On Screen

...But it is too loosely written, too enervated to register that theme with much force...

...These shifts do not simplify the emotions of the novel, they underscore its tragic elements...

...The eponymous novel, the shortest in Tolkien's trilogy, translates into Jackson's longest effort, laden with so many denouements I found myself begging for the credits to roll...

...Even the conceit of a lady martial artist is pretty long in the tooth...

...As with In America, if you can forgive the film for lacking verisimilitude, there is much to enjoy...

...From side angles, blazing lights obscure dancers standing in the shadows offstage and whispering as the light and sound crews go about their work...

...Frazier's style is a sputtery monotone, and Cold Mountain reads like The Odyssey meets The Painted Bird on a double dose of Benadryl...

...It tracks childhood friends who grow up on different sides of the law...

...Nevertheless, with a steadily greater percentage of a picture's profits depending on its opening weekend box office take, the studios appear to believe they have found a new way to pull in additional patrons...

...The ballet's artistic director, Alberto Antonelli (Malcolm McDowell), is an egomaniacal tyrant who thrives on bruising the egos of his underlings...

...In the case of House of Sand and Fog, a potentially moving story of a determined immigrant at odds with a desperate recovering addict is stunted...

...He is obsessed with his heroes' violent clash against the forces of the Dark Lord Sauron, and he centers the film around the defense of the fortress of Minas Tirith, an early event in the book that occupies a good two thirds of film's running time...

...Hollywood publicists have obviously been working overtime to shift interest in the financing of movies from the business to the arts pages...

...I expected Minghella, like Jackson, to extract only the violent elements of his source...

...Ripley...

...A lot of flailing and stabbing flashes across the screen, but it is hard to tell who is brandishing the swords and who is being impaled...

...Clocking in at just under three and a half hours, this turgid episode of Lord of the Rings concludes Jackson's Tolkien project, and, to my mind, it is the most ordinary of the trio...

...He unpacks their personae in short scenes, juxtaposing personal tribulations with creative triumphs and revealing a chaotic matrix of desires unified only in the dances themselves...

...The stories that surround the dances detail the hardships and emotional duress some will endure to create exquisite art...

...The lovers' on-screen yearning for each other is more convincing than in the original, as is their own surprise at their sudden mutual devotion...

...Worst of the lot is The Return of the King...

...In fact, one of Jackson's chief amendments to Tolkein's epic is the ironing out of its moral ambiguities...

...In addition, Minghella's Inman is gentler and nobler than Frazier's...

...The conventionally choreographed climactic melee sinks the film to the level of an ordinary swashbuckler...

...Airman's panoramic camerawork soaks up the excitement of the performances, and not just because he is wise enough to avoid excessive cutting...

...The appeal of Jackson's boring trilogy escapes me entirely...

...One is Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, a multiplotted affair with a big name cast that was almost universally acclaimed as a tragedy worthy of comparison to Euripides...

...Catherine Hardwicke's Thirteen depicts an adolescent girl who is drawn into a world of sex, body piercing and rebellious hostility by her new best friend...

...In 1996 Minghella broke into big-budget filmmaking with The English Patient and won himself an Oscar...

...The scenes framed in nature feel more Romanian than Confederate...

...There are few more damning things you can say about a film—at root a visual experience—and yet The Lord of the Rings almost universally has been praised as an epic of our time...

...If only watching Jackson's incoherent staging were as exciting as playing a video game...

...The "company" referred to in the title consists mostly of members of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, sprinkled with a few professional actors...

...The quality of a film—the power of its writing, directing, and acting—has little, if anything, to do with its budget...

...The efforts of dwarfs, elves, hobbits, wizards, and men to usher their world into a new age is the substance of Tolkein's novel, and it is full of quiet, philosophical moments...

...KillBill made headlines for Miramax' tussle with director Quentin Tarantino over his three and a half hour cut...

...But its long, talky midsection— a structural flaw shared by many recent action films—lacks tension and fails to build sympathy for Russell Crowe and his crew...

...These were period pieces adapted from modern novels, and in both the director took the Peter Jackson approach, recasting them as war stories that glorify the homicidal impulse...

...Minghella, who is British, knows as little as Frazier about the landscape and language of the 19th-century American South...

...Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation is worth seeing for the subtle performances of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson as an unlikely couple...

...Two other films deserve mention...

...Each shot frames the full bodies of the dancers (the film has almost no close-ups) and reminds us that spectators and stage crew are part of the theatrical experience...

