On the Town

DIMINISHED CAPACITY
Running time 92 minutes
Written by Sherwood Kiraly
Directed by Terry Kinney
Starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, Virginia Madsen, Dylan Baker, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C. K.

Diminished Capacity is a harmless but monotonous trifle about a baseball card. Matthew Broderick is making too many movies and giving the same performance in all of them. This time, he’s a Chicago newspaper editor named Cooper who suffers a brain concussion and gets demoted to proofreading comic strips. His neurologist says he’s got what they call “diminished capacity,” but he no longer throws up when he drives a car, so he goes home to visit his mother (the wonderful Lois Smith) and discovers that everyone in his hometown has diminished capacity, too—especially his Uncle Rollie (Alan Alda).  read more »

August
Running time 88 minutes
Written by Howard A. Rodman
Directed by Austin Chick
Starring Josh Hartnett, Adam Scott, Naomie Harris, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Rip Torn, Robin Tunney, David Bowie

Worse still, there’s a deadly, amateurish infection going around called August, with yet another novocained performance by zombified Josh Hartnett as a dot-com Internet star named Tom Sterling, who invents a company called Landshark with his brother Joshua (Adam Scott). Nobody knows what Landshark does, but when Tom explains it, he says: “That’s so third quarter ’99. You want bleeding-edge, mission-critical, cross-platform robust scale. What you want is E. Pure E. Not E commerce.  read more »

TheWackness
Running time 110 minutes
Written and directed by Jonathan Levine
Starring Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley, Olivia Thirlby, Famke Janssen, Mary-Kate Olsen

Not the least of the problems facing people who write about movies on a weekly basis is the deadlines. You can’t say, “I think I’d rather go to the beach today.” The empty space looms at you like a computerized monster, always demanding to be filled with your words, whether you have anything to say or not. Also, they say as you get older your attention span shortens. I don’t know about that, but I can promise you as sure as Monday follows the weekend that as the world changes and filmmakers get younger, the quality of motion pictures has diminished, and I find very few movies of worthwhile value to hold my interest.  read more »

Liz Callaway
Feinstein’s at Loews Regency
Through June 28

As usual, when it comes to value received for money spent, the music scene surpasses the movies. At Feinstein’s at Loews Regency, glorious jazz diva Ann Hampton Callaway’s younger, shorter and equally talented sister Liz is knocking their socks off. A veteran of Broadway show tunes and classy concert halls, she has chosen, for reasons of self-satisfaction only she can explain, to celebrate the pop tunes of the 1960s. She calls this cabaret whim “The Beat Goes On” and as Fats Domino used to chide at the Peppermint Lounge, “It do, babe, it sho’nuff do.  read more »

Expired
Running Time 110 minutes
Written and directed by Cecilia Miniucchi
Starring Samantha Morton, Jason Patric, Teri Garr

“Expired” is the word you see before they tow your car away. So it is little wonder that a new movie called Expired should be about—what else?—a meter maid. “I’m one of the most hated people in the world,” says Claire, a poor, hapless Santa Monica parking enforcement officer played with wistful, unhappy but eternally optimistic fervor by the quirky actress Samantha Morton. “People run from me like the plague. Insult me. Give me the finger. Verbally abuse me.  read more »

Finding Amanda
Running Time 100 minutes
Written and directed by Peter Tolan
Starring Matthew Broderick, Brittany Snow, Maura Tierney, Peter Facinelli

Finding Amanda is an inconsequential little low-budget throwaway with another stagnant, indifferent performance by the underwhelming but overexposed Matthew Broderick as a mediocre Hollywood TV writer named Taylor Peters. Taylor is so unreliable, indifferent and irresponsible that each episode of his sitcom is like a knee replacement. A severe case of writer’s block has reached the level of mental illness. He also suffers from a gambling addiction so serious that it has derailed his career and almost wrecked his marriage to the long-suffering wife (Maura Tierney) he has lied to for years.  read more »

Wanted
Running Time 110 minutes
Written by Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov
Starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp

Even in the summer garbage dump of bloated bilge aimed at computer hackers and sleepwalkers with I.Q.’s under 40, a bucket of swill called Wanted reaches the bottom of the waste heap. There are so many things wrong with this cabbage-headed comic book that I don’t know where to begin. I guess it doesn’t matter. Since none of it makes one word of sense, you can just jump in anywhere.

From what I understood of the alleged “plot,” it seems that 1,000 years ago a secret group of assassins called “The Fraternity” went around ridding the population of bad guys.  read more »

The Incredible Hulk
Running Time 114 minutes
Written by Zak Penn
Directed by Louis Leterrier
Starring Edward Norton, William Hurt and Liv Tyler

Five years have passed since the first big-screen Hulk wasted the reputation of director Ang Lee on a computer-generated comic strip nobody wanted to see. That film suffered punishing reviews and a devastating 70 percent drop-off in attendance in the second week, from which it never recovered. But you can’t keep an old, green, 10-ton Brussels sprout down for long. It’s too early to predict if The Incredible Hulk, the CGI sequel, will sink to that same level of box office infamy, but take it from me: You’ll have the DVD by Labor Day.  read more »

The Happening
Running Time 91 minutes
Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel and John Leguizamo

There’s a moment in the boring, brain-dead new M. Night Shyamalan film The Happening when Mark Wahlberg turns to the camera, trying to suppress a grin, and asks, “Can this really be happening?” I ask the same question every week, but it just gets worse.

It’s not a good sign when a director casts Mr. Wahlberg, a ruddy rapper-turned-actor who looks like a choirboy selling crack in the apse, as a science teacher pondering the mystery of why honeybees are disappearing from coast to coast.  read more »

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
Running Time 101 minutes
Written by Ann Peacock
Directed by Patricia Rozema
Starring Abigail Breslin, Chris O’Donnell and Julia Ormond

Considering the surfeit of popular junk that is currently polluting the ozone, an enchanting little movie like Kit Kittredge: An American Girl is so sweet and sanitized it makes me feel almost guilty for liking it. But this vehicle for Abigail Breslin, the Oscar-nominated surprise sensation of the acclaimed Little Miss Sunshine, is not only a brisk, beautifully conceived period piece that spells entertainment with a capital E—it exalts the cheerful audience-participation innocence of those family films that used to star Margaret O’Brien, Dean Stockwell and Peggy Ann Garner.  read more »

Quid Pro Quo
Running Time 82 minutes
Written and Directed by Carlos Brooks
Starring Nick Stahl and Vera Farmiga

