Movie review by Greg Carlson

As evidenced by the numbers of people turning out to see it, “Anger Management” is as close to a sure-fire success as you can get. The inspired teaming of the legendary Jack Nicholson and the, well, not legendary Adam Sandler covered a wide enough demographic for the honchos at Sony Pictures to start salivating even before the weekend totals started rolling in. The only problem with the movie is that it is not very funny. Or entertaining. “Anger Management” looks reasonably sharp and clever on paper, but on the big screen, the movie is clearly more “Big Daddy” than “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

A quick scan of the credits indicates that, sadly, “Anger Management” is just another clone from the well-oiled Sandler machine, a Happy-Madison production brought to you by the team behind “The Animal.” In the movie, Sandler plays human doormat Dave Buznik, a meek loser who toils away in cubicle hell as a designer of clothing for overweight housecats. Despite his intrinsic timidity, Dave inexplicably dates the dishy, sweet Linda (Marisa Tomei, treated like an afterthought), who doesn’t seem to mind that the rest of the world walks all over her man.

Following a series of misunderstandings on a plane during a business trip – one of the only marginally comical sequences in the movie – Dave is sentenced by a judge (the late, great Lynne Thigpen) to anger management class. Administrated by author and anger expert Dr. Buddy Rydell (Nicholson), Dave’s class is populated by an odd assortment of apoplectic lunatics that range from a pair of lesbian porn stars to a traumatized veteran of the Grenada invasion. Dave quickly figures out that Buddy is just as nuts as his patients, but, facing jail time as an alternative, he is forced to go along.

Once the cockamamie premise is firmly established, with Buddy literally moving in to Dave’s apartment and sharing his bed, the Sandler-Nicholson interplay takes over, and the two performers lay it on with relish, lurching through a contemptibly daffy string of unfunny bits, poorly staged by director Peter Segal, whose resume includes “Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult.” Screenwriter David Dorfman also earns his share of the blame, relying on pathetic clichés and ill-conceived confrontations that wouldn’t even draw a chuckle from most kindergartners.

One segment, for example, finds Dave and Buddy descending on a Buddhist monastery to settle a score with Dave’s childhood nemesis. Even with the considerable talents of John C. Reilly at the filmmakers’ disposal, the best they can do is a tired physical slapstick that ends with a head-butt and an orange-robed wedgie. In addition to Reilly, “Anger Management” enlists a parade of stars in cameo performances, to no avail. From Bobby Knight, John McEnroe, and Rudy Giuliani to Luis Guzman, John Turturro, Woody Harrelson, Heather Graham, and Harry Dean Stanton, the movie comes off as downright desperate to please. The supporting players do nothing, however, to enhance the movie’s minimal coherence, and “Anger Management” ends as it began: a irreparable, pointless goner.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Writer Larry Cohen and director Joel Schumacher are both known for peddling pulp fictions to audiences who may or may not want the wares, and now, following a decades-long gestation period, Cohen’s strident and nutty story has been realized on the big screen.  Schumacher, grasping the anachronism of a man trapped in a phone booth, justifies the break in logic by raining down a shower of opening images that bounce from the teeming masses on their cell phones to the satellites on high that provide the connections.  Kieslowski did the same thing much better in “Red,” but Schumacher understands that he has to hit the ground running if he is going to hook the audience.

Scruffy Colin Farrell is well-cast as PR hustler Stu Shepard, the devilish offspring of Sidney Falco from “Sweet Smell of Success.”  A wannabe kingmaker, Stu struts the pavement of Times Square, browbeating his fawning toady of an assistant while juggling an endless stream of calls from clients, magazine editors, and other pretenders.  Stu has a crush on one of his marks, adorable actress Pam (Katie Holmes), and calls her daily from the last working phone booth in his orbit, because he is married, and knows his wife checks the cell phone bills.

