Welcome back, Sam Raimi. The director who gave 1980s horror an adrenaline shot with The Evil Dead has finally come home after going sappy with those Spider-Man movies. Drag Me to Hell is a hoot and a half, from beginning to end. Alison Lohman shows great scream-queen potential as a previously chubby farm girl now trying to make it as a loan arranger in a Los Angeles bank. Her boss tells her to learn to make “tough decisions” if she wants the coveted assistant manager position, but the decision that follows is less “tough” than “dumb”: She refuses an old Gypsy woman (Lorna Raver) an extension on her mortgage, and receives a horrifying curse for her trouble. For three days she will be haunted by a monstrous demon, and then she will have to honor the title of the movie. Raimi sends his camera spinning around rooms, ominous shadows slap people around, and at one point a possessed character dances while suspended over a séance table. This is really exhilarating filmmaking, unafraid to be a little silly (how can you take the story seriously, anyway?) and able to make you giddy with fright at such ridiculous things as a handkerchief or a talking goat. For a PG-13 horror movie, it’s amazing how much ickiness (maggots, blood, toothless biting) Raimi was able to squeeze in, and there’s even a cartoon-worthy bit with a falling anvil and splattered eyeballs. My audience squealed with delight. I’m not sure if this says more about me than it says about the year in movies, but this is my favorite film so far this year.

Just as John Ford brought nobility to the American Western, Sergio Leone (1929-1989) did the same for the spaghetti Western. Which is ironic, because his earliest movies play like caustic parodies of the original Old West. Leone was born with already cinema in his DNA, the son of a filmmaker and an actress. He entered the medium as an often uncredited assistant director in productions ranging from Vittorio De Sica’s postwar classic The Bicycle Thief (1948) to Robert Aldrich’s kooky biblical epic Sodom and Gomorrah (1962). His first movie as a director was indeed part of the whole sand-and-sword genre: The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), which is better than most others of its ilk and quite good on its own. It was A Fistful of Dollars (1964), however, that really kicked off his career. It was a rip-off of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Kurosawa even sued Leone for it), even as Yojimbo itself was influenced by American Westerns. Leone loved Westerns, yet A Fistful of Dollars is a sort of mockery of their innocence, as if their purity could not survive in the cynical, venal modern world. It’s no wonder Clint Eastwood became an international sensation as “the Man with No Name,” embodying a new kind of hero for nihilistic modern times.

Eastwood (along with Lee Van Cleef) also starred in the other two installments of the “Dollar Trilogy,” For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). These are frantic, sardonic movies, with the tropes of American oaters (especially the sadism of the villains) cranked up to 11. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly began a turning point for Leone, with a melancholy beauty starting to seep through the sarcastic veneer. This beauty bloomed in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), perhaps Leone’s greatest movie. The story of land disputes, revenge and killers is not original, but the treatment Leone gives it is transcendental. It’s visually ravishing, with the rocky mountains of the American West for once playing themselves rather than being faked by Spanish deserts; the cast (Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards) are icons being forged before your eyes; and Ennio Morricone’s magnificent soundtrack brings a majestic dimension to every scene. And there’s an aching feeling for the passing of an era, the death of a time. Once Upon a Time in the West is the film Leone moved his whole life towards, a sort of simultaneous questioning, love letter, and eulogy for railroads, taciturn cowboys and ballsy ladies, and American vistas.

Like David Lean, Leone felt the need to keep making bigger and bigger movies. Duck, You Sucker (1971) had enormous sequences of riots and shootings, but what’s most striking about it is the emotional effects he gets out of the friendship between Rod Steiger’s Mexican bandit and James Coburn’s Irish revolutionary. It’s also a very political movie, in that it sees revolt not so much as doomed as it is removed from the people who were originally meant to benefit from it. Afterwards, Leone became more a producer than a director, though his uncredited hand could be felt in bits of My Name Is Nobody (1973). His last movie was the epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984), which was famously mauled by the studio and released in a horribly cut version. The restored version reveals Leone’s final masterpiece, a tale of betrayal, death and closet honor among thieves that unfolds across decades with a flowing, almost Proustian sense of memory and loss. He died prematurely at 60, just as he was about to start a new production with Robert De Niro about war in Leningrad.