Look high and low, but you won’t find a weirder movie than Quid Pro Quo. In 1989, a high-speed car crash kills the parents of a boy named Isaac Knott, leaving him an orphaned paraplegic. Eighteen years later, confined to a wheelchair, he’s a 26-year-old investigative reporter who tells odd stories of life in New York City on public radio. (Same job Jodie Foster had in The Brave One, which should have been a warning. Must be a dangerous career choice, because this one also leads to trouble.) Tracking down a story about a man who pays a doctor to cut off his perfectly good leg, Isaac (played by the gifted Nick Stahl, from In the Bedroom) discovers a sordid underworld of fetish freaks who get off on amputations.  read more »

In two of the town’s swankiest cabaret rooms, the testosterone levels are soaring. Every Monday night at the Algonquin, Rue McClanahan (the feistiest of TV’s aging “Golden Girls”), in her directorial debut, guides her husband, Morrow Wilson, through a center ring salute to Noël Coward, in the aptly titled Noël Coward 101. He doesn’t resemble Noel, or sound like him, but his quips and pointed, well-chosen anecdotes about the renowned composer, songwriter, playwright, novelist, painter and performer aim darts at the funny bone and rarely miss their mark. (He called Peter O’Toole “Florence of Arabia.”) Suffering from a restless spirit that prevented him from committing to anyone or anything, and a cynicism that prevented him from finding inner peace, he was a man in a hurry—always lonely and full of poisonous wit. From the soignée sadness of “World Weary” to sage advice for pompous Mrs. Worthington to “Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage,” Mr. Wilson builds each stanza into an even larger portrait of Coward, who could neither read nor write music, but created classics transcribed by friends. The voice is unsteady and there’s not much range, but Mr. Wilson has passion and wit and a refreshing lack of pretense that guarantees a high-flying good time. Clearly, this is a labor of love that really pays off. When Noël Coward’s party finally ended, there were fireworks. Morrow Wilson at the Algonquin creates a perfect depository for that kind of bombast to explode over again.

At Feinstein’s at the Regency, Tony Danza is like a pugilist who moves like Rocky and taps like a Rockette. Agile, fit and loaded with charm, he plays against image in spats and a straw hat; he offers songs and stories with dancing themes; he tells corny George Bush jokes, musician jokes, and dumb-blonde jokes, and talks about his age. Almost 60, he’s beyond Valpolicello and ready for Viagra. The show has variety. He sings close harmony with four musicians in a Four Seasons sock hop arrangement of “The Last Dance” and occasionally plays the ukulele, cornet and harmonica—all badly. But the thing about the guy is the way he always surprises you. He can bring back vaudeville with a sassy soft shoe, then blow a cool rendition of the jazz classic “Freddy the Freeloader” in a very reasonable approximation of Miles Davis. Tony Danza could bring back vaudeville, and boy do we need it now.

rreed@observer.com

Chris & Don. A Love Story
Running Time 90 minutes
Directed by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara

Chris & Don. A Love Story is a poignant and thoughtful documentary about the astonishing and transforming love affair between the world-famous writer Christopher Isherwood and the highly regarded artist Don Bachardy. At a headline-grabbing time for same-sex relationships, heading for the altar, it seems more relevant than ever. And the couple it’s about are rather extraordinary even without the civics lesson.

Chris was a British novelist whose diaries and recollections of the Weimar era leading up to World War II, compiled in an acclaimed book called Berlin Stories, were the basis for both the play I Am a Camera and the musical Cabaret. He was already an established man of letters 30 years older than Don when he met the gawky, sexy, naïve 18-year-old on the beach at Malibu in 1952. A love at first sight that dared not speak its name aloud in the early ’50s lasted until Isherwood’s death, in 1986. It was a relationship that surpassed all doubts, worries and obstacles, and survived three decades of indignities, social homophobia and Hollywood gossip columns. At the end, it had also erased the parameters of togetherness. Chris and Don were as good as married, and they didn’t need to exchange vows, sign a piece of paper or hire a choir singing the “Ave Maria” to prove it. They were definitely ahead of their time.

Combing Isherwood’s diaries for guidance, co-directors Guido Santi and Tina Mascara spent 10 years meticulously putting this film together. Out of so much sweat and dedication comes a deeply affecting love story of a passion that turned to trust. With fatherly devotion, Chris practically raised the sun-kissed California teen, and Don loved him like a father, mentor, educator, teacher and savior. They didn’t even own a dog because Chris was reluctant to share his affection with something other than Don. We trace his arrival in America in 1939, fleeing from the snow and grime of New York to the heat and rat-infested palm trees of Hollywood, where he continued to write like a camera taking pictures. “Someday this will have to be developed,” he said. He was spiritual enough to become a monk, but he was also too spirited (and horny) to give up boys. And Don talks about surrendering to the advances of a man who was almost 50 when they met, the intimacy of their lives and the thirst for knowledge that never wavered, with such blasé acceptance that it never seems decadent. The word “pedophilia” is not in his vocabulary.

And so, through his tutor-guru-guide, Don entered the world beyond the claustrophobic confines of working-class Los Angeles. He rubbed elbows with Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Igor Stravinsky and Somerset Maugham; with Chris at his side, he saw the world. In Tangier, he smoked his first quality, mind-expanding Moroccan kief at 21 while visiting Paul Bowles. In Paris, he imitates the Hunchback in the shadow of Notre Dame. In Key West, he falls for Anna Magnani while she’s shooting The Rose Tattoo. Finally, when the time came for the young man who believed nobody liked him for himself to prove his worth, it was Chris who paid his way through art school and encouraged Don’s only talent. Drawing pen and ink sketches of the rich and celebrated, he discovered success and, consequently, his own manifesto.

There were problems, separations, and sexual experiments with other bodies that would have severed weaker unions, but the older man’s wisdom and the young man’s refusal to abandon the best thing that ever happened to him kept Chris and Don devoted for a lifetime. When Chris was dying of cancer at 82, it was Don’s turn to play the strength card. The son became the parent, the guardian, the nurse. Togetherness transcended even death.