Even with its breakneck set-up, “Phone Booth” hits the wall as soon as Stu picks up the ringing phone following one of his many calls to Pam.  A voice on the other end of the line (Kiefer Sutherland, at his smarmiest) calmly explains that he has a high-powered rifle, and will kill Stu if he dares to hang up.  Stu’s incredulity evaporates along with his swagger when the sniper proves he is not joking around.  An innocent bystander is shot, and soon the entire street is swarming with cops, news vans, and curious onlookers rolling tape in their camcorders.  Fortunately for our protagonist, attending officer Captain Ramey (Forest Whitaker) is able to figure out that Stu is the victim and not the killer.

What follows, is messy, ill-conceived, and woefully set-bound, as Stu and the sniper play a verbal game of cat and mouse.  Farrell, sporting an occasionally spotty Bronx accent, rips it up with reckless abandon: crying, sweating, screaming, and begging, his Stu is an actor’s dream role.  Ditto for the unseen Sutherland, who just sits back and pours it out like honey.  The relationship of the two men is problematic, however, as the sniper feels that Stu’s lack of compassion, honesty, and responsible moral behavior is enough to mark him for death.

What “Phone Booth” chooses to sidestep, to its detriment, is any reasonable explanation as to why the sniper knows so much (or even cares) about Stu in the first place.  Tantalizing details of Stu’s moral shortcomings are peppered throughout the phone conversation, and occasionally Stu takes a wild guess at the sniper’s connection to him, but the movie purposefully elects to leave the information a secret.  Maybe Cohen and Schumacher want to keep the movie’s themes in the realm of fable.  If so, the filmmakers left out one important ingredient: a reason why we should care about Stu Shepard in the first place.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A smelly, matted-down shaggy dog story with enough red herring to supply a cannery for a year, “Basic” limps into theatres with little prospect of success. On paper, the movie boasts a strong resume: “Die Hard” director John McTiernan, the first on-screen re-teaming of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson since “Pulp Fiction,” plot threads that allow room for pumped-up action sequences as well as steely interrogations, a supporting cast that includes talented performers like Connie Nielsen, Taye Diggs, and Brian Van Holt. The weak link, however, is the tortuous, labyrinthine screenplay by James Vanderbilt, which collapses under the weight of its migraine-inducing convolutions, diversions, and smoke-screens.

Jackson plays the boastful, strutting Army Ranger Sgt. Nathan West, a vicious martinet whose idea of a swell time is to send his trainees on exercises in the Panamanian jungle during a gale-force hurricane. A classic caricature of the military sadist, Jackson verbally abuses his soldiers with the kind of language that echoes R. Lee Ermey’s humiliating rhetoric in “Full Metal Jacket.” The training exercise goes horribly wrong, however, and confusion reigns as some of the soldiers are killed after turning against each other during the storm.

Col. Bill Styles (Tim Daly), with only a few hours to sort out the mess before it is turned over to higher-ranking authorities, calls on one of his best, head of base MP Julia Osborne (Nielsen) to question the two soldiers who survived the mysterious shootout. One of the survivors, however, refuses to speak to anyone other than a fellow Ranger, which cues the appearance of boozy DEA agent Tom Hardy (Travolta), a former Ranger with seemingly little love for West and his tactics. Before you can cry “re-write,” Osborne and Hardy are sparring like an old married couple as they clash over the best ways to extract info from the tight-lipped murder witnesses/suspects.

With a flair for pacing, McTiernan moves the action along at a brisk rate, but once the interrogation scenes begin (which operate as a back and forth, “Rashomon”-like tennis match between the two surviving soldiers), “Basic” breaks down, piling on conflicting details so quickly that the audience gives up on making any sense of the plot. Giovanni Ribisi, usually outstanding in small roles like the one he plays here, tries on a ridiculous accent and hammy affectation that derails any credibility his character might have had. The film is also not aided by the inclusion of several competing versions of what happened during the exercise – seeing them merely adds to our disorientation.

