlds. The movie belongs in the recent vanguard of arthouse animation along with Michel Ocelot’s Azur and Asmar and Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues — astonishing (and primarily hand-drawn) works that push the envelope of what the medium can do. The climactic sequence in which the Vikings finally attack might scare small fry if it weren’t so surreally, almost mathematically beautiful.

Admittedly, there has to be a bit of bait-and-switch in any story about the creation of an iconic Christian text that doesn’t actually mention Jesus (even if the grown Brendan does look quite beatific by the film’s final scenes). The Secret of Kells uses early Christian theology to access a wider, more universal sense of wonder — it’s a movie in which even the molecules feel illuminated.

Released today on DVD

AVATAR (2009) The movie’s story may be a little trite, and the big battle at the end between the ugly mechanical force and the gorgeous natural world goes on forever, but what a show director James Cameron puts on! The continuity of dynamized space that he has achieved gloriously supports his trippy belief that all living things are one. Glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged. GRADE: A

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "The Lovely Bones"

Grade: C-minus
There was cautious optimism among longtime followers of director Peter Jackson that The Lovely Bones might inspire him to create a worthy companion piece to his 1994 Heavenly Creatures, which similarly involves teenagers and murder in an otherwise tranquil setting and remains far and away his best film. The potential was certainly there in the book, which reminds of Dennis Lehane's successfully filmed novels Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone in its devastating emotional trauma, but offers the distinctive perspective of the most entirely plausible omniscient narrator in modern literature.

Unfortunately, the massive success Jackson has enjoyed in the intervening years with his CGI-heavy The Lord of the Rings saga (the source of which receives fleeting homage in a bookstore scene here) and King Kong" has infected the way he approaches this far more intimate tale. Instead of having the late Susie Salmon occupy a little perch in an abstract heavenly gazebo from which she can peer down upon her family and anyone else - all that is really necessary from a narrative point of view - the director has indulged his whims to create constantly shifting backdrops depicting an afterlife evocative of The Sound of Music or The Wizard of Oz one moment, The Little Prince or Teletubbies the next.

It's a shame, because the first half-hour or so suggests that Jackson, had he taken a vow to keep it real and use not a single visual effect, still has it in him to relate a human story in a direct, vibrant manner. Aided immeasurably by the spirited teen actress Saoirse Ronan (Atonement), who plays Susie, the early scenes depicting the ordinary life of the Salmon family in a midsized Pennsylvania town possess a heightened quality charged by lively acting and Andrew Lesnie's dynamic mobile camera.

"We weren't those people, those unlucky people to whom bad things happen," Susie intones from above, as we watch her interact with attractive young parents Jack and Abigail (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz), sporty sister Lindsey (Rose McIver) and younger brother Buckley (Christian Ashdale), boozy glamorpuss grandma Lynn (Susan Sarandon) and handsome first crush Ray Singh (Reece Ritchie), just before she announces she was murdered on Dec. 6, 1973.

Even before the deed is done, it's plainly stated that the perpetrator is neighborhood solitary guy George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), a man marked as creepy by his utter ordinariness. While Tucci, adorned with stringy blondish-brown hair, moustache, large glasses and a raspy voice that tightens and elevates under pressure, is good enough to validate all the scenes involving this bland monster, Jackson shows his low-budget horror-film roots in the way he shoots the sinister scenes, with silhouetting white lights, heavy fog effects, wide-angle closeups and generic synth backgrounding from Brian Eno's otherwise effective score.

While the script by the Rings trio of Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Jackson at first inventively reshuffles elements to cinematic advantage, over time it serves more to dilute the impact of some story elements - the father's obsessive determination to nail George no matter what, Lindsay's romance, the passage of years - and eliminate others, including Ray's beautiful, long-suffering mother and the relationship between Abigail and local cop Len Fenerman (Michael Imperioli), whose efforts to solve Susie's murder are maddeningly frustrated.

Once Susie is installed in her heavenly quarters, for which Jackson digitally dedicates himself to continuously changing the wallpaper, the emotional link to the family is ruptured and never fully repaired. There are intermittently intense scenes: Lindsey proves herself a resourceful if somewhat reckless spy, and the ever-meticulous George almost blows his cover on occasion. The way Jackson only partially reveals the killer's face at times is effective but stands in stark contrast to the wobbly treatment of so much else.

As the story progresses - in a way that points to resolution in one sense and a simple petering out in another - it becomes clear that the actors are being deprived of any meaty, well-developed scenes to play; we learn more about them early on than toward the end, making this a film of slowly diminishing returns.

With reddish hair, brilliantly alive eyes and a seemingly irrepressible impulse for movement and activity, Ronan represents a heavenly creature indeed, a figure of surging, eager, anticipatory life cut off just as it is budding. Less quicksilver and more solidly built, McIver's Lindsey properly begins in her live-wire sister's shadow only to grow gradually into an impressive figure. Chain-smoking and depleting the liquor cabinet, Sarandon camps it up for a few welcome laughs, while Ritchie seems a likely candidate for teen idolhood.