Chris & Don. A Love Story does what a good documentary should. It informs the mind and broadens the horizon while never losing its entertainment value. Mr. Bachardy, now 74, has never lost his mischievous twinkle his ardor, or his intoxication with life. He is the life force behind the film, and throws himself into every scene with zest. He is not play-acting, but there’s an emotional rawness in his honest portrayal of himself that is affecting—whether he’s speechless with ecstasy meeting his idol, Montgomery Clift, or caring and gentle visiting his older brother, a broken toy in a nursing facility after years of mental breakdowns. I must confess there’s an unsettling melancholy at the heart of this movie. The sense of love and loss and grief and mourning left me profoundly depressed. Still, it’s positive and funny, too. What moved me was not so much how Chris and Don turned the hot-button age-difference controversy to their advantage, but how their love transformed a shy, insecure boy who didn’t feel he had much to offer the world into a man of pride and distinction with his own identity intact. Chris and Don proves there are all kinds of love in this lonely old world, and none of them are wrong.

rreed@observer.com

Sex and the City
Running Time 145 minutes
Written and Directed by Michael Patrick King
Starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis

There’s nothing wrong with Sarah Jessica Parker that couldn’t be cured by wart-removal surgery. That growth on her face just gets bigger with every close-up, and in the full-length movie version of Sex and the City it’s so distracting you can’t concentrate on anything else. It’s not a beauty mark. I guess you can’t tell a co-producer anything, but listen up, girl. At this point, you would make a wonderful Halloween witch. Unfortunately, to fix all the things wrong with Sex and the City, you need more than a scalpel.  read more »

Savage Grace
Running Time 99 minutes
Written by Howard Rodman
Directed by Tom Kalin
Starring Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane, Eddie Redmayne

The tragic consequences of A-list decadence have seldom been more fascinating or disturbing than in Savage Grace, Tom Kalin’s steamy, solemn dramatization of the best seller by Natalie Robins and Steven Aronson about the harrowing murder of New York socialite Barbara Daly Baekeland in a luxury flat in London’s Cadogan Square (the same street where Oscar Wilde was arrested) on November 17, 1972. When the police arrived, they were introduced to the corpse by the man who stabbed her to death with a steak knife—her schizophrenic, 26-year-old son, Tony, who sat vacantly on the kitchen floor next to the body, eating Chinese takeout. The shock waves on both sides of the Atlantic were immediate and lasting.

Savage Grace—elegantly photographed and directed, with a carefully written screenplay by Howard Rodman, and a stupendous performance by Julianne Moore as its centerpiece—catalogs the pathological lives of a rich, dysfunctional family from postwar 1946 to the changing sexual permissiveness of 1972, illuminating their rise and spectacular fall from distinction and privilege to a nightmare of violence and self-destruction. It’s not a pretty story, but it is absolutely, flesh-crawlingly true. Barbara Daly was a beautiful model, failed actress and dilettante artist who married upward to Brooks Baekeland, whose father invented Bakelite plastics. Barbara—restless, promiscuous, out of her league, and slowly driven to madness by ennui, which is nourished by the pretentious jet setters in her husband’s social set—and Brooks (played with stoic cruelty by the brilliant actor Stephen Dillane)—awed by her beauty and outraged by her escapades—were habitués of the Stork Club who always turned heads and landed in Walter Winchell’s column, especially when she would pick up any stranger in a limousine and spend the night with him, leaving her husband on the curb. In 1946, son Tony was born, securing the marriage for all the wrong reasons. Baby is supposed to make three, but little Tony was used to bridge gaps, please two deluded parents and close their abyss. He was doomed from the start.

Lonely and needy for the love she never got from her passive husband, Barbara smothered the child, sowing the seeds for a sordid future in ways that redefined the meaning of “mama’s boy.” As a schoolboy, she forced him to recite the Marquis de Sade for appalled dinner guests. Living in Paris in 1959, she taught him to arrange flowers, appreciate china and French cuisine, and nurse her hangovers by serving her in bed with a perfectly sculptured red rose on her breakfast tray. Barely out of knickers, his fate was already sealed. Torn between his mother’s obsession and narcissism and his father’s disappointment and indifference, Tony knew he had to escape to save himself, but was too weak to run. When he brings home his first girlfriend to their villa in Mallorca, his father seduces her and abandons the family, leaving Tony forlorn and devastated, in the powerful clutches of his mother, who moved him all over Europe seeking new identities. In 1967, on the beach in Cadaques, 21-year-old Tony (played as an adult by critically acclaimed young British stage actor Eddie Redmayne) finally surrenders to his homosexuality, finding passion with a handsome beach bum while his mother watches approvingly. By now Barbara is paying taxi drivers to ravage her sexually and sharing both her son’s pot and his gay lovers. When bisexual New York art promoter Sam Green (Hugh Dancy) houseguests for the summer, he sleeps with Barbara, then Tony, then both of them at the same time, in a jolly, sexually liberated threesome. Back in Paris, she grows dependent on sleeping suppositories and attempts suicide. Tony becomes her sole guardian, applying salve to the stitches in her slashed wrists while she lies naked in the bathtub eating ice cream.

The role Tony is required to play demands the services of a trained psychiatrist; it’s too vast and emotionally punishing for one person to master at such a young age. By the time the mother straddles her son wearing a pink Chanel suit and pearls, then masturbates him to a climax, Tony is sucking his thumb and clinging to the dog collar of a deceased pet like a Linus blanket. A simple thing like the loss of that dog collar is what sends him over the edge. It is clear that a downward descent into mental illness and inevitable violence is building like a pulsing vein in the forehead leading to a stroke. Depravity and self-indulgence at last lead to the ghastly and fatal conclusion on the kitchen floor of 81 Cadogan Square, which will leave you trembling. The narration, culled from desperate letters Tony wrote to his cold, indifferent father, is deeply touching. He was sent first to a prison for the criminally insane on the English moors, then to Rikers Island, where he died by his own hand in 1981.

No spoilers here. The story has already written itself. But director Tom Kalin (Swoon) distills its most sordid ingredients into a heady brew that hits you like a stun gun. Mother-son incest, adultery, full-frontal nudity, murder and suicide may not lure summer ostriches hellbent on burying their brains in entertainments as forgettable as Chinese menus, but what a haunting experience they’ll miss. It’s hard to describe the impact of such harrowing material, but Savage Grace proves that deeply flawed characters can be mesmerizing if their complexities are examined with empathy over a period of time. If nothing else, see this movie for the Oscar-worthy performance by Julianne Moore, which clings to you long after you leave the theater. She has the same red hair and Irish glow; freckles on white skin like crushed Wheaties in milk; and reckless charisma and simmering beneath-the-surface emotions as the real Barbara Baekeland. She takes risks. Above all, the bravery and dramatic range with which she breathes realism into a difficult and unsympathetic role is positively heroic.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Running Time 124 minutes
Written by David Koepp
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf

As summer time-wasters go, the latest Indiana Jones will go in record time, if you ask me. Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the first chapter in the series since 1989, is a four-star yawn. Harrison Ford started this fairy-tale franchise 27 years ago. At 65, he looks pretty darn trim, but why doesn’t he stop dyeing his hair? Sometimes it’s a rugged, manly silver. In the next scene it looks like he’s wearing a champagne rinse from Elizabeth Arden. Finally it turns orange as a Sunkist popsicle. Whatever else we expect from Indiana Jones, we don’t want him to look like Lucille Ball.  read more »

She’s been labeled a contralto, but the statuesque, smoky-voiced Karen Akers sounds to me more like a polished, neon-nourished lady baritone. To demonstrate how she has changed from cool, remote goddess of ice cream in her early nightclub outings, to warm, beguiling Mother Earth in the ripeness of her maturity, this top-ranking cabaret star’s new monthlong visit to the Algonquin’s august Oak Room explores every musical mood. She calls the act “Move On,” because of all the things in the experience of life, including taxes and death, change is the one that is unavoidable.