The plot twists are dispatched with such ferocity that the sexual tension between Osborne and Hardy elicits only laughter when the two finally get into a physical tangle. Like everything else in “Basic,” it seems to come out of nowhere. By the film’s final stages, Vanderbilt’s script has completely disintegrated, making suggestions about what is really going on that serve only to negate literally everything that has transpired thus far. Unlike other movies that play head games with their audience (think about classic film noir or “The Usual Suspects,”), “Basic” forgets the rule that if you are going to deceive your viewers, you still need to respect them in the final outcome.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Like many cinematic translations of the work of Stephen King, “Dreamcatcher” dabbles in so many side-trips and diversions that the result is one rather large, rather sticky mess. Paring down an 800-plus page novel into reasonable feature film length is a challenge no matter how you slice it up, but even the legendary William Goldman (who has already done time on S.K. drive with scripts for “Misery” and “Hearts in Atlantis”) cannot wrap his formidable pen around the sprawl. Goldman, along with director Lawrence Kasdan, never figures out how to unpack King’s behemoth, and the result is alternately tedious and laughable.

With echoes of “Stand By Me,” “Dreamcatcher” begins with a quartet of childhood friends whose adult lives lack the warmth, magic, and wonder they shared as kids. Jonesy (Damian Lewis), Beaver (Jason Lee), Henry (Thomas Jane), and Pete (Timothy Olyphant) once rescued a mentally retarded boy from some sadistic bullies, and were rewarded with the supernatural ability to communicate with each other telepathically and see into the future. Douglas Cavell, the victim of the bullies, has difficulty pronouncing his name, and is affectionately called “Duddits” by his protectors (who begin to recognize that there is something extraordinary about their new friend).

The now grown men don’t have much contact with Duddits anymore, but the powers bestowed upon them all those years ago have not faded with age. The foursome retreats to a rustic getaway in the woods of Maine for an annual hunting trip, but things do not turn out as expected when a bloated, disoriented hunter with a wicked, blistering facial rash shows up. Before you can say “Dumb and Dumber,” the hunter is letting loose with some of the most extensive screen flatulence this side of “Blazing Saddles,” and the audience laughs in spite of itself.

The chuckles rapidly dissipate into disgust, however, when the hunter’s rectum explodes, absurdly shifting the tone of the movie into high sci-fi outer space beastie mode. With more than a nod to “Alien,” “Dreamcatcher” decides about halfway in that it is supposed to be a “bugs on the run” movie. Seems that hunter didn’t just have gas – he was playing intestinal host to a nasty, eel-like extraterrestrial with rows of jagged teeth. Pretty soon the U.S. military is involved, as a “black ops” unit led by veteran alien hunter Colonel Curtis (Morgan Freeman, slumming) descends to quarantine the area.

Most people will have given up on “Dreamcatcher” by this point (the movie jettisons the significance of its own title in favor of set pieces that show off the slimy CG effects shots), but Kasdan and Goldman are just getting warmed up. Inexplicably, Curtis goes completely insane just as the alien invasion problem begins to pick up steam. Kasdan never gets a handle on how to pace such a grab-bag of disparate elements, and the appearance of a grown-up version of Duddits (played by Donnie Wahlberg) in the eleventh hour is predictable down to the outcome of the final confrontation with the uber-alien.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Every now and again, highly respected, laurel-wreathed actors will indulge in some goofy antics that make little sense to paying customers. Even when these sorts of movies are directed by grand old veterans like William Friedkin, who made at least two of the best films of the 1970s in “The Exorcist” and “The French Connection,” the mystery remains: do actors read the script before they sign on to do the movie, or do they simply take their agent’s word for it?

Recently minted Academy Award winner Benicio Del Toro, whose performance in “Traffic” was both electrifying and genuinely worthy of its accolades, has not been immune to appearing in questionable fare (see: “Excess Baggage”), but in “The Hunted” he cuts loose with some of the silliest dialogue he is likely to ever encounter, including a speech about the injustices suffered by poultry. Playing a battle-stressed soldier who saw vicious action in Kosovo, Del Toro is Aaron Hallam, a Rambo-esque survivalist who knows exactly how to kill a man with a few quick strokes of a knife, or if need be, his bare hands.

