Reviews

"Affair in Trinidad" (1952) was supposed to be Rita Hayworth's "comeback" after a several year hiatus from Hollywood. Columbia pictures clearly pulled out as many stops as it could to get audiences into the theaters to see "Trinidad." The film's opening narration and its exotic locale are obviously derived from "Casablanca." Hayworth's pairing with leading man Glen Ford hearkened back to the great success of "Gilda." And the film's plot, using Hayworth to spy on Cold War conspirators, owes more than a little to Hitchcock's "Notorious."

The film does have some entertainment value, but Hayworth was clearly rusty and her great beauty was beginning to age even though she was only 35 at the time of the film's release. Oddly, only two scenes show off her signature erotic singing and dancing, and the second one of these is a complete dud. Her chemistry with Ford is also much more forced in "Trinidad" than it had been in the far superior "Gilda." A love triangle involving a rich, shady older man is another element borrowed from "Gilda," but with much less complexity in the plot and with no depth whatsoever in the development of the rival/antagonist.

I have always found it curious that in "Gilda," "Trinidad," and a few other films Rita Hayworth is often billed as a "femme fatale." Actually, she is the reverse of a femme fatale - - a woman with overt sexuality and seemingly loose morals who turns out to be "good" and "vulnerable." At least in "Gilda" her sexuality is trafficked upon in noirish ways until her heart-of-gold is finally established. Here in "Trinidad," despite being advertised as the hottest "Lady of Trinidad" and her introduction via a come-hither, bump and grind dance number, we are asked to believe that not only is she not promiscuous but that she is practically virginal, not having had sex in several years even with her suicidal/murdered ex- husband.

With Hayworth's characters sexuality is typically a come-on and a mask, not a source of power or a threat to masculine dominance as it is with true femme fatales like Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis Diedrich in "Double Indemnity." Also unlike true film noirs, the plot in "Trinidad" (and to a lesser degree "Gilda") resolves in a closed, happy ending, not a descent into chaotic darkness. Both of these characteristics are typical of the 1940s & 50s Hollywood mainstream drama, and NOT of the true film noirs that ran counter to the mainstream and remain more interesting to modern audiences than the standard Hollywood fare.

All in all, "Affair in Trinidad" is a derivative work with both eyes on the box office and not much depth or credibility. Its claims to film noir status are dubious at best. And Rita Hayworth fans - of which I am one -- are likely to be left cold by the action and the romance.

I first saw "Gone with the Wind" in its initial commercial TV broadcast in 1976. I have since seen the film numerous times via a succession of home video media: videotape, laserdisc, and DVD. Yet seeing the film once more on blu-ray and a large widescreen high def monitor is like seeing it completely anew. The sweeping cinematography of this classic epic film has never before been delivered to home audiences in such stunning power and detail. The achingly romantic score has never sounded better, whether heard in original mono or reconstructed stereo. Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) has never looked more rakishly handsome nor Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) more alluringly sensual. In short, for anyone not having seen "Gone with the Wind" in glorious big-screen Technicolor (almost all film viewers under the age of 70), the recent blu-ray release is a must-see revelation.

Beyond the compelling audio-visual experience, "Gone with the Wind" thankfully retains its fascination as a central piece of American popular culture - a work of art complex and rich enough not only to bear up under multiple viewings but to reveal, like great literature, different aspects of its meaning depending on the cultural and personal variables that a viewer brings to the experience. There were certainly a great number of impressions in my recent viewing that I don't remember having in quite the same way 30, 20, or even 10 years ago.

For one thing, characters and character relationships impacted me much differently than in the past. Scarlett's multiple marriages and affairs – even the protracted love/hate odyssey with Rhett – seemed less interesting now than the strength of character that enables her physical survival and success as a business woman. In many ways, Scarlett is clearly not an ante- and post-bellum Southern belle, but a woman of the 1930s, newly emerging from a patriarchal culture and acquiring a social role and status equivalent to a male's.

As with other '30s films that touch upon the redefinition of female roles, Scarlett's acquisition of masculine power is greeted with ambivalence or downright hostility. Even Rhett, who is generally bemused by and attracted to Scarlett's unbridled "self-interested" power grabs, eventually tries to "tame" and dominate Scarlett via marriage. On one occasion he tries to persuade her to give up the lumber mill and become a more devoted mother to Bonnie Blue. On another, he compares the "heartless" Scarlett unfavorably to Belle Watling, another hardheaded businesswoman but one whose ancient profession is considerably less threatening. Ultimately, Rhett attempts to assert his masculine power by an act of sexual aggression for which he would today be subject to domestic rape charges. Amazingly, given the era in which the film was made, nothing works for long. Scarlett is indomitable and irrepressible. Unlike other '30s heroines, Scarlett is NEVER reduced to a subordinate role. In the end, Tara and the screen are hers and hers alone.

Another thing that struck me in my latest viewing of "Gone with the Wind" was how much its creators (particularly David O. Selznick) strove to temper the racist content of the story materials. Of course, they were unsuccessful from today's perspective, but when the film is compared to "Birth of a Nation," the original film epic of the South's secession and destruction, one can clearly see its progressive designs. First of all, glorification of the South's rebellion is tempered from the outset by the dissenting voices of such otherwise dissimilar characters as Rhett and Ashley, both of whom foresee that the South has written its own ticket to destruction by entering into a war it cannot possibly win and for an historically dubious cause. Notably, the two central male characters view slavery askance. Rhett is never a slave-holding "gentleman." And Ashley, who is the scion of slaveholders, reveals plans to free the Wilkes slaves upon the death of his father. Moreover, the slaves on the Tara plantation, while still subject to stereotypical treatment, are far more prominent and rounded as characters than in any previous American film intended principally for white audiences. This is particularly true of sage-like Mammy, of course, but not only of her.

The stark differences between the Mitchell/Selznick version of Civil War history and D.W. Griffith's can be seen most clearly in the post-war Reconstruction period. In "Gone with the Wind" the really ugly stereotypes of empowered blacks are absent, with the negative focus centering instead on white carpetbaggers. Even the threats to Scarlett's Southern Womanhood come not from renegade blacks, but first from a white Northern deserter and later from white scalawags in Shantytown, a locale that Scarlett intrepidly, if foolishly, ventures through. From this latter threat she is pointedly rescued not by chivalrous whites, but by her former slave, Sam, who beats off the would-be rapists and drives Scarlett safely home. What a far cry this is from "Birth of a Nation," where Little Sister throws herself from a cliff rather than be raped by a former slave who has stalked her through perilous woods.

Above all, "Gone with the Wind" deliberately avoids all mention of the Ku Klux Klan, the terminally embarrassing heroes of "Birth of a Nation." The only scene that comes close to a Klan allusion occurs following the attempted assault on Scarlett when Ashley, Dr. Meade, and then-husband Mr. Kennedy, set about clandestinely to "clean out" the scalawags. Yet even then their targets are not primarily black, nor do the avengers don robes. The audience is not even permitted to witness the attack – only Ashley's wounds from it.

If Americans in the 21st century can still respond to "Gone With the Wind" - and clearly they can - it is not only because of its grand pictorial displays and epic action but because in terms of gender and race, this classic of Hollywood's 1939 peak year looks forward to a modern "tomorrow" as much as, if not more than, it laments a tragically flawed American past.

Shot in France with a French cast and a Franco-Polish crew, "Blue" (1993) is the first entry in the masterful Three Colors Trilogy that Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski completed shortly before his untimely death in 1996. Each of the three films draws its title from one of the colors of the French flag. In "Blue" Kieslowski richly counterpoints the color's conventional connotation of grief with its emblematic meaning of "liberty."

After a devastating car accident claims the lives of her young daughter and her internationally renowned composer husband, the film's protagonist Julie (Juliette Binoche) finds herself unable either to deal with the profound pain of loss or, despite several aborted attempts, to commit suicide. She elects instead to distort the meaning of "liberty" by cutting herself off from all things connected to her happy domestic past and from all human relationships that might cause further pain. She empties her home of furnishings - including all but one key item that belonged to her daughter. She retrieves the last composition that her husband was working on (significantly entitled "Concerto for European Unification") and deposits it in a passing garbage truck. She summons and sleeps with her husband's associate, Olivier, who she correctly suspects has always carried a torch of unrequited love.

As a test of her dispassion, Julie perversely uses the act of love making as one final gesture of disconnection, hoping also to prove "just a woman" to Olivier and not worthy of his continued pursuit and idealization. In the morning she deserts Olivier and her emptied country home for a leased room in Paris, where she plans to do nothing and live anonymously. On her way off the estate, however, we watch as Julie scrapes her knuckles along a stone wall until they bleed, suggesting that the pain of human existence and memory resides powerfully beneath her liberated surface.

For some time while residing in Paris, Julie continues her self-imposed human exile, having little to do with her neighbors, focusing intently on the phenomena of the present (like a sugar cube dissolving in her morning coffee), and continuing to repress the feelings and memories symbolized by sudden bursts of orchestral music against a black screen. Inevitably, however, Julie's walled in isolation begins to crumble. Olivier finds her hiding place, a homeless man inexplicably plays fragments of the Unity Concerto on his flute, a young stripper who has been ostracized by all others in Julie's apartment building insinuates herself into Julie's life and re-awakens her memories by zeroing in on the blue glass mobile that hangs in Julie's apartment – the one object connected to her daughter that Julie was unable to abandon or destroy.

Ultimately, two events combine to extract Julie from her psychological slough of despond and initiate the process of her re-engagement with the world. First, by a chance occasion paralleling the accident itself, she learns that her husband had been conducting a prolonged affair with a young law clerk and that the woman is carrying her husband's child. Initially stunned with betrayal, Julie angrily confronts the woman, but then her inherently generous nature surfaces and Julie invites her to take possession of the abandoned country estate. At about the same time, Julie learns that Olivier has undertaken to complete the Unification Concerto on his own, which - as he has counted on - arouses Julie's ire and provokes her into aiding Olivier with the project.