Here are sublime songs of loss, loneliness, failure and hanging on in the face of adversity. In previous engagements, she’s focused on the songs of one or two writers at a time—Kander and Ebb, Jule Styne, etc. Now, through June 14, she’s blending some of the legends with a few newcomers whose work has been underexposed. Many treats are guaranteed. I call Ms. Akers the Queen of Obscurity—not because she’s a stranger to success but because she devotes so much time to researching, resuscitating and refurbishing lesser-known songs of great value. Sometimes the choices are mundane. To mirror the need for turning over a coin and starting a new life, cartoonist Shel Silverstein’s “I’m Checking Out” is not as good as the devastating showstopper “I’m Getting Off Here,” from the unproduced musical Jimmy Valentine, which I’ve heard from both Margaret Whiting and Gloria DeHaven. But most of the time, she hits a bull’s-eye. “The Kindest Man” by Barry Kleinbort is a heart-melting example of obscurity destined for the spotlight. And Francesca Blumenthal’s witty song “Between Men” (a girl could bide her time in worse ways) is a perfect demonstration of how to cope, with a sense of humor. It’s about a woman who’s tried E.S.T., volleyball, yoga, blackjack, sables, playing Barbie to Ken and even Zen, all “between men.” There’s a pinch of Sondheim, a dash of Lieber and Stoller, a soupçon of Amanda McBroom. And there’s a song I’ve never heard, by Kander and Ebb, called “At the Rialto,” which I can’t wait to hear again. One of the nicest things about any Karen Akers recital is the fact that she never runs out of surprises.

I also like the way she’s perfected the art of singing straight ahead, without frills and flourishes, exotic vocal booby traps or stupendous stunts. The point of “Move On” is that change begets change; we must all find the raw materials to reinvent ourselves when stress, anxiety and loss erodes our identities, and new solutions must be found. With a little help from Édith Piaf and the interlacing of poems by the Algonquin’s own Dorothy Parker, Karen Akers (sensitively accompanied by Don Rebic on piano and Dick Sarpola on bass) is moving on beautifully at the Oak Room.

War, Inc.
Running Time 107 minutes
Written by Mark Leyner, Jeremy Pikser and John Cusack
Directed by Joshua Seftel
Starring John Cusack, Dan Aykroyd, Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei, Hilary Duff

It gets worse. The Indiana Jones movie is a disappointment. But a moronic mess called War, Inc. is a downright disaster. Obviously, John Cusack’s capacity for self-destruction knows no limitations. He hasn’t made a movie anyone could sit through for too many years to count, yet his alleged career soldiers on through one flop after another. With all due respect, War, Inc. might be the last straw.

In a deadly political satire designed to show the apocalyptic aftermath of George Bush, the clueless Mr. Cusack plays Brand Hauser, a former C.I.A. operative turned terminator-cum-showbiz-mercenary; he works for Tamerlane, a corrupt corporation run by a former U.S. vice president, played by Dan Aykroyd, who conducts interviews on the toilet while describing his bowel movements. (Think Dick Cheney and Halliburton. On second thought, don’t.) Tamerlane is devoted to the exploitation of the U.S.-conquered country of Turaqistan. Mr. Cusack has been dispatched to assassinate a trouble-making oil tycoon named Omar Sharif, who looks and sounds like Henry Kissinger, in the middle of a trade show that takes place inside a Popeye’s Chicken and Biscuits franchise. Turaqistan is one of the many countries the U.S. has invaded, destroyed and turned over to corporations that run the world. Mr. Cusack can’t find it in his spaceship, and you should hear his instructions: “Stay on this heading for about six hours, thirteen minutes. Turn left at the Aurora Borealis. When you see something that looks like a frozen gall bladder, that’s Greenland. Hang a soft right there.” You have to see it to believe it, although my advice is cross the street and keep on going.

Once he connects with his hysterical robot of an assistant (played by his criminally wasted sister, Joan Cusack), Mr. Cusack dodges terrorist gangs, machine guns and dangerous American soldiers who have been in the trenches so many years they’ve gone insane, and tours the trade show where the press is injected with painful microchips to “reduce the danger of journalism mortality.” Between demonstrations of the latest automobiles equipped with precision-guided missiles and musical numbers with war amputees doing the cancan with prosthetic limbs, he gets distracted by a crusading reporter named Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei), whose answering machine belches, “I’m either unmasking corporate greed or washing my hair—so leave a message!” She’s determined to expose U.S. involvement in the Middle East as a violation of international law, but her contribution is really nothing more than a violation of what would be, in saner times, the dignity of a former Academy Award winner. Hanging out without a sign of direction, there is also the hopelessly miscast Hilary Duff as a pop singer named Yonica Babyyeah, the Britney Spears of Central Asia, who bares her breasts and sings songs about sex while erotically licking a gasoline pump nozzle. Yes, War, Inc. pretends to aim for loftier goals, like sending up alleged crimes like American war-profiteering, unconstitutional invasion of international boundaries, the trashing of the Geneva Convention, and government-sponsored terrorism, but it achieves no significance whatsoever. None of it is clever enough or well thought out enough to trigger any controversy, and none of it is remotely comprehensible. I threw in the towel when the Asian Spice Girl, surrounded by sandbags and bodyguards, started singing “I want to blow you … I want to blow you … blow you up!” and Mr. Cusack yelled, “Get me Katie Couric, Al Jazeera, and 100 gallons of sheep shit!” Mr. Cusack contributed to the screenplay and co-produced this abomination, so he cannot be excused on grounds of temporary insanity.

War, Inc. was non-directed by Joshua Seftel, who is to film direction what Marvel Comics is to classical literature. It was filmed in Bulgaria—and they should never have allowed it out of the country.