War does strange things to men, and Aaron passes his time tracking down deer and elk hunters who unfairly use huge scopes on high-powered rifles. Aaron sees this as supremely unfair, and pays the hunters back by gutting and dressing them just like their intended prey. Aaron’s bloody activities quickly draw the attention of the FBI, who discover that they are going to need the help of Aaron’s old teacher, L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones), a former civilian employee of the U.S. military who is both a preternaturally gifted outdoor tracker and an expert in brutal hand to hand combat. A hilarious flashback featuring a handlebar-mustachioed Jones fills in some of the blanks: this is the kind of guy who makes his recruits literally forge their own knives on the way to becoming killing machines.

Friedkin does not shy away from dishing it out as heavily as possible (i.e. Jones portentously freeing a white wolf from a snare, Johnny Cash’s ominous cover of Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” on the soundtrack, etc.) but if “The Hunted” has anything going for it, the taut pacing is the leading candidate. Like “The Fugitive,” “The Hunted” works best when it is locked into the relentless pursuit mode that allows for nimble editing and swift camera moves. Friedkin breathlessly moves the action between urban settings and dense forest locales with ease, greatly abetted by superb cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. And if you can see the faces of the stuntmen standing in for Del Toro and Jones now and then, well, at least the action isn’t computer generated.

In the end, though, there isn’t much movie there, and we never get close to understanding how Aaron strayed so far from rationality. Instead, a thoroughly predictable confrontation, featuring more grunts than a match at Wimbledon, pits the student and the master against one another. The screenplay, by David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths, and Art Monterastelli, assumes it is making sound use of some tried and true representative anecdotes, but unfortunately the scribes forget to relate any insight into Aaron’s motivations other than the basic post-traumatic stress disorder that has fueled the plots of so many similar movies.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Aging action star Bruce Willis’ open support of the current Bush administration’s pro-military philosophy immediately indicates the underlying sensibilities of “Tears of the Sun,” a messy hybrid that attempts to fuse social consciousness with a glorification of gung-ho ass-kicking. Following in the footsteps of ex-wife Demi Moore, Willis plays Navy SEAL Lt. A.K. Waters, a tough, relentless warrior given to smearing camouflage greasepaint into every crag and cranny of his stony, square-jawed face. Short on words but long on muscle, Waters completes his missions with total commitment and zero emotion.

Sent by Captain Bill Rhodes (Tom Skerritt, who must by now have his own personal set of officer uniforms) into civil war-torn Nigeria to extract a humanitarian physician, as well as two nuns and a priest, Waters suffers one of those end-of-the-first-act crises of conscience that stirs him to abandon orders and protocol and risk himself and his loyal team of comrades in order to “do the right thing.” The right thing is embodied in the stubborn platitudes of Dr. Lena Kendricks (Monica Bellucci), the “critical personnel” Waters has been assigned to rescue. With injured patients in tow, Kendricks and Waters begin a treacherous hike through the jungle toward Cameroon.

Director Antoine Fuqua, whose “Training Day” really packed a punch, makes the most out of a dire script, alternating between suspenseful nighttime scenes and rain-soaked horrors made worse by the daylight. In fact, the most problematic aspect of “Tears of the Sun” is its bifurcated psychology: the atrocities that attend “ethnic cleansing” are superlatively vile and gruesome, but they only provide an excuse for Waters and his SEALs to rain down hell on the Nigerian baddies. One suspects that American audiences will take satisfaction in the SEAL squad’s superior training and firepower, but the propagandistic fantasia wears thin in short order.

Waters’ elite group of fighters, mostly indistinguishable from one another except for Atkins (Cole Hauser) and Pettigrew (Eamonn Walker), serve the traditional function of grunts in combat films – ripe for the picking off, the inevitability of several deaths is a foregone conclusion. Nobody pulls out a picture of his wife, but anyone who has seen a war movie will get the idea. Composer Hans Zimmer even cribs Barber’s Adagio when a shot eerily reminiscent of “Platoon” sweeps upwards to show hordes of enemies closing in on the outnumbered heroes.