Mainly, it's Wahlberg and Weisz who are shortchanged by the film's divided attention between earthly agony and astral accommodation. Both actors are OK as far as things go, but that's not nearly far enough.

When it sticks to the everyday neighborhood inhabited by its characters, The Lovely Bones, which was shot on Pennsylvania locations and in New Zealand studios, finds a reasonable equilibrium between drama and production values. When it ventures beyond it, heaven turns into Hades.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "35 Shots of Rum"

Grade: A-plus
Lionel and his daughter, Joséphine, live in a tidy and comfortable apartment in a high-rise housing project on the outskirts of Paris. Lionel (Alex Descas), a widower and a man of few words, works for the commuter rail system, while Joséphine (Mati Diop) studies social sciences at university. She and her classmates debate about colonialism, resistance and relations between the industrialized world and “the global South,” dropping names like Frantz Fanon and Joseph Stiglitz as they try to make sense of a world that is both distant and immediate.

35 Shots of Rum, a quiet and lovely film by the French director Claire Denis, is partly concerned with measuring that distance, the bewildering chasm between huge and tumultuous international movements and individual lives. It is self-evident that the story of Joséphine and Lionel, an African immigrant whose wife was German, is bound up in a complicated history of demographics and political economy. The fact that nearly all of the characters in this film are French while few are white is a further index of how the European landscape has changed in recent decades.

But the more salient change, the one that shapes Denis’s delicate narrative, is the one that occurs within Lionel and Joséphine’s relationship. It has to do with universally recognizable but nonetheless highly particular shifts in emotional weather, as a child and her parent undertake a gradual separation after years of solitary intimacy.

Denis has long been interested in France’s former colonies, particularly in Africa. In films like Chocolat (her 1988 debut, not to be confused with the more recent Juliette Binoche-Johnny Depp confection) and Beau Travail (1999) she has examined some of the political contradictions and psychological pressures of this colonial legacy, but in 35 Shots of Rum it remains in the background, like those classroom discussions. Which is not to say that matters of race and nationality are irrelevant to the movie, only that their relevance is implicit, either too obvious or not pressing enough for the characters themselves to discuss.

In addition to Lionel and Joséphine, they include two longtime neighbors who are also suitors. Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), a chain-smoking taxi driver with high spirits and sad eyes, has been in love with Lionel for a long time, much as Noé (Grégoire Colin), a handsome slob who lives with his cat, has carried a smoldering torch for Joséphine. The father and daughter, both made more attractive by their apparent indifference to their own beauty, neither invite nor discourage romantic attention, though they must learn to find a place for it in their lives.

In its modest scope and mellow tone, 35 Shots of Rum resembles Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours, another recent film by a French director who has sometimes trafficked in provocation and extremity. Both movies embed extraordinary thematic richness within a simple, almost anecdotal narrative framework, and both achieve a rare eloquence about the state of the world by means of tact and reticence.

35 Shots is more eventful — to paraphrase an old Velvet Underground song, someone dies, and someone gets married — but its real drama is in quiet moments, in glances and whispers captured by Agnès Godard’s exquisite and expressive cinematography.

The film’s title refers to a feat of drinking that Lionel, who has an impressive ability to hold his liquor, vows to attempt on the appropriate occasion. When the moment arrives, it is at first not clear whether he is inspired by grief or joy, but by then Denis has shown how close together those emotions are, and how the melancholy strains of ordinary existence are also its sweetest music.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "44 Inch Chest"

Grade: C
44 Inch Chest can be described as six guys sitting around in barely furnished rooms, talking. Actually, one of the six says nothing at all: he sits quietly in the chair to which he’s tied, bruised and bloody and shaking and wondering if — or maybe just when — the other five will kill him.

Or it could be that this fellow, known on screen and in the end credits only as Loverboy, is on hand to pick up some acting tips in a trans-Channel cinematic exchange program. He is played by Melvil Poupaud, a subtle and accomplished young French actor (with notable roles in A Christmas Tale and Time to Leave), and he finds himself surrounded by roaring British lions. Loverboy’s tormentors are Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Dillane, John Hurt, Ian McShane and Ray Winstone, an honor guard of refined ruffianism.

There is a woman in this movie, directed by Malcolm Venville from a script by Louis Mellis and David Scinto (authors of Sexy Beast, the great 2000 gangster drama in which Winstone trembled before the reptilian menace of Ben Kingsley). Her name is Liz, she is played by Joanne Whalley, and she is both marginal to the action and a central catalyst of the drama. Loverboy is her lover; Winstone’s Colin is her jealous, heartsick husband; and the rest of the blokes are Colin’s underworld pals, doing him a good turn by delivering up his rival for rough justice.