Celebrating 50 years of personal and professional partnership in the lives of lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman, Michael Feinstein’s new show at the Regency is a musical bonanza indeed. Each night features a special guest star. I was lucky enough to see the divine Mary Cleere Haran, who crooned “So Many Stars” with a sublime Brazilian bossa nova beat that could sink your heart. You never know whom you’ll hear. One night it’s Christine Ebersole. The next night it’s Marvin Hamlisch. And every night it’s Alan Bergman, who joins Michael to interpret some of his own lyrics with warm, whispery precision. I would be less than honest if I did not admit I’ve grown weary of “The Windmills of Your Mind” and “The Way We Were.” It’s not that they’re any less excellent than the rest of the Bergmans’ catalog; it’s just that I’ve heard them so many times they’ve become ossified. Still, people get married to “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” and divorced to “Where Do You Start?”, and you will never hear them sung better than in this show. In a freaked-out world of flash and trash, the Bergmans are unique. They write lyrics that are intelligent, penetrating and memorable, to music by such brilliant collaborators as Michel Legrand, Cy Coleman, Johnny Mandel, David Shire, Marvin Hamlisch, David Grusin and others—winning three Oscars and countless Tonys, Grammys and Emmys doing it. Plus, they’re so eclectic and prolific there’s always something new to discover. “We always feel like the words are on the tips of those notes, and we have to find them,” says Alan, who sings his own material softly, introspectively and full of irony, distilling from a limited vocal range a maximum of emotion. One highlight for me in this show is the way Alan quietly swings “That Face,” the valentine he wrote to Marilyn 50 years ago as a kind of marriage proposal. Another is Michael’s amusing lyrics to “The Best of Friends” (“When you itch, I scratch/ When you sleep, I snore/ That’s what best friends are for”). The five-man orchestra headed by Rosemary Clooney’s longtime pianist John Oddo honors the artistry of the Bergman lyrics with special affection. From Brazil to Broadway, from jazz to Yentl, the Bergmans have captured and polished an entire spectrum of music that has not only survived the fads and trends, but promises to be around for decades. Everything at Feinstein’s right now is a class act all the way.

The music scene has been more interesting lately than the movies, and that’s a fact. The hot ticket last week (at $250 a throw) was the sold-out concert production of Camelot with the New York Philharmonic, which was broadcast live from Lincoln Center on PBS. This week’s don’t-miss “it could only happen in New York” happening is Sunday afternoon, with a one-performance world premiere of Pamela’s First Musical, by Cy Coleman, Wendy Wasserstein and David Zippel, staged at Town Hall as a benefit for Broadway Cares Equity Fights AIDS, with Don Sebesky orchestrations, Graciela Daniele directing, and starring Donna Murphy, Tommy Tune,

More about Camelot: Less luminous than its reputation, this famous musical by Lerner and Loewe has survived mainly through its songs, but since the original production in 1960, with Richard Burton, Julie Andrews and a young Robert Goulet, it has not only gathered moss but grown a few lichens. A royal wedding, a beautiful queen, a beloved king, a storybook knight and a perfect kingdom, all brought to ashes by jealousy, adultery, witchcraft and sex! Here is surely the unbeatable mix for a legendary musical. Unfortunately, Camelot has not aged as well as vintage Madeira, but the concert version was still something of a heady event, and whenever opera star Nathan Gunn was onstage the excitement neared the status of a mob riot.

The weird directorial flourishes by Lonny Price seemed as old as Merlyn (Stacey Keach, looking like Father Christmas), with a massive gold crown hanging over the stage; a round table that rose from the floor; movable boxes that suggested beds, thrones and forest landscapes; and dancing nymphs in tank tops, tuxedos, kilts and fencing armor, blending antique ideas with New World vision. With the orchestra at the rear of the stage and no television monitors, the disappointing Dublin-born Gabriel Byrne was unable to see the conductor, talking his way through “How To Handle a Woman” as if on cue from Richard Burton, in a manner that only made his inability to carry a tune seem even more sluggish than necessary. But in all fairness, how could he shine on the same stage with Nathan Gunn? After “If Ever I Would Leave You,” which brought the capacity 2,752-seat Avery Fisher Hall audience to a screaming ovation that stopped the show for five performances in a row, Mr. Byrne never really regained his equilibrium. Marin Mazzie was a golden-throated Guenevere (her vocal articulation remains clear as Baccarat crystal), but there was never any question whom she would choose between a sexy, soaring Sir Lancelot and a sweet but wimpy King Arthur. (In the end, she chose the convent.) The less said the better about Fran Drescher, camping it up as wicked sorceress Morgan le Fay like the Nanny playing a Turkish belly dancer while clutching a giant Hershey bar.

Never mind. The Philharmonic never sounded fuller or richer, the score is still gorgeous, and the energy and charm of Nathan Gunn was so overwhelming you could forgive everything loopy that surrounded it. This was a Camelot (and a production of Camelot) that was clearly claimed and ruled by this dynamic, mesmerizing baritone, in a triumphant performance that transported Lancelot into the most dashing knight who ever turned a Round Table upside down. He has been praised throughout the world in a panoramic field of dramatic operas ranging from The Magic Flute and The Barber of Seville to Billy Budd and An American Tragedy, so his acting chops come as no revelation, but now Mr. Gunn has turned his first Broadway-style career crossover into a titanic triumph, capturing every aspect of Lancelot’s personality—pompus, hilariously vain and obsessively self-worshipping on “C’est Moi”; chivalrous and sexy in the Queen’s arms; valiant with a sword; growing into tenderness and humility after betraying the king he loves more than his own ego—with a virile and colorful stage presence, a convincing French accent and a lyrical voice rich in depth and tone. Unless the music world has given up the search for another Alfred Drake, someone is busily creating a new Broadway musical just for him, as we speak. Camelot sometimes meandered, but Nathan Gunn was unforgettable.

THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS
Running Time 78 minutes
Written by Maureen Medved
Directed by Bryce McDonald
Starring Ellen Page

On the heels of Juno and Smart People, Ellen Page is back, temporarily out of luck, in the dense and dreary Canadian film The Tracey Fragments. Filmed almost entirely in annoying split-screen frames, this audacious puzzlement is worth seeing, I guess, for some startling and innovative visual designs. But it doesn’t amount to anything more substantial than a technical tour de force. In the film’s evocation of a teenage girl’s mind-set following an unsettling event, it resembles the equally pretentious Evan Rachel Wood-Uma Thurman fiasco, The Life Before Her Eyes.