“Tears of the Sun” lacks both depth and credibility when it comes to Kendricks and her throng of beleaguered followers. The Nigerians on both sides of the civil conflict are treated as two-dimensional, and a “surprise” twist that takes place well into the action borders on offensive stereotype. Bellucci, presumably cast as much for her beauty as for any acting ability, is saddled with dialogue in which she constantly barks about her “people” needing to rest, while Waters counters with his own orders to “keep moving.” Once you’ve heard the umpteenth variation on this dialogue, you’ll be as anxious to leave Nigeria as the surviving SEALs.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Ron Shelton’s “Dark Blue” looked good on paper: screenwriter David (“Training Day”) Ayer adapting James Ellroy’story, Kurt Russell and Ving Rhames showing off their chops, the clever premise of setting the action against the 1992 verdict announcement in the trials of the cops who bludgeoned Rodney King. The premise, however, is much sweeter in theory and on paper than it is unspooling on the big screen. “Dark Blue” wallows in the formula it had hoped to transcend, laughably careening well-past plausibility inside its first five minutes. Filled to overflowing with convenience, coincidence, and cliché, “Dark Blue” is obvious, leaden and bordering on nonsensical.

Kurt Russell, as the vile, racist Sgt. Eldon Perry Jr., plays the top half of the tired veteran/rookie team-up endemic to the genre. Goofy Scott Speedman, never able to control his greasy golden mane with the same kind of skill Russell demonstrates with his outrageous conk, slack-jaws it as the wide-eyed innocent hard pressed to keep up with his elder partner and the kind of demented street justice favored by the honchos who run the LAPD’s Special Investigations Squad. At the shooting board hearing that kicks off the movie, Russell sums up the moral ambiguity that is his raison d’etre: “At the end of the day, the bullets are in the bad guys and not us.”

Previews for the film suggested that Ving Rhames would factor as a central figure in the narrative, but his by-the-book Assistant Chief Arthur Holland is such a straight arrow (you never see him out of uniform), the filmmakers seemed to have no idea what to do with the character, opting most of the time to simply ignore him. By the time a last-ditch effort to humanize the chief drops out of the sky in the form of a five-year old extramarital tryst, the Perry plotline has consumed the lion’s share of the movie’s attention, and the audience is impatient to return to Russell’s corrupt gun-slinging.

Director Shelton, who has shown a flair for vibrantly-sketched characters in the past, unfortunately doesn’t have the time to fully explore the relationships Russell and Speedman have with the women in their lives. Lolita Davidovich is excellent as Perry’s fed-up wife – she makes the most of her limited screen time and really delivers the goods in a solid scene where Perry makes her read aloud the letter she had intended him to find once she had already left. More problematically, Speedman’s character is sleeping with Holland’s assistant, Sgt. Beth Williamson (Michael Michele) primarily because it seems to serve the plot by linking the good cops and the bad cops.

Naturally, the movie’s climax corresponds to the rioting and looting that occurred in the wake of the verdicts in the King beating trial being read, and Perry is caught in the eye of the hurricane in South Central. Using his car like a battering ram, he navigates through a surreal tableau of smoke and fire, threatening to use his pistol any time the angry mob gets too close. It is a bravura set-piece, which makes it such a shame that the movie that led up to it amounts to nothing. As visually impressive as it is (a CG wide-shot of the city on fire notwithstanding), “Dark Blue” fails to convince us that it deserves even the kind of guarded praise afforded other recent cop movies like “Training Day” and “Narc.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Todd Phillips, the writer-director whose perpetual fixation with all things (academics excepted) collegiate has served him from the documentary “Frat House” to the surprisingly funny “Road Trip,” takes another run at it with “Old School,” a mildly entertaining comedy with some unfortunately lengthy stretches in between the laughs. Based on the well-worn premise that recapturing one’s youth is as worthy an endeavor as anything related to growing up, holding a job, and spending time with your family, “Old School” coasts by on the charm of its lead trio, funnymen Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson, and Vince Vaughn.

While the thought of three dolts in their mid-thirties starting up a college fraternity in order to avoid eviction is not likely to capture any prizes for originality, the film displays a relatively high level of enthusiasm from its leads, despite the turgid, bottom-feeding script. Phillips’ direction is leagues below “Road Trip,” feebly cobbling together ideas that might have sounded humorous in the planning stage, but fail in the execution. Misogyny is practically required in sex comedies targeted at young males, but the women in “Old School” – especially the lead romantic interest for Wilson’s character – are ignored to the point where they virtually disappear.

