Last Rays and Shadows of Summer

...As if attempting in vain to outshine the more restrained star, they belt out their lines...

...Meanwhile her husband, racked with debt, makes several comically futile attempts to commit suicide...

...The picture thus embraces the view that the only God worthy of our adoration is one who can be proven to benefit us personally, no matter how violently we curse him or refuse to do his bidding...

...Road to Perdition stars Tom Hanks as a professional hit man...

...The hunt for a petty crook who stole a few bucks from a convenience store connects to a vast web of criminal activity, and McCaleb himself is soon implicated...

...The ethnic diversity of the city plays a large role in the action, and racial tensions contribute to the difficulties of solving the case...

...Critics apparently think this film, like Sunshine State, is about the struggle between parents and children...

...He also notices that his usually docile dogs are barking viciously...

...The region is home to one of those legendary Florida burgs founded entirely by blacks in the 1930s...

...Blood Work, though, is Eastwood's best film in many years...

...Sayles may be the only truly independent filmmaker working in the U.S...

...Signs and Road to Perdition turn in on themselves, celebrating heroes who are entirely self-seeking...

...today...

...Curious Michael Sullivan Jr...

...Road to Perdition is especially lethargic...

...One evening he sneaks into the back seat of the family car and witnesses a gangland massacre...

...This grinning psychopath, who feels compelled to photograph his victims, is as inept and cartoonish as the "special guest villains" on the Batman television series...

...In the current season one of the pleasantest surprises has been Clint Eastwood's Blood Work, a gripping murder mystery set in Los Angeles...

...The two main stories concern the efforts of daughters, one black and one white, to make peace with their parents...

...Its camera work serves the tricky narrative without calling attention to itself, and the quiet jazz score by Lennie Niehaus rarely telegraphs emotion or damps the dialogue...

...A renowned football player claims to be returning home as a prodigal son, but has actually come to help the developers...

...So screens are filled with what kids have shown they like best: violence, explosions, and action rapid enough to hold their skimpy attention...

...UNFORTUNATELY, Critícs and audiences were busy lavishing praise on the two most dismal of the summer's allegedly thoughtful films: the gangster picture Road to Perdition and Signs, a pathetic exercise about spiritual awakening that plays like Ingmar Bergman with a double lobotomy...

...Like a good Bergman hero...

...Confidential...

...Rooney makes all sorts of claims for the professionalism and menace of his organization, yet he tends to favor underlings whose eccentricities outweigh their competence...

...Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was about the creation of such a community...

...The last-and supposedly most ruthless-is Harlen Maguire (Jude Law...

...The magnitude of the perpetrator's malice gradually comes into sharp focus...

...If there were ever a time for a concerned person to question the wisdom of a higher power, it would be when creatures from another world start treating the earth like an enormous Burger King...

...The multiple story lines of Sunshine State center on the efforts of rival companies to purchase depressed local land and gentrify it, complete with golf courses and strip malls...

...One dream sequence also does not ring true, and a few plot points stretch credibility...

...Road to Perdition might have been a lot better if he and screenwriter David Self had allowed themselves to satirize the tired clichés they invoked...

...Like Blood Work, it depicts men and women from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, except this time the locale is a small island in Florida...

...But when an attractive woman (Wanda De Jesus) begs him to catch her sister's slayer, McCaleb is unable to turn her down...

...But Hanks and Hoechlin share very few scenes, and in those they are usually dodging bullets rather than talking...

...Here, a cursory viewing of Close Encounters of the Third Kind would have explained precisely what is going on, but Graham and director-screenwriter M. Night Shyamalan operate as if these phenomena are entirely new...

...Studios therefore began distributing the Hollywood legend's productions in August, perhaps hoping to capitalize on his name once they were repackaged for video...

...Instead, he is so tormented by his wife's death that he has given up believing in his creator's benevolence...

...The movie evokes familiar motifs...

...He tells us his habitual reply: "He was my father...

...In each, characters weigh the value of personal well-being against that of doing good in society...

...Signs has Mel Gibson as a defrocked Episcopalian minister...

...Tyler Hoechlin) is eager to discover exactly what his father (Hanks) does for a living...

...In the one instance where a former parishioner asks for spiritual counsel, he treats her problems with a mocking hostility that we are asked to share...

...At the outset, Graham Hess (Gibson), a widower who lives in a farmhouse with his brother and two children, discovers immense and bizarre patterns cut into the cornfield out back...