 Whenever eyes need to pop sublimely and corrupting must purr, we’ll have Peter Lorre. Seriously, was there ever a more vivid “character actor”? I first saw him in The Maltese Falcon (1941), where his provocative vamping as Joe Cairo managed to steal the show from a cast made exclusively of show-stealers. Then the great shock: Seeing him as the child killer in Fritz Lang’s M (1931): Plump, soft-faced, driven by demons, sad, horrific. I still get chills just from remembering him before the criminals, on his knees screaming about the helplessness of his crimes. And Lorre was reportedly also starring in a comic play at around the same time! Hollywood took notice, so whenever a whiff of Euro trash was called for, Lorre was brought over to bulge and quiver. I’ve never seen a film that didn’t profit greatly from even five or ten minutes of him. Remember his noisy exit from Casablanca (1942), dragged by guards while Rick stood by? His mad scientist cackling with glee in Mad Love (1935)? Or his Monsieur “Pig” sizing up Joan Crawford in Strange Cargo (1940)? Ah, that voice, a gurgle from the depths of decadence—pure music. It was marvelous even in imitation, like whenever a cartoon version of the actor popped up to terrorize Bugs Bunny. Lorre was funny and sinister and charming, but also very serious: He directed a movie, The Lost One (1951), which is the most serious lament for postwar Teutonic Europe before the German New Wave. He ended up in Roger Corman and “beach party” flicks, but his presence will never dim. Steve Buscemi is the closest we have to him today. A toast to these invaluable weasels.

Horror movies were verboten when I was growing up, but once in a while I’d manage to sneak in one. I had heard about An American Werewolf in London, John Landis’s 1981 horror thriller, from friends, and the title alone was enough to make me borrow a fellow movie buff’s tape. So, by the time David Naughton and Griffin Dunne appeared on screen amid the sheep in the back of a truck, I was crazy with anticipation. The movie didn’t disappoint. Its mix of visceral frights, bizarre anxiety and smart-ass humor is still great. So two Yanks go to England and are attacked by a werewolf; Dunne is gruesomely slaughtered, but Naughton is just wounded. It’s only a matter of time before the beast inside him breaks loose once the full moon is out, and when it does it really is horrifying (props to the make-up folks, whose handmade work puts today’s facile CGI to shame). The surprise, however, is the clever ways Landis keeps subverting the material, giving it a darkly comic spin. Remember Dunne’s ghost putting in increasingly grotesque appearances? Or the quick shout-out to The Muppet Show? Or the many songs that had the word “moon” in them? To a kid who had never seen a horror movie, this was heady stuff. (Jenny Agutter, who plays the cute British doctor who falls for Naughton, was my first movie crush.) And I always loved the callous abruptness of the ending, with a raucous version of “Blue Moon” blaring right after the tragic final shot. I have to confess that, if I had to pick just one werewolf movie, I’d choose The Howling. But this one nevertheless has a special place in my (ripped-out by claws) heart.

1. Showgirls (1995): Paul Verhoeven is no stranger to having audiences misunderstand his movies, but people really missed the boat on this one. The story of an avid young dancer (Elizabeth Berkeley) working her way up the Las Vegas stripping circuit was tarred and feathered and ran out of town when it first came out, and critics today still smirk if you try to defend it. But the truth is that this is a devastating satire of ambition and show biz, visually exhilarating and funny enough (and intentionally funny) to make Frank Tashlin proud. Between the reviewers and the great French director Jacques Rivette (who called this a masterpiece), I’ll go with Rivette, thank you.

2. Heaven’s Gate (1980): Another beautiful movie ruined by a lingering reputation. The story goes that Michael Cimino’s epic saga of the corruption of the potential of the Old West was virtually single-handedly destroyed by a review from New York Times Vincent Canby. Afterwards, everybody just seemed to be parroting the same words (“disaster,” “overlong,” “incomprehensible”) without even bothering to see the movie. Its reputation remains shaky to this day, but I’m glad to see more and more people at least giving this profoundly moving Western a chance. Heck, the great British critic Robin Wood even placed it in his all-time top-10 list.

3. Lady in the Water (2006): I’m not a big fan of M. Night Shyamalan, but this heartfelt fantasy absolutely didn’t deserve the venom the critics spewed on it. Sure, Shyamalan has a pretty unsightly sense of self-grandeur that is off-putting, insisting on creating his own worlds (complete with his own mythology) where he is some sort of messiah. All of this applies here, but people seemed to entirely miss the sweetness and childlike sense of storytelling and community that the movie radiates. When Paul Giamatti brings the water sprite (Bryce Dallas Howard) back to life through the power of his emotion, it’s hard not to cry. Instead, folks were making fun of the special effects.