There is not much of a story here, and not enough of the mixture of menace and comedy that made Sexy Beast so memorable. There is, as I’ve suggested, a lot of talk: you often feel as if you were watching the workshop production of a half-written play. But the dialogue, richly profane and Mametically self-conscious in its idioms (if you can imagine David Mamet transplanted to London from Chicago), yields its own pleasures. Think of 44 Inch Chest as a piece of chamber music and you can compensate for the thinness of its story and the lack of visual distinction.

Winstone carries the main melody with his raging, weepy impersonation of a tough guy whose soft heart has been trampled and who doesn’t know how to respond. His impulses are violent, and you suspect that violence is a big part of his job, but he mostly seems to want to sit and cry.

This worries his friends, in particular Old Man Peanut (Hurt), whose views on honor, manhood and sex are brutally old school. This puts him somewhat at odds with Meredith (McShane), a suave gay man with a satiny voice and more nuanced views on matters of love and sex.

Mal (Dillane) is the handsome dandy of the bunch, whom Colin at one point suspects of having a thing for Liz, while Archie (Wilkinson), who lives with his aging mother, is the scoutmaster, or perhaps the mother hen.

The four of them, waiting for Colin to act, urging him on and leaving him alone with Loverboy, sometimes seem to be taking a break from some other, livelier movie, and it is a tribute to the skills of both the writers and the actors that the characters are so vivid and interesting. It would be nice if they had a little more to do.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "Cloud Nine"

Grade: B
When I was much younger, I would experience an "oh, no!" feeling if I realized I was attracted to a girl. It was a mixture of joy in the moment and dread of the usual complications that had, around the age of 19, tutored me that there was no such thing as living happily ever after - usually, anyway. I suspect that feeling never entirely leaves us. Consider the German film Cloud 9, with Inga (Ursula Werner), who is 67 and has been married with reasonable happiness for 30 years to Werner (Horst Rehberg), and finds herself knocking hopefully on the door of a 76-year-old man she hardly knows.

This is Karl (Horst Westphal), who had dropped off his pants to be altered. Inga is a seamstress, working on a sewing machine in her bedroom, living in a nice little apartment with Werner, who in the evenings likes to listen to recordings of steam engines arriving in train stations. His idea of a nice day out for the two of them is taking a train to no particular place while they look out the window.

Werner is not presented as a boring monster, because he isn't. Looking out a train window is often the occasion for dreamy reveries, and as I watched this film, I felt the desire, easily suppressed, to go to the Amtrak station and buy a ticket to no particular place. Werner helped Inga raise her family; her daughter Petra (Steffi Kuehnert) considers him her father, and they carry out a soothing ritual of drinking coffee and watching TV.

What came over Inga when she was measuring Karl for his pants? Why did she deliver them herself? Why did he invite her in, and why did they fall into each other's arms a moment later and find themselves losing their underwear so quickly? There's no accounting for such things. The French call it a coup de foudre, a lightning bolt to the heart.

Petra advises her not to confess to Werner. "Go ahead, Mother, enjoy yourself - but tell no one!" Sound advice. Inga however finds confession necessary. Werner doesn't take the news at all well. "I didn't want to!" she cries out. "I didn't want this to happen to me!" One of those oh, no! moments.

We shy away from details about elder sex. Inga and Karl are like a couple of kids, enjoying each other's bodies and presence. She's no beauty, never wears makeup, and apparently goes through the whole film without washing her hair, unless the time she skinny-dips with Karl counts. But when she smiles: Well, everyone has a beautiful face when they look at you with love in their eyes. In this film without deeply complex characters, so much depends on how Karl and Werner look at Inga, and how she looks at them.

The director, Andreas Dresen, presents the sex scenes as if they involve two 20-year-olds, as she should. During sex, you have only two ages: immortal or dead. She regards their total nudity with all the detachment we might feel in a steam room. There is a scene where Inga stands naked in front of a mirror and looks at herself. Such a moment of honesty is common enough in the movies, but she does it for so long that our minds begin to supply her thoughts about the inexorable fading of youth.

Paul Cox's film Innocence also considers a late-life romance, and is deeper than Cloud 9, which won Cannes' Un Certain Regard in 2008, because its characters are more sensitive and thoughtful. Inga and Warner don't seem to know much more about such matters than they did when they were teens. About Karl we can't be sure. Yet these performances are so quietly effective that we watch, absorbed. I'm not sure, however, that where this film comes from quite earns the place it goes to.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "Crazy Heart"

Grade: A
Crazy Heart, written and directed by Scott Cooper, is a small movie perfectly scaled to the big performance at its center. It offers some picturesque views of out-of-the-way parts of the American West, but the dominant feature of its landscape is Bad Blake, a wayward, aging country singer played by Jeff Bridges.

Those last four words should be sufficient recommendation. Some of Bridges’s peers may have burned more intensely in their prime, but very few American actors over the past 35 years have flickered and smoldered with such craft and resilience. Neither blandly likable nor operatically emotional, this actor has a sly kind of charisma and a casual intelligence. You suspect that he may be smarter than some of the characters he plays — the lounge musician in The Fabulous Baker Boys, the deadbeat bowler in The Big Lebowski, the egotistical author in The Door in the Floor, to take just a few examples — but also that he knows every corner and shadow of each one’s mind.

