Screen Presents

What's hot and what's ice-cold in the year-end onslaught.

The Barbarian Invasions

Denys Arcand's sequel of sorts to The Decline of the American Empire (1986) picks up the story of debauched university professor Rémy (Rémy Girard), his satyrical impulses dulled by a cancer that will likely soon claim his life. Arcand's original was a moralistic precursor to sex, lies, and videotape, mercilessly satirizing the mating habits of the intellectual class. Seventeen years later, Arcand has discovered mercy, though thankfully not sentimentality. Though the old friends, many now encumbered with domestic responsibilities, gather around Rémy's bedside and trade ribaldries, The Barbarian Invasions is far more interested in exploring Rémy's late-in-life attempt to come to terms with the responsibilities he's taken on, and the ones he's shirked. Chief among these is his lackluster parenting of Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau), who has grown up to be the thing a Marxist-leaning parent fears most: a successful businessman. That Sébastien's money buys Rémy a private room in an otherwise overcrowded Canadian hospital (not to mention heroin more powerful than the hospital's painkillers) only intensifies the tension between a father and son who haven't spoken in years, not least because Rémy is forced to confront the fact that the son has outdone the father in every respect.

Arcand has a weakness for too-tidy situations, and the smug air that dominated Decline is still present, if dissipated. (If Arcand feels an obvious kinship with his characters, he's also implicitly praising his self-awareness at their expense.) Still, despite its title, The Barbarian Invasions is less alarmist than elegiac, even hopeful, and contains at least one moment -- involving footage from the 1949 Italian Heaven Over the Marshes -- that will fix itself in your memory long after you leave the theater. -- Sam Adams (Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse)

Cold Mountain

The first moments in Cold Mountain are sensational and sickening, an apt introduction to a Civil War saga. As the camera pans a company of exhausted Confederate soldiers, Ada (Nicole Kidman) reads her letter to long-absent love Inman (Jude Law): "This awful war," her voiceover lilts, imagining their eventual reunion, "will have changed us both beyond all reckoning."

It's July 1864, and the Siege of Petersburg, Va., is under way. Neither the hunkered down Southern troops nor the advancing Northerners can anticipate the coming devastation: "Burnside's mine," a 586-foot tunnel the Yankees have dug beneath the Southern camp, explodes. When the Yankees flounder into the crater, unable to escape, the Confederates attack: "Like shooting fish in a barrel!" cries one of Inman's fellows.

Amid the tumult, Inman's comrade, a Native American, exchanges a look with a black man fighting for the North, providing one of the film's few references to the racial history and politics of the Civil War. Instead, the film focuses on archetypal romance and horror -- the mutual yearning that sustains Inman and Ada across the many miles, and the War's dreadful unmaking of community and nation.

Adapted by director Anthony Minghella from Charles Frazier's 1997 novel, the movie is at once distractingly episodic and sweepingly nostalgic. Realizing the War is not his "cause," Inman deserts and makes his way back to Ada, via a series of Odyssey-like encounters. Thus he meets a reverend (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and stops him from murdering a black woman pregnant with his child, a gnarly backwoodsman (Giovanni Ribisi), a sorrowful widow (Natalie Portman) and a wise goat-tender (Eileen Atkins).

Meantime, the film crosscuts to Ada's own trials back at Black Cove farm, where she battles the Home Guard commander Teague (Ray Winstone), as he aggressively pursues her. She's soon joined by tough girl Ruby (Renée Zellweger), who shows her grit in her first onscreen minute by snapping the neck of a sinister rooster. While Ruby brings order to the farm work, Ada reads from Wuthering Heights by candlelight, reflecting the film's own tragic and fantastic romance.

In too-brief appearances by Ruby's fiddler father (Brendan Gleeson), Cold Mountain suggests the detail that might have been. Warm and energetic, his musical performances (that include a singer played by The White Stripes' Jack White) draw from multiple sources, inspiring community and providing pleasure, as necessary on a battlefield as in a bar or at a Christmas celebration. Effectively focused and warm, such moments expose the chilliness of the film's grander gestures. -- Cindy Fuchs (Opens Thursday at Ritz Five)