4. Mission to Mars (2000): When you talk about Brian De Palma, it seems you can’t just give props to the guy, you have to vigorously defend him against an army of naysayers. “He’s a cold stylist!” “He’s a misogynist!” “He rips off other movies!” So it goes with this exceptional science-fiction tale, which was slaughtered by reviews when it first came out. People were complaining about the quality of the dialogue and the silliness of the situations and completely missing the visual poetry De Palma invests in this film, which is more than worthy of comparisons with Stanley Kubrick’s own classic space odyssey. I usually dislike the critic Armond White, but bless him for defending this one.

5. Color of Night (1994): Weird how some critics sometimes will focus on a film’s single aspect and forget about the rest. When talking about Richard Rush’s giddy, audaciously over-the-top thriller, they kept going back to Bruce Willis’s penis over and over. Never mind the bold use of color, the hilariously high-pitched cast (including Ruben Blades, Brad Dourif, Lance Henriksen and Leslie Ann Warren), or the return of director Rush (absent from the screen for 15 years). No, it was all about the special guest appearance of Bruce’s willie. Grow up, people, and appreciate a movie that stretches the borders of a conventional thriller.

6. Ishtar (1987): Another one of those movies whose very name seems to make people shudder. Folks saw Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman playing terrible lounge singers stuck in the Middle East, then saw the huge price tag on the movie’s budget, and readily called it a turkey. No need to even watch it, apparently. Actually, it’s a very funny satire of the old Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road comedies, with barbed commentary on Yankee fingerprints in that troubled region of the world and insights on friendship and betrayal from director Elaine May. And, dear critics: The songs are supposed to be bad. That’s part of something called “humor.”

7. A Countess from Hong Kong (1967): Talk about disrespecting your elders. Charlie Chaplin is one of cinema’s great builders, giving dignity to screen slapstick and finding nobility and humor in human survival at its most desperate. So how do reviewers repay him when he made this criminally underrated comedy-drama? Oh, by deciding he was “senile.” I can see audiences who got off on Bonnie and Clyde that same year shunning this as old-hat, but anybody with even the slightest sense of film history should have understood Chaplin’s sweetness here, which is so deliberately anachronistic as to be downright avant-garde. Andrew Sarris’s terrific appreciation seems like a voice in the wilderness, both then and now.

8. Cruising (1980): There were picketing lines even before William Friedkin’s lurid thriller reached screens. Because the story dealt with a New York cop (Al Pacino) who had to pose as a gay hustler in order to capture a killer terrorizing the city’s homosexual areas, it was automatically assumed that the film was homophobic. That’s an understandable response, of course, but the movie is not so much against gays as it is against the oppressions society forces on people of all kinds, resulting in murderous distortions of sexuality and identity. Glad to see it got more shaded, understanding reviews when it was re-released a few years ago.

9. Land of the Pharaohs (1955): Howard Hawks was a master storyteller who left masterpieces in every genre he tackled. Or almost every genre. Even Hawks aficionados dismiss his entry in the sword-and-sandal epic sweepstakes, but it’s not a bad movie at all. The plot, set in ancient Egypt and dealing with an architect involved with pyramids, stern pharaohs and malicious vixens, is an odd fit for the loose-limbed filmmaker, but it has the professional-men-in-action lines of the classic Hawks template, and the film displays a marvelous sense of movement in crowds and widescreen spaces. And, in its deadpan way, it’s very funny. Ever alert, Martin Scorsese gave it a nice shoutout in his documentary about American movies.

10. Freddy Got Fingered (2001): Is Tom Green a mad genius, or just mad? I’m willing to risk my critical reputation (which is not saying a lot) in suggesting the former. Critics scrambled to outdo each other’s vitriol when it came to reviewing this purposefully haphazard film, which isn’t so much a comedy as a freeform essay on what’s funny, what’s gross, and what’s just impossible to describe. Will it become the Un Chien Andalou of the gross-out comic world? Only time will tell, but for now, you’d be hard pressed to dismiss this as an ordinary movie.

Killshot (The Weinstein Co.): And this week’s Tortured Unreleased Project award goes to… this long-shelved thriller, which was apparently already in the works when the Weinstein brothers were still at Miramax in the 1990s. It’s gone through so many different hands, and been recut and previewed and reshaped so many times, that it must by now suggest a stitched-together Frankenstein monster of what it once was. Despite all, it’s not terrible. The guy who made Shakespeare in Love was probably not the best choice to direct an Elmore Leonard story, but the cast (including Mickey Rourke, Diane Lane, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Rosario Dawson) is solid.