Unlike Bridges, Bad, who is 57, seems to be running on the last fumes of his talent. He drives from one gig to another in a battered truck, playing bowling alleys and bars with local pickup bands and sleeping in less-than-deluxe accommodations. He smokes and drinks as if trying to settle a long-ago bet between his liver and his lungs about which he would destroy first. The chorus to his signature song (one of several written especially for Bridges) observes that “falling feels like flying, for a little while.” That time has long since passed for Bad, who is scraping the bottom and trying not to complain too much about it (except when he can get his agent on the phone).

Drinking, cheating, love gone wrong — a lot of country music expresses the weary stoicism of self-inflicted defeat. Loss and abjection are two of the chords that define the genre. A third is redemption, which has also been a theme of modest, regionally inflected American independent cinema for quite some time. So even before Maggie Gyllenhaal shows up as Jean, a New Mexico journalist with a cute young son and some disappointments of her own, you can be pretty sure that you’re in for yet another drama of second chances and late-breaking epiphanies.

But no one ever put on a country record in search of novelty or wild surprise. What you seek in those songs is honest feeling and musical skill. Even in decline, Bad has both of those things, and enough professionalism to keep complete self-destruction at bay. Performing in front of a small, appreciative crowd in Colorado, he strikes up an old hit and then hands the song off to the band so he can run offstage and vomit in the parking lot, returning just in time to sing the final chorus and make eye contact with the groupie he’ll wake up with the next morning.

What does Jean see in this wreck? Bridges, settling into Cooper’s understated script as if he’d written it himself, makes the answer both obvious and a little enigmatic. There is a playboy’s charm and an old-fashioned Southern courtliness half-hidden behind the weariness, the anger at squandered possibilities, the flabby gut and the unkempt beard. This fellow may be bad, but he’s also dignified.

Bad’s own songs express this tension, as do other selections on the soundtrack (overseen by T Bone Burnett), which help to establish this fictional musician’s place in the actual musical universe. His main connection to the current country scene is Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), a former protégé who has hit the big time and whose support Bad both desperately wants and is sometimes too proud to accept. Tommy is part of a slick new breed that pays respect to the stalwarts of the past (as any good country singer must), but whose smoothness nonetheless gets under the skin of his sandpapery former mentor.

In his first interview with Jean, Bad pays the expected homage to precursors like Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell, but really he belongs in more recent, somewhat rougher company. Bad’s home — when he’s there — is in Houston, and the voices that accompany his comings and goings are mostly drawn from the outlaws and renegades associated with Texas in the era of his early manhood. You hear songs by Townes van Zandt and Waylon Jennings, and you may also think of Willie Nelson and some others. As for Bridges: he can’t help it if he looks like Kris Kristofferson and sounds a little like David Allan Coe.

When Robert Duvall (a producer of Crazy Heart) turns up as one of Bad’s old friends, you might also remember Mac Sledge, the Bad Blake figure he played in Bruce Beresford’s 1983 film, Tender Mercies. Cooper’s movie owes an obvious debt to that one, but there can never be too many songs about drinking, loving and feeling bad, and there is always room for another version of that old song about the guy who messed it all up and kept on going. Especially when that guy can play the tune as truly and as well as Bridges.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "Godspeed"

Grade: C-plus
In director Robert Saitzyk's ethereally grim slice of low-budget filmmaking Godspeed, healing and retribution meet like participants in a western-style showdown.

Set in an unforgiving, harshly beautiful Alaskan wilderness (and filmed around Anchorage and Wasilla), it lays out the fated convergence of three disturbed souls: Charlie, a compromised faith healer (Joseph McKelheer) for whom an unspeakable tragedy has led him to drink; an alluring stranger named Sarah (Courtney Halverson) who's drawn emotionally and sexually to Charlie's pain; and her apocalyptic-minded brother Luke (Cory Knauf, also the co-screenwriter), who has his own ideas of biblical deliverance.

Cinematographer Michael Hardwick's poetically assured use of the RED One digital camera gives Saitzyk's Terrence Malick-ish ambitions a compelling visual orientation in spiritual uneasiness - and eventually brutally violent resolution - but what keeps Godspeed from lasting power are its melodramatic swerves and less-than-revelatory acting. But despite its fissures in tone and technique, Godspeed occasionally plays like a sturdy indie outpost of revenge cinema.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "Homecoming"

Grade: F
Rich girl, poor girl, college golden boy and blue-collar sweetheart. Homecoming, an ugly little thriller in which Mike (Matt Long), a star high school quarterback who has won a scholarship to Northwestern brings his new girlfriend back to his shabby hometown over the Christmas holidays, might have been an incisive examination of class differences in Middle America. Instead the movie, directed by Morgan J. Freeman (not to be confused with Morgan Freeman, the actor), contents itself with being the dramatic equivalent of female mud wrestling: the hero’s jealous high school girlfriend, Shelby (Mischa Barton), who has remained obsessed with him, imprisons his upscale sweetheart, Elizabeth (Jessica Stroup), in her rundown farmhouse.

