Actually, calling this version of Dawn of the Dead a remake is applying a misnomer. It’s more of a re-imagination. The premise and circumstances are similar to those of Romero’s picture, but the specifics are different. Having seen the 1978 movie doesn’t mean that you will be able to predict the outcome of the 2004 version, since very few of the same things happen. The ending in particular is different - especially the unprecedented way in which Snyder arrives at it. Those who bolt from their seats the moment the closing credits begin will leave with a much different impression of the resolution than those who stay to the bitter end. Interspersed between screens filled with names are Blair Witch Project-style video clips that extend the story. Shame on multiplexes that bring up the house lights early!

The movie transpires in the city of Everett, Wisconsin, where a mysterious epidemic is running rampant through the population. No one knows who the first victims are, or how the virus started, but anyone bitten by an infected individual dies, then is born again as a mindless ghoul. A group of five surviving humans - nurse Ana (Sarah Polley), cop Kenneth (Ving Rhames), ordinary guy Michael (Jake Weber), and expecting parents Andre (Mekhi Phifer) and Luda (Inna Korobkina) - seek refuge in a local mall. There they encounter a pugnacious security guard, CJ (Michael Kelly), and his sidekicks, Terry (Kevin Zegers) and Bart (Michael Barry). Later, they spot a truck circling the mall parking lot and rescue the passengers, including smart-ass Steve (Ty Burrell), sexpot Monica (Kim Poirier), father and daughter Frank (Matt Frewer) and Nicole (Lindy Booth), tough-as-nails Norma (Jayne Eastwood), and ever-practical Tucker (Boyd Banks). Banding together, these people try to outrun and outgun their undead opponents.

As in the original, we never learn much about the origins of the virus. We see glimpses of TV news broadcasts providing coverage of the spreading epidemic, but eventually all that remains on the air is static. The 1978 movie left open the possibility that the outbreak was confined to a geographical area. This Dawn of the Dead offers no such illusion of comfort. The view here is apocalyptic. The only way to escape the ravages of the plague is to find a place the zombies can’t reach.

One of the things that annoyed me about the original Dawn of the Dead - and it’s a seeming requirement of horror films - is the flagrant stupidity exhibited by the characters. Although the men and women of the new installment are not defined by their idiocy, there are times when they show a lack of common sense. For example, if you recognized that the quickest way to a horrible death and an even more horrible re-birth is to be bitten by a zombie, would you (1) wear heavy clothing and/or some kind of body armor to protect your flesh, or (2) venture into the midst of a swarm of undead dressed in a flimsy, short-sleeve tee-shirt? The people inhabiting Dawn of the Dead choose option (2), making us wonder whether they have all undergone frontal lobotomies.

With so many characters, it’s inevitable that most of them end up as one-dimensional throw-aways whose sole purpose is to increase the body count. But there are exceptions. Ana, Kenneth, Michael, and Andre are developed to a point where we care about them. And several touching subplots are handled with a deft hand: Andre’s concern about his unborn fetus, Frank and Nicole’s sad farewell, Kenneth’s long-distance friendship with a man on the roof of a nearby gun shop, and Ana and Michael’s halting attempts at intimacy. Of course, not many people go to a horror film looking for character development and drama, so there are plenty of good scares, and a moment or two of gut-wrenching terror. The movie even crosses the PC line and allows children to do demonic things.

The creatures in this film move a lot more quickly than those in the original, whose slow, staggering gait was ripe for parody. Here, their swiftness proves to be the undoing of more than one character. As zombie films go, this one is a small step beneath Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, which was darker and creepier, but it’s still a respectable effort. Adherents of the original may be annoyed by some of the changes, but cameos by Tom Savini, Scott Reiniger, and Ken Foree (who once again makes the dire pronouncement: “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth”) should build some goodwill. For those who enjoy tight, tense, graphic horror, this movie offers an ample helping.
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The small Maine town of Darkness Falls has a dark history. In 1841, a widow named Matilda Dixon was known in the town for giving children a gold coin when they brought her their baby teeth. One day, two children didn’t return home from her place and the townsfolk immediately grabbed their pitchforks and torches. They captured Dixon and executed her in a mob hanging. The only problem was that Dixon hadn’t kidnapped the children. They were simply lost and wandered home the next day.

Since her death, the ghost of Matilda Dixon has haunted Darkness Falls. She visits all the children the night they lose their last baby tooth, and if they peek when she comes to take it, she will kill them. In 1991, Kyle Walsh peeked. Sucks to be him.

Kyle was able to escape the murderous ghost by staying in the light (which is the Tooth Fairy’s only weakness from a light-sensitive condition she had when she was alive), but his mother was not so lucky. Of course, when the police show up, no one believes Kyle story and suspect that he killed his mother.

Fast-forward twelve years when Kyle (Chaney Kley) is suddenly contacted by his old girlfriend Caitlin (Emma Caulfield) for advice. Her younger brother Michael is having similar nightmares about the Tooth Fairy. Kyle leaves his safe haven of Las Vegas (where there is nothing but light – and the gambling and legalize prostitution ain’t bad for him either, I’m sure) and heads back to Darkness Falls to help Caitlin and her brother. Of course, what follows is a high-spirited chase as the Tooth Fairy tries to finish her business with Kyle – and has no problem killing anyone else in her way.

“Darkness Falls” takes a childhood fable of the Tooth Fairy and wraps a horror story around it. It reminds me of the mid-1980s after “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” hit it big in the box office and every Hollywood knock-off they could think of came out surrounding a holiday or day of significance. Stinkers like “April Fools Day,” “Prom Night” and “Silent Night, Deadly Night” were some of the fallout from this trend. (MAD Magazine once did a spoof of this series of horror films called “Arbor Day,” which continues to be one of the funniest things the magazine has ever published.)

If “Darkness Falls” does well, I’m sure that there will be plenty more to follow, making murdering monsters out of such terrifying creatures as the Easter Bunny. We’ve already had “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Jack Frost.” Just keep your eyes peeled for films like “Jack Sprat” and “Humpty Dumpty” in the near future.

Actually, the premise of “Darkness Falls” is incredibly eerie and effective – a ghost that will hunt down anyone who ever lays eyes upon it. Although it has some overt similarities to Freddy Krueger of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” fame (such as the hideous scarred face and it coming to get you when you are going to bed), the Tooth Fairy works as a villain.

The biggest problem with the characters is that they have all taken lobotomy pills. They are even more stupid than characters normally are in horror flicks. For example, although Kyle still clearly believes that the Tooth Fairy is out to get him, he accompanies his “friend” Larry to a dark bar in the middle of the dark woods. Duh.

The film also has a body count like that of “Eight Legged Freaks,” with so many people getting slaughtered that you quickly lose count – as well as any inclination to care about the next ones to suffer the Tooth Fairy’s wrath.

And speaking of the Tooth Fairy, she wears this silly porcelain mask to keep out the light. While its filmmaking purpose is clear (to keep the bad guy obscured throughout), it is much too similar to the mask the killer used in “Valentine” (a not so great movie to pay homage to) and at times is too much like “The Phantom of the Opera.” That was the genius of the “Scream” flicks – the unique mask. And that was the last real original horror movie mask since the “Halloween” prop department spray-painted a William Shatner mask ghost white in the 1970s.

In a lot of ways, the cinematography and surreal feel of the film overpowers the story and plot. If you’re in the business to shoot your own low-budget horror film, this is one to see to get some ideas of how to use darkness, shadows and creepy sounds to your advantage. However, if you’re looking for a compelling horror flick, don’t waste your time with “Darkness Falls.”

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Review
While still working his icy chills in his homeland of Japan — he’s now installed in Hollywood remaking his own work — Hideo Nakata directed a series of effective, idiosyncratic ghostly tales that positioned the horror genre away from the glare of schlock. His notion of fear is a slow creep, a stain on the ceiling, the blur of a video image, the insidious tremor caused by a momentary image of a small Japanese child with lank hair and dead eyes. In this style, his most famous films, Ring and Ring 2, might as well have been squealing up Elm Street way compared to the subtle strains of this ghost story that uses reticence, a flat refusal to fully expose its evil schemes, to invoke a very redolent fear.