...It is clear that Signs endorses such cankered, selfish religiosity when Graham appears in the end back in the collar, his faith revived, triumphantly ready to give Protestantism a bad name...

...Their popularity is surely related to the smugly simplistic ideas they profess and the big names they feature...

...After 10 or 15 minutes are spent trying to puzzle out the behavior of the belligerent hounds, we have to wait another half-hour before someone suggests that the markings in the crops are landing guides for alien spacecraft...

...Both pictures are lugubrious, consumed by the darkness of a suffocating, lifeless mood...

...Sunshine State is about its collapse...

...There is even, toward the end, a bizarre assault on the villain that recalls a famous sequence in Dirty Harry, which made Eastwood a staple of cop dramas over the past 30 years...

...That may explain why Sayles is more willing than almost anyone else to attack the voracity and inhumanity of American big business...

...The director's visuals are efficient and economical...

...The invasion does not begin until the movie's last quarter...

...What I recall most are shots of Hanks walking-to his car, down a road, across a field, through several series of computer-generated images that are muddy studies in brown, black and gray...

...As a result, he needs to enlist no fewer than three assassins to take out Sullivan, who easily outwits his assailants...

...The developers, represented by a group of paunchy golfers whose callous conversations are interspersed throughout the film, care not a whit for the folks living in the area...

...Her death apparently was providential after all, for it leads Graham to save his family...

...All four of the films I have covered are considered "adult" works because they ask us seriously to consider a moral issue...

...He feels an obligation to do justice for the stranger who gave him newlife...

...He is required to engage in tense confrontations with former colleagues, to run after and away from others, and in one painful scene, to get beaten up...

...A matron hosts an annual fair that hardly anyone is interested in...

...I had the impression that deep down the directors were aware of the triviality of their subjects and overcompensated by creating a mock-European sense of portent...

...Against this backdrop of decay Sayles spools out a number of human dramas...

...But Graham and the film take advantage of the calamity to restore his faith, not because the tragedy brings him to a sorely needed awareness of human suffering or the need for grace, but because his wife's last words furnish clues-signswhich help him defeat an exotic being that has abducted his son...

...Having recently undergone a heart transplant, McCaleb has been warned to take it easy and rebuffs all requests for his services...

...These are the silliest casting decisions since Steve Buscemi was made to impersonate a Schwarzenegger-like killing machine in Con Air...

...The enigmatic beauty appealing to the prowess of an experienced crimefighter harks back to The Maltese Falcon and the Sherlock Holmes tales...

...The story, such as it is, is set in 1931...

...At the end Michael Jr., in a voice-over narration, says that in later years people would ask him whether his father was a good man...

...Eastwood plays Terry McCaleb, a retired FBI agent who suffered a heart attack two years ago as he was about to apprehend his longtime nemesis-a serial killer who made McCaleb famous by writing his name in blood above the victims' bodies...

...Director Sam Mendes has won nearly as much praise for this disaster as he did for American Beauty three years ago...

...he has to get home and take his medication...

...Like Road to Perdition, it unfolds with excruciating slowness, presenting clues we have seen countless times before as novelties...

...He left the church after neighbor Ray Reddy (Shyamalan himself) accidentally mowed down Graham's wife with a car...

...The same unthinking obstinacy can be attributed to Self and Mendes, who substitute platitudes and implausibilities for any genuine exploration of their film's implications...

...The harder he works, the more his health suffers...

...Graham has not exactly ceased to have faith in God...

...Signs is not so cowardly, but I almost wish it were...

...Sunshine State is a canvas of American desires and ambitions, funny, sad and unique...

...Eastwood has crafted a satisfying entertainment...

...Though well-known and accomplished, he has no interest in courting the Hollywood mainstream...

...Its notion of redemption is depressing and repellent...

...But two actors in key roles, Paul Rodriguez as an ornery detective who is a thorn in McCaleb's side, and Jeff Daniels as a boozy neighbor, are unconvincing...

...But he began his career as a screenwriter and it is the dialogue that soars...

...We learn from television news reports that they are "hostile" and have come to earth to "harvest" us...

...When Sullivan Sr.'s boss, John Rooney (played by Paul Newman, of all people), decides he can't trust Junior to keep the secret, he orders the slaying of both father and son...

...On Screen Last Rays and Shadows of Summer By Raphael Shargel Hollywood wisdom has it that kids should be the target audience in summer, when they are free from school and parents are eager to keep them occupied...