As earlier intimated, it now becomes clear that she, not her husband, was the concerto's primary composer. Work on the concerto not only restores Julie's creative link to life but also sparks love and desire for the ever-faithful Olivier. The healing powers of love and music together are indicated by the lyrics of the concerto's chorus. Adapted from St. Paul's Letter to the Corinthians, they read: "Though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, if I have not love, I am nothing." The film ends with a montage of images that weave an existential tapestry of chance and fate, love and isolation, life and death. The most memorable of these is a sonogram of the fetus pulsating in the mistress's womb, compensating imperfectly yet affirmatively for the loss of Julie's own child.

Roger Ebert, in his original review of "Blue," cited Ingmar Bergman's conviction that "many moments in films can only be dealt with by a close-up of a face - the right face - and that too many directors try instead to use dialogue or action." Dialog and action in "Blue" are indeed sparse and obviously subordinated not only to close-ups on Juliette Binoche's extraordinarily expressive face, but to other purely cinematic film elements such as color, composition, camera placement, and – perhaps above all – sound. Indeed, "Blue" includes one of the most original and emotionally powerful diegetic soundtracks that I have ever encountered.

Whether regarded as an independent entity or viewed in the context of the whole trilogy, "Blue" is a major work by one of the great masters of contemporary world cinema.

One of the most favorably reviewed and box-office successful foreign language films ever distributed in the United States, "Like Water for Chocolate" was the collaborative product of Mexican actor/director Alfonso Arau ("El Guapo" to fans of "Three Amigos") and his wife, Laura Esquivel, author of both the film's screenplay and the novel it was adapted from. Like the novel, the film's narrative materials show the heavy influence of "magic realism," a Latin American style of storytelling first popularized in North America and Europe in the late 1960s through the translation of the novels of Nobel laureate, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, especially his masterpiece, "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

As with other works of magic realism, "Like Water for Chocolate" blends elements of realism, dream, and myth to create a world whose surface is mundane but where the fantastic emerges regularly and matter-of-factly. Much of the magic in "Like Water for Chocolate" is linked to cooking, an ordinary feminine domestic activity that becomes a powerful, preternatural vehicle for unleashing the heroine Tita's creativity and passion, both of which are repressed by the machismo culture and absurd female-binding traditions of early twentieth century Mexico.

Befitting the story's origins in the romance genre, passion is at the center of "Like Water for Chocolate." Indeed, the Spanish phrase "como agua para chocolate" is purportedly a familiar Mexican expression describing a person who is about to boil over with sexual desire. (The American expression "hornier than a hoot owl" is a non-culinary - and rather less romantic - equivalent metaphor.) Passion - its expression, repression, or absence - shapes not only Tita's life and marriage, but also the characterizations of the intimidating Mama Elena and of Tita's sisters, Rosaura and Gertrudis, contrasting foils in the matter of female sexuality. Rosaura is bound by paternalistic traditions of restraint and denial while Gertrudis becomes literally inflamed by sexual desire along with adapting a pre-feminist political assertiveness and egalitarianism.

Supporting the unfolding of this Mexican Cinderella tale, the cinematography of "Like Water for Chocolate" exhibits great range and beauty, by turns subtle and breathtaking. The film's lighting styles and color palette are equally effective either in establishing the fable-like mood of the stark Coahuila Desert or in detailing the more realistic ranch house where many of the interior scenes are set.

Topping all, of course, are the set pieces of Tita's sumptuous meals, endless quilt, and fiery bed, unforgettable images through which her sexual being is triumphantly expressed.

"The Gambler" (1974) is a riveting drama about a man who - like many young adults in the baby boom generation - rejects the world of privilege and comfort he has been born into. Rather than turning to some form of counter-culture politics, however, Alex Freed (James Caan) holds an establishment job as a professor of English while pursuing "the juice" of financial, social, and even physical risk and pain during his considerable free time.

Like Dostoyevski's Underground Man, to whom the screenplay pays homage in an early scene of Freed lecturing to his students at NYC (i. e. CCNY), "the gambler" rejects the middle class world of reason and social convention and instead embraces the irrational, the realm of will and desire where two plus two can equal five and where poets, athletes, and addicts can "know" and experience things that ordinary human beings living in the rut of mundane existence cannot.

Unfortunately for Freed he will never be a poet although, as a literature professor, he can quote Shakespeare, e.e. cummings, and Walt Whitman with anyone. He can also turn an original phrase or two and lead his relatives, friends, and other less literary folk to believe that he has great books in him. But the truth is that he's a third rate talent stuck in a $1500 a month gig trying to wheedle literary appreciation out of reluctant undergrads who are obviously going through the motions to get paper qualified for one pragmatic goal or another.

He is also not a great athlete although he kids himself about how he might have been a star basketball player - even, at one point, stopping at a playground in Harlem to take on a local 15 year old hot shot in a game of one-on-one, betting $20 to a dime that he will win. He gives the hot shot a pretty good game, but loses, thus establishing the real extent of his athletic talent for us - and perhaps himself - to see. No, the only sure and easy way he can get the juice is through gambling and the self deceptions about winning and losing that his compulsive behavior entails.

Considering the barrage of searing insults that Harvard-educated Axel Freed hurls at the Brown University (my alma mater) football team, I would like to say very bad things about this film, but I'd be lying. Written by heralded screenwriter James Toback ("Fingers," "Bugsy," etc.) and featuring one of James Caan's finest performances, "The Gambler" has deservedly become a 1970s cult classic.

Compared to such somber, even bleak, recent Woody Allen movies as "Match Point" and "Cassandra's Dream," "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" has a good deal of humor. Yet to bill the film as a comedy - while no doubt shrewd marketing - is misleading both as to its quantity of chuckles and even more so in regard to its plot resolution. The film is not by any means a Hollywood style screwball romantic comedy, not even of the ironic failed romance variety that characterized such Allen classics as "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan."

Rather, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is akin to many European and some American indie film adult sex comedies, focusing less on the boy-gets-girl removal of obstacles to idealized love and more on the foibles and vagaries of sexual attraction and human mating patterns. Such comedies are populated by flawed human beings whose choices in love reflect their own limitations and usually end in compromise or unhappiness – that is, realistically rather than romantically. Viewers prepared to accept this approach will really like "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"; those expecting a full resurrection of "funny Woody" may be disappointed.

The film's semantically curious title refers to its twenty-something central characters Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) along with its romance-inspiring setting (Barcelona). While on a visit to Spain, the American friends are invited to share the rather opulent Barcelona residence of Vicky's family friend (Patricia Clarkson). Vicky is doing research on "Catalan identity" for her Master's thesis and killing time waiting to be securely married to a Wall Street business type back in the States. Cristina is essentially a hot girl on a hot summer's night, looking for sexual adventure and not knowing where she's headed in life but wanting it to be (in Benjamin Braddock's term) "different."

Little time is wasted getting the plot moving as the young women soon meet and are aggressively "courted" by Juan Antonio, a bohemian Spanish painter (Javier Bardem). Cristina is immediately smitten but Vicky is standoffish, partly because she is engaged but mainly because she fears disruptive emotions. As one might expect, things get emotionally complicated and tangled among the threesome in short order. What one doesn't expect, though, is the mid-Act 2 entrance into the picture of Juan Antonio's divorced wife Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz). Maria Elena enters the scene like a force of nature, completely rewriting the chemistry of interaction among the principal characters and initiating a series of events - one more unpredictable and cataclysmic than the last –that build to a resolution completely true to the characters although open and unsatisfying in the superficial Hollywood ending sense.

"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is clearly Allen's tightest, most inspired screenplay in some time, maybe since "Husbands and Wives" in the early '90s. It is also his best job of casting since perhaps even earlier than that. As Vicky, relative newcomer Rebecca Hall ("The Prestige") plays a part that in the '80s and early '90s would have gone to Mia Farrow, but she plays it with a bare minimum of annoying imitation-Woody tics and has a much more appealing screen persona than Farrow usually managed to project. Scarlett Johansson's role is nicely limited to the small compass of her acting talent while tastefully exploiting her sensational sensuality. Javier Bardem, following his Academy Award turn as a ruthless hired killer and his stunning performance as a quadriplegic in "The Sea Inside," continues to demonstrate formidable range here in playing a complexly human character, even if his bedroom eyes are apparently more powerful than his artist's brush. And what can one say of Penelope Cruz's tour de force as Marie Elena? Stealing every scene, Cruz fully inhabits a breathtakingly beautiful character who is alluringly feminine, powerful, inspirational, and more than a tad crazy. The closest precedent to her character type I can recall is Jeanne Moreau's Catherine in Francois Truffaut's masterpiece "Jules and Jim."

In several other respects, including the extensive use of a narrator, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" resembles a rendition of "Jules and Jim" told from a female perspective – i.e. it resembles "Two English Girls," which is Truffaut's own version of "Jules and Jim" from a female perspective. One thing the three films certainly share is an image of love as a constant and shifting ménage a trois (or sometime a quartre!) Whether the connections to Truffaut were intended, I do not know. However, Allen has repeatedly expressed his life-long admiration for the European film masters of his youth: Bergman, Fellini, Godard, and Truffaut. The examples in his earlier work of the influence of the first three of these are plentiful. Perhaps it was time to take on Truffaut. If so, the initial results were happy indeed.

The Godfather (1972) did for gangster movies what 2001: A Space Odyssey did for science fiction. Like Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola re-energized and, to a degree, reinvented a basic Hollywood pulp fiction action-entertainment genre, using it as a vehicle for the high artistic ambitions of a post-New Wave film "auteur."