Traumatized by the disappearance of her younger brother, social outcast Tracey (Ellen Page, exploring another troubled-teen identity crisis in ugly clothes) leaves her small town for the bright lights of … Winnipeg? Have you ever seen Winnipeg? I told you it was a head scratcher. Anyway, she’s alone and broke, so she wanders the streets and hangs out on a city bus, encountering other weird outsiders and, every once in a while, catching a glimpse of someone who might be her missing brother. Director Bruce McDonald, a Canadian cinematheque favorite whose work is rarely seen outside of the Toronto International Film Festival for good reasons, shuttles between tones wildly to reflect the vertiginous nature of Tracey’s rapidly changing mood swings. They careen from schoolgirl fantasies about a punk named Billy Zero, to quasi-surreal run-ins with a remote, ineffective shrink and her near-catatonic parents, to frenzied accounts of high-school persecution. The voice-over narration is peppered with the kind of obscenities that oscillate between shocking and endearingly childish, at which Ellen Page excels. Worse, the use of double images is consistently maddening. It’s not a new device, just deadlier than a blank screen. Mr. McDonald pushes the envelope so far that he eventually tears the screen apart—literally—in an effort to capture Tracey’s internal head trips. Or maybe he just wants to keep the audience awake.

Everything fails, as this horror drags on for 78 minutes of misery. The only redeeming factor is Ellen Page, who is both infuriating and touching. But her fan base will not only sleep through The Tracey Fragments—they’ll snore.

BEFORE THE RAINS
Running Time 98 minutes
Written by Cathy Rabin
Directed by Santosh Sivan
Starring Henry Moores, Rahul Bose, Nandita Das

Grateful for small favors, I applaud Before the Rains, a lovely, lyrical film with perfect timing that is a welcome relief from BlackBerrys, iPods, gas taxes, punk rock, the failing economy and the boredom of cutthroat election campaigns.

Helmed and lensed by the distinguished Indian director-cinematographer Santosh Sivan (Asoka), and set in southern India in 1937, it tells the exotic tale of a foreigner torn between two worlds, who pays a supreme price for cultural confusion. Henry Moores (Linus Roache, the star of the memorable Antonia Bird film Priest) is an English businessman-adventurer with a dream of building a spice plantation in Kerala. But his plans first require a new road to be cleared through the hills and jungles of a vast terrain rarely visited by white men, and he needs the money and manpower to do it. To secure the aid of the local villagers, he depends on his trusted right-hand assistant, a native named T.K. (Rahul Bose). To serve his baser needs, he depends on his housekeeper, Sajani (Nandita Das), a mercurial and intelligent girl who also becomes his lover. A journey together to collect honey in the forest turns into a sexually charged encounter witnessed by two local boys, who waste no time in spreading news of the affair to Sajani’s village. The scandal turns this warm, loyal and respectable woman into a social outcast: beaten by her husband, turned away by her family and forced into hiding. The risk escalates and the tension mounts when Henry’s wife (the elegiac Jennifer Ehle) and son arrive from England. Domestic demands rein him in temporarily, but the jealous, resentful Sajani will not be cast aside so easily. Threatened with death in her own village, she turns to T.K. for help and Henry for refuge. Henry is too cowardly to confess his infidelity, so he does what many men in his position do. The result is a tragedy that ends one life and ruins another. How long can power and privilege protect a foreigner when sin becomes a tribal matter?

A sweeping film filled with lush scenery and breath-tightening suspense, Before the Rains has the look of a fine, erotically charged period epic (think The Painted Veil) driven by emotion, but as it binds its characters tighter within their self-made moral dilemmas, it shifts into the gears of a good film noir. As with his homosexual man of the cloth in Priest, Linus Roache again excels as a mild man capable of desperate acts of weakness fueled by sexual desire. But it’s the Indian actors who illumine Before the Rains, capturing the colonized Indians’ compromised dignity. Shades of the well-made narrative films of the old school here, but I’ll take Somerset Maugham over Speed Racer anytime.

SPEED RACER
Running Time 129 minutes
Written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski
Starring Emile Hirsch, Susan Sarandon, Christina Ricci, John Goodman

Even for summer trash, this abomination by the creatively challenged Wachowski brothers is a train wreck so bad that words literally fail me, but I will say it looks like somebody ate 25 cafeteria Jello-O congealed salads and then threw up all over the sets. Happily, I was out of town for Iron Man and have no intention of catching up, but slashing whatever I.Q. points I saved was Speed Racer, an obnoxious two-hour-and-15-minute tribute to noise and Fiestaware from the muttonheads who polluted the planet with the Matrix trilogy; it’s pretty much in a garbage pile of its own. Summer isn’t even officially here yet, but for me Speed Racer fires the opening shot for what threatens to be a three-month school-vacation Marvel-comics festival of violence, stupidity, junk and unsaturated fat, aimed at morons with I.Q.’s of 40 and under, and starring assorted hulks, Spider-Men, Batmen, ninjas, robots, superheroes that are anything but super, and Adam Sandler. Few summer movies promise to be more nauseating than Speed Racer, unless you count the one with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly as siblings (you need a barf bag just for the trailers).  read more »

THE BABYSITTERS
Running Time 90 minutes
Written and directed by David Ross
Starring John Leguizamo, Cynthia Nixon, Katherine Waterston

The movies have never known how to mine the diversity of multitalented John Leguizamo, but he’s currently shining brightly in two roles as different as chipotle and cherry pie. In Brad Furman’s The Take, he plays a tough Latino armored-truck driver in gang-infested East L.A. who survives a close-range gun blast that leaves him fractured for life. In first-time director David Ross’s The Babysitters, he plays a preppy suburban Dad in cashmere sweaters and Bass Weejuns, so lonely and neglected by his boring soccer mom wife (Cynthia Nixon) that he succumbs to the seductive charms of their babysitter, an honors student named Shirley (Katherine Waterston), who responds to her nice employer’s generosity with a generous “perk” of her own. She’s so proud of her new sexual power that it inspires her to enlist her high-school girlfriends. Pretty soon she’s talked a network of sexy classmates into a profitable business that can send them all to college. Printing business cards, doing bookkeeping on their laptops, juggling appointments with all the upstanding husbands and fathers in the neighborhood, the girls are soon up to their ponytails in clients. But a good thing can only last so long. Things begin to backfire and profits plunge when one girl’s greedy sister gets in on the act and goes into business for herself. They call it earning tuition money. The law calls it statutory rape.

It’s only a matter of time before the police find out—or, even worse, every wife on the block. Until the risks turn deadly, what first appears to be a lurid romance between a responsible family man and a neighbor’s 16-year-old daughter ends up being a deliciously dark comedy about a prostitution ring of neighborhood babysitters who introduce a whole new meaning to the term “parental nightmare.” Mr. Leguizamo is too good for dirty-old-man jokes; he turns his character’s yearning for the old freewheeling bachelor days before he was tied down by family responsibilities into a justification for lust that leaves the viewer with a queasy moral discomfort. You can’t approve of his secret sex life with underage vixens in bobby socks, but you understand him—and like him anyway. It’s refreshing to see him play Everyman, with no ethnic chains at all.