How Elizabeth ends up there is a far-fetched tale: she wanders alone on the road after being turned away from a sinister motel in the middle of the night; Shelby accidentally hits her with her car, then brings her home for emotional and physical abuse. Shelby’s nursing care consists of hooking Elizabeth up to an IV to sedate her and twisting her already broken ankle when she tries to escape. An ax appears, and later a gun. While Elizabeth is helpless, the sexy Shelby mobilizes all her wiles to seduce Mike.

Long’s football star is a bland pretty boy with no distinctive personality, and Stroup’s Elizabeth an attractive cipher. Shelby, as it develops, is a psychotic maniac who grows progressively more bonkers as the movie goes along. Homecoming is coldly efficient for what it is. But what it is is trash.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "The Horse Boy"

Grade: B
What do you do if your autistic son is unresponsive to treatment yet inexplicably soothed by the proximity of horses? If you are Rupert Isaacson and his wife, Kristin Neff, you take him to a country where horses are as essential as water: Mongolia.

The Horse Boy is a record of that extraordinary journey, a grueling weekslong trek across the plains of Mongolia in search of shamanic help for Rowan, their 5-year-old son. Plagued by inconsolable tantrums, chronic incontinence and severe dissociation, the boy is no one’s idea of a congenial travel companion; but as his parents endure discomfort, defeat and ritual floggings (“You’re not allowed to scream,” Mr. Isaacson warns his deep-breathing spouse), the director and photographer, Michel Orion Scott, finds a windswept beauty in surroundings so barren that the shores of Lake Sharga appear like a mirage.

Resolutely unvarnished (“I didn’t expect an urban slum,” Mr. Isaacson remarks on arriving in the capital city, Ulan Bator) and astonishingly intimate, The Horse Boy chronicles a couple in emotional and physical extremity. Though experts are on hand — including Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge University psychologist and eerily look-alike cousin of the comedian Sacha — to tell us how little they know about autism, the film is not a primer on this heartbreaking condition. Instead it recounts a deeply personal, highly subjective and inarguably thought-provoking story of one family’s quest for a certain kind of peace.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "Mammoth"

Grade: C-plus
Mammoth runs counter to expectations. In his sixth feature film and English-language debut, Lukas Moodysson for the first time has movie stars and international locations, which causes one to anticipate the Swedish director doing a Tom Tykwer - looking to expand his filmmaking via a big, globe-hopping picture. Anything but. For despite its title, Mammoth is a small-scale story about families and how children fit into an often puzzling adult world. The story simply takes place in three distinct time zones.



Those expectations may hurt the film's ability to move into mainstream homes for viewing, however. The film's vagueness of purpose and elevation of small ironies and self-evident truths to the level of deep-dish revelations may further damage the film with sophisticated viewers. The rental outlook is iffy at best.

If one thinks of Babel minus the melodrama and histrionics, you get a clearer picture of what Moodysson has done here. Families get split up around the world, with adults often minding children that aren't theirs, yet the interconnectedness remains.

The film's focal point is an upscale Manhattan couple, Leo and Ellen, played by Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Williams. Leo is a computer geek whose "genius" for video games has brought him into the world of high finance and ambitious startups. Ellen is an emergency room doctor, who spends her days patching and repairing torn bodies the mean streets keep tossing at her.

Their 8-year-old daughter Jackie (Sophie Nyweide) spends most of her time with her Filipino nanny Gloria (Marife Necesito). When Leo departs for Thailand to raise significant capital, Ellen all the more acutely feels a sense that she is a bit player in her own life. Her husband is away and her daughter out with the nanny while she frantically struggles to save the life of a boy whose mother thrust a knife into his stomach.

Gloria's own two young boys in the Philippines miss their mom badly. The eldest phones her, begging her to come home. And Leo, who is not really a dealmaker, finds himself lost in Thailand, eventually winding up with a bar girl (Run Srinikornchot), who is pleasing foreign men to support her own baby.

This is the globalization of the nuclear family, where so many small ironies abound. Gloria's youngest son loves basketball so she goes to a store in New York and buys him a ball, made in the Philippines, to send to him back in the Philippines.

The film's scenes are sketchy, often inconclusive and filled with characters' frustrations. While writer-director Moodysson's points are clear - sometimes to the point of mundane obviousness - viewers may experience their own frustrations with all this soft drama.

Of course, children miss parents half a world away and, of course, a mother may grow jealous of her child's intimacy with the hired help. Such sentiments feel more at home in a newspaper column or personal blog though than in a movie. The shallowness of these ideas cannot stand the wide-screen scrutiny.