House of Sand and Fog

A stunning mediocrity whose year-end acclaim is proof for anyone who doubts most critics' inability to think for themselves, Vadim Perelman's high-toned adaptation of Andre Dubus III's novel is the perfect movie for people who, deep down, don't really like the movies. It may be the emptiest piece of "literary" filmmaking since The English Patient. Driving toward its blood-soaked conclusion -- a pathetically contrived (yet apparently successful) attempt to convince people they've seen something "important" -- the film brings together rumpled divorcee Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) and the refugee family of an Iranian colonel (Ben Kingsley) that moves into her house after it's repossessed by the government. While the movie pretends to care for the Iranian family, and the performances by Kingsley and especially onscreen wife Shohreh Aghdashloo give the material a dignity it otherwise lacks, it's Kathy's story in the end. It's she who's asked, "Is this your house?" While its bathos may be mistaken for sensitivity, the movie's true shallowness is nowhere more evident than in the comically named Les(ter) Burdon, Ron Eldard's rogue cop. Rather than genuinely exploring (not to say understanding) racism, House fobs the issue off on Eldard's deteriorating alcoholic, whose blunt jeremiads effectively shield Connolly's Kathy from any stains on her character. House of Cards is more like it. -- S.A.(Opens Friday at Ritz East)

Peter Pan

Publicists for this latest film of Peter Pan could hardly have anticipated the media onslaught rendered by the new charges against Michael Jackson. That's not to say that Neverland -- even when first imagined by J.M. Barrie -- was ever wholly innocent, but Jackson's appropriation of the name only underlines the strangest possibilities of never growing up. Still, and even for all the respectable fun it offers, P.J. Hogan's movie covers some provocative ground of its own, much of it Electra-complexed. Mostly following the familiar storyline, the film begins as imaginative Wendy Darling (Rachel Hurd-Wood) regales her brothers, John (Harry Newell) and Michael (Freddie Popplewell), with tales featuring Cinderella triumphing over pirates with swords. Such bedtime adventure makes up for what the kids see as their dreary diurnal lot, in which milquetoast dad (Jason Isaacs) can't even muster the nerve to speak to his supercilious employer, harrumphy Aunt Millicent (Lynn Redgrave) thinks Wendy must "grow up" (that is, prepare to deliver her "secret kiss" to the appropriate suitor) and exquisite Mrs. Darling (Olivia Williams) keeps assuring them that adults mean well.

The kids would rather abide in their fantasies, a point that Hogan's movie celebrates in cleverly imagined detail. When Peter (Jeremy Sumpter) appears floating outside their window, it only takes a moment for the Darling children to decide to fly off with him to Neverland, as soon as he promises them pirates, mermaids and Indians. Also flitting along is Tinkerbell (Ludivine Sagnier), instantly cranky on seeing Peter's swoony disposition toward Wendy.

The dirty-faced Lost Boys are similarly smitten, as they want nothing so much as a mother to tell them stories. Quite adorably, the pirates (including Richard Briers' delightful Smee, prone to holding teddy bears hostage) seek similar reassurance, no surprise given the murderous ferocity of their captain, Hook (also Isaacs). The exchanges between Hook and a kidnapped Wendy (who thinks briefly she might also want to be a pirate, naming herself "Red-Handed Jill") are especially intriguing, as he is, quite explicitly, her father.

Hook is plainly menacing, as quick to slay his own men when they err as he is determined to take revenge on Peter for the whole ticking crocodile business. But as Isaacs plays him, Hook is also weirdly wonderful, as lonely and childish as the poutily heroic Peter, and Wendy's eventual return home to "grow up" is less a rejection of Peter's "wild life" than it is a recognition of her own desires, for adventures of her own. -- C.F. (Opens Thursday at area theaters)

21 Grams

Taking Kierkegaard's observation, "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards," as its unofficial epigraph, Alejandro Gonzles Iñrritu's 21 Grams puts time in a blender, with a structure dictated by emotional logic, not linear narrative. The title refers to the weight that supposedly leaves every human body at the moment of death (though you won't find much substantiation for such a claim outside the press notes), which, ectoplasmic suppositions aside, points toward the movie's central concern: What do people leave behind after they die? The subject of much theoretical debate, that question is a matter of imminent concern for the movie's three central characters: Naomi Watts' bereaved mother, Sean Penn's ailing heart patient and Benicio Del Toro's born-again ex-con. In a sense, the film's fractured structure (taken from Guillermo Arriaga's script) serves to hide a plot studded with melodramatic coincidences (which won't be revealed here), but the ripe emotions of melodrama provide the perfect counterpoint to Iñrritu's ostentatious style, so broadly displayed in Amores Perros. While Amores Perros' interwoven structure seemed contrived, a film-school exercise, 21 Grams' prismatic assemblage fits the lives of characters whom rationality has abandoned, for whom the usual ways of understanding the world no longer make sense. Watts particularly gives a performance of almost unbearable rawness, second only to Melissa Leo's feral turn as Del Toro's anguished wife. 21 Grams' year-end placement all but dooms it to the perception that it's just another entrant in the Oscar-grubbing misery derby, but unlike House of Sand and Fog, its tragedies aren't manipulative: They may defy explanation, but they're not nonsensical. -- S.A. (Opens Friday at Ritz Five)