The Babysitters is about more than a respectable man’s double life. When his married buddies get wind of what’s happening in all those lighted bedroom windows, they want to cut themselves in on some babysitter action, too, and with her little black book, Shirley becomes a pint-size Polly Adler. The film shows the easy sexual mores that can result from too much capitalism; the rigid Darwinian social structure of suburban high schools that ignores the students’ hormonal progress; and the tortured guilt suffered by grown-ups when it’s time to pay the piper. Pitched somewhere between dark comedy and melodrama, The Babysitters breaks rules. Like television’s Six Feet Under and the recent film Juno, it’s the perfect antidote to the dopey, butter-cream-frosted teen flicks of John Hughes—Pretty in Pink with poison sauce.

NOISE
Running Time 90 minutes
Written and directed by Henry Beam
Starring Tim Robbins, William Hurt, Bridget Moynahan, William Baldwin

Almost as an ironic companion piece, there’s an excellent new film called Noise, about the psychological impact and neurological damage that is being inflicted on the victimized population of inner cities by the interminable cacophony of ringing cell phones, blaring traffic horns, ambulance sirens, ghetto blasters and endless construction demolition. While Susan Sarandon, his other half and mother of his children, grabs the money in Speed Racer, Tim Robbins shows the dangers a movie like that can cause. In this low-budget movie with a message, he plays an ordinary Joe with a new baby who is desperate for a good night’s sleep. Traumatized and baggy-eyed from car alarms that go off so often in the middle of the night the cops don’t even pay attention anymore, he decides to take matters in his own hands—smashing car windows, flatting tires, cutting the wiring to disconnect the alarm signals, he calls himself “the Rectifier.” The mayor of New York (William Hurt) calls him a vigilante, but the public opinion polls turn him into a hero. The movie investigates the ways other battered New Yorkers cope (buying earplugs, closing their windows, turning up the AC) while the city does nothing to reduce noise pollution, but Mr. Robbins tries to right the wrongs by jotting down license plates, looking up offenders in the Department of Motor Vehicles and suing them. His wife (Bridget Moynahan) thinks since there’s nothing you can do about it, you might as well make the best of it, but Mr. Robbins is on a mission, spending so much time in court that he loses his job, as the short-tempered judges keep dismissing the cases and threatening him with jail time. The causes grow when he takes on power saws, jackhammers and police whistles. He moves to the country to escape, but the noise is not much better there, either. Think weed whackers and power mowers. Risking his career, his income and his marriage, he turns noise reduction into a calling—cutting battery cables, smashing broken apartment building intercom buzzers and collecting thousands of signatures to get his issues on the ballot of the next election. Thwarted by self-serving city officials right up to City Hall, the undaunted Mr. Robbins retaliates with the longest, loudest car alarms in town, making for some clever screenwriting and some very funny action sequences. Noise is a funny movie about a serious issue, delivered tongue in cheek but with real conviction. The superb cast, which includes Ms. Moynahan and William Baldwin, supports the always politically charged Mr. Robbins with sincerity of purpose, and writer-director Henry Beam superbly blends a unique comic vision with the real challenge of an overcrowded world where people with perfect hearing are becoming an endangered species. It’s a message worth listening to. What? Say that again. I can’t hear you.

THEN SHE FOUND ME
Running Time 100 minutes
Written and Directed by Helen Hunt
Starring Helen Hunt, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Colin Firth

Then She Found Me, directed and co-written by Helen Hunt, who also stars, is a funny and touching story about the way we create families both by blood and by choice. April Epner (Hunt) is 39 and her biological clock is sounding an alarm. When she gets dumped by her charming but adolescent husband (Matthew Broderick, who specializes in such things) as a marital mistake, one door closes, but another one bursts open. Enter Bette Midler, as a brash, overwhelming and thoroughly obnoxious talk show host named Bernice, who drops in out of the blue to declare herself April’s biological mother. The jaw-dropping cherry on top of the Sunday sundae: April is the result of a one-night stand Bernice had 40 years ago with Steve McQueen.

Both devastated and baffled, April finds an escape from her screwed-up life in the arms of Frank (Colin Firth, who steals the movie), a handsome, warm, understanding and conveniently single father whose wife deserted him and their children. Mothering a ready-made family and tackling a new relationship at the same time presents double jeopardy, but the emotional minefields really explode when April discovers she is pregnant herself! Events unfold with a quiet dramatic trajectory, interrupted by unnerving needle pricks of humor. Always there is the thread of moody, contemplative silences as affecting as two bare feet touching under a cafe table. What’s lacking in big emotional outbursts is compensated by Ms. Hunt’s desire to explore a woman’s most painful anxieties.

O.K., it’s not Barbara Stanwyck in No Man of Her Own or even Lucille Ball in Yours, Mine and Ours. But the Hunt-Firth team has a glowing chemistry; the human strain in his eyes and on his brow is unsentimental but on the verge of tears. Midler has her moments, too. Less fun since she turned from the Divine Miss M into the head of the local Hadassah, she’s still a force of nature capable of creating her own bombast, to the detriment of anybody who shares the screen. She’s a fine catalyst as the larger-than-life hurricane who forces April to question the neat, dull, cookie-cutter existence she’s ordered for herself, as if from a caterer. Debuts can be dicey, but as a director, Helen Hunt handles the reins sweetly, but with control and finesse. Actors directing themselves: Not always a good idea, but this time you go away impressed.

THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES
Running Time 90 minutes
Written by Emil Stern
Directed by Vadim Perelman
Starring Evan Rachel Wood, Uma Thurman, Eva Amurri

Thanks to the enchanting Evan Rachel Wood, half of a labored melodrama called The Life Before Her Eyes is agreeably watchable. The rest of it is dead on arrival. Still a favorite of mine after following her through 52 episodes of my favorite TV series Once and Again, she grows more into a pubescent Grace Kelly with every new role. Alas, the roles are getting sicker. In this one, she’s a 17-year-old named Diana in the high-school girl’s room, smoking forbidden cigarettes and smoothing her blush in the mirror with her best gal pal, when she hears the first shots. Then the whole school is dripping blood, and the bitter student with the machine gun bursts into the toilet. Although she miraculously survives, her life is never the same again. She is left emotionally maimed.