As dull, cuckolded businessman Mitch, Luke Wilson has the least colorful role to play. Mitch leaves his girlfriend (Juliette Lewis, appearing in one of the movie’s many cameos) after discovering her predilection for group sex with complete strangers. He moves into a large home near his alma mater, soon to be joined by Ferrell’s Frank and Vaughn’s Beanie (each one suffering from nebulous, unspecified marital miseries). Vaughn riffs on his signature smug persona, this time as a soccer coach, father of small children, and owner of a regional electronics chain. As a relative newcomer to the big screen (having pulled the ripcord on his SNL parachute), Ferrell shows considerable big screen promise, delivering even the most suspect dialogue with excellent comic timing.

The biggest problem with the movie is not its vulgarity, but its complete lack of unity and coherence in plotting and pacing. Add to that the weak and aimless screenplay, which never bothers to offer a good explanation for the disparate types of pledges recruited for the upstart fraternity, and you’ve got a spotty hour and a half. The oddball assortment of wannabe frat boys includes an octogenarian, a morbidly obese young man, and a bunch of nameless, faceless clods too old to be in college; it adds up to nothing but an arbitrary way to generate “comedy.” Worst of all, Jeremy Piven is saddled with the humiliating task of playing the stereotyped evil-creepy school administrator who stands in the way of the good guys.

Following a thoroughly inept sequence where the ragtag frat must negotiate a series of scholastic and athletic challenges to prove its worth to the powers that be (the same thing was done much better in “Revenge of the Nerds”), the story quickly, inconsequentially winds itself down. Other name brand talent shows up in cameo roles, most notably Andy Dick as an in-home fellatio instructor, Craig Kilborn as a philandering cad, and Seann William Scott as a mullet-coiffed petting zoo proprietor. Snoop Dogg practically phones in his fleeting spot, arriving just long enough to perform a few seconds of a song at a raging party. Only Ellen Pompeo, as Mitch’s high school crush, manages to shine despite being perpetually upstaged by beer kegs and nude streaking.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Aglow with the recent surprise Academy Award nomination for its masterful director Pedro Almodovar, “Talk to Her” finds itself immediately in the front rank of the Spanish filmmaker’s impressive list of credits. With “Talk to Her,” Almodovar has topped his excellent “All About My Mother” (1999) and perhaps drawn even with the film many consider to be his masterpiece, the audacious, irrepressible “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988). Assuming Almodovar is just getting warmed up – he is only in his early fifties – his many admirers must be salivating at the prospect that the next phase of his career might deliver yet another series of fantastic movies.

Almodovar’s films – which typically carom between slapstick and serenity with astonishing ease – often hinge on the kinds of coincidences beloved by soap operas, but the practically fearless director always manages to locate emotional complexity in the inhabitants of his colorful ensembles. Outrageous things are expected to happen to Almodovar’s characters, but throughout it all, these people remain hopelessly and gloriously human. Best of all, Almodovar consistently demonstrates a sublime level of comfort with even his most obsessive, wrong-headed, misguided, and forlorn characters, offering them empathy where most would find only contempt.

This is certainly the case with Benigno (Javier Camara), the troubling, sexually-ambiguous mama’s boy who attends the bedside of beautiful, comatose ballerina Alicia (Leonor Watling) with the kind of zeal and devotion one usually finds reserved for the Virgin Mary. Benigno, we come to learn, has fallen madly in love with Alicia after seeing her rehearse at the dance studio across the street from his apartment. Following the freak traffic accident that renders Alicia catatonically lifeless, Benigno uses his experience as a nurse to become Alicia’s primary caregiver in the hospital where her psychiatrist father assumes she will receive the best care.