The production work in New York, the Philippines and Thailand is excellent, but somehow the intimacy Moodysson clearly wants to achieve goes missing.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "Summer Hours"

Grade: A
Summer Hours opens, as so many French films do, with a major family reunion at a marvelous old house in the country. But while the setting is familiar, even Chekhovian, what writer-director Olivier Assayas does with it is not.

Assayas, whose credits include Clean, Demonlover and Irma Vep, is not the type to do things as usual, or even do anything classically French. So it is a pleasant surprise to see him working in a naturalistic form but bringing his own particular sensibility to it.

For Summer Hours turns out to be global as well as personal, a family drama with a larger point. While the film is elegiac in the best sense, concerning itself with what the passage of time does to a family, it also takes on broader questions about the disintegration of both a culture and the society that supports it.

None of this is visible when the film starts on a fine summer's day, at a country house to die for, some 50 minutes outside of Paris. Children are playing, dogs are barking, the aging cook is grumbling - it all feels very much like business as usual for a warm afternoon. Only it isn't.

The three adult children and their own kids gathered for their mother's 75th birthday party not only rarely see one another, they are rarely in the same country. Jeremie (Dardennes brothers regular Jeremie Renier) works for a multinational shoe company in China. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) is a designer who's based in New York. It's only Frederic (Charles Berling), an economist and academic, who lives and works in France.

Though her birthday is the nominal cause of the gathering, mother Helene (Edith Scob, whose career dates back to 1960's cult classic Eyes Without a Face) has her own agenda. She wants to talk to Frederic, the only son in France, about what she wants to be done with the house and its furnishings after she's dead.

For this is not your run-of-the-mill beautiful country house. It belonged to Helene's uncle, Paul Berthier, a well-known painter, and it is filled with the paintings and furnishings he collected over a lifetime of friendship with some of France's great artists.

Despite that, and despite Helene's passion for the house, she insists to Frederic that it and everything in it be disposed of after her death. The children are scattered, they lead lives of their own, and she doesn't want the house to be a burden. Frederic, who is passionate about the house, disagrees, insisting it should be passed down intact to the next generation.

Naturally, the inevitable happens sooner rather than later, and, in a scene that is the heart of the film, the re-gathered siblings engage in spirited discussion as, balancing reasons of practicality with those of emotion, they wrestle with the question of what should be done with the house. What they decide and how that plays out in practical terms take up the bulk of the film.
 
Adding even more drama to the discussion is the realization that Summer Hours is talking not just about the potential end of this house but the possible disintegration of a society and a culture as well. What does it mean when money determines the value of everything? Is society diminished or improved when things of worth exist only in museums?
 
Despite the importance of these questions, Summer Hours also finds time to explore the personal, to examine the warm but wary way these siblings interact with each other. And the emotions surrounding Helene's death are always close at hand, as is the realization of how continually disturbing death is to the living.

What is most unusual about Summer Hours is that it is concerned about what will be left of French culture if the country's best and brightest move offshore. French films traditionally take France and its eternal appeal for granted. Summer Hours is the rare film that worries about that, worries about the future, and that proves to be invaluable.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "The Young Victoria"

Grade: B

In one portrait of the young Queen Victoria, the 18-year-old who ascended the British throne in 1837 and gave the Victorians their name, she sits in her coronation robes staring straight ahead with a somewhat glazed expression. Her arms are white and fashionably plump, her dress cream and splashed with gold. Her coronation robe, a massive ermine-and-red-velvet cloak, spills off her bared shoulders and onto the ground, creating a luxurious puddle. She looks a bit bored — heavy hangs the crown, or at least those opulent threads.

This isn’t our familiar image of Victoria, the globular old lady shrouded in widow’s weeds and vehement melancholia, and wearing a dour look that suggests that she was never amused, not now, not ever. That woman, who became known as the Widow of Windsor after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861, is nowhere to be seen in The Young Victoria, a frivolously entertaining film, with Emily Blunt, about the young monarch. Blunt, who as Meryl Streep’s viperous assistant in The Devil Wears Prada” slyly upstaged Anne Hathaway, doesn’t have Victoria’s padding or bearing, which is probably why she was cast in the role. No one wants to watch the lives and loves of the rich and dowdy.

That at least seems to be the prevailing filmmaker wisdom, which is why what we usually get in movies about royal personages from dusty and distant worlds are sumptuous frocks, soaring music, a dash of intrigue and thunderous nonsense. Young Victoria — the latest in a long line of fictional entertainments about the dramatic, if more often than not melodramatic, ups and downs of female British monarchs — fits the bill nicely. There’s something about a queen that inspires filmmakers (audiences too), who enjoy pulling the curtain away from these most private lives and taking peeks under the royal robes. Because this queen spent so much of her life draped in black and gloom, her younger self would seem particularly ripe material.

She is and she isn’t, at least here. Directed with some snap by Jean-Marc Vallée from a screenplay by Julian Fellowes, The Young Victoria opens with some turgid on-screen text about her birth in 1819: “A child is born.” No, not Jesus, but little Victoria, heir to the throne and the only daughter of the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson) and the unseen, soon-to-be-dead Duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III. But while she was born with a royal spoon in her mouth, little Victoria, like so many rich girls before and since, proves deeply unhappy. “What little girl does not dream of growing up as a princess,” Victoria asks early in dolorous voice-over, before lowering the boom: “Even a palace can be a prison.”