Within his narrower focus on 20th century American civilization (as opposed to Kubrick's philosophical speculations on human evolution), Coppola shapes the story of the Corleone Mafia family into an epic/satiric vision of American business, government, justice, and moral decline. The Godfather's brilliantly constructed opening sequence, the wedding of Don Corleone's daughter, not only establishes the Don's character, the nature of his organization, the role of family and Sicilian tradition in his world, and the character of his sons (three natural and one adopted), but also establishes the relationship between the Don's world and "legitimate" society. For instance, the film's opening words are those of Bonasera, a petitioner for a wedding "favor," whose voice over a dark screen first asserts the American Dream, "I believe in America. America has made my fortune," and then turns to disillusioned contradiction: "for justice, we must go to Don Corleone."

Numerous subsequent lines of dialog establish literal or metaphorical connections between the criminal underworld and social institutions. Some of the most memorable ones include: "My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.""Now we have the unions, we have the gambling; and they're the best things to have. But narcotics is a thing of the future. And if we don't get a piece of that action, we risk everything we have. I mean not now, but ten years from now." "It's not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business." And most famously of all: "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse."

The film's title refers to two godfathers, the original Don Corleone and his youngest son - and ultimate successor - Michael. Marlon Brando's performance as Don Corleone, for which he was awarded a Best Actor Academy Award, balances the Don's subtly counter-pointed functions as beloved, grandfatherly patriarch and fearsome, brutal crime boss. Yet Michael, as the character most centrally and significantly affected by the film's plot and played with a brilliance equaling Brando's by a then unknown Al Pacino, is the principal protagonist.

At the wedding, Michael's centrality is signaled by the Don's frantic call, "Where's Michael? We are not taking the picture without Michael!" A World War II hero still in decorated uniform, Michael is meanwhile busy differentiating himself from his family to his girl friend and future second wife, Kay (Diane Keaton). "Luca Brasi held a gun to the band leader's head," he relates, "and my father assured him that either his signature or his brains would be on the release. That's my family Kay. It's not me." Michael's initial disinterest in Mafia activities is reinforced by his adoring father who envisions him as "Senator Corleone" or "Governor Corleone" not as his successor. That role is reserved for his hot-headed eldest son, Sonny (James Caan). But, of course, events conspire to suck Michael in - and to keep sucking him in right through Godfather III - the assassination attempt on his father, Michael's coolly murderous response, the car bomb meant for him that kills his first wife, the Sicilian beauty Apollonia (aptly named for the god of sun light), the riddled body of his brother Sonny. Inevitably, a morally darkened Michael emerges at the end of the film, one who outdoes his father in guile and ruthlessness and whose final brutal and deceitful acts in Godfather I seal his doom as a Macbeth-like villainous tragic hero.

Shot mainly on location in various New York City locales, The Godfather spans a ten-year post World War II period. A multitude of props, costumes, and pop culture artifacts arranged by the film's art director, Warren Clyner, and production designer, Dean Tavoularis, lend a rich sense of historical authenticity to the film's mise en scene. Moreover, the film's lighting by brilliant cinematographer Gordon ("prince of darkness") Willis, contributes greatly to both the film's realism and its thematic symbolism. Compare, for instance, the use of extremely dark, shadowy, color desaturated interior scenes – especially in the Don's home office – with the brightly lit, vivaciously colored outdoor wedding scene or the sun-drenched, romanticized Sicilian landscape.

The Godfather is edited in the classic Hollywood invisible style, subordinating technique to the needs of narrative and visual continuity. But the film is expertly edited nonetheless. In particular one might note the stunning use of multiple parallel editing that occurs in one of the film's last scenes: the assassination of the other crime family heads, elaborately planned to coincide with Michael's participation in the baptism of sister Connie's child. Likewise, The Godfather's soundtrack is a memorable combination of diegetic period music ("Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas") and a lush, operatic original score composed by one of the greatest film music composers, Nino Rota (a frequent Fellini collaborator as in 8 1/2).

With The Godfather and its even more ambitious sequel, Coppola pushed the classic gangster film in the direction of high art and released it once and for all from the moralistic grip of the Hays Code, which arose in the 1930s in large part as a response to the romanticizing of criminals found in such early examples of the gangster genre as Scarface, Little Cesar, and Public Enemy. Not only did the code regulate the degree and nature of sexual and violent imagery in all films, but it also specifically required that criminals be portrayed as morally repulsive social deviants and that plots involving them be resolved with the implicit or explicit lesson that "crime did not pay." Fortunately for American popular culture The Godfather radically rewrote the rulebook and paved the way for a generation's-worth of gangster masterpieces ranging from the Scarface remake to Pulp Fiction to The Sopranos.

For some time I avoided "The Interpreter," [2005] which sadly was to be the final film directed by recently deceased Sydney Pollack. It received lukewarm reviews in the mass media (although Ebert liked it) and generally unappreciative commentary on IMDb. My avoidance turned out to be a mistake. I have since viewed the film several times on video and have admired it more with each viewing. Yes, the pacing is unusually slow for a political thriller. Yes, the relationship between the leads has a weird chemistry and does not end with the usual Hollywood romantic closure/cliché. Yes, the script is talky, very talky even. And, yes, the plot is hard to follow and has some large plausibility holes, particularly in the film's final sequence.

As it happens, though, only the last of these is truly a "weakness," and then mainly to those unfortunately literal-minded film viewers whose aesthetic pleasures are utterly ruined by "logical" inconsistencies in plot construction or resolution. Would the Secret Service, FBI, and U.N. security staff really leave a nearly assassinated leader of a foreign state unattended in a "safe room" immediately after the event? Certainly not, one hopes. But stranger things have "really" happened in the panic following actual assassinations in 20th century American history. Were that not so, the conspiracy theorists would have much less grist for their mills. Regardless, the flaw in logic just doesn't matter much, for the entire plot to assassinate President Zuwani, the dictatorial and ruthless head of Matobo, a fictional African state, is not only a "con" as one of the FBI officials gathers early on in the investigation, it is also a perfect example of a Hitchcockian Maguffin.

Unlike more intellectually simplistic political thrillers, including Pollack's own genre classic "Three Days of the Condor," "The Interpreter" isn't ultimately about the surface subject of its main plot. The plan to assassinate Zuwanie while he delivers a self-exculpatory speech at the U.N. – i.e. what Silvia Broome hears, or claims to have heard, whispered in Ku on a darkened General Assembly floor – is as much what "The Interpreter" is about as "Psycho" is about the theft of $40,000 or "Casablanca" is about the missing letters of transit signed (with ridiculous implausibility) by General De Gaulle.

What "The Interpreter" is about instead is a rich complex of issues that surround and emerge from the working out of its convoluted plot. Very interestingly, it is about the politics of revolution and betrayal in contemporary Africa (taking its main cue from the horrors in Zimbabwe). It is also about the importance of language and communication in a world where children are armed with AK-47s. The film explores the linguistic workings of the U.N. in loving detail and even takes the time to invent and employ a made-up language (the aforementioned "Ku," which Silvia Broome interprets along with uninvented and un-subtitled French). A key witness in the investigation speaks only Portuguese. Moreover the film's climax, comes not with the expected death of Zuwanie but with his having to read - and choke on - the powerful and inspirational words he wrote before he became like the monsters he beheld. In the next to last scene we hear Silvia's voice-over naming Zuwanie's victims as recorded in detail in her dead brother's notebooks, thereby illustrating another unique power of language: bearing historical witness to atrocity. Most of all, "The Interpreter" is about two characters, Nicole Kidman as U.N. interpreter and Matoban ex-patriot Silvia Broome and Sean Penn as Secret Service agent Tobin Keller, wounded by violence done to loved ones and helping each other resist the desire to subject others or themselves to further violence, "a lazy form of grief" as it is defined in one of the film's many memorable phrases.

Supported by the wonderful Catherine Keener as Keller's torch-carrying partner and Pollack himself as the chief of the Secret Service, Kidman and Penn, two of the finest actors of their generation, offer up their usual first-rate performances here, carrying off five scenes of extended dialog wherein they explore each other's hidden facets and discuss such unlikely but arresting topics as the Ku form of justice and whether wanting someone "gone" is or is not the verbal equivalent of wanting him or her "dead." Personally, I'll take such interruptions in the flow of action over the requisite car chase and explosion scenes any day – although the film does have its own interesting versions of the latter as well. All in all, "The Interpreter" is a film that has been seriously underrated and deserves a look from those who appreciate textured screen writing and subtle acting and who, like me, may have been put off by the film's original reception.

"Cassandra's Dream" [2007] explores a favorite Woody Allen conundrum: whether there really exists a moral line that when crossed causes the transgressor to suffer intolerable pangs of guilt - and, if so, whether those pangs originate from a watchful Judeo-Christian God, the fateful Furies of classic tragedy, or simply the chance structure of an individual psyche.

The film presents us with two such transgressors, the brothers Ian and Terry Blaine (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell), who for various reasons agree to commit a murder of convenience against a man they know only as a threat to their rich Uncle Howard (Tom Wilkinson), whose goodwill and largess they covet. One brother - good looking, smooth talking Ian - seems quite capable of rationalizing the crime and reaping its benefits, which for him include the funding of his latest get-rich-quick scheme and the successful wooing of a beautiful aspiring actress (Hayley Atwell) he must social climb to attain. But the other brother – underachieving, goodhearted Terry – motivated by huge gambling debts, a girl friend with domestic inclinations, and a weak mind made even weaker by a growing addiction to alcohol and painkillers, begins to unravel almost as soon as the murder is committed.