Thus you have one of the slowest, and often most infuriating, horror movies ever made. Dark Water, as its names suggests, works most of its dread through the expanding image of an iron-brown water stain, and the unending drip-dripping of its torment. The ethereal backstory here tells of a missing girl (a staple of Japanese horror) in ghost form haunting the scene of her downfall in search of a new mother, and Yoshimi, with her own child, fits the bill. In the meantime she’ll ‘make friends’ with little Ikuko.

Nakata, however, keeps the supernatural shards of his story at one remove, allowing them to glimmer sullenly in the background — repeated glimpses of this spooky kid — building a small soap opera in the foreground. We learn Yoshimi (played with dancing nerves by Hitomi Kuroki) has escaped from a brutal marriage, leaving her frayed and open to suggestion; one being that her paranoia over this strange vision of a girl is being manipulated by her ex-husband aiming to regain custody of their daughter. The film, at this stage, never fully commits to the outright alien, allowing Nakata to insinuate it could all in her head, the mucky glower of that stain representing the state of her mind.

Things do tip finally in the direction of genuine weirdness, if not toward an ending that will wholly explains itself, but the impression lasts, proving that oft-regaled saw in horror parts that less is so often more. Especially when it comes to the itchy terror of pre-pubescent Japanese children.

Verdict
Not nearly as clever as Ringu, Dark Water is an honest, old-fashioned ghost story with plenty to chill the marrow and make you vow never to take the lift again.

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But wait there’s more! As we follow Matt and Kate a super model named Raquel Lake is being interviewed by a police officer about some murders that have taken place.  The scenes from the prison and the police interview are intercut with each other with no explanation as to the link between the two.  One assumes that the point of the movie is to put this puzzle together.

The back of the DVD box it states 35mm film and 5.1 sound.  The movie delivers well on these two fronts, picture quality was excellent and the audio quality was very good.  No hand held or “shaky cam” in this movie.  I was glad about that, the technique is much over used.

The visual effects where passable, although not stunning.  Oddly the best VFX of the movie is at the very end, and you’ll have to watch the entire movie to see it.  I did like what they did with the wolf.  In one scene the wolf “attacks” a prison door which Kate is kept behind and it is very well done.  There is a monster in this movie, not a CGI one.  It’s the traditional guy in a suit style, it’s not a bad monster effect, you don’t see it much in the movie any way.

I really liked the concept for this movie, it’s a great idea.  I can’t talk too much about it without giving away the entire movie.  Now I must warn you…this movie uses the non-linear story technique with flashbacks and even flash forwards.  Now, I like this kind of stuff because I am a huge fan of LOST and they use that technique a lot on that show.  Dark Reprieve does not do it as well as LOST, but for the most part it works.

The acting is passable for the most part.  It would have been a better movie with a better cast, but I think the filmmaker here is selling a concept more than a cast.

There is very little to zero gore in this movie.  If you like lot’s of gore then this movie will disappoint you so keep that in mind.  There is no full on nudity.  There are two very hot women in this movie but neither one gets fully nude at any point.  There’s a good butt shot, that’s about it.

So if Dark Reprieve crosses your path I can recommend that you check it out.  The revealed ending does not leave you hanging, all of the “mysteries” are explained clearly.

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The movie is based on a real-life uprising in the Congo in the late 50s, early 60s. It follows the mission of Captain Bruce Curry and his band of mercenaries to rescue the inhabitants of a city in what was then the Belgian Congo from an attack by Simba rebels and to retrieve $20 million dollars in uncut diamonds for the Congolese president. The story gives director Jack Cardiff and his cast plenty of opportunities for fast and frequently very bloody action, with an opening sequence (polarized silhouette shots of a train crossing an upward-sloping bridge set to tense, pounding music by Jacques Loussier) that has earned the film a cult audience (director Martin Scorcese is among the film’s many admirers).

In an interview with John Bowyer for the book Jack Cardiff, the director recalled that while preparing Dark of the Sun, “I made a trip to the Congo, and I met reporters who lived through all of the troubles there [following independence in 1960], and they showed me photographs of the real thing - I wish they hadn’t. I remember vividly a photograph of a man with this throat cut in the bath; his head was nearly off and the bath was full of blood. The savagery was unbelievable.” However, when filming began, he was forced to choose another location besides Africa. “The whole thing takes place on a train and obviously we needed a train to film on, but in the Congo there were no steam trains. Plus we couldn’t afford it and it was too remote, so we finally ended up shooting it in the West Indies. We found an enthusiastic amateur there who had his own stream train, so we all traipsed out to the West Indies and made the film there. The jungle all looked very much like the African jungle.” During production, Cardiff and his wife were entertained by British author Noel Coward, who lived with his partner in an old stone house on a mountaintop on the island.

Cardiff made his mark in cinema primarily as a cinematographer, a role the 91-year-old continues to pursue, with his latest project as director of photography for the British film Lights 2 (2005). Even if he had done nothing else in film, “Jack O’Lantern,” as he is known because of his expertise in lighting, would be remembered forever for his highly acclaimed color cinematography for Black Narcissus (1947), for which he won an Academy Award, and The Red Shoes (1948), both directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. But his career credits are far more extensive: Hitchcock’s Under Capricorn (1949), Albert Lewin’s strange and ravishingly beautiful Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), The African Queen (1951), War and Peace (1956), Rambo (1985). He made his feature film directing debut with the uncompleted Errol Flynn picture William Tell (1953) and later received critical acclaim, as well as an Oscar® nomination and Golden Globe Award, for Sons and Lovers (1960). His finely tuned pictorial sense is evident in Dark of the Sun, for which he also provided uncredited cinematography.

Cardiff and actor Rod Taylor first met when the actor played the lead in Cardiff’s film Young Cassidy (1965), based on the autobiography of Irish writer Sean O’Casey. That same year, they worked on The Liquidator, a James Bond send-up. The two became good friends, and The Mercenaries was their third and final film together. Cardiff considered it one of Taylor’s best performances, but for many audiences, the actor will always be most remembered as the lead in The Time Machine (1960) and Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).

At the time of its release, Dark of the Sun was slammed by critics for excessive violence, although what we see in the picture would barely raise an eyebrow today. The New York Times wrote “Dark of the Sun is a kind of cross between The Dirty Dozen and The Comedians, which stars Jim Brown and Rod Taylor in a kind of I Spy duet…There is a lot of carnage on every side, in contexts that will probably infuriate anyone who scrutinizes movies for their politics.” Time magazine echoed a similar reaction: “Thrilling as it is under the suspension of disbelief, Dark of the Sun would have been a much brighter movie had it not pretended to mirror fact. This film spills plenty of blood, but it turns the Congo’s victims into plastic participants in a war that is not quite real.” In his own defense, Cardiff stated “When I made the film, I thought that it would have been too awful for words to make it like the real violence, but it had to have violence in it….I could only say to those that I met that my film was nothing like the real thing - it was a quarter, a fifth, a sixteenth of the violence that really happened. None the less, it had the reputation as a violent film.”
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Harlan Pyne is a very bad man, and like many bad men he just doesn’t understand what he did that was so wrong. In fact, if you were to ask him, he’d say that everyone was always goading him on and misinterpreting his actions. So when Doctor Samantha Goodman actually does goad him on, for really real this time, at his sanity review he gets a little upset. He’s spent 15 years locked up in an insane asylum and in his opinion he’s paid his debt. Never mind the kidnap/murder/rape thing that got him in there in the first place.However, Goodman shouldn’t have goaded him and she knows it, but she’s a little bit on edge. Who can blame her? The CAT scans she had that morning have revealed that a brain tumor she has isn’t in remission anymore, but is growing. No possibility of cure or treatment.