A chill fills that palace’s rooms, a coldness largely emanating from the duchess and her close adviser, Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong), who keep Victoria under lock and key to control her and the power she will assume. Isolated from other children, with only servants and a spaniel for company, Victoria amuses herself as best she can. Blunt tries her hardest to interest us as well, but there is limited entertainment in watching even an appealing actress wander forlornly, talking to herself and the dog. Victoria, it seems, wasn’t all that interesting at this stage in her life (or so it appears here), which might explain why Vallée tweaks his material to the point of exaggeration, sometimes to the point of parody, as with Strong’s virtual mustache-twirling.

Happily, the story of young Victoria is also the tale of her relationship with her young consort, Albert (Rupert Friend, pretty and pink-cheeked), her first cousin. Born on the Continent, in part of what would become Germany, Albert enters Victoria’s life obliquely, first through the machinations of their uncle, King Leopold of Belgium (Thomas Kretschmann), and then during tentative visits. There’s a political dimension to Leopold’s matchmaking, but those details are immaterial to the romance that develops and deepens. Despite the filmmakers’ efforts to persuade us that The Young Victoria is a serious work, and despite some tense moments and gunfire, the movie’s pleasures are as light as its story. No matter. Albert may never rip Victoria’s bodice, but he does eventually loosen it, to her delight and ours.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "Pirate Radio"

Grade: B

Boys will be boys and often at top volume in Pirate Radio, Richard Curtis’s fanciful fiction about rebel broadcasters who, in the mid-1960s, blasted British airwaves and eardrums with the Stones, the Kinks and the Who, among other youth-quaking greats of the era. Stuffed with playful character actors and carpeted with wall-to-wall tunes, the film makes for easy viewing and easier listening, even if Curtis, who wrote and directed, has nothing really to say about these rebels for whom rock ’n’ roll was both life’s rhyme and its reason.

Borrowed from the annals of the strange but true, the story opens in 1966, before the British invasion had breached Britain’s official radio channels, run by the British Broadcasting Corporation. In his book Selling the Sixties: The Pirates and Pop Music Radio, Robert Chapman writes that the government’s cultural guardians responded to rock ’n’ roll with degrees of indifference and hostility: “BBC policy makers continued to go about their cultural missionary work much as they always had done, selectively retrieving a folk tradition here, acting as a kindly public service benefactor there, bestowing sponsorship upon those deemed worthy of official approval.” Although the BBC played a few weekly hours of rock, it largely, aided by the government, kept the noise down.

To fill that musical gap (and to serve real commercial interests), pirate radio stations dropped anchor off the British coast and began beaming rock ’n’ roll to a grateful nation (some 20 million listeners). In Pirate Radio, the tuneful epicenter qua bad-boys club is a tanker on which some dozen men, D.J.’s and various supporting players, including a token woman (and lesbian), taunt the government scolds with Jimi Hendrix and Dusty Springfield. Rising to the rebels’ bait with increasing apoplectic rage is Sir Alistair Dormandy (Kenneth Branagh, wearing a mustache and cartoon sneer), a government minister who tries to shut the pirates down so he can keep the nation safe with regulated doses of high culture and educational programming.

Curtis alludes to the subtleties of this simmering culture war a few times by flanking Sir Alistair with art, including an abstract blob that looks like a Henry Moore sculpture. Sir Alistair’s snobbery and paternalism make him the enemy, and his position makes him a potentially interesting one. But Curtis isn’t concerned with exploring why gatekeepers might want to maintain the divide between high and popular culture. He wants to party. So he piles on the comic high jinks, lobs the jokes and cranks the splendid tunes, which is fine even if he tends to cue many of these for the hard of thinking: playing Leonard Cohen’s  So Long Marianne, for instance, to accompany a heartbreaker named Marianne (Talulah Riley).

Marianne plays a mean trick on the ship’s innocent in residence, Carl (Tom Sturridge), who’s under the wing of the renegades’ leader, Quentin (Bill Nighy, reliably amusing). A tasty treat played by January Jones, on hiatus from driving Don Draper up a wall in Mad Men, plays an even meaner trick on another of the ship’s D.J.’s. Both female characters are irrelevant, which sums up the film’s interest in women, at least when vertical. The truer romance involves rival D.J.’s played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rhys Ifans, both fine, who take turns stealing scenes as Curtis gamely invokes the spirit of Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night”) and, every so often, throws in another meaningless aerial shot of the ship.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "Defendor"

Grade: C-plus

The likable but hardly memorable, the offbeat action-comedy Defendor follows the exploits of Arthur Poppington (Woody Harrelson), an emotionally crippled, comic book–obsessed construction worker who goes out at night dressed as Defendor, a crime-fighting vigilante without superpowers or a gift for clever catchphrases. (“Look out, termites — it’s squishing time” is about the best he can muster.)