New in Town (Fox): Good grief! Renee Zellweger’s face looks frozen even before she gets to the subzero Minnesota town into which she’s transplanted. She plays the standard career girl with more ambition than heart who gets to soften up once she moves out of the big city and learns the ways of love from a big hunk of a man (here it’s Harry Connick Jr.). Didn’t they already shoot this in the 1940s with Rosalind Russell and Fred MacMurray? Legally Blonde goes to Fargo? Look, I spent some time in Minnesota, and, despite their peculiar questions about that modern-day Sodom that is San Francisco, they deserve better than this.

Falling Down (Warner Bros.): Michael Douglas is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. It’s a pretty good idea, actually: You have an American dad who cracks under the pressure of modern-day stress, abandons his car in a traffic jam and marches through the least savory portions of L.A., going ballistic on anybody who gets in his way. Unfortunately, Joel Schumacher has made a career out of taking pretty good ideas and turning them into glitzy mulch. (Even The Lost Boys deserved more.) This could have been a sharp dark comedy or a devastating exposé of urban anxiety, but the filmmakers lose their courage along the way. In the end, it’s the movie that falls down.

Zabriskie Point (Warner Bros.): Ah, the 1970s. When an art-house staple like Michelangelo Antonioni could actually be invited to make a movie in Hollywood, and then be chastised for being “pretentious.” Critics’ negative reactions to this one are baffling, as if they were expecting the L’Avventura director to turn in a feel-good Western or something. But existential artist that he is, Antonioni instead delivered a slow, visually ravishing, spooky vision of alienation, with a pair of young lovebirds walking through this alien, capitalist wasteland. Well worth a look, if for nothing else than for the eye-popping climactic apocalypse that’s unleashed upon Rod Taylor’s expensive mansion. Name a movie in the past five years that’s been as daring.

Philippe Garrel x 2 (Zeitgeist): Philippe Garrel is, as they say, an acquired taste. If you can manage to stay awake, his rhythm takes hold and you find yourself fascinatingly narcotized. Regular Lovers is the only one of his films that’s received anything close to a release, so this two-film package (I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar (J’entends plus la guitare, 1991) and Emergency Kisses - (Les Baisers de secours, 1989)) is mandatory for serious film students. Keep the bottle of pep pills handy, and have a go at them.

The Cannes Film Festival came to a close yesterday, with Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon unsurprisingly taking home the Palme d’Or. Knowing Haneke’s typical brand of hardcore seriousness, expect no romantic comedy. The top winner at Cannes usually showcases plenty of artistic merit, though sometimes you really have to wonder. (Dancer in the Dark, anyone? Pelle the Conqueror? The Son’s Room?) So here, without further ado, is a list of my 10 favorite past Palme d’Or winners, in chronological order.

Viridiana (1961): That Luis Bunuel’s scathing story of the desire for faith and the endless variety of human venality made it to the festival in one piece (it was produced in Spain under Franco’s nose) is miraculous in itself. That it pocketed the top prize is even more amazing. Still stands up sublimely.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964): Jacques Demy lived in a world of his own, and when he put that world on the screen, it could be either nauseatingly saccharine or plain enchanting. This candyland fantasy, in which every word is sung, epitomizes the latter category. A visual and melodic feast; weirdly enough, one-eyed master Fritz Lang was the president of the jury that year.
 
Blowup (1966): It’s one thing to incorporate a decade’s feeling of unease into a movie; turning them into a timeless artistic statement is quite another. This existential thriller is the only movie I can think of that could fascinate students of Michelangelo Antonioni’s stylized angst and fans of the first Austin Powers.

If… (1968): Lindsay Anderson’s unforgettable call for arms, which could never be made now. Taking a page from Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct, Anderson directs Malcolm McDowell into cinematic legend as a budding revolutionary navigating a world of dying British symbols, bullies, and offhand surrealism. Great music, too.

Taxi Driver (1976): Where to begin? Robert De Niro’s indelible “You talkin’ to me” speech? Jodie Foster dancing with Harvey Keitel? The final bloodbath? Martin Scorsese created a brilliant urban nightmare, but apparently other jury members had to fight hard for the film to win, since jury president Tennessee Williams was beyond appalled by the film’s violence. They won their case, and cinema history was made.