Wanting to break the news to her family gently. She suggests that she and her husband go up to their cabin with her sister, just the three of them. Well… for a little while. Seems that ol’ Harlan has pulled a great escape and is still nursing a bit of a grudge. So when he and an equally psychotic friend arrive to break up the little get-together we know it’s not going to be pretty.

But Harlan isn’t there simply for revenge. Samantha psychoanalyzed him, so he’s going to psychoanalyze her, old school style. He wants to know why a psychiatrist lost her cool with him, and he wants to know why sometimes she would… well, I won’t say. That would be ruining it. I’ll let you discover it all on your own.

The Dark Hours is one of those rare gems out of Canada that wipes away the bad taste left by movies like Men with Brooms. It’s not trying to be “typically Canadian” or anything else except a dark, and at times, brutal thriller. There’s a scene in this movie, where if you don’t wince. You’re not human.

Paul Fox and Will Zmak have crafted a clever film that relies on nuance and intelligence to make you squirm, rather than ripping off a Nine Inch Nails video. As such, it’s a smidgen too theatrical and talky at times, but if you have the patience for a movie where something doesn’t blow up every five seconds, you’ll find this a rewarding experience.

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David O’Malley wrote and directed this film. He has experience in both fields which is more than a lot of his contemporaries can claim. Most of his writing has been with �B� flicks such as the comedy thriller �Fatal Instinct� and horror flick with a touch of Sci-Fi called �Alien Zone�. A lot of people would show some distain for such credits but if you examine his movies O�Malley has consistently worked on his craft. I have seen several of his previous works; okay, usually one overnight cable movie stations, and they are fun to watch. He has a way of weaving a story that in the case here is like an old fashion story you tell around a camp fire or like that favorite uncle who loves to tell you spooky stories. Not every film has to be a classic. So many writer/directors aim so high they set themselves up for failure. Others just push out any tripe they can think of. Here is a man who can appreciate the need for a tale of terror like this one. Of course there are elements from the best of the genre. There is a touch of Bates Motel present but that is only because those films used traditional means of creating the suspense required to tell the story. There is also a little bit of the old EC Comics here. You know the �Tales from the Crypt� pulp magazines that your mother hated to find in your room. O�Malley gives the right dark comic touches to keep the story moving along.

Speaking of moving things along O�Malley is also a very good director. He paces the film perfectly. It starts off in such a fashion that you know what is going to happen based on years of horror film watching but it is the way he gets there that is interesting. He also has a cast that is far better than the usual horror flick. It seems that those movies do an open casting call at a frat party kegger. Here we get real names that you will recognize. Roy Scheider, Daryl Hannah, Eric Roberts and Tia Carrere are all here. While this is admittedly not their best work they didn�t just phone in their performances either. They are all professionals and know how to play their roles realistically and with style.

The film opens in a disorienting montage of images. We see flashes of blood, a man in an orange jump suit being fingerprinted and a car pulling up to a remote park check point. The ranger goes to the car and looks in. He asks the driver if he had an accident; evidently there is a lot of blood present. The man being printed at the police station is Paul (Nick Cornish) and he has a large bandage on his face. Back at the checkpoint the ranger asks the driver to open his trunk. It turns out the driver is also Paul with deep scratches on his face. Inside his trunk is a dead body with an uprooted plant on top of it. The ranger pulls his gun and takes him into custody. In the holding room Paul pulls off his bandages as images of mutilated bodies flash by. This is actually a technique that is over used in many horror flicks. They try to tease the audience with d�j� vu like flashbacks. Here, O�Malley employs the device with more skill showing the audience just enough to whet the appetite of the viewers. You think you know what will happen based on the title of the movie but this segment seems disjointed and distant from that story. Sheriff Fields (Robert R. Shafer) is on the phone telling someone that the FBI has been called and he has bodies all over the place. Special agent McCloud (Doug Wert) from the FBI comes up to the sheriff. The body in the trunk belonged to the man who owned a local motel. When the police went there they discovered more bodies. Paul claims that the motel owner, Sam (Roy Scheider) stumbled across the bodies in one of the rooms. Special agent McCloud interviews Paul trying to get to the bottom if things. Paul was on his honeymoon; finally we start getting into the real story. This may seem like a lot of fluff before getting to the meat of the matter but it comes across as an expert storyteller setting up the audience for what is about to be revealed. Paul begins to tell the story to the agent. He goes back to his whirlwind romance and marriage to Kathryn (Lindy Booth). At first everything seems great and they were in love. The first sign that Paul had that this was not a normal wedding day is when Kathryn suggests they spend the night in their own places. He was looking forward to their wedding night (it looks like she held out) but she wants to wait until they get to the little cabin they have lined up in the Northwest. They stop off for a coffee where Kathryn seems annoyed by an obnoxious man, brilliantly played by Eric Roberts. You know the type, talking loudly on his blue tooth phone and insulting everyone around. He goes off to the bathroom and Paul goes to fill up the car. Well, the man winds up slashed to death. This is only the start as Paul ultimately begins to realize that the woman he married is not the sweet girl he thought she was.

This well crafted movie is being distributed on DVD by Starz/Anchor Bay. The have one of the most diversified catalogues around so there is a good chance that you already have several of their titles already. This is not only a great popcorn flick it holds together as something you will want to watch over and over.
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We open with Sarah (Skye Bennett), an autistic girl who finds her MRI frightening even before the machine malfunctions, almost setting on fire. That’s the tipping point for her father Ben (Noah Huntley), who decides that this hospital isn’t going to do her much good and she might as well be comfortable at home, despite the warnings of nurse Emily (Dominique McElligott). The power goes out while they’re in the elevator - shared with impatient businessman Jon (William Hope), mentally unstable Tobias (Ronald Pickup), and security guard Rick (Leon Herbert) - and when it finally comes back on, something is definitely not right: The sixth floor of the hospital seems to be completely empty, for starters, and that’s before the ghosts and monsters start showing up.

Hospitals are scary places to begin with, and not necessarily because of the sickness. There’s something unnatural about how cleanly-designed and sterile those places can be, and emptying them out makes them even more disconcerting - it increases the feeling of helplessness most non-medical professionals feel there. Dark Floors plays into all that, and then, just at the point where audiences might start taking that for granted, starts messing things up - the lower floors are dirtier and no longer unoccupied - ghosts, monsters, and corpses start appearing, bringing the atmosphere from unnerving-but-safe to outright dangerous.

Director Pete Riski deserves a lot of credit - though he’s been doing commercials and music videos for a while, this is his first feature, and he’s a very strong hand at the helm. Opportunities abound for things to become silly, but he always remembers that tension comes first. The monsters are played by Lordi, covered in monster make-up and wearing leather-and-iron heavy metal fetish gear, but Riski never lets them usurp the movie from the protagonists. Regardless of any problems the script might have, Riski nails the proper mood at every moment.

It’s in part because Riski directs so well, indicating that there is in fact a clear vision at work, that the script is so frustrating. There are nifty scenes scattered throughout the movie, and the writing is clever enough to do some very nifty things with its time out of joint bits (several times, the audience seemed to get a kick out of realizing where bits were leading). The dialog is serviceable but not impressive - writing with an eye toward a foreign audience almost guarantees that. What’s really just unforgivable is that ultimately, the movie doesn’t seem to have much interest in why this is all happening. It drops a ton of hints that Sarah is important, Tobias says his share of cryptic things, but there is no tying them together such that the individually well-done ghosts, demons, mutilations, reanimated corpses, and distortions of time and space form a cohesive whole. It’s not even good ambiguity, where what we see could reasonably support several situations; it’s just a big mess.

And that’s a crying shame. “Dark Floors” has enough going for it - noteworthy direction, decent acting, nice production values, and occasionally clever writing - that it could have been a real gem if that had all led to something, rather than just falling apart.