More likely to get the crap beaten out of him than he is to apprehend evildoers, Arthur is obsessively pursuing a mysterious nemesis named Captain Industry, in the process running afoul of a crooked cop (Elias Koteas) and befriending a young prostitute (Kat Dennings).

Rather than viewing Arthur with withering scorn, Harrelson and writer-director Peter Stebbings clearly have a lot of affection for this well-meaning, imbalanced everyman, using him as a metaphor for the chasm between our heroic aspirations and our meager realities. But although Harrelson displays the right balance of sweetness and quiet instability, Defendor’s genial spirit fails to mesh with the filmmaker’s exploration of darker emotional terrain, whether he’s trying to evoke pathos from Arthur’s unhappy childhood or create tension from Defendor’s showdown with a dangerous Russian gang. (Even worse, Stebbings throws in some weak social commentary by turning Arthur into an unlikely champion for the city’s disenfranchised citizens.)

In some ways, Defendor’s modest charm is preferable to the furrowed-brow misery of deranged-loser cautionary tales like Big Fan, but while Arthur may be a nicer breed of kook, that doesn’t mean he’s a more compelling one.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "The Missing Person"

Grade: B-minus

Writer-director Noah Buschel 's ambitious, stylish neo-noir The Missing Person starts so self-consciously that it verges on parody but impressively gathers steam, gaining depth and breadth as it evokes 9/11 post-traumatic stress. It's a great-looking movie, with an evocative use of music and, in rugged-yet-sensitive Michael Shannon, has an actor whose forceful, focused presence is the film's sturdy linchpin.


Shannon's John Rosow, a martini-loving, hardscrabble Chicago private eye, is awakened in the middle of the night with an offer he can't afford not to take. For $500 a day plus expenses he is to board a train to Los Angeles at 7 a.m. to tail one of its passengers (Frank Wood), who has in tow a little Mexican boy. Rosow is to bring the man, about whom he is initially told nothing, to New York.

In time-honored fashion, Rosow encounters an array of people who are inevitably either comical, ironic or sarcastic - or all three. Just as the viewer is about to give up on the possibility that anyone will ever give Rosow anything resembling an ordinary, normal response, the film adroitly shifts gears; we gradually realize that Rosow and his target have had their lives transformed by 9/11. In a sense, Rosow is as much a missing man as is his quarry.

Despite honoring noir genre conventions, Buschel also draws upon his fertile imagination in dialogue and in storytelling that allows his film gradually to accrue meaning.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "Oh My God"

Grade: C-minus

Oh My God, a globe-trotting quest to answer the eternal question “What is God?”, strives for its own divine omniscience, interviewing dozens of subjects across 23 countries. A commercial photographer by training, director Peter Rodger sure knows how to make everything from the Himalayan mountains to the Kenyan plains look postcard perfect, as he travels the world to capture such exotic sacred rites as African animal sacrifice and Mayan pole dancing.

But in trying to shape his panorama into a spiritual inquiry, Rodger fails to heed his own complaint that “truth is being diluted by too many voices.” The reflections of Israelis and Palestinians, as well as Katrina victims and cancer patients, are reduced to a babble of disjunctive sound bites. The musings of celebrities like Seal and Ringo Starr are given prominence over those of religious leaders and scholars, while a relentless Moby-esque soundtrack subsumes each insight into a sonic miasma of theism. The results are often tasteless moments, like Hugh Jackman cackling over footage of an Australian aboriginal ritual scored to techno. To its credit, Oh My God’s overstimulated montage settles late into a sophisticated sequence that balances contending opinions on contemporary Islam. Otherwise, it’s 90-plus minutes of our big blue marble as seen by a creator with an eye for the exotic and a serious case of ADD.

To be released tomorrow on DVD: "The Slammin; Salmon"

Grade: C-minus

The Slammin’ Salmon takes the premise of Big Night, one of the most sublime restaurant movies ever made, and tries to adapt it for the gross-out set. It succeeds. It’s your choice as to whether that’s good news or bad.

In Big Night two Italian immigrant brothers peg the survival of their struggling restaurant to a lavish meal served on one all-or-nothing night. The restaurant in The Slammin’ Salmon is owned by a former boxer (Michael Clarke Duncan, in the film’s best performance) who needs to make $20,000 in one night to pay off a gambling debt.

The focus here, though, is not on the food, but on the waiters and waitresses, who come up with one gimmick after another to get customers to spend more. The movie is the work of Broken Lizard, a sketch-comedy troupe that has branched into filmmaking (Super Troopers, Beerfest), and it has its share of funny moments. But it also has its share of tired ones, like the subplot involving the inadvertent swallowing of a ring.

How many times has this obvious joke been used in dumb movies? You’ll have plenty of time to ponder that as the ring makes its long journey down the digestive tract to its inevitable exit.