Apocalypse Now (1979): “My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam!” Francis Ford Coppola’s legendarily arduous production works best in sequences than as a whole, but what sequences! Beset by problems (horrible weather, ailing actors, money troubles) and presented as a “work in progress,” the film nevertheless waltzed out the top winner. The “Ride of the Valkyries” sequence surely had something to do with it.

Under the Sun of Satan (1987): Maybe the most challenging movie on the list, from a filmmaker who’s still too unknown outside of his native France. The George Bernanos novel is just about impossible to adapt, yet Maurice Pialat is up to the challenge, and creates a difficult but ultimately overpowering portrait of a rural priest’s faith and passion. Jeered while collecting his prize, Pialat flipped off the audience. Nice!

Wild at Heart (1990): Not the greatest David Lynch movie (Mulholland Dr. received only the Best Director Award when it played in Cannes), but I always had a soft spot for this woolly road trip into the great surrealist’s pop subconscious. Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern are beautifully matched bats out of hell, Diane Ladd and Willem Dafoe do some unforgettably grotesque things, and hey, it’s The Wizard of Oz!

Pulp Fiction (1994): Another controversial winner (like Pialat, Quentin Tarantino gave some jeering harridan the finger) that still works beautifully. Pumpkin and Honey Bunny at the café. “Royale with cheese.” The adrenaline shot. “Bring out the gimp.” The Wolf in his tux. So many indelible bits, so little time… For anybody with the slightest love for cinema, it’s a gift that just keeps on giving.

A Taste of Cherry (1997): Abbas Kiarostami won a deserved Palme for this superficially simple but in reality quite complex tale of a suicidal man’s journey into an open grave. With breathtaking visuals, evocative rhythms, and quite a stinger at the end. A great starting place to explore the works of one of the world’s greatest filmmakers.

Terminator Salvation provides the redoubtable action franchise with a handful of “firsts.” First sequel to not have Arnold Schwarzenegger, first to have a PG-13 rating, and first to absolutely suck. Seriously, how did such a kick-ass series strike such a joyless note? Frankly, I blame The Dark Knight. After that one, every action flick now is laboring after the serious and meaningful treatment. Please, it’s hard enough to be an entertaining movie, so leave the statements about despairing human life to Michael Haneke or the Babel guy or whoever. Set entirely in the near future, the story follows John Connor (Christian Bale) as he leads the human resistance against the rampaging machines that have taken over the world after Judgment Day. For a franchise filled with so many memorable female characters, the ladies don’t have much to do here. The focus is on the enigmatic Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), but a bigger mystery is why Helena Bonham Carter and Bryce Dallas Howard aren’t given better things to do than to just skulk around CGI-looking futuristic rubble. There’s too much camera-shaking, and the structure boils down to run-hide-run-hide-run-hide (the guy from Entertainment Weekly who described this as a zombie movie hit the nail right on the head). The director, McG, keeps things rushing along enough to entertain the ADD-freaks in the audience, but for anyone who remembers the patient mix of explosions and characters in James Cameron’s 1984 original will get no Salvation from this boringly busy actioner.

It took me a bit to get into Luchino Visconti (1906-1976). For a while, watching his period pieces of men in tuxedos and women in fancy brocades posed against impeccably turned-out rooms, I had the feeling he was sort of an Italian James Ivory, directing furniture better than people. Even a viewing of The Leopard (1963) didn’t help change my mind, but that’s because the version I saw (the English-language released in theaters by Fox) had been truncated and very badly recut. It was a viewing of The Leopard that Visconti wanted, the Criterion DVD version that’s over three hours and in Italian, which changed my mind. Suddenly, everything had fallen into place. It wasn’t about the décor, but about the passage of time, the story of people (the director included) who mourned the fading beauty of their world. Another fascinating thing was the way Visconti, especially as he grew older, became both fascinated and repelled by this rotting. It’s the intensity of their feelings that keep the films turning into camp.

Visconti was a fascinating figure, full of contradictions: An aristocratic gay Marxist, courtly and massive (Burt Lancaster once described him as a “magnificent bull”). He was born in luxury, the son of a Duke who loved expensive horses. His interest in the arts took him to the fertile artists’ enclave of early 20th-century Europe, where he met Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau, and Jean Renoir. It was Renoir who gave Visconti his start as an assistant director in the great French director’s A Day in the Country (1936). During the shooting, Renoir reportedly brought James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice to Visconti’s attention, and, sure enough, in 1943 Visconti debuted as a director with his own version of it, Ossessione. If it shows plenty of elements that illustrate Renoir’s influence, his next movie, La