As Terry's guilt-ridden torment begins to threaten both Ian and Uncle Howard with exposure, Uncle Howard – the ultimate amoral sleaze ball – proposes that Ian knock off his brother too. Thus the stakes in the crossing-the-line plot are raised to the ultimate Biblical crime: fratricide. Can Ian, having gone a long way down the slippery slope to utter nihilism, complete the job? That is the last moral question Allen raises in "Cassandra's Dream," and I'll leave it to his small cadre of faithful viewers to find out the answer for themselves.

I will, however, divulge the verbal playfulness in the film's title. On a literal level, "Cassandra's Dream" is the name the brothers give a sailboat they purchase in the film's opening sequence. It is named in honor of a 60-1 shot that came through for Terry during his initial lucky streak at the dog races. Symbolically – and, some might say, heavy-handedly – the sailboat Cassandra's Dream evokes the world of Greek tragedy and specifically Homer's Cassandra, daughter of King Priam of Troy, who is blessed/cursed by Apollo with the gift of prophecy that no one heeds. Cassandra foresees the tragic doom of Troy but it powerless to stop it.

Allen's film has a similar sense of inexorable doom, and the sailboat that symbolizes tragic vision also frames the film's action physically in its opening, central turning point, and climactic scenes. Since the boat was acquired by seeming "luck," yet, like Oedipus' crown, is really a harbinger of unforeseen but quickly arriving tragic fate, it neatly encapsulates the film's central theme as well. On top of this is a broader play on the metaphorical use of ships to express luck, good or ill. Ian ironically assumes that his "ship has finally come in," but as his father (like a one-man Greek chorus) reminds him: "The only ship certain to come in has black sails."

Like most of Allen's films in the past decade, "Cassandra's Dream" reworks territory familiar to those who have followed his career since the beginning. Many of the same moral issues were raised and explored in one of Allen's greatest films, "Crimes and Misdemeanors," whose title in turn revealed the literary sources of the theme: Dostoyevski's "Crime and Punishment." Allusions to Greek myth and tragedy were extensively laced – albeit comically – throughout "Mighty Aphrodite" and in the opening of Allen's preceding film, "Scoop." "Cassandra's Dream" is not as good as any of these or perhaps not even as good as the last example of "serious Woody," "Match Point," but it's not a bad film. Its plot has a stark, stage-like melodramatic quality that is compelling even if entirely humorless and mostly predictable. The pairing of two fine young actors like Farrell and McGregor creates a fascinating chemistry and the rest of the cast, particularly Wilkinson and the gorgeous Atwell, has its moments. Vilmos Zsigmund's cinematography, highlighting London and the English countryside, is stunning, and Philip Glass's score adds a powerful emotional dimension as well.

I've gone back and forth on my feelings about this latest effort from Allen, but I've finally veered toward a qualified thumbs up. For devotees of "funny Woody," I'd suggest a pass, but his die hard fans – of whom I am certainly one – will find much of interest in "Cassandra's Dream."

"Two-Lane Blacktop" [1971] is a cult road film starring James Taylor in his only film appearance, Dennis Wilson of Beach Boys fame, Warren Oates fresh from his career making appearance in Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch," Harry Dean Stanton in a memorable cameo as a homosexual hitchhiker, and Laurie Bird, whose short life and career would be capped tragically by suicide in her boyfriend Art Garfunkel's apartment.

In many respects "Two-Lane Blacktop" holds up better than the much more celebrated "Easy Rider" released a year or two earlier. Whereas "Easy Rider" is seriously dated by drug glorification, psychedelic imagery, hair styles, clothing fashions, and heavy-handed anti-establishment politics, "Two Lane" ties more deeply and less topically into the American Romantic tradition begun by Walt Whitman and re-invented in the 1950s by Jack Kerouac and the Beats. As in Kerouac's "On the Road," the journey across America that structures "Two Lane" is both a quest to grasp the huge American landscape and a thrust at freedom from the restraints of modern civilization as expressed through the car culture and youthful rebellion born in the 1950s and burgeoning in the 1960s. As director Monte Hellman suggests on the Criterion DVD release, "Two Lane Blacktop," despite its official release date, is the last movie of the 1960s.

The souped up 1955 Chevy driven by Taylor and tended to by his mechanic sidekick Wilson is the film's central symbol for the Romantic notion of burning with a white hot flame. ("You can never go fast enough.") Similarly, travel on mythic Route 66 back from West to East is a reversal/renewal of the path followed in the founding of the country. Yet none of the principal characters actually make it back to Washington D. C., New York, or Florida - the three east coast locations variously mentioned as geographical goals. Their journey and ours leads into the rural, back-roads heart of the country, leaving us there and making the next step in the journey open and unknown.

In spirit and vision "Two Lane" has much in common with "Breathless," the defining work of the French New Wave. Like Godard's Bogie-inspired Michel, "Two Lane"'s main characters adopt arbitrary identities - in their case, racing hustlers and wandering free spirits. Like Michel too, they impose an arbitrary meaning on their world. While his takes the form of petty thievery and sexual adventure, theirs is a cross country race for pink slips. Yet the race is abandoned and even forgotten by film's end. Only life in the moment has any meaning; once an "end" is glimpsed, the quest is abandoned in favor of some new impulse.

The film shares much else with the French New Wave as well, especially its rejection of big budget studio formulas for structuring stories. The film was shot on location in sequence as the actors were actually making the cross country journey that the film was fictionalizing. There was a deliberate use of spontaneous and accidental event (e.g. a rainstorm that wasn't scripted). To keep the actors in the "present," only the most experienced one of them, Warren Oates, was allowed to see the script. No use was made of make-up, set design, special effects or other accoutrements of the Hollywood system. The actors were youthful and inexperienced (other than Oates) and the plot, such as it is, is riddled with deliberate aimlessness and disproportion, ending anti-climactically and with little or nothing resolved.

In most ways "Two Lane Blacktop" is really an anti-road movie and those who watch it thinking they will be rewarded by exciting car races and sexual adventure are in for a big disappointment. Ultimately the film isn't about car racing at all, but about defining one's self in an existential void. It's about living absolutely in the present, in the here and now - with the past irrelevant and the future unknown. More than anything, this extreme and unapologetic romantic bent is what makes "Two Lane Blacktop" such a pure and unforgettable expression of the 1960s.

As its title implies "Vantage Point" [2008] is about point of view - and I mean it's ALL about point of view. The same fifteen minutes worth of action is numbingly re-told from the point of view of more than half a dozen characters, with each re-telling giving the viewer a bit more information about the workings of the film's terrorist assassination/abduction plot and weaving the characters into an eye catching but pointless tapestry. As an exercise in the techniques of film editing and plot construction, I suppose the film has its merits. But the use of multiple points of view is hardly the revolutionary discovery the film makers seem to think - as those familiar with such time-honored classics as "Citizen Kane,""Rashomon," and "The Killing" may attest. For better or worse, "Vantage Point" also sustains a high pitched kinetic intensity for almost all of its 90 minutes of run time. The exhausting pace of the movie is created - as in the much more successful "Run Lola Run" - via a mix of physical action (running, car chases, explosions), rapid cutting, tight framing, and a relentlessly percussive score. Unlike "Run Lola Run," however, "Vantage Point" offers so little variation in its frenetic style that the film's ending comes more as a relief than a revelation.

The film's plot is resolved with what could have been a nice touch of humanistic irony except that, like just about everything in the film, its impact is undercut by utter predictability and by the fact that we just don't care about any of the characters, including the one designed to tug at our heartstrings in the climactic scene. To varying degrees the characters are underdeveloped and their actions are largely unmotivated.. Most appear for very brief periods and then become "glorified extras" (as Dennis Quaid aptly quips in his DVD interview). Why bother to show us the terrorists' point of view (a few times over) if we never learn why they are up to their nasty tricks? The film's director, Pete Travis, claims that the shifts in narrative and camera point of view had the deeper purpose of broadening the audience's sympathy for divergent political and personal attitudes about the depicted action, but that worthy intention just didn't make it to the screen.

On a more positive note, the problems with "Vantage Point" certainly do not stem from the casting or acting. The film is very well cast with accomplished American stars and young foreign actors who look the parts and have excellent screen presence. Forest Whitaker as a latter day, digital video camera version of Abraham Zapruder has the best developed part in the script, and he does his usual brilliant job inhabiting it, but his efforts are far from enough to save the day. Dennis Quaid does as much as anyone could expect in the protagonist's role of a psychologically scarred Secret Service presidential bodyguard. His character is similar in outline but not depth to the one played by Clint Eastwood in "In the Line of Fire." Quaid's part is simply underwritten and sacrificed to the film's one-trick pony of technique. Sigourney Weaver is excellent in the film's opening sequence as a hard-edged TV newsroom director, but, again, the part goes nowhere and she barely shows up again. William Hurt's role as a U.S. president attending a Spanish summit designed to bring an end to the Age of Terrorism amounts to little more than a cameo - well, a double cameo, but you'll need to watch the film (or at least its trailer) to get that twist. And, frankly, it isn't worth it.

Although clearly not in the same league, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) has at least one thing in common with such classics as Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and Blue Velvet: its opening sequence contains an extreme anatomical close up. Rather than disembodied lips, eyes, or ears, however, the viewer is treated to a close up of Scarlett Johansson's panty-clad, recumbent rear end. Eye-catching as the shot may be, I'm not sure of its intent - unless it's a sly dig at female body fetishizing in American (and Japanese) cinema. Whatever, Lost in Translation is an arresting and amusing blend of romantic comedy and fish-out-of-water satire.