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No movie can ever have too much atmosphere, and Dark City exudes it from every frame of celluloid. Proyas’ world isn’t just a playground for his characters to romp in — it’s an ominous place where viewers can get lost. We don’t just coolly observe the bizarre, ever-changing skyline; we plunge into the city’s benighted depths, following the protagonist as he explores the secrets of this grim place where the sun never shines. Dark City has as stunning a visual texture as that of any movie that I’ve seen. Line up the other recent candidates, which include Tim Burton’s Batman, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessan and The City of Lost Children, and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and Dark City equals or bests them all. Visually, this film isn’t just impressive, it’s a tour de force.

Thankfully, Dark City doesn’t have an “all style, no substance” problem, either, because there’s a mind-challenging story to go along with the eye candy. Proyas hasn’t written this film for the passive viewer. To become involved in Dark City, thinking is mandatory. Unless you’re puzzling out the answers alongside John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), you’re going to miss more than one revelation. Very little is spelled out in this movie; the answers are all there, but you have to recognize them for what they are. How often do we get features like this, that don’t pander to the least common denominator?

Ironically, two months into 1998, my top three films to date (Sliding Doors, Open Your Eyes, and Dark City) all question the nature of identity and reality. Dark City is much like Open Your Eyes (which was shown at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and will open theatrically later this year in North America) — both are meditations on the importance of memory to an individual, and how everyone’s personality is comprised of the sum total of his or her remembrances. In the way Dark City tinkers with the boundaries of what’s real and what isn’t, it recalls The Game. Some viewers may also be reminded of Total Recall, although Proyas’ film plunges deep into issues that the Schwarzenegger vehicle used as icing for an action-laden cake.

Dark City opens by immersing the audience in the midst of a fractured, nightmarish narrative. The protagonist, who later learns that his name is John Murdoch, has amnesia. He begins his “new life” as a full-grown adult naked in a bath tub, uncertain of how he got there. His only company in the grungy hotel suite is the nude body of a dead prostitute. Did he kill her or not? He doesn’t know. Suddenly, Murdoch receives a phone call from someone named Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland), who claims to have his best interests at heart. Schreber warns him to get out of the hotel immediately. Soon, without a clue about his identity, Murdoch is fleeing from corpse-like creatures with incredible mental powers. But it turns out that Murdoch is not defenseless against his enemies — his mind, like theirs, can shape reality, although he doesn’t understand how to harness his abilities. Soon, his quest to unearth his past links him up with Emma (Jennifer Connelly), a woman who is supposedly his wife, and Police Inspector Bumstead (William Hurt), who believes Murdoch to be innocent of the prostitute’s murder. But Murdoch’s small group of allies offer little help when it comes to dealing with his powerful, ghoulish adversaries, the amoral Mr. Book (Ian Richardson) and Mr. Hand (Richard O’Brien).

Proyas’ inspiration for his Dark City appears to be New York during the first half of this century, but, using a style that is part science fiction, part noir thriller, and part gothic horror, he has embellished it to create a surreal place unlike no other. Film lovers will find that Dark City is overflowing with references to classic pictures — everything from the silent Dracula adaptation, Nosferatu, to Hitchcock’s masterful Vertigo. Throw in a little Twilight Zone and Star Trek for good measure. Even if you get bored with the storyline, which is extremely unlikely, there are still plenty of these little details to absorb your attention.

Proyas’ excellent vision extends to his casting choices. Rufus Sewell (currently appearing in Dangerous Beauty) makes a perfect John Murdoch, since he is equally good as a confused, desperate refugee and an avenging angel. Kiefer Sutherland, affecting a limp and a strange accent, evokes images of a Nazi scientist who’s more concerned with the experiment than with its victims. Jennifer Connelly, who looks the part of a classy, black-and-white screen siren, plays her femme fatale role to a “T”. And William Hurt is sufficiently gruff in the kind of part that Humphrey Bogart would have been at home in.

If there’s a flaw with Dark City (and it’s a small one, to be sure), it’s that the film takes a little too long forging a link between the audience and Murdoch. For the first thirty minutes, we’re left floating, watching the confounding narrative unfold, marveling over the strange occurrences, and waiting for film to really grab us. Once that happens, it’s difficult not to become completely engrossed. So, is the lengthy setup necessary? Almost certainly, and, as I said, any slow spots are only a tiny blemish on the face of a film that offers a gratifyingly original and stunning science fiction experience.

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Review
In his recent books, James Ellroy has pared down his style to terse dialogue and functional sentences - as close to the blueprint for a screenplay as any novel is likely to get. Ellroy didn’t write the screenplay for Dark Blue - that fell to Training Day scribe David Ayer - but he did provide the story outline, which follows the same obsessions with police corruption and macho bonding as his fabled ‘LA Quartet’ (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz), bringing them forward to the eve of the LA riots in 1992.

Cop Eldon Perry (Russell) is willing to drag the law down to the gutter level of the villains he wants to get off the streets by any means necessary. In this respect, he’s the cast from the same mould as Denzel Washington’s Alonzo Harris in Training Day. The crucial, Ellroy-inspired difference is that Perry isn’t a loose cannon with his own personal soldiers; he’s a third-generation cop, endorsed by the closed-door loyalties of the LAPD’s Special Investigations Squad. The SIS operates as a brotherhood with no qualms about blackmailing fellow officers in order to protect their power base.

As Perry comes to realise that he too is just a pawn in his boss’s eyes, his battle with personal demons plays against two bigger backdrops: the clean-up operation within the LAPD (personified in the muscular, African-American form of Ving Rhames’ incorruptible assistant chief) and the images of a riot-torn city. The direct link between them is impossible to ignore. It’s Perry’s out-dated, above-the-law attitude that sanctions the four cops who beat up Rodney King, which leads to increased racial tension in the city.

Russell revels in the vicious, immoral side of his character, a father who laughs off an expensive phone bill because the 0900 sex line numbers prove his son “isn’t a fag”. Hitting a career high, the actor never once pleads for audience sympathy, but his commitment wins us over nevertheless.

Verdict
Clumsy exposition and flat dialogue stop Ayer’s screenplay from doing Ellroy justice. Russell, however, joins Nick Nolte (The Good Thief) and Ray Liotta (Narc) in proving that, for character actors needing a career boost, crime does pay.

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Estranged brothers Francis (Wilson), Jack (Schwartzman) and Peter (Brody) reunite aboard an Indian train. What is conceived as a spiritual quest goes way wrong due to confrontations, misadventures and too much baggage.

Review
Three stooges antics mingle with subtler silliness, painful life-wisdom, bittersweet vicissitude and his trademark whimsy in this unmistakable Wes Anderson special.

Anderson again explores the sad peculiarity of a dysfunctional family, in what could be viewed as a companion-piece to The Royal Tenenbaums. But he enters new territory by removing the quirky siblings to colourful Rajasthan, where heady exoticism and atmospheric alien culture (plus the local, opium-rich cough mixture) all have their effect on the damaged Whitman brothers and their tragi-comic personal journeys.

Francis (Owen Wilson) has organised this odyssey a year after the brothers buried their father, their mother (Anjelica Huston) went AWOL and they parted acrimoniously, each with a share of dad’s luxurious luggage. Francis has planned every detail, with a bullied PA who lurks in the corridors and is ordered to keep his distance. Middle brother Peter (Adrien Brody) is about to become a father and is anxiously pondering why he married. Youngest brother Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is a writer mourning a recent break-up and furiously denying that his fiction is an ill-disguised chronicle of their lives.

Despite all Francis’ efforts to control the other two, his plans go awry when they stray from temple visits into a string of disasters. When the train itself goes off on the wrong track and a railway man explains, “We haven’t located us yet,” he’s speaking to the Whitman condition. Even more blatantly symbolic is the motif of the Whitmans’ luggage, to which the brothers cling jealously, along with their resentments, throughout. But it is handled wittily as a centrepiece in the delightful storybook production design, itself set off beautifully against vibrant locations.

