IN GRAD SCHOOL at Columbia, we were able to study a private print of Jean- Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. Never theatrically released in America, its scarcity made it special, so I watched it repeatedly. It was one of the experiences that made me unafraid of movie art; drawn-in by Godard’s dense narrative and thrilled by its Cinemascope colors.The story of Paula Nelson (Anna Karina) searching a town called Atlantic City for her lost lover and uncovering a political conspiracy uncannily resembled the fun and adventure of film watching. Read more Read it in print

MEXICO’S CRITICALLY OVER- RATED Carlos Reygadas is unlikely to breakthrough to popular acclaim with his latest film, Stellet Licht, while Mexico’s highly publicized “Three Amigos”— Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro Gonzáles Iñáritu and Guillermo del Toro—are just that: commercial clowns. Between these camps stands Julián Hernández, Mexico’s finest filmmaker with the greatest human touch—which may be why his masterpieces Broken Sky and A Thousand Clouds of Peace have gone uncelebrated. Humanism is critically unpopular among art snobs. Read more

Zwick relates the true-life story of Tuvia, Zus and Asael, the three Bielski brothers who formed an armed resistance gang when the German Army marched into Belorussia in 1941.The badass title suggests a revenge flick tinged with righteousnessa Holocaust movie where the Jews fight back. Read more Read it in print

Imagination is Adam Sandler’s response to bad times. As Bedtime Stories’ hotel employee Skeeter Bronson, Sandler helps his single-parent sister (Courteney Cox) during her new job search by babysitting his niece and nephew. He tells them bedtime stories that spur their own fantasies and—magically—come true in his own life. This is an inspired metaphor for the way pop culture ought to work: It is handed-down by one generations, taken-up by the next, understood by all, and becomes a source of amazement and spiritual sustenance. Wall-E be damned! Read more

Spoiler Alert: Tom Cruise’s Col. Claus von Stauffenberg of Germany’s Tenth Panzer Division does not kill Adolf Hitler in Valkyrie. Although director Bryan Singer and screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander devote the film’s plot to dramatizing von Stauffenberg’s historically correct plan, they get no deeper than telling audiences what they already know. Singer’s approach to history is as trivial and incompetent was as his fantasy process in The Usual Suspects and the X-Men movies. Not only is Singer’s filmmaking aesthetically frustrating (lacking coherent visual rhythm) but his juvenile regard of the July 20, 1944, plot to kill Hitler—one of 15 documented attempts—is intellectually insulting. Read more Read it in print

It takes almost three hours for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to wind down and approximate the climax of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s fascinating image of a gigantic embryo floating in space and contemplating the Earth—then the audience—combined absurdity and magnificence. All mankind’s historical experience and scientific knowledge was distilled to a cosmic joke. Director David Fincher covets it, but Benjamin Button’s banal survey of big-L life—culminating in a hero’s return to an embryonic state—can’t top it. Read more

Not content to turn history into a clinical account, animator and documentary filmmaker Ari Folman both mythologizes and records his search for longforgotten memories of being a soldier in Israel’s first war with Lebanon in the 1980s in Waltz with Bashir. Not an animated biography, nor a cartoon documentary, Folman’s Waltz takes therapist Ori Sivan’s testimony of the “dynamic” nature of memories—“If some details are missing, memory fills the holes with things that never happened”—and creates an awesome hybrid of fact and personal fiction. Waltz is likewise “alive,” refusing to be cowed by the stultifying assumption of documentary filmmaking that reifies the testimony of talking heads. Folman makes his lay experts look compelling and human by refusing to shoot them up against a wall of absolute credibility, and they know it. He celebrates both the strength and the gaps of their stories and treats them with real respect rather than unimpeachable pieces of crumbling parchment paper. Read more Read it in print

As The Wheelers, a perfect-seeming, golden-blond, white American middle-class married couple in Revolutionary Road, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet press all the high-drama buttons, yet they don’t resemble anyone anybody actually knows. Their marital problems, based on each person’s sulky personality—Frank’s a restless philanderer, April’s a frustrated artist, they’re both jealous of each other—could fill an HBO mini-series. It’s cynical dramedy for people who pride themselves on being smart—that is, unsentimental. But Leo and Kate’s first film together since Titanic is a commercial calculation, using the stars’ glamour for fashionable sentimentality—a dark look at the American Dream through its twin nightmares, marriage and suburbia—and its subsets, love and careerism. Frank and April Wheeler fail at everything, even hope. (“We shared the secret that we would be wonderful in the world.” That’s how rich smart folk flatter themselves.) The only cliché Revolutionary Road lacks is the word “American” in its title. Since 1961, novelist Richard Yates’ title Revolutionary Road began to stink of pretense; now Yates’ smart-cynical concept has gotten the director it deserves: super-slick, always-pretentious Sam Mendes. Read more

A crucial, though seemingly trivial, decision was made when writer/director/comic book pioneer Frank Miller decided to make The Spirit look like his and Robert Rodriguez’s film adaptation of his own comic book, Sin City. As a creative choice, it makes sense considering how wrapped up The Spirit is in excusing its gleeful garishness by claiming similitude with various other seemingly disparate culture myths—comics are apparently just like Greek myths. Because comics still need to be defended, Miller, a notoriously combative defender of low culture and the satisfyingly gaudy EC Comics that inspired Sin City, has gone on the defensive and traded in The Spirit’s blue suit for a black one. Read more

Hype for Mickey Rouke in The Wrestler is an embarrassment; the excellent actor has had greater roles and given more interesting performances (his tabloid exploits notwithstanding). As a middle-aged, small-time wrestler living in a New Jersey trailer, Rourke’s Randy “Ram Jam” Robinson tells his estranged daughter, “Now I’m an old, broken-down piece of meat, and I’m alone and I deserve to be alone. I just don’t want you to hate me.” Jason Statham voiced more eloquent regret in Death Race; Ram Jam just wants pity. Worst of all, Ram Jam confesses in an old amusement park where he and daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) go to reminisce about the good ol’ days. It’s lousy irony because nothing about The Wrestler is amusing. Director Darren Aronofsky has made a literal-minded parable about suffering and mankind’s miserable existence. Aronofsky inflicts as much pain on the audience as self-flagellating Ram Jam does when brutalizing/mutilating himself in and outside the ring. Read more Read it in print