The "water" here is contemporary Japan and the out-of-it fish are Bill Murray playing Bob Harris, an over-the-hill, unhappily married actor brought to Japan to do celebrity endorsement ads for Suntory whiskey and Johansson playing Charlotte, a recent Yale philosophy grad who is hanging out in Tokyo listlessly taking in sights and visiting with friends while her photographer husband is busy with various shoots. According to the conventions of romantic comedy, the two eventually meet cute and strike up a friendship that threatens to become a love affair but never quite does. The stars crossing these potential lovers are age difference and complicated lives. Thrust together by boredom, cultural alienation and pure chance, both sense that their relationship is necessarily transient and Platonic.

Immediately following the opening butt-shot, Lost in Translation begins its whimsical and mildly satiric view of Japan with an airport hostess in voice-over welcoming visitors to the New Tokyo Airport while Harris taxis through a night scape of great glass department stores and skyscrapers surrealistically saturated in neon ads. He wakes to see a gargantuan Suntory billboard ad of himself promoting the whiskey in Japanese. Doing a double take, he rubs his eyes to clear them of culture shock. Throughout much of Lost in Translation, the viewer must do likewise, metaphorically speaking. The overarching vision of Tokyo is that of a fun house mirror reflection of Western culture, a major Asian city somehow crossbred with Las Vegas and Times Square with beautifully bizarre results.

Harris's first 48 hours in Japan humorously establish his strangeness in a strange land. His shower head, for instance, only reaches his nose, and the exercise machine in the hotel's gym barks instructions in Japanese as it races completely out of control like the feeding machine in Chaplin's Modern Times. The scenes shooting new ads for Suntory are filled with language barrier jokes such as receiving the direction to act like Sinatoro, leader of the "lat pack." Funniest of all, perhaps, is the late night visit from a Japanese hooker sent as a welcome present from the president of Suntory. "Lip my stockings," she implores. "Lip them!" Eventually Harris gets the idea that she means "rip," but the hooker then acts out a dramatic rape fantasy that apparently turns on her rich Japanese clients, but leaves Harris completely baffled and alarmed.

The film's two main characters finally meet in the American themed lounge of the hotel they share. From their first casual encounter at the bar, they develop a potent chemistry based on their disconnection from the cultural surroundings, their unhappy marital relationships, and their similarly sardonic senses of humor. Moreover, each is having a difficult time with a key life passage. Harris is deep into a midlife crisis and Charlotte is facing the classic identity crisis of a young adult. Their adventures together begin after Harris charms her with a playful proposition: "Can you keep a secret? I'm trying to organize a prison break. I'm looking for an accomplice. We'd have to get out of this bar, then the city, then the country. You in or you out?" Over the next few evenings, Harris and Charlotte trip the light fantastic in a variety of Japlish pop culture venues. Charlotte's Japanese friend "Charley Brown" takes them to a strange strip club with sexually explicit hip hop music ("Suckin' on my Titties") blaring in the background and then to his apartment for dancing, pot, and a few inevitable rounds of karaoke. The adventures reach a soul-searching climax in Harris's room sipping drinks in bed and watching a re-run of La Dolce Vita. Charlotte confesses: "I''m stuck. Does it get easier?" And Harris answers: "No. Yes. It gets easier. . . . The more you know who you are and what you want, the less you let things upset you." They then fall asleep without the anticipated sexual consummation. Indeed, Harris and Charlotte's "fine romance" is much more akin to an old-fashioned Astaire/Rogers tease than to the illicit sexuality of, say, Woody Allen's affair with the teen-aged Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan.

On the morning of Harris' departure, he and Charlotte say almost nothing. "Aren't you going to wish me a good fright or something?" A look of terrible loss is written on Harris' face as Charlotte retreats to the elevator with a curt "O.k., bye." But on the way to the airport Harris glimpses her on the sidewalk and chases after, seemingly setting up a classic clichéd romantic comedy ending, but instead we get a prolonged heartfelt embrace climaxed by Harris's mysterious, unheard whispering into Charlotte's ear. Speculation about what was said, of course, abounds. Romantics might assume that a future assignation is being arranged, but that would negate the entire thrust of the film. Instead, the whispers probably reiterate Harris's assurance that Charlotte will indeed find herself and grow from a gorgeous and intriguing young lady into a beautiful and accomplished woman. The soundtrack's exit music ("Just like honey" by The Jesus and Mary Chain) connects both to Charlotte ("Listen to the girl as she takes on half the world") and to Harris as he journeys back to repair his nearly broken marriage and in-the-dumps career ("Walking back to you is the hardest thing that I can do"). Thus this brief encounter ends not in romance but with the mutual-aid opening of blocked passages.

To a degree of success few films have ever achieved, Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946) balances film's opposite yet equal capacities to record life as it is and to create completely imaginary landscapes via editing and optical effects. Most Cocteau films veer heavily toward the fantastic, the mythic, the poetic, or the surrealistic, but in Beauty he rendered a mise en scene based largely on 18th century Dutch painting, employed an invisible camera and editing style, and relied on conventional storytelling techniques in order to make his retelling of the classic fairy tale as realistic as possible. Nevertheless, Beauty and the Beast is primarily noted as among the most successful adaptations of a fairy tale ever made and one of the greatest fantasy films of any type. And this is true despite Cocteau's enormous handicap of working in a recently war-ravaged country with minimal financial and technical resources.

One influential and provocative interpretative approach to Beauty and the Beast is through Freudian psychology. From this perspective, Beauty's story is a symbolic sexual drama in which a young woman breaks free from a psychologically incestuous relationship with her father (and brother?), overcomes her fear of male sexuality and of her own, and ultimately enters mature womanhood.

Strong evidence to support this interpretation can be found in the framing of the film's opening and closing scenes. In the film's opening scene Belle's suitor, Avenant, shoots a (phallic) arrow that misses its ostensible target and enters a ladies-only bedchamber where it lands across the mirror image of Belle on the floor she is polishing. Uninvited, Avenant invades the bedchamber, retrieves the arrow, and uses it to embrace/restrain Belle. He then proposes marriage, and - when he is denied - forces his attention on Belle with something close to physical assault. From a Freudian perspective, Avenant represents the unleashed libido that Belle is not psychologically or culturally prepared to confront directly.

Avenant, in turn, receives his just comeuppance in the film's final scene when he is slain by an arrow from the bow of Diana, protector of chastity and the presiding goddess in the Beast's garden pavilion. Entry to this pavilion (female sexual nature), is permissible only by using a golden key, dominion over which the Beast has chivalrously granted to Belle. (i.e. the woman says when) Yet with the aid of Belle's evil and duplicitous older sisters, Avenant comes into false possession of the golden key. This alone would negate the legitimacy of his entry to the pavilion, but he decides to enter even more illicitly by smashing the hymen-like glass portal hidden on the building's roof, thus prompting his ironic execution via the same phallic symbol with which his pursuit of Belle had begun.

This framing symmetry of two spatial "violations" in the opening and closing scenes of the film is not accidental. It underlines the difference between the Beast's tempered, courtly masculinity and Avenant's unrestrained ego and desire. The film ends not only with the Beast's transformation into the handsome prince thanks to Belle's loving gaze, but also with the transformation of Avenant into the guise of the beast, a physical manifestation of his unrestrained inner animal. That Avenant, the Beast, and the Prince are played by the same actor suggests their Freudian interplay of id, superego, and ego - which Belle is also working out in feminine terms as she resists and then accepts the journey from her father's house, through the Beast's castle, and on to her married royal destiny.

Many scenes throughout Beauty and the Beast acquire added depth through a Freudian approach. The cutting of the rose in the Beast's garden, for instance, can be seen as a symbolic violation that evokes the Beast and begins the liberation of Belle from bondage to her father and evil-sister Mother substitutes. Edited in jump cuts, the threshold scene when the Beast first carries Belle into her castle bedchamber depicts the repeated transformation of Belle's costume from servant/child to woman/bride, the very journey she must undertake as she leaves her "maidenhood" and her father's house and accepts her passage to adult female sexuality and maturity.

Belle's journey between the Merchant's house and the Beast's castle is facilitated by two decidedly Freudian symbols of masculine sexuality: the horse, Magnificent, and the Beast's hunting gloves, steaming with the blood and scent of his animal/masculine power. Indeed, the magic words that Belle must say to prompt Magnificent's gallop back to the castle indicate the psychological necessity of her journey: "go where I am going! Go, go, go!" The relatively more subtle symbol of the stallion as agent of transportation is later replaced by the glove which not only steams with the Beast's masculine power, but which she dons while reclined on the respective beds of her bed chambers in the Castle and the Merchant's house.

That Belle's journey of maturation must be undertaken, despite her reluctance, is most poignantly underscored in the scenes of Belle's return to the Merchant's house after she has lived for a while in the Beast's castle. In her father's house, she rapidly regresses to the physical and psychological bondage that had characterized her condition at the beginning of the film - only now the audience, if not Belle herself - is painfully aware of the arrested development it represents.

Like so many Greta Garbos, we want her out of the there and back with the Beast where she belongs!

If nothing else, Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) is an instructive case study in the failure of most sequels to live up to the successes of their progenitors. The original Kate Blanchett Elizabeth (1998) was one of the finest historical dramas of the last 20 years. In addition to the usual virtues of well-mounted period dramas (e.g. sumptuous costuming, make-up, and set-design), it offered a fresh point of view on familiar historical/biographical material, a sparkling script filled with memorable lines, secondary characters that burned themselves onto the screen, and understated but powerful cinematography and score. By contrast, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, while in some respects even more visually sumptuous than its predecessor, is over-produced, over-acted, and over-blown.