Years pass. Now she is Uma Thurman, a respected teacher, wife and mother with a daughter of her own. Outwardly, she seems fine. But she is paralyzed with terror, irritable, short-tempered and unable to sleep. Doomed to relive the unimaginable horrors of that Columbine-style massacre, the “real life” she dreamed of after graduation has turned out very differently than the one she hoped for. On the 16th anniversary of the tragedy, when the town stages a memorial service for both the victims and survivors, Diana refuses to attend, but keeps seeing herself at 17, on the street, in the classroom, standing where her own daughter now stands, fondling her present-day husband sexually. Clearly, she is going mad, losing touch with reality, headed for the cracker factory. To make matters more confusing, the action switches back and forth between decades, with both actresses playing Diana. Fragments of the teenage shooting blend with threads of adult life, creating concentric circles of observation and reflection. Older Diana is now in danger of passing her distrust and mourning to her own child, while younger Diana and her best friend Maureen talk about sex, religion and driver ed. The movie begins to drag. Suddenly, it becomes clear that nobody is who they seem to be. Was it straight-laced, religiously obsessed Maureen (wonderfully played by Eva Amurri) who died in a bloodbath, or precociously sexy Diana? Or, in fact, did nothing ever happen at all? Each revelation becomes another example of the film’s naïve spaz-queen literary style. The clues about what is real and what is not are less tantalizing than intended, and the movie is drenched with enough symbolism and imagery to make Wes Anderson blush (too many references to Alice in Wonderland, William Blake and Schopenhauer for a subtle viewer to endure without gagging). I liked director Vadim Perelman’s provocative first film, House of Sand and Fog, but this one is a mess. Another Columbine redux is more than I want to envision. But the switch from the horrors of newspaper headlines to probing philosophical questions (am I who I really think I am?) is not only unsatisfying but unlikely to stir the teenage demographic.

SMART PEOPLE
Running Time 95 minutes
Written by Mark Jude Poirier
Directed by Noam Murro
Starring Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, Thomas Haden Church

Accidents happen. So I have decided the lukewarm reception a fine, witty and intelligent new film called Smart People has been getting is just an accident of bad timing and critical exhaustion. We waste so much time evaluating stinkers that sometimes we overlook the real deals when they come along. Smart People is the real deal. It’s the best movie about academics dancing on the lip of an ivy-covered volcano since Wonder Boys.

In a challenging change of pace that pays off handsomely, Dennis Quaid eschews his ripped and toned torso for wrinkles, circles, crow’s-feet and a 38-inch waistline to play a scruffy, bored and grumpily disillusioned professor of literature at Carnegie Mellon whose students are mundane and whose book has been rejected by every publisher. Don’t be fooled by the puffy little paunch, the shuffle in his walk and a beard that simply has to smell like stale nicotine; they just make him look like a real person for a change. He’s got a backache in Smart People, and there’s some indication of a possible knee replacement in his future, but the man is ageless. Also, enormously versatile and talented. As Professor Lawrence Wetherhold, he is up to his dewlaps in mediocrity and desperate for inspiration. He could be a movie critic.

He is also surrounded by an empyrean cast, buoyed by a savvy, pliant director (Noam Murro) and a brilliant screenplay (by Mark Jude Poirier) so skillful in its small details of character analysis that it makes even the most irritating eccentric seem interesting enough to want to know better. The movie is less about action than life. When first we meet the lonely, widowed Professor Wetherhold, he is having student problems, family problems, tenure problems and curriculum problems. The faculty hates him, and his two children regard him as a painful appendage they are forced to endure, like a bone spur. Jumping the barbed wire fence at the campus parking impoundment lot where his car has been towed, he suffers a concussion and wakes up in the hospital, ranting at the ER doctor (Sarah Jessica Parker), a former pupil he dismissed with a C, who regards him as a pompous windbag. His children are oblivious to his predicament: collegiate son James (Ashton Holmes) is an art history major running up bills on Dad’s credit card; sassy daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page) is a rabid Republican so pragmatic she donates all of her dead mother’s clothes to charity for a tax rebate. The professor’s license has been revoked, so his smelly, unreliable, bankrupt adopted brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) moves in to play chauffeur but spends most of his time munching cereal, sleeping in the buff, flirting semi-incestuously with the precocious Vanessa and leaving the professor stranded all over town without wheels. With such a surfeit of trauma, Wetherhold’s flagging interest in teaching the Victorian novel is understandable. Clearly, he needs to get laid; Ms. Parker fills the gap and drives him around at the same time. He softens. This is a forward advance toward humanity for a man so out of touch with niceness that he considers the supreme act of compassion changing a student’s essay grade from a C to a B-. In time, everyone matures, but not with easy, formulaic Hollywood resolve. The characters are dysfunctional (the dinner table ordeals are Norman Rockwell meets the House of Dracula, and Vanessa’s Thanksgiving feast is an invitation to a peptic ulcer) but everyone copes, with a breezy mix of sarcasm and surrender. These people are normal and real, which in today’s cinema means fresh and fascinating.

No wrinkles are ironed out permanently, but in the end everyone finds enough spiritual Botox to get them through more than the next semester. The professor sells his book to a commercially crass New York publisher after renaming it You Can’t Read, the oversexed uncle finds a girlfriend, the son sells a poem, the daughter heads for college to find new recruits to political conservativism and Sarah Jessica Parker does wonders for the professor’s limp id by presenting him with a brand new baby. The actors are uniformly terrific in their collaborative confusion, and director Murro orchestrates them with the precision of a finely tuned string ensemble. After Juno, the delectable Ms. Page seemed doomed to play cynical androids, but in Smart People she is simply an adorable teen drama queen looking for love and discovering the best place to start is at home. Ms. Parker is fine, as always, but I pray that she soon removes the wart on her face that is fast becoming a grim distraction in her close-ups. Mr. Church is as outrageous as he was in Sideways, but he salves over the shocks with restraint even when he’s mooning the camera in droopy BVD’s with the flaps open. As for Mr. Quaid, it is hard to describe how charming he can be as a once-promising intellectual facing extinction, and as a bumbling, cranky narcissist who can’t find his heart. This is a new Dennis Quaid in his best role since Far From Heaven. He is fearless, and he left me cheering.

So much good work must not go overlooked. I just loved this movie because it’s witty, intellectual without being pretentious, and filled with characters who are logically stressed and anxious to connect to a world outside of themselves. Here are people who are quirky, contradictory and full of surprises, people in a daunting world searching for an epiphany. They’re smart people. They’ll figure it out. And I predict you will love them while they do.

THE VISITOR
Running Time 103 minutes
Written and directed by Tom McCarthy
Starring Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Hiam Abbass

One film worth time and attention but without a big budget to announce its arrival in full-page ads is actor-turned-writer-director Tom McCarthy’s moving, humane and life-affirming new film The Visitor. This honorable and thought-provoking follow-up to Mr. McCarthy’s highly and deservedly well-received debut feature, The Station Agent, is that rare low-budget film that is really about something more than self-indulgence. There is nothing mediocre about it, and a great deal that will make you think and feel and, yes, care about the world you live in.

No stars here to lend glamour and marquee value, but the central force is Rich