...Eastwood is wonderfully gravelly as McCaleb, looking ever paler and more enervated as he tracks his quarry, and is backed by a generally fine east...

...As a director Eastwood, who almost always stars in his films, had been churning out bloated, inconsequential pictures of late, with the worst bearing two-word titles like Absolute Power, True Crime and Space Cowboys...

...he keeps us guessing about the motives of the murderer and where the trail of clues might lead...

...In the second, Marly Temple (Edie Falco), who has been running her retired father's hotel and restaurant, must contend with his intransigence and her own guilty desire to sell the properties and move on...

...Yet overall Blood Work is consistently diverting...

...If Maguire spent less time with his camera and his whores and more in movie houses of the era, where gangster flicks were all the rage, he would have learned enough tricks to best the almost equally foolish Sullivan...

...While following a trail that takes him all over L.A., he meets family members of the victims, witnesses to the crimes, cops and agents with differing attitudes toward the once renowned hero, and doctors who are trying to preserve his life...

...The idea of a damaged detective returning to duty brings to mind such films as Vertigo...

...Its current desolation, we learn, is an indirect result of the Civil Rights movement: The most affluent denizens long ago moved to white neighborhoods, leaving the needy who remain at the mercy of encroaching newcomers...

...As he gets closer to discovering the identity of the murderer, his body becomes increasingly prone to rejecting his new heart...

...A few flaws prevent the movie from being absolutely first rate...

...But within this sea of bells and whistles a few quieter, more mature releases always surface...

...He is interested exclusively in his and his family's happiness and callous toward the flock he left behind...

...The very different wounds of these daughter-parent relationships are slowly uncovered and then allowed to heal...

...In each case, the actor stretches his range beyond the breaking point...

...Blood Work puts a distinctive spin on all these themes, however: Unlike most catch-the-killer pictures, it is not about a race against time but against the ravages of age...

...Particularly memorable are the rich interchanges in the charged relationship between Marly and Jack Meadows (Timothy Hutton), a landscape architect employed by the developers...

...Hutton does his best job in ages here, and is joined by splendid performersnot merely the two leads but also Alan King, Ralph Waite, Mary Steenburgen, and the too rarely seen Jane Alexander as Marly's eccentric mother...

...He is sensitive to his own pain but utterly unfit for the ministry...

...When he finally tracks Sullivan to a diner he is outraged to discover that his mark, having excused himself to go to the bathroom, has sneaked out the back door...

...In the first, Desiree Perry (Angela Bassett), a newly married successful actress, returns with her husband to visit the mother she has not seen since she was exiled from the house at age 15...

...Sunshine State, written, directed and edited by John Sayles, is grander and rarer, the best American movie of the year so far...

...The line is emphasized as if it is fraught with import, but he seems to simply be evading the question, refusing to reveal what he really believes...

...If only it had garnered the attention it deserved...

...The heart now beating in his chest belonged to the dead woman...

...Many of them are poor and black, powerless to influence the political machine that the real estate executives control...

...But Signs is less about the extra terrestrial onslaught than about Graham's crisis of faith...

...Although McCaleb is an extremely proficient investigator, his vocation isn't, if you'll forgive the expression, for the faint of heart...

...he continually feels the need to rest...

...In the larger and more humane worlds of Blood Work and especially Sunshine State, such figures are the villains, loathsome corrupters of a more inclusive idealism...

...In one particularly potent scene, they are granted permis sion to uproot a histori cally black graveyard to make room for their playing fields...

...Because they do not, the picture's funereal seriousness is as empty as its alleged "theme...

...Rooney soon begins to change his mind about how to handle Sullivan, who fails to kill Maguire when he has the chance, and the film crawls toward an inevitable conclusion...

...The murderer's identity is fairly easy to guess, too, even if his rationale remains mysterious...

...I don't know which sight made me laugh harder: a middle-aged, paunchy Hanks brooding over his Tommy gun, or Gibson scowling in a clerical collar...

...In fact, the restoration of a family unit under the shadow of corporate and civic greed has been the major theme of Sayles' recent films, including the magnificent Men With Guns and Limbo...

...The aliens, who look like giant grasshoppers when we finally see them, speak in clicking sounds, so they cannot clearly communicate their intentions...

...His temperature rises...

...My guess is that they have grown tired of the cuisine at home and decided, for a change, to dine out...

...It doesn't hurt, of course, that Brian Helgeland's script is his finest since he collaborated on L.A...