...Over the course of a season, Airman explores their private lives, their work during rehearsals and their dealings with the public...

...The concept is as old as the James Cagney-Pat O'Brien gangster films of the 1930s, and to my mind Eastwood has not added the moral complexity his admirers have praised...

...Master and Commander opens with a masterfully eerie nocturnal battle sequence...

...TwentiethCentury Fox and Disney were lauded for investing $150 million in Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, a maritime yarn set in the Napoleonic era, devoid of romance and featuring few female characters...

...More rewarding is In America, a disarming movie by Jim Sheridan, best known for My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father, lavish biographical works...

...The lighting is almost always hazy—the better, I suppose, to hide the glitches in the animation...

...he shows mercy to those he defeats and betrays remorse when he sees someone killed out of spite...

...The choppy narrative structure is further broken up by a series of flashbacks describing Ada and Inman's courtship, as well as a few yarns interpolated by minor characters...

...He followed up in 1999 with The Talented Mr...

...An emaciated Uma Thurman plays a humorless blonde inexplicably capable of slaughtering a host of Asian opponents, one after another, in hand-to-hand combat...

...The surest sign that Jackson himself is aware of the poverty of his images lies in his collaboration with the composer Howard Shore...

...Despite the film's having been shot entirely with a hand-held camera, the emotions have such rawness and truth that the kamikaze style seems appropriate...

...on the contrary, it is the subject of the film...

...The onslaught of digitally animated creatures battling one another is closer to Nintendo than to Tolkien...

...Still, the director is in top form and his peek into the world of modern dance is a delightful surprise...

...And New Line was endlessly applauded for spending $300 million, a fortune for a small studio, on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy...

...Like a Minghella film, the novel puffs itself up with epic import as it unwinds tawdry tales of desperate people driven to murder...

...The writer-director, however, has inherited none of father Francis' skill with a camera...

...Their apartment complex is inhabited by perhaps the most polite complement of junkies ever to appear on screen...

...As with the first two installments, the actors— except for the always wonderful Ian McKellan—seem dazed by the proceedings, delivering their lines as if reading the script for the first time...

...More interesting is Cold Mountain, a big-budget Civil War romance that made headlines in the arts pages because the producers chose to film in Romania—though the story is set in the Carolinas—in an effort to keep costs below $ 100 million...

...The media gushed over cofounder Harvey Weinstein's decision to release the movie in two installments...

...I know I'm in a small minority with regard to this film, but I find it wanting on almost every level...

...Jackson dispenses with reflection...

...When the family warms up to a half-crazed hermit who lives a few stories down, he inexplicably gives up his solitary existence and becomes a close friend, riding to the rescue in a moment of crisis...

...But why should audiences care about the economics of filmmaking...

...One of his victims is Ry (Neve Campbell, who coproduced the film and cowrote the original story with Barbara Turner), an overworked dancer (she moonlights as a cocktail waitress) eager to play featured roles...

...its heroine's quest for revenge against her husband's murderers was relegated to sidebar status...

...Even the muggers stand on ceremony...

...He flubs the most dramatic moment in the whole trilogy, when the hobbit Frodo is corrupted by the ring, because he is unwilling to blemish his protagonist's record of good behavior by fully exploring the ring's temptations...

...And, indeed, too often this season they have proved to be better at heightening anticipation by hyping their investments than at producing original new films...

...It is photographed with a dreary portentousness, and even its tragic ending, rare for a commercial release, is too calculated to be affecting...

...Most of the winter's highly touted entries were simple variations on very old themes...

...The ash-white avenues of Minas Tirith are ridiculously uniform, a detail George Lucas or James Cameron couldhave gotten right...

...With thentwo young daughters, they emigrate illegally from Ireland to New York City, take up residence in a dilapidated building, and try to adjust to life in their new home...

...the level of their enthusiasm matched the hoopla about the supposed esthetic breakthrough of Tarantino's first two films...

...As a result, some of the novel's most memorable scenes have been eliminated, including the traitorous mage Saruman's foiled attempt to hypnotize the wizard Gandalf's army...

...None of it adds up to a satisfying Southern story...

...The good guys strut and pose as if modeling for the cover of a sword-and-sorcery edition of GQ...

...I found Kill Bill repellent and Master and Commander a mild failure...

...You could attend a screening with your eyes closed and understand about 80 per cent of what is going on...

...To make matters worse, Tarantino's racism and misogyny are evident in every shot...

...Minghella has streamlined the novel's action by stringing the flashbacks into chronological order during the first half of the film...