Owen Wilson, without whom Anderson has never made a film, plays the eldest brother and self-appointed patriarch with
a haunted insecurity behind his confident humour. Wilson’s Francis has recently had a near-fatal accident, so for most of the film his face is bashed up, his remarkable nose hidden under a bandage. Given awareness of Wilson’s recent troubles, the dismaying state of his Francis enhances the poignancy of the brothers’ predicaments beyond what was foreseen and scripted, though Brody and Schwartzman more than hold their own as his rivals in grief and slapstick.

Like Francis, Anderson micro-manages everything, down to the characters’ footwear. By surrendering to his love of trains and train movies he put himself into a filming situation (aboard a real, moving train) that found impromptu, ingenious elements and a feel of things being made up as they went along. This can feel maddeningly farcical and chaotic at times, but the performances and the sense of a genuine experience are ultimately and imaginatively moving.
As an extra treat, the film is preceded by a short in which Schwartzman’s heartbroken Jack is holed up in a Paris hotel when his ex-lover (Natalie Portman) turns up. It’s a more apt prologue than it initially appears, the incident paying off dividends aboard The Darjeeling Express. Watch for a stunning last shot that goes straight to the heart.

Verdict
Funny peculiar and funny ha ha, with a spontaneity and energy that gather up a powerful emotional head of steam as it chugs along.

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Sometimes, you can tell when parts of a movie have been left on the cutting room floor, and that’s the case with Daredevil. The trade-off for a short running length (only 100 minutes) is a herky-jerky narrative that rarely moves smoothly. There are times when important nuggets of information are missing – not because they have been intentionally withheld but because the scene(s) in which they were revealed are not in the final cut. Coherent exposition is not Daredevil’s strong suit.

Cinematically, the inspiration for Daredevil is Batman. Hell’s Kitchen in The Big Apple is a dark and dreary place, and, although it’s not as architecturally bizarre as Gotham City, there are stone gargoyles and harpies everywhere. Few scenes transpire during the day; nearly all of the action is either indoors or at night. And the title character is a vigilante wearing a mask and a tight leather suit who spends his nights up on the city’s rooftops stalking the bad guys. Although Daredevil’s alter-ego, Matt Murdock (Ben Affleck) isn’t as rich or suave as Bruce Wayne, he certainly has a way with the ladies.

We see Daredevil’s origins via a flashback that absorbs about 15 minutes of the movie’s first half-hour. After being blinded in an accident with hazardous chemicals, Matt (played as a boy by Scott Terra) discovers that his other four senses have been exponentially enhanced. In fact, he now has a radar-like sixth sense that allows him to “see.” (The first time or two the camera allows us to view things from Matt’s perspective are interesting. After that, the approach quickly becomes overused.) Following the death of his father at the hands of a mobster, Matt decides to devote his life to bringing criminals to justice – one way or another.

As an adult, Matt is a lawyer by day, vigilante by night. His nocturnal activities have caused him to be a thorn in the side of New York’s biggest crime lord, Kingpin (Michael Clarke Duncan), who recruits an Irish villain named Bullseye (Colin Farrell) to eliminate Daredevil. Bullseye is a magician with hand-thrown missiles like knives. He never misses – until his first confrontation with Daredevil. Meanwhile, Matt enters into a whirlwind relationship with the dangerous and athletic Elektra Natchios (Jennifer Garner), who also happens to be on Kingpin/Bullseye’s target list.

Although Matt generally believes in what he’s doing, he has doubts. Consequently, the screenplay has him paying frequent visits to a confessional. He also has lines like, “Can a man make a difference? There are days when I believe that, and others when I don’t.” Unfortunately, all of this angst seems more like window-dressing than genuine motivation. In fact, one of the problems with Daredevil is that the main character never attains three-dimensionality. Despite various attempts by writer/director Mark Steven Johnson to flesh him out, he remains as flat as an image on a comic book page.

As befits a comic book-turned-motion picture, there are plenty of action scenes featuring moves that defy logic, gravity, and the laws of physics. The best of the fights, however, isn’t the duel between Daredevil and Bullseye, nor is it the anticlimactic showdown between our hero and Kingpin. Instead, it’s what passes for foreplay between Daredevil and Elektra. Instead of kissing and cuddling like most normal couples, they do their best to knock each other on their butts.

As hard as he tries, Ben Affleck will probably never be better than mediocre as an action hero. Affleck isn’t bad as Matt/Daredevil, but he’s not good, either. More impressive is Jennifer Garner, who radiates spunk and spirit as Elektra. Michael Clarke Duncan seems to be enjoying himself in the larger-than-life role of the biggest crime boss in the city. And, for a change, the ubiquitous Colin Ferrell gets to play someone who’s bad-to-the-bone. The phrase “over the top” doesn’t do this performance justice.

Fans of the comic book will probably have some nits to pick, but, overall, Daredevil does about one would expect from a movie of that name – present about 90 minutes of disposable, action-oriented entertainment. It’s not as good as either of its recent Marvel cinematic siblings (Spider-Man and X-Men), in large part because the proceedings lose far too much momentum in the last act and the desire to set up a sequel results in things ending with a whimper. It’s an adequate superhero yarn, but, hopefully, it’s not the best of the burgeoning genre that 2003 has to offer.

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No one is ever going to accuse Twister of being a masterpiece of originality, but, as roller- coaster movie go, it’s a great deal of fun. Part of the reason is the effective use of audio and visual effects; the other part is that director Jan de Bont knows how to get the adrenaline flowing. Twister is a rush. Dante’s Peak, on the other hand, is a bore. Oh, it has its moments, but most of them are concentrated in the final forty-five minutes. The first hour, which is all typical disaster movie setup, is interminable.

In keeping with time-tested formulas, we have a male/female pairing, children and animals in danger, a voice of reason that no one listens to until its too late, and a character with a tragedy in the past. Volcanologist Harry Dalton (Pierce “Bond, James Bond” Brosnan) lost his beloved girlfriend four years ago when they were studying an erupting volcano in South America. As a result of this incident, he tends to be jumpy about any possible volcanic activity, and when there are signs that the snowcapped mountain overlooking the tiny Washington state town of Dante’s Peak (population 7400) may be about to blow its top, Harry calls for an evacuation. The local mayor, Rachel Wando (Linda Hamilton), backs him up, but the others on the town council aren’t so sure. Enter Harry’s boss, Paul Dreyfus (Charles Hallahan), and his group of roving geologists (who look like refugees from Twister’s ragged band of storm hunters). Paul, sensitive to the delicate political situation of spreading panic without proper scientific evidence, calls off the evacuation. So, of course, when disaster inevitably strikes, people are needlessly killed.

The first hour of Dante’s Peak is spent getting to know the characters. Not that we need that much time, since they’re all familiar types. In addition to Harry and Rachel (who predictably become romantically involved), we’re introduced to two kids, an independent old lady, and a dog. If you manage to stay awake through fifty-five minutes of drivel, you’ll be rewarded with some nifty special effects as the mountain throws everything it has at the town: fire, water, air, and earth. No stone (literally) is left unturned. It’s pretty impressive, I admit, but there’s an unwelcome sense of deja vu. As recently as the aforementioned Twister, we’ve already been there and done that, and it was a lot more enjoyable last time around.

Brosnan and Hamilton gamely try to generate some chemistry, and, while both are appealing in their own right, the moronic plotline and dumb dialogue defeat them at nearly every turn. It will come as no surprise for astute viewers to learn that the screenwriter for Dante’s Peak, Leslie Bohem, also wrote Stallone’s Daylight. Both movies feature some similarly embarrassing bad lines. Meanwhile, director Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Getaway) fails repeatedly to do anything interesting to enliven the proceedings.

Even discounting the first hour, Dante’s Peak still isn’t all that satisfying. I suppose there’s a certain degree of tension as Harry and company flee rivers of molten lava and volcanic shockwaves in their attempt to get out of town before it’s buried in ash, but, with everything being done according to a well-established formula, the level of excitement stays low. Once the film is over, you’ll likely acknowledge that, although there’s some nice eye candy, the experience as a whole leaves something to be desired.