Meanwhile, journalist and travel-guide writer Marco (Dario Grandinetti) begins a relationship with a female bullfighter on the rebound from a painful breakup with another toreador. Lydia (Rosario Flores) is as full of life and energy as Alicia is without, but by a perfectly Almodovarian twist, the torero ends up in a coma and is placed in the same hospital as Alicia. Benigno and Marco become friends, bonding over the bizarre circumstances in which they find themselves. Along with Almodovar, the audience begins to relish the remarkable irony that these two women are completely unaware of the affectionate dedication and concentrated commitment the two men lavish upon them.

Almodovar mirrors the ardor of Benigno and the perseverance of Marco with a jaw-dropping homage to silent film that depicts a kind of forerunner to “The Incredible Shrinking Man” by way of Ferdinand Zecca, Georges Melies, and J. Stuart Blackton. In the piece, a tiny lover demonstrates his complete faithfulness and fealty to the woman responsible for his altered state by doing something nearly unprintable (and certainly too fun to spoil here). Despite the wild inclusion of this fantasy diversion (the film also includes magnificent side-trips to take in Pina Bausch’s dance theatre and Caetano Veloso performing a song), “Talk to Her” is fairly tame by Almodovar standards. It is also one of the best films of the year.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

At its best, Stephen Daldry’s screen version of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Hours” is a cinematic tour de force – a delicately handled meditation on those elusive, solitary Woolf-ian intelligences that resist even adequate treatment in the cinematic format. At its worst, the movie is an operatic muddle – an occasionally hoarse disarray of an actor’s showcase, providing more than the usual supply of opportunities to set fire to the scenery. The intersections of madness and genius are perennial catnip to the givers of awards (see the ridiculous, already dated “A Beautiful Mind”), and on that count, “The Hours” is sufficiently mobilized.

Operating as a shored-up triptych that doesn’t always gel, the film covers three women in three time periods: uber-writer Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman and prosthetic nose) in 1923 composing “Mrs. Dalloway” while fighting off the demons of her mind, suburban housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) in 1951 finding her own fragile hold on marriage and motherhood coming unglued even as her life is transformed by reading “Mrs. Dalloway,” and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) in 2001 loosely acting out the part of a modern day Mrs. Dalloway as she prepares for a party to honor her former lover, a poet now dying of complications from AIDS.

The agenda of “The Hours” is decidedly grim, and Daldry meets the challenge head-on with an opening set piece that imagines Woolf’s suicide by self-drowning in March of 1941 as a languid, romanticized Pre-Raphaelite painting. Weighed down with stones in the pockets of her coat, Woolf’s submergence is attended with thanatological fervor: gliding along underwater, her shoe comes loose in a fetishized tableau that would do John William Waterhouse proud. Taking one’s own life is firmly established as a central motif, and the succeeding stories will attend to the sad topic in ways both expected and surprising.

While Kidman (false proboscis and all) excels at capturing subtlety and nuance in her handling of a difficult role (witness, for example, an exquisite, heartbreaking train station scene between Virginia and husband Leonard, played by Stephen Dillane) and Streep is as peerless as ever, Julianne Moore’s segments are easily the film’s most troublesome. For some reason, Daldry chooses the 1951 setting as a staging ground for the most artificial and extravagantly over-designed theatrics of the movie, and despite Moore’s noble efforts, too much information is missing to connect all the dots. With the exception of a few quotations of Woolf’s, screenwriter David Hare has done away with voiceover – an admirable choice that proves a hindrance in at least this portion.

The supporting cast is almost uniformly impressive, featuring some memorable work by Ed Harris (who takes it a little too far a little too often) as Clarissa’s former lover, Jeff Daniels (in what amounts to an extended cameo), Claire Danes as Clarissa’s daughter, and Allison Janney as Clarissa’s partner. Moore is assisted by her old colleague John C. Reilly, whose presence always makes even the best-staffed films more interesting, as well as Toni Collette, in what has to be the movie’s oddest diversion. Besides the terrific Dillane, Kidman’s scenes are fleshed out by the presence of Miranda Richardson as Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell. The movie remains firmly in the grip of its three leads, however, and audiences looking for a fearless plunge into the heart’s darkest reaches should be pleased by the results.