The problems with this sequel start at the core: a screenplay that lacks originality and wit. Whereas the first film brimmed with quotable lines like "I am no man's Elizabeth" and "The dead have no titles," not a single phrase from the sequel sticks to mind. Even worse, its lack of imagination is compounded by systematic cannibalizing of key dramatic situations in the original script and by the regurgitation of dialog - minus the poetry and rhythms of the original language. When poor Kate Blanchett winced at the clip of her performance at this year's Oscar ceremony, it wasn't from false modesty. As a great actress, she recognizes unconvincing bluster when she sees and hears it. That she received a best actress nomination for this Elizabeth was a clear case of an Academy make-up call for not having given her the award when she really deserved it.

In addition to a wonderfully realized protagonist, the first film developed a rich cast of secondary characters like Sir Richard Attenborough's Lord Cecil and Geoffrey Rush's chilling but fascinating Sir Walsingham, Elizabeth's chief of security. In The Golden Age Walsingham returns as a poor shadow of himself, little more than a stooped and aging whipping boy for Elizabeth's frequent shrill tirades. To experience the trashing of this wonderful character (and actor) was emotionally painful. The sequel also lacked the compelling villain supplied by Christopher Eccleston's Norfolk in the original. In The Golden Age the villain's role is filled instead by Philip, King of Spain, but the cutaways to his religion-inspired vendetta against Elizabeth are distant emotionally as well as geographically, and the physical stereotyping of all the Spanish characters is embarrassing. Even the attempted assassination of Elizabeth, one of the most obviously recycled scenes, pales in the sequel. In the original we get the spooky, hood-clad specter of a pre-Bond Daniel Craig pursuing the Queen on behalf of the Pope (a wonderful cameo by the legendary Sir John Gielgud), while here we get a shaky nondescript youth pointing and firing a pistol at point blank range and either missing or forgetting to put a bullet in the gun. Who knows (or cares) which? On a positive note, Clive Owen's presence as Sir Walter Raleigh is The Golden Age's most interesting addition - but while Owen cuts a fine, convincing figure in 16th century garb, his relationship with Elizabeth is far less interesting and less satisfying than the one provided by Joseph Fiennes as the youthful Elizabeth's first love, Sir Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester.

Futilely attempting to compensate for a weakly-written script, The Golden Age offers up lingering, protracted visuals, one of the most overbearing musical scores in contemporary cinema, and - naturally these days - special effects galore. Unfortunately, the detailed CG rendering of the Spanish Armada's destruction succeeds less as drama than as an emblem of a Hollywood big budget vessel crashing and sinking under its own rudderless bulk.

The silent film masterpiece Battleship Potemkin (1925) was commissioned by the Soviet government to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the uprising of 1905 and to establish the event as an heroic foreshadowing of the October Revolution of 1917. Ironically the film's director, Sergei Eisenstein, was one of the earliest and most influential advocates of a formalistic approach to film art. Subsequently, Eisenstein's formalism and suspect politics would cause innumerable conflicts with government agencies insisting on "socialist realism." Influenced by the Russian film theoretician, Lev Kuleshov, and through him by D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (smuggled into Russia in 1919), Eisenstein constructed his films from a "collision" of rapidly edited images, a montage of shots varied in length, motion, content, lighting, and camera angle. Without question the most memorable illustration of Eisenstein's stylistic approach - and probably the single most cited and studied sequence in world cinema history - is the "Odessa Steps" sequence in Potemkin.

In structure Potemkin is a "five reeler" divided into five narrative parts, an organization clearly derived from the five-act arrangement of Western drama. In "Men and Maggots," Eisenstein dramatizes the pre-revolutionary oppression and discontent of the battleship's working class sailors as the situation inevitably builds to mutiny. Even before the sailors and their upper class officers/masters are visually introduced, Eisenstein establishes revolutionary conditions symbolically by the collision editing of waves breaking violently and ominously at sea. Onboard ship we witness crowded, unsanitary conditions. Eisenstein emphasizes the sailors' dehumanization with shots of arbitrary lashings, harsh labor, and - most memorably - the maggot infested meat intended for the evening's meal. The ship's nearsighted physician is brought forward by the other officers to declare the meat perfectly suitable to be served with the dark soup, boiling like the sailors' rage. In accordance with Marxist maxims, the church also fails the men, and we see one of them smashing a plate inscribed with words from The Lord's Prayer from two different camera angles (in perhaps the first deliberate "jump cut" in cinema history).

Identified by inter-titles as "Drama on the Quarterdeck" and "An Appeal from the Dead," Potemkin's second and third parts depict the actual mutiny and the onshore funeral of its leader and first hero of the revolution, Vakulinchuk. United by Vakulinchuk's appeals to brotherhood, the initial mutineers are joined by the entire crew in an attack on the officers. A chaotic scene ensues whose violent passion is served well by Eisenstein's editing techniques. The officers' quarters are trampled and symbols of their privilege are destroyed. The ship's doctor is thrown overboard, accompanied by dramatic crosscuts to the maggot-ridden meat and his eyeglasses metonymically dangling in the rigging. Tragically, Vakolinchuk's death is the price paid for the revolt (no omelet without breaking eggs) and he is laid out with dignity on an Odessa pier. Hundreds of ordinary Odessa citizens gather with the sailors to honor him and to pledge "Death to the oppressors." Shots of fists clenching and unclenching signal the birth of revolutionary consciousness.

The complex and unforgettable Odessa Steps sequence constitutes the film's fourth act. It begins with uplifting music and a series of close-ups and medium shots on the elated faces of diverse people on the shore and selected objects (parasol, eyeglasses, baby carriage). Suddenly (as exclaims a title card in huge letters) the music stops and lines of soldiers with drawn rifles and fixed bayonets appear at the top of the steps. Here Eisenstein releases the full force of collision editing as nearly a hundred shots are pieced together to contrast the panicked mayhem and victimization of the citizenry with the relentless assault of the soldiers driving the citizens down to the trampling horses and flying sabers of the waiting Cossacks below. The mise-en-scene is framed by a statue of Caesar at the top of the stairs and a church at the bottom, symbolic metonyms for Russia's oppressive institutions: tsarist monarchy and the Orthodox Christian church.

Punctuating the sequence are two scenes involving mothers and children. In the first, a mother and young boy who had been introduced among the joyous faces in the crowd are among the slaughter's first victims. The boy is shot, but the mother continues running until close-ups of her face convey her horrified gaze at the son's fallen body being trampled by the crowd. With a much slowed editing pace, the camera follows the mother as she carries the lifeless body of her child up the stairs to confront the soldiers (shown only in a diagonal shadow line). They summarily shoot her dead. After this lull, the carnage continues for another several dozen cuts until a second mother is shot through the stomach (the womb of Mother Russia?) as she tries to shield her baby in its carriage. In a scene famously imitated in The Untouchables, the carriage incongruously slips down the staircase. Horrified faces of huddled citizens watch the slow progress to its doom. When the carriage reaches the bottom there is a cut to a Cossack wielding a sword and a classic Kuleshov effect suggests what we do not actually see: the slaughtering of this pure and symbolic innocent. The final series of shots in the Odessa sequence is of three stone lions, one in repose, one sitting up, and one roaring. The editing animates them into a visual metaphor of the people's awakened rage.

Somewhat anticlimactically, the fifth act returns us to the battleship as the mutinous sailors flee on the high seas and await an encounter with other ships from the fleet. They and the viewer expect retribution, but when the meeting occurs no shots are fired and instead all the sailors wave and throw their hats in the air in a symbol of comradeship. Eisenstein was rewriting history at this point since the revolution was not successfully launched for another twelve years. But that quibble aside, Battleship Potemkin stands as one of the seminal works of the silent film era, and it retains extraordinary cinematic power.

Le Divorce (2003) is not by any stretch a very good movie. But is it - as a stunning number of IMDb subscribers have dubbed it - "the worst movie ever made"? Very far from it I'd say, but then I've seen a ton of real clunkers in over five decades of obsessive movie viewing. While Le Divorce has more than its fair share of implausible and languorous moments, I nevertheless managed to stay reasonably awake and entertained throughout.

The heavily negative response the film received from American reviewers and on this film site has perhaps less to do with the film's merits (or lack thereof) than with the misleading way it was marketed and to the casting of Kate Hudson in its lead role. Though limited in acting range, Ms. Hudson is blessed with her mother Goldie's winning smile and a screen-persona tailor-made for light comedy. In Le Divorce she seems to have stumbled into an alternate universe, and no doubt her many fans felt the same way upon viewing the film.

However it might be classified (and I'm not sure how that might be), Le Divorce is clearly NOT a romantic comedy geared to the tastes of teens and twenty-somethings. It's probably better not to think of it as a romantic comedy at all - at least not in the usual American sense of a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets girl plot with a heavy admixture of screwball humor to keep the patrons amused. Quite to the contrary, Le Divorce includes scenes of attempted suicide, stalking, hostage taking, and murder. And these are not handled with humor - screwball, black, or any other form. They are staged with at times all too much seriousness.

Also, "the boy" in the romantic formula turns out to be a notorious 55 year old French sophisticate/philanderer named Edgar Cosset (Thierry Lhermitte) whose M.O. for the conduct of extra-marital affairs includes the gift of an expensive Hermes "Kelly bag" at the start of a relationship and a stylish scarf at its end. One of the running jokes in Le Divorce (admittedly not a belly-whopper) is that every woman in Paris seems to recognize Edgar's seduction methods and instruments except his latest flame, a visiting American ingénue, Isabel Walker (Hudson). Nor does the Edgar-Isabel plot have a happy ending in the manner of Gigi, a film referenced by Le Divorce through the casting of Leslie Caron in a well-done supporting role.