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Luc Besson has produced or written some of the most intriguing movies of the last 20 years (”Le Femme Nikita,” “The Fifth Element,” “Crimson Rivers,” “Ong-Bak”). He takes this classic animal story and makes a simple but inspired change: He turns the dog into a human being. Jet Li stars in “Unleashed” as Danny, a lethal martial arts warrior who has been raised in captivity since childhood and is used by Bart, a Glasgow gangster, as a fearsome weapon. Danny lives in a cage under the floor of Bart’s headquarters, travels quietly in the gangster’s car, and, when his collar is removed, explodes into violent fury and leaves rooms filled with his victims.

This is a story that could have made a laughable movie. That it works is because of the performances of Jet Li and Bob Hoskins, who plays his master. “Danny the Dog” is fearful of his owner, passive in captivity and obedient in action, because he has been trained that way for his whole life. Bart the gangster is another one of those feral characters Hoskins specializes in, a man who bares his teeth and seems prepared to dine on the throats of his enemies. Hoskins, who can be the most genial of men, has a dimension of pitiless cruelty that he revealed in his first starring role, “The Long Good Friday” (1980).

But “Unleashed” would be too simple if it were only about Bart and Danny. Besson’s screenplay now adds the character of Sam, a blind piano-tuner played by Morgan Freeman. Sam lives in a gentle world of musicians and pianos and his beloved stepdaughter Victoria (Kerry Condon). Danny falls into their lives by accident, after running away from Bart, as a dog is likely to do when it becomes fed up with its master.

In Danny’s early memories, a piano figures somehow. A drawing of a piano triggers some of those old shadows, and when he hears piano music with Sam and Victoria, and when they give him his first simple music lessons, a great cloud lifts from his mind and he knows joy for the first time. He also begins to recall his mother, who was a pianist, and remembers fragments of the events that led to him becoming Danny the dog.

The film is ingenious in its construction. It has all the martial arts action any Jet Li fan could possibly desire, choreographed by Yeun Wo-ping, who is the Gerald Arpino of kung-fu and creates improbable but delightful ballets of chops and socks, leaps and twists and kicks and improvisations. Everything happens in a denatured sepia tone that is not black and white nor quite color, but a palette drained of cheer and pressing down like a foggy day.

Because Hoskins is so good at focusing the ferocity of Bart, he distracts us from the impossible elements in the trained-killer plot. Because Morgan Freeman brings an unforced plausibility to every character he plays, we simply accept the piano tuner instead of noticing how implausibly he enters the story. Freeman handles the role in the only way that will work, by playing a piano tuner as a piano tuner, instead of as a plot device in a martial arts movie. His stepdaughter Victoria is invaluable because, as Ann Coulter was explaining when she was so rudely shouted down the other day, women are a civilizing influence on men, who will get up to mischief in each other’s company; Victoria’s gentleness stirs Danny’s humanity more than it inflames his lust.

So many action movies are made an autopilot that I am grateful when one works outside the box. Luc Besson, here as producer and writer, almost always brings an unexpected human element to his action stories; “Crimson Rivers,” for example, remains an overlooked triumph in the police procedural genre, taking a murder investigation to a bizarre conclusion.

“Unleashed” ends with a confrontation between Bart and Danny in which Bart reveals the truly twisted depth of his attachment to the “dog.” They say dogs and their owners eventually start to resemble each other, but in this case an actual transference seems to be going on.
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The two people live in 18th century France, at a time just before the revolution, when the decadence of the aristocracy has become an end in itself. The Marquise de Merteuil lives in a world of drawing rooms and boudoirs, where she swoops down like a hawk upon the innocent and the naive, wrecking their idealism with a triumphant laugh to herself.

Her partner and confidant is the Vicomte de Valmont, who was once her lover and is now her weapon against young women presumptuous enough to love. In their private score-keeping, nothing counts more than a heart destroyed and hopes laid to waste.

One day the Marquise (Glenn Close) comes to the Vicomte (John Malkovich) with an assignment. She has lost a lover who left her to marry an innocent young woman named Cecile (Uma Thurman). She wishes the Vicomte to seduce the young woman before she can bear her virginity to the marital bed. The Vicomte accepts the dare and dispatches himself to the country, where, however, he eventually sets his sights on another young woman instead.

She is the virtuous Madame de Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer), who wishes to be faithful to her husband. Certainly there is nothing overpoweringly attractive in the lecherous Vicomte, who is a little cadaverous and has a reputation as a cad. But the Vicomte persists, and he uses a weapon that sometimes works against the pure and the good: He presents himself as frankly evil and thus inspires a spark of lust to stir within the woman herself. He plays on her curiosity about what it would be like to be a bad girl.

All this intrigue goes more or less according to plan, especially when the Marquise sics another young man on the unsuspecting Cecile, then uses that as an excuse to arrange for Cecile to visit the country home where, wouldn’t you know, the Vicomte and Madame de Tourvel are staying. The seduction of Cecile comes easily. But the seduction of Madame Tourvel, when it is finally arrived at, is a surprise for everyone because the Vicomte and Tourvel really do fall in love.

This is too much for the Marquise; as her instrument, the Vicomte may make love to whomsoever he pleases, but he is not to fall in love with anyone. All of the pretend emotions of the game of seduction turn into the real emotions of the game of betrayal.

“Dangerous Liaisons,” based on Christopher Hampton’s London and New York stage hit “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” (and on the scandalous 18th century novel by Choderlos de Laclos), is a mannered, elegant film in which the languorous intrigues of the opening scenes set up the violent passions of the later ones. It is a film in which the surfaces are usually calm and only the flash of an eye or a slightly raised voice betrays the most terrible struggles going on beneath.

It is played to perfection by Close and Malkovich in the central roles; their arch dialogues together turn into exhausting conversational games, tennis matches of the soul. The other key roles, played by Pfeiffer and Thurman, are trickier, because they involve characters who should not be entirely aware of what is really happening. Both actresses are well cast for their roles, and for Pfeiffer, in a year that has seen her in varied assignments such as “Married to the Mob” and “Tequila Sunrise,” the movie is more evidence of her versatility. She is good when she is innocent and superb when she is guilty.

If there is anything lacking in the movie, it may be a certain gusto. The director, Stephen Frears, is so happy to make this a tragicomedy of manners that he sometimes turns away from obvious payoffs. I am not suggesting he should have turned the material toward the ribald, or gone for easy laughs, but there are times when he holds back and should have gone for the punch line. “Dangerous Liaisons” is an absorbing and seductive movie, but not a compelling one.

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When Kevin Costner made Dances with Wolves, he was at the height of his popularity. The debacles of Waterworld and The Postman were still years in the future. As an actor, he was riding the crest of a motion picture wave that included Silverado, No Way Out, The Untouchables, Bull Durham, and Field of Dreams. Dances with Wolves, which gave Costner the triple hat of performer, producer, and director, was one of the most ambitious and impressive debuts of any novice film maker in the past three decades. In the ’90s, it is only one of two films lasting longer than three hours to have grossed more than $100 million domestically (the other being Titanic), showing that the public loved it as much as the critics.

Dances with Wolves has been called a “revisionist western” - a movie that reversed the traditional roles of Cowboys and Indians. In fact, it’s nothing of the sort. While it is true that the Sioux tribe is portrayed with the kind of balance and sensitivity rarely accorded to Native Americans in any movie, the Pawnee do not fare as well (as Sioux enemies, they are presented in much the same fashion that Indians were back in the ’50s and ’60s). And the American soldiers are depicted as genuine, imperfect human beings, not as thoughtless, vicious brutes. We mourn the death of Lieutenant Elgin as much as that of Stone Calf. So, although Dances with Wolves makes a conscious attempt to set the historical record straight, the role reversal is not complete. This is not meant to minimize Costner’s achievement in presenting an epic motion picture from the Native American perspective, but to note that Dances with Wolves did not subvert the entire genre; it just twisted a few of the conventions. Areas that were once presented in graphic black and white have been blurred by the inclusion of many shades of gray.