...On a basketball court, of course, the excitement lies in an unknown outcome...

...The manipulative score whines softly during the tender moments, screams out in times of tension, and clashes orchestrally during moments of tragedy...

...The Return of the King expends most of its energy on pyrotechnic displays...

...The film's sadomasochism, particularly its lingering shots of mutilated female bodies, apparently has appealed to the testosteronedriven fantasies of some ticket buyers...

...In Middle-Earth the triumph of good over evil is never in doubt...

...The cast consists of unknowns, with the exception of the stellar Samantha Morton, who played supporting roles in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report...

...DreamWorks was reported to have staked its Oscar hopes on the somber House of Sand and Fog...

...The pair's juvenile joie de vivre is counterbalanced by a seriousness characteristic of children who have weathered hardship...

...This shortcoming, and the overlong running time typical of today's mainstream films notwithstanding, Cold Mountain is a superior adaptation and more interesting than the hype that surrounds it...

...Kill Bill is not short on sassy gab or gory showdowns, but it recycles ideas we have seen a hundred times before...

...Sitting through it, I was reminded of the fourth quarter of a basketball game, where it takes longer and longer for the clock to advance as the teams move toward closure...

...But Minghella does stoop to making the members of a deserterhunting party tracking Inman as despicable as the gold-hunting Mexicans in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre...

...It is a pity that this potential crowd pleaser has not received a wider release, not to mention a more aggressive marketing budget...

...I do not share the feelings of the viewers taken with them, but I can at least understand where they are coming from...

...Much of In America explores each member's attempt to deal with their grief over the loss of little Frankie...

...I was pleasantly surprised to find the director rising above his material...

...Jackson and his technicians have a hard time convincing us that anything about the Middle-Earth they have rendered is real...

...The specter of injury—a career-threatening danger—haunts the performers, few of whom earn enough money to make ends meet...

...It is a historical romance about a Confederate soldier named Inman (Jude Law) who deserts and heads home, hoping to reunite with a woman, Ada (Nicole Kidman), he barely knows...

...The Company mines the workings of show business—and in Altaian's hands that means deglamorizes the industry...

...On the way he encounters a menagerie of war-torn characters, many of whom fall to his rifle blasts...

...I am not sure that any publicity campaign could have made Robert Airman's unconventional The Company a hit...

...Morton and Considine turn in remarkable performances, but they are outclassed by reallife sisters Sarah and Emily Bolger, who play their daughters...

...Yet these far-fetched elements do not prevent the family dynamic at the heart of the film from registering as bracing truth...

...As the camera swoops through the streets of the city, we realize we are within the confines of a three-dimensional model...

...Apparently Jackson is too timid to illustrate evil's lures...

...Entertainment sections, which once focused on a film's story line and the aspirations of its actors and director, now are increasingly devoted to the business side of making movies...

...the picture looks cheap, and its plot seems poorly improvised...

...Tolkien laced his prose with vivid descriptions of the natural world...

...Frazier's novel barks right up Minghella's tree...

...Frazier probably intended his book as an allegory about the evils of war...

...The dances form the heart of the film, from the magnificent ribbon ballet that plays over the opening credits to the bizarre "Blue Snake" finale...

...The plot con cerns Sarah (Morton) and her husband, Johnny (Paddy Considine), who have just lost a child to cancer...

...he made with Daniel DayLewis...

...Such business does not distract from the pleasure of watching The Company...

...The performances are rich, the production design (by the legendary Dante Ferretti) exquisite, and the cinematography (by John Seale) lush and colorful...

...Traditionally the industry brings forth its most ambitious pictures at the end of the year, but the risks being discussed concerned the bottom lines of the studios producing them, not how the careers of their creators might be impacted...

...Although it was shot in New York, the landscape represented in the film is far more benign than the real thing...

...I was curious what director-screenwriter Anthony Minghella would do with his source, a bestselling 1997 novel by Charles Frazier...

...The evil beings drool, crawl and bark broken sentences through garish, deformed faces...

...Given the entertainment industry's ongoing romanticization of itself, a film that lays bare so much of the unpleasantness of show business, without resorting to satire, rates as downright iconoclastic...

...If you are looking for movies about human relationships, the smaller, independently produced films fare better, though you will have to endure the jittery camerawork that has become a hallmark of the junior industry...

...Long takes show the front of the stage over the backs of the audience's heads...

...He has retained and shortened its most memorable episodes, while striking out the dull...