There is no reconciliation to be found in Le Divorce between American post-feminist romantic idealism and French double-standard patriarchy and sexual cynicism. These are two worlds that do not comprehend each other, and never the twain shall meet- well, hardly ever. The film's other romantic plot involving Isabel's older sister, the pregnant poet Roxanne (Naomi Watts) does provide us with a somewhat conventional romantic resolution, by uniting Roxanne not with her divorce-seeking, two-timing French husband (who ends up precipitously and conveniently dead) but with the sympathetic lawyer she hires to represent her in an increasingly ugly property battle with her in-laws. By the time this happens, however, "le divorce" has been relegated to the background, and "l'affaire" between Isabel and Edgar has moved to central prominence in the screenplay.

Naomi Watts is a great actress, but Le Divorce is clearly not her finest moment. Her role is by turns over-the-top dramatically (her poetry reading scene and subsequent suicide-attempt) and underwritten (she practically disappears in the last third of the film). The rest of Le Divorce's cast includes some very good actors like Glenn Close, Sam Waterston, Stockard Channing, Stephen Fry, Matthew Modine, and the aforementioned Leslie Caron. Other than Caron, the only one of these who is given much to do is Modine. And that turns out to be quite unfortunate since the mad betrayed-husband stalker/murderer he plays is a completely unmotivated and implausible character who bizarrely hijacks the film's final scenes for no apparent reason other than to make dramatic visual use of Le Tour Eiffel - after all, this is Paris, n'est pas?

If Le Divorce had been a low-budget ex-Sundance project with a cast of no-names, I think it might have garnered a more appreciative following. It is nothing if not quirky, and it does offer some piquant cross-cultural humor and jabs at the privileged world of the arts(y). The plot also keeps us guessing where it will turn next, but one does have to wonder whether the director wasn't equally in the dark about that.

Directed by Polish-born Roman Polanski, Chinatown (1974) is often credited with reviving the classic film noir detective/crime genre exemplified by such '40s and '50s American films as The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, and Touch of Evil. While classic film noir is characterized by low lit, black and white cinematography, Polanski managed to infuse Chinatown with a profound sense of corruption and nihilism while setting his tale amid the relentless blazing sunlight of a Southern California drought and despite employing two photographic elements previously thought antithetical to film noir style: color film stock and anamorphic widescreen composition. Chinatown's great critical and popular success demonstrated once and for all that the essence of film noir lay mainly in its bleak moral vision, not its cinematographic style.

Seizing full advantage of the 1968 demise of the Hollywood Production Code and the subsequent liberalization in American cinema's treatment of sex and violence, Chinatown builds upon the film noir tradition of exploiting and exploding social taboos. Take, for instance, the central plot function of incest or the notoriously brutal scene in which Jake Gittes has a protruding part of his anatomy nearly cut off (no, not literally that part - but the phallic implications are clear and played for sly comedy in subsequent scenes). Yet Polanski also added an entirely new dimension to classic film noir by linking up its darkness with the paranoid/depressive mood of post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, thereby extending the noir sense of corruption beyond the mean urban streets and to high governmental and privileged economic places. Chinatown may be set in 1930s L.A., but its soul is in the 1970s.

Like earlier film noir private detectives, Chinatown's protagonist, Jake Gittes (a role Jack Nicholson was born to play) is derived in large part from the cynical, wisecracking, "hardboiled" detective popularized in 1930s novels by such writers as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Also like many earlier film noir works, Chinatown adopts a storytelling point of view that is analogous to a mix of "first person" and "third person limited" narration in the novel. Such a viewpoint immerses the audience in a subjective search for truth within a maze of deceptive appearances, recognizing or failing to recognize clues (the "bad for glass" seawater in the Mulrays backyard, the obituary column, Noah Cross's bifocals) just as Gittes does and not a second sooner. Indeed, Chinatown is very unusual in the degree to which it sustains a subjective narrative viewpoint, often punctuating it with clever point of view shots using binoculars, camera lenses, car mirrors, and a variety of Peeping Tom setups.

Gittes's perspective proves to be much more unreliable even than that of classic film noir era private eyes. Like Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Hammett's Sam Spade, Gittes is courageous and resourceful; like them and unlike the police, he is governed by a code of honor, however unconventional or self-defined. Nevertheless, the world in which Gittes operates is far less redeemable by the actions of a detective hero than was the mid-twentieth century world of classic noir and eons remote from the optimistic 19th century world of such English detective novel heroes as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Repeatedly in Chinatown the private eye code either fails to function or is subject to mockery - until, in the film's shocking last scene, Gittes fails for a second time to save a damsel in distress and is led away mumbling "do as little as possible" while a bought police force ushers the innocent Catherine Mulray into the grasp of her rapacious grandfather/father.

Chinatown's representation of another archetypal film noir character, the femme fatale, significantly departs from original film noir conventions as well. The casting of vampish looking Faye Dunaway in the role of Evelyn Mulray would seem to fit well enough, but what happens to the character in the plot and what, even more disturbingly, we learn has happened to her in the film's back-story is not at all in keeping with classic noir. Evelyn's alluring deceptions and even her nymphomania are ultimately the effects of her quite literal violation by patriarchal power, not another instance of female sexuality ruthlessly wresting power in a man's world. If in classic film noir the death or exposure of the femme fatale is requisite for whatever moral redemption is extracted from the darkness, Evelyn's brutal death in Chinatown marks a plunge completely into the darkness.

Of course central to the structure of Chinatown is that most noir of all cities, Los Angeles, centered here on its eponymous "Chinatown" district, where the film's plot climaxes. The scarcity of water in Polanski's Los Angeles transforms the city into a symbolic spiritual Wasteland akin to T.S. Eliot's. But here the fisher king won't die because he is an all-powerful capitalist/father figure willing to "do anything" without moral restraint. Played in a great piece of postmodern self-reflection by John Huston, the father of film noir, Noah Cross is also a figure of the Anti-Christ. Note his ironically doubled Biblical name, his favorite lunch (suggestively Christian fish served with the heads on!), and his power over water, which he diverts not to liberate any chosen people but to line his pockets and own everything he possibly can, including "the future, Mr. Gittes, the future."

Few, if any, American mainstream films have bleaker, more nihilistic resolutions than Chinatown. And few are more powerful or memorable.

In Night At the Museum, Ben Stiller plays his usual role as a good-hearted schlemiel thrust into a humiliating situation that he ultimately emerges from with a small measure of heroic dignity. In this instance, his character, Larry Daley, is an out of work weekend Dad who is about to be evicted from his apartment once again and thus lose the last shred of admiration his ten year old son has for him. To keep both the apartment and the son's affections, he accepts a job as night watchman at a New York City Natural History Museum, where an Egyptian tablet has for some decades administered a powerful magic spell that causes history literally to "come alive."

Each evening, the museum's wax and bone denizens, human and animal alike, become animate, leave their various encasements and displays, wander the museum's corridors, and raise havoc with museum property, each other, and, of course, Larry. The human cast of characters prominently includes Teddy Roosevelt (Robin Williams), Sacajawea ( Mizuo Peck), Attila the Hun (Patrick Gallagher), a miniature cowboy (Owen Wilson), and an equally diminutive Octavius Caesar (Steve Coogan) while the animal crew is headed by a capuchin monkey, a tyrannosaurus skeleton, and a pride of lions. As we ultimately learn, Larry (Stiller) has been selected for the job because he seems like a perfect stooge/fall-guy for the nefarious plans of three outgoing night watchmen (Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney, Bill Cobbs) he is ostensibly replacing. Night at the Museum is based on a clever farcical concept that - one might think - would serve as a perfect vehicle for Stiller's comic persona. Unfortunately, something damaging intervened in the concept's translation to an actual film, namely a screenplay that is short on laughs and long on predictability and sap.

Too many scenes in Night at the Museum fall humorlessly flat; for instance, Larry's confrontations with the museum's pompous but inarticulate curator. Others, like the Oprah style pop psychological healing of Attila the Hun's inner child, are almost embarrassingly bad. The scenes with diorama miniature cowboys (headed by Owen Wilson) and miniature Roman army (led by Steve Coogan's Octavius) are mildly amusing thanks to the efforts of the actors and neat special effects, but, again, suffer from an underwritten and unimaginative script. The scenes involving Sacajawea are completely pointless other than the riff on the pronunciation of the last syllables of her name (waya or weeya?) By the third repetition of the joke, it has been thoroughly emptied of the scant humor it contained on the first go round. And what can one say of Robin Williams' turn as Teddy Roosevelt other than that it made one fondly recall the much funnier Teddy that stole scenes in the classic Arsenic and Old Lace? Except for one brief scene where Williams is allowed to release his inventive comic genius into a parody of African "Click" language, he is kept completely in check (and thus wasted) exhorting the Stiller character to rise to the heroic occasion, repeating Shakespearean chestnuts about having "greatness" thrust upon one, and mooning after/stalking Sacajawea with unrequited love.

Yes, Night at the Museum does evoke a few chuckles - most examples of which were included in the film's ubiquitous trailers - but it contains surprisingly little physical humor and utterly lacks wit, unless one finds a scene between Stiller and the capuchin monkey concocted solely to justify the punch line "stop slapping the monkey" the height of cleverness. Most members of the audience I saw the film with didn't think so, or they were too young or too old to get the joke. Which raises another issue with the film - what was the intended age group of its principal audience? Codgers who might delight in the bit parts of Hollywood legends? Boppers who might identify with the museum docent who upon meeting Sacajawea, supposedly the subject of her 900 page doctoral dissertation, is reduced to pre-verbal ("you rock!') groupie talk. Kids needing a history lesson or amused by urine gags? No doubt the intent was "all of the above." Unfortunately, that aim - as with much of today's Hollywood fare - ends up reaching "none of the above" very satisfyingly.