Dances with Wolves opens with a brief Civil War prologue in which the protagonist, Lt. John Dunbar (Costner), establishes himself as a hero by providing a diversion so that a group of Union soldiers can overcome an entrenched Rebel position. Dunbar’s reason for his actions - he preferred losing his life to living without a leg (the doctors were planning an amputation) - are unimportant. All that matters are the results, and, because of his bravery, he is offered a station anywhere he wants. He chooses the frontier, so he can see it before it is gone. Soon, he has been dispatched to the small South Dakota post of Fort Sedgewick. But, when he arrives there in the company of the wagon-driver Timmons (Robert Pastorelli), he finds the place deserted. Nevertheless, he resolves to obey his orders, and, after dismissing Timmons, he sets about putting things to right and solving the mystery of where everyone went.

For over a month, Dunbar is alone at Fort Sedgewick. His only companions are a friendly wolf that he names Two Socks and his faithful mount, Cisco. Gradually, over time, he becomes comfortable with his peaceful surroundings - some of the most beautiful country he has ever seen. The sequences with Dunbar alone at Sedgewick are some of the best in the movie. There is a kind of quiet cinematic poetry in these scenes as we grow not only to learn about the character of Dunbar, but about the land itself - not as it is today, but as it was 135 years ago. The first hour of Dances with Wolves is setup, but the gorgeous visuals, lush score (by John Barry), and reflective tone makes it a pleasant introduction.

The story moves into high gear with the arrival of the Sioux, led by the thoughtful Kicking Bird (Graham Greene) and the tempestuous Wind in His Hair (Rodney A. Grant). At first, there is mutual distrust, but, as Dunbar and the Sioux interact and begin to communicate (each learning a few words of the other’s language), they form a truce, then a bond. With every passing day, Dunbar finds himself more and more infatuated with the Sioux way of life. And his interaction with them becomes even easier when Stands With A Fist (Mary McDonnell), a white woman who has lived with the Sioux since childhood, is able to act as an interpreter. Eventually, Dunbar leaves Fort Sedgewick and moves into the Sioux camp. He falls in love with Stands with a Fist, becomes a respected member of the tribe with his own Sioux name (”Dances With Wolves”), and is able to forget the life he left behind - until the day when Fort Sedgewick is garrisoned and the soldiers find him: an out-of-uniform officer “gone Injun.”

Dances with Wolves works on many levels. It’s a rousing adventure, a touching romance, and a stirring drama. While Dunbar’s story is fictional, the background surrounding it is real, from the Sioux beliefs to the “take without asking” policy of many frontiersmen. Costner was determined to make the film as authentic as possible. He did most of his own stunts. Instead of using a half-breed for Two Socks, he used a full wolf. The Sioux speak their own language, Lakota (with subtitles), instead of English. And Costner cast only Native Americans as Indians.

The characters populating Dances with Wolves are strongly written and effectively portrayed. While no one is going to place Costner alongside Laurence Olivier in the acting department, he brings a likability to Dunbar that many better performers might not have been able to match. The film works in large part because we identify so thoroughly with Dunbar. In fact, we know nothing of his past - he comes to us as a clean slate, born through his act of suicidal courage. We never learn anything about his family or childhood, but we see the frontier and the Sioux culture through his eyes, and it quickly becomes apparent that for him, the past is irrelevant. The reality of his life begins when we first meet him.

To say that the Sioux defy traditional stereotypes is to understate the matter. As portrayed by Graham Greene, Rodney A. Grant, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Tantoo Cardinal, and others, these are a group of compelling, diverse characters who show no hint of caricature. Mary McDonnell plays an effective love interest for Dunbar. Like him, Stands With A Fist is caught between two cultures. Costner should be applauded for this casting choice. McDonnell has the maturity to make certain scenes work when a younger actress might have struck a false note (McDonnell is three years older than Costner). The director was determined that Stands With A Fist should be portrayed by a “woman,” not a “girl.”

Although Dances with Wolves contains several well-executed battle scenes, there’s little doubt that the most breathtaking sequence is the buffalo hunt, where the Sioux riders race alongside thousands of rampaging buffalo and bring several of them down. It’s a high adrenaline sequence that marks the moment when Dunbar finally rejects his old culture to embrace his new one. From a technical and logistical perspective, this is probably the year’s singlemost memorable scene, and the adroitness with which Costner directed it explains (at least in part) why he won the Best Director Oscar.

For several years after Dances with Wolves, expectations were high about Costner’s next project. Sadly, when it finally materialized in late 1997, The Postman was a colossal disappointment. Will Costner ever direct again? At this point, that question cannot be answered, but, even if he never makes another film, he can be proud of the singular achievement on his resume. For three hours, Dances with Wolves transports us to another world, and that’s the mark of a great motion picture.

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The situations of the title are laid out pretty straightforwardly in the start: Some sludge from the nearby nuclear power plant (right next to the cemetery) seems to be causing outbreaks of the dead suddenly showing signs of life, much to the annoyance of the gravedigger (James Jarett), while across town the local high schoolers are getting ready for the prom. Organizer Lindsay (Greyson Chadwick) is annoyed that her slacker boyfriend Jimmy (Jared Kusnitz) doesn’t seem to take it (or anything) seriously, and opts to go with student council president Mitch (Jeff Adelman) instead; Jimmy’s friend Steven (Chandler Darby) is trying to ask his lab partner Gwen (Carissa Capobianco), but the cheerleader has her eyes on Nash (Blair Redford). No girl would want to go with backyard wrestling-loving thug Kyle (Justin Welborn) in the first place. It’s a good thing all of them wind up late or not going, though - when the living dead attack the prom, it’s up to them to come to the rescue!

Why, exactly, the school dance should wind up the focal point of the zombie outbreak is left somewhat fuzzy; we’re to take it somewhat on faith that teenager is a zombie delicacy to the point where they will all naturally converge upon the gym rather than just shamble about randomly. Of course, these zombies aren’t quite the Romero standard-issue variety; they’re articulate enough to express their desire for brains and a few of them are tool-users. Heck, they’ve got enough energy to burst out of their graves like their coffins have ejection seats.

The zombies may be able to make pretty good time, but they still fall apart fairly easily. For a movie with a relatively low budget, Dance of the Dead has a lot of action, starting up pretty early on and never letting up for very long at all. It’s generally fun, clever action at that - director Gregg Bishop busts out a bunch of fake blood, sure, but he also gives us neat bits where a character will run a zombie through with a baseball bat and then smoothly yank it out the other side. You don’t see maneuvers like that very often, and other filmmakers might have stopped for a bit so that the audience could congratulate them, but these guys pull it off like it’s no big deal.

It’s also kind of funny, in contrast to the rest of the movie, which is very funny. It does a great job of not pushing too hard, relegating some of its best jokes to the background - I love how, during Nash’s band’s tryouts for the prom, it’s the gray-haired teacher who’s digging the rock & roll while the rest look uncomfortable (there’s probably some amount of truth to that, as well). It plays on the familiar tropes of the teen comedy, and does it broadly, but has fun mixing and matching: The cheerleader is genuinely and unironically nice, the rowdy quotes the bible, and so on. They get to say and do genuinely funny things rather than just represent their cliques, as if they were actual kids who had known each other all their lives rather than just types who never encountered each other. This also applies to Mark Oliver as the high-strung gym teacher, who absolutely kills in his every scene.

He and deadpan James Jarrett are the main adults of note; the rest of the movie belongs to the kids. Most of them, I believe, are actual teens, or at least below drinking age, which is always nice to see. Most play their characters as basically good kids. I don’t know whether it’s really a big deal that many appear to be from the Atlanta/Rome area where the movie shot, but that certainly may be a contributor to how well they work as a group. I especially like how Kusnitz and Chadwick work off each other; it’s not a bland opposites-attract thing, but two teens who seem to dig each other individually.