Falling into the "Codgers" demographic myself, the chief pleasures of Night at the Museum for me were the brief opening scene played between Stiller and real-life mother, Anne Meara, and the amazingly energetic performances of octogenarian Dick Van Dyke and near nonagenarian Mickey Rooney, looking (and acting) better than he has in what? fifty years? I should also add some complimentary words for the film's visual delights, highlighted by some stunning displays of forced perspective as well as the imaginative animation of a puppyish tyrannosaurus skeleton that enjoys playing fetch with one of its own colossal bones. All in all, though, Night at the Museum was a major disappointment.

As one of America's most often viewed and beloved films, The Wizard of Oz (1939) is a central text of popular culture. Its images and dialog represent a fund of common reference often drawn upon and responded to even by those who have not seen the film (a group of beings that excludes earthlings). One measure of Oz's impact is the vast quantity of borrowings from, re-makings of, and homages to the film found in every popular American artistic medium. As just a small sampling, one might cite Star Wars (1977), The Wiz (1978), The Muppet Movie (1979), A Christmas Story (1983), After Hours (1985), Return to Oz (1985), Wild at Heart (1990), Twister (1996), The Simpsons (multiple allusions), the rock group America's song "Tin Man" (1974), Oz (TV prison drama, premier 7/1/97), and Wicked: The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz (the current hit Broadway musical).

In addition to its lasting cultural currency and entertainment value, The Wizard of Oz occupies an important place in American film history in a number of other respects. Along with The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939), Oz was an early masterpiece of the three-strip Technicolor process. Like most of the early Technicolor films, it used color not to enhance realism, but to create a fantastic or historically remote realm. Color is an obvious source of symbolism in Oz (e.g. "the yellow brick road," "Emerald City") and even infiltrates its musical score ("Somewhere Over the Rainbow"). Anticipating a film like Pleasantville by some 60 years, Oz also creates irony and other meaning through the dramatic juxtaposition of color and monochrome (sepia) film stock. The film's soundtrack was also groundbreaking in that, apart from backstage musicals, The Wizard of Oz was perhaps the first film to use an array of musical numbers to advance a dramatic plot, rather than simply as set pieces for heightening emotion or for demonstrating the singing and dancing ability of its protagonists.

The film's visual effects are likewise historically significant. Although not quite the landmark that King Kong (1933) had been, The Wizard of Oz was nonetheless a remarkable and important testament to the increasing importance of film "magic" to the Hollywood style of production. The verisimilitude and dramatic power of such memorable scenes as the twister that transports Dorothy (Judy Garland) to Oz, the screen entrance of Glinda, the Good Witch of the North (Billie Burke), in a gigantic bubble, the "Surrender Dorothy!" skywriting sequence, and the melting death of The Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) are undeniable. Oz's visual grandeur is also the product of stunning glass painting composites of the Oz landscape and Emerald City skyline, wildly imaginative set designs in Munchkin land and the Wizard's palace, and the most memorable use of fantasy costuming and makeup in Hollywood history, gloriously highlighted of course by the Tin Man (Jack Haley), the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), and the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr).

Adapted from L. Frank Baum's popular "modern fairy tale" The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1899), the film version of the story directed by Victor Fleming (et al.) is arguably a far superior work of art. Although it preserves the simplistic moral lessons of Baum's work ("there's no place like home"), The Wizard of Oz creates much more complex characters than are found in the original text. This is particularly true of the main character, Dorothy. If in the novel Dorothy's journey to Oz is straightforwardly literal, the film's Oz quest entails a transformation of characters and situations from mundane Kansas into dream/nightmare symbolism. This device adds psychological depth to the tale, particularly pertaining to Dorothy's problematic relation to the various mother /father figures in both locales.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum's novel) does, however, offer a fascinating sub-textual political allegory of the late 19th century Populist Movement, which is understandably absent from a screen adaptation written several decades later. According to this allegorical reading, the novel's Dorothy represents a well meaning but naïve American public being led down a yellow brick road (the gold standard) to financial disaster. The road leads to Emerald City (i.e. Washington, the home of greenback dollars) and a sham Wizard (i.e. President Cleveland). Dorothy's companions represent politicians (The Cowardly Lion suggests William Jennings Bryant, the Populist Presidential candidate) or political factions (the Scarecrow suggests Midwestern farmers; The Tin Man evokes dehumanized Eastern factory workers; and even cuddly Toto is purportedly named for the era's "teetotalers.") As a political goal, "the way home" is the ideal of economic equity - to be secured, among other means, by the substitution of silver for gold as the standard for the dollar, legislation that would ease the spread of wealth to the nation's working class. Not coincidentally, the novel Dorothy's magic slippers are made of silver.

That the film changes this famous footwear to a visually more dramatic, but politically meaningless, "ruby" indicates the Populist subtext had lost its significance to Oz's late 1930s audience. In its place, some commentators have argued - quite plausibly I think - that a "pre-feminist" politics may be discerned instead. In this view, Dorothy embodies a late 1930s stage in the transformation of the social role of American women from the end of the 19th century to the present day. Garland's Dorothy was the first widely popular female character in American storytelling to be portrayed as an archetypal "hero figure" (one who - in Joseph Campbell's formulation - is usually marked by birth and reluctantly called forth on a journey/mission fraught with dangers and filled with a significance beyond her or his narrow self-interest). As an orphan chosen by chance/fate in the form of a Kansas tornado to become the dream-world liberator of Oz and its "little people" inhabitants, Dorothy is closely akin to Luke Skywalker, Frodo, and The Matrix's Neo - awkward, unconfident adolescents whose heroic adventures symbolize their maturation into adulthood.

Coming immediately on the heels of Match Point (2005), a fine if somewhat self-repetitive piece of "serious Woody," Scoop gives new hope to Allen's small but die-hard band of followers (among whom I number myself) that the master has once again found his form. A string of disappointing efforts, culminating in the dreary Melinda and Melinda (2004) and the embarrassing Anything Else (2003) raised serious doubts that another first rate Woody comedy, with or without his own participation as an actor, was in the cards. Happily, the cards turn out to be a Tarot deck that serves as Scoop's clever Maguffin and proffers an optimistic reading for the future of Woody Allen comedy.

Even more encouraging, Woody's self-casting - sadly one of the weakest elements of his films in recent years - is here an inspired bit of self-parody as well as a humble recognition at last that he can no longer play romantic leads with women young enough to be his daughters or granddaughters. In Scoop, Allen astutely assigns himself the role of Sid Waterman, an aging magician with cheap tricks and tired stage-patter who, much like Woody himself, has brought his act to London, where audiences - if not more receptive - are at least more polite. Like Chaplin's Calvero in Limelight (1952), Sid Waterman affords Allen the opportunity to don the slightly distorted mask of an artist whose art has declined and whose audience is no longer large or appreciative. Moreover, because they seem in character, Allen's ticks and prolonged stammers are less distracting here than they have been in some time.

Waterman's character also functions neatly in the plot. His fake magic body-dissolving box becomes the ironically plausible location for visitations from Joe Strombel (Ian McShane), a notorious journalistic muckraker and recent cardiac arrest victim. Introduced on a River Styx ferryboat-to-Hades, Strombel repeatedly jumps ship because he just can't rest in eternity without communicating one last "scoop" about the identity of the notorious "Tarot killer." Unfortunately, his initial return from the dead leads him to Waterman's magic show and the only conduit for his hot lead turns out to be a journalism undergraduate, Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson), who has been called up from the audience as a comic butt for the magician's climactic trick. Sondra enthusiastically seizes the journalistic opportunity and drags the reluctant Waterman into the investigation to play the role of her millionaire father. As demonstrated in Lost in Translation, Johansson has a talent for comedy, and the querulous by-play between her and Allen is very amusing - and all the more so for never threatening to become a prelude to romance.

Scoop's serial killer plot, involving grisly murders of prostitutes and an aristocratic chief suspect, Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman), is the no doubt predictable result of Allen's lengthy sabbatical exposure to London's ubiquitous Jack the Ripper landmarks and lore. Yet other facets of Scoop (as of Match Point) also derive from Woody's late life encounter with English culture. Its class structure, manners, idiom, dress, architecture, and, yes, peculiar driving habits give Woody fresh new material for wry observation of human behavior as well as sharp social satire. When, for instance, Sondra is trying to ingratiate herself with Peter Lyman at a ritzy private club, Waterman observes "from his point of view we're scum." A good deal of humor is also generated by the contretemps of stiffly reserved British social manners encountering Waterman's insistent Borscht-belt Jewish plebeianism. And, then, of course, there is Waterman's hilarious exit in a Smart Car he can't remember to drive on the left side of the road.

As usual, Allen's humor in Scoop includes heavy doses of in-jokes, taking the form of sly allusions to film and literary sources as well as, increasingly, references to his own filmography. In addition to the pervasive Jack the Ripper references, for instance, the film's soundtrack is dominated by an arrangement of Grieg's "The Hall of the Mountain King," compulsively whistled by Hans Beckert in M, the first masterpiece of the serial killer genre. The post-funeral gathering of journalists who discuss the exploits of newly departed Joe Strombel clearly mimics the opening of Broadway Danny Rose (1984). References to Deconstructing Harry (1997) include the use of Death as a character (along with his peculiar voice and costume), the use of Mandelbaum as a character name, and the mention of Adair University (Harry's "alma mater" and where Sondra is now a student). Moreover, the systematic use of Greek mythology in the underworld river cruise to Hades recalls the use of Greek gods and a Chorus in Mighty Aphrodite (1995).

As to quotable gags, Allen's scripts rely less on one-liners than they did earlier in his career, but Scoop does provides at least a couple of memorable ones. To a question about his religion, Waterman answers: "I was born in the Hebrew persuasion, but later I converted to narcissism." And Sondra snaps off this put-down of Waterman's wannabe crime-detecting: "If we put our heads together you'll hear a hollow noise." All in all, Scoop is by far Woody Allen's most satisfying comedy in a decade.