That’s what makes the film a blast - it could very easily have just been a by the numbers horror comedy, just crossing genres in expected ways, but instead it constantly finds little ways to surprise.

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The Dancer Upstairs opens with a brief prologue chronicling a meeting at a police checkpoint between the officer in charge, Agustin Rejas (Javier Bardem), and a philosophy professor (Abel Folk). Years later, that philosophy professor, going by the name of Ezequiel Dur�n, is deemed to be a serious threat to national security. Believing himself to be the “Fourth Flame of Communism” (after Marx, Lenin, and Mao), Ezequiel is inciting the people to rebel against the government, and is using terrorist methods to promote his agenda. Rejas is assigned the job of unearthing him and bringing him to justice, but, before his investigation begins bearing fruit, a significant military figure is assassinated and martial law is declared. Now, Rejas’ every move is scrutinized by soldiers.

Meanwhile, Rejas’ personal life is stable, but unfulfilling. An innocent liaison with his daughter’s dance teacher, Yolanda (Laura Morante), threatens to lead to something more when Rejas examines the emotional gulf that has opened between himself and his wife, Sylvina (Alexandra Lencastre), who is increasingly fascinated by superficial things. Rejas likes being with Yolanda, and contrives ways to be around her. He senses that she feels as strongly about him as he does about her, but they both recognize that any deep or lasting attachment is unlikely and unrealistic, especially in the current political climate.

For the most part, the investigation is a bore. Any fan of a good detective story knows that the key to keeping the viewer’s interest is to build momentum. In The Dancer Upstairs, things start promisingly, but they plateau early and end up stalled for too long. When the expected payoff scene arrives, it is anticlimactic and unsatisfying. During one of the film’s key investigative sequences, which features policemen sifting through garbage looking for unfiltered Camel cigarettes and medication for eczema, I was reminded of the TV show “CSI.”

That isn’t the association Malkovich is aiming for. He wants us to think of the Costa-Gavras films from the ’60s and ’70s. (To emphasize this point, we see Rejas watching State of Siege on television.) Like Costa-Gavras, Malkovich develops a politically turbulent backdrop in front of which the story can unfold, although The Dancer Upstairs is thin when it comes to details. Other than the bare facts � a revolution is brewing, the government has declared martial law, and there’s a manhunt underway for Ezequiel � we’re left pretty much in the dark about what’s really going on. It’s enough to cause one to feel stranded in Allegory Alley.

More compelling than the detective story is that of Rejas’ relationship with Yolanda. These two click. There’s real chemistry between them, and their interludes keep the movie from losing its focus. Their conversations are the only interesting ones written by Shakespeare (Nicholas, not William). We sense from the beginning that the relationship won’t go anywhere. Rejas is married and is the kind of upright man who won’t stray. But, even as we recognize this, we also see how much better matched he is with Yolanda than with his wife. If The Dancer Upstairs had spent more time with these two and less with the hunt for Ezequiel, it would have been more engrossing.

If nothing else, Malkovich has crafted an impressive looking film. There’s a lot of artistry in his direction � so much so, that, at times, it borders on the pretentious. Jos� Luis Alcaine’s photography is evocative, and the tone, lugubrious though it might be, is firmly established. The real strength of The Dancer Upstairs is Javier Bardem (Oscar nominated for Before Night Falls), who brings conviction to the part of Rejas. Bardem has a forceful, charismatic presence. There are times when he’s the only reason we stay interested in the movie. Laura Morante is well-matched to Bardem, although she has only about one-third of his screen time.

I have a great deal of respect for John Malkovich as an actor, but, based on this film, the jury is out about whether he has a future behind the camera. There’s no arguing that The Dancer Upstairs is ambitious material for a first-time outing, but, even with a huge assist from his lead actor, Malkovich doesn’t nail it. The movie may appeal to fans of Costa-Gavras (although that has to be a rather limited audience), but, with little other than the love story subplot to energize the proceedings, many viewers will find that, for all its grace, The Dancer Upstairs moves too slowly.

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He plays Dan Burns, a newspaper advice columnist, whose wife died four years before. He’s raising three girls on his own, two teenagers and a pre-teen, and he must be doing a good job because they treat him like a slightly slow brother. At Thanksgiving, he takes them all to Rhode Island, where his parents (John Mahoney and Dianne Wiest) own a vast, rambling brown-shingled beach house you probably couldn’t touch for $20 million. Since Mahoney’s big job is wearing an apron in the kitchen, it’s hard to see him as a guy owning that kind of real estate. Maybe he inherited. Also on hand is Dan’s brother Mitch (Dane Cook).

Dan goes into town in the afternoon and runs into Marie (Juliette Binoche) in a bookstore. They begin one of those conversations that threatens to continue for a lifetime. It’s not love at first sight, but it’s intrigue, approval and yearning. She supplies her phone number. That evening, brother Mitch brings his girlfriend home and, yes, it’s Marie.

That’s the setup, and the movie deals with how to fit all those conflicting emotions into the house. Good thing it’s big enough for lots of secret conversations on the move; the fact that social rules forbid them to declare their growing love make Marie and Dan feel all the more like blurting it out. Binoche is superb at looking upon her new man with the regret she’d feel for a puppy she can’t adopt.

The movie’s director and co-writer, Peter Hedges, made the overlooked little treasure “Pieces of April,” a 2003 Sundance hit, also about a Thanksgiving family reunion (which, oddly enough, also involved a family named Burns). His plot this time is less fraught, maybe because enormous stakes are not involved; Mitch and Marie are not desperately in love; Dan and Marie hardly know each other, and social awkwardness is the most difficult hurdle between here and happiness. That’s why the movie’s so soothingly pleasant.

Yes, there are some loud moments and big laughs, some of them involving the three girls, who seem to be enduring simultaneous hormonal yearnings, but Mahoney and Wiest keep a steady hand on the tiller, and the fireplaces and Arts & Crafts furniture exert a calming influence. Juliette Binoche also has much to do with the film’s charm. French but eloquent in English, she fills a place that Ingrid Bergman used to inhabit in the cinema: Able to be very serious, very sweet, very beautiful, she has the gravitas to make this story seem more important than a mere game of switching partners.

If the film has a flaw, and I’m afraid it does, it’s the Sondre Lerche songs on the soundtrack. They are too foregrounded and literal, either commenting on the action or expounding on associated topics. In such a laid-back movie, they’re in our face. The songs are on the movie’s Web site, if you doubt me. But I got over the music and had a good enough time, although something tells me this is the kind of movie that will inspire countless queries from moviegoers asking me where that house is. I’ll save you the trouble: I tried to find out, but couldn’t. It looks real enough and not digital, but there’s not a single exterior photo of it on the movie’s official Web site.

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The movie: When last we left little Damien, Gregory Peck was attempting to stab him to death with a holy Ginsu knife. Thankfully, the local police got involved and assured the world there’d be a sequel by saving the boy. He has been taken in by his uncle Richard Thorn (William Holden), and now, the Anti-Christ has hit puberty and all hell breaks loose, literally. The plot is dang near exactly the same — one or two folks are convinced Damien is evil, but his uncle simply won’t accept it. And like before, strange “accidents” occur to those who dare question the young man’s lineage, and usually after they’ve been scared half to death by a squawking black crow. But this time, though, there’s proof. Some archeologists dug up an ancient temple wall that’s covered in an image of the Anti-Christ — and he looks EXACTLY like Damien. Only no one bothered to photograph the thing, and it takes the whole movie to ship it to the Thorn-funded museum. With piles of bodies all around him, Uncle Richard, STILL has to see the wall for himself before he’ll comprehend the truth and decide to finish the job his brother started. In the first movie, Damien was protected by Satan’s henchmen, the same is true for this film, but now he’s old enough now to discover, for himself, his true purpose and who his REAL father is. And the fella charged with that instruction is none other than B-favorite Lance Henriksen as Damien’s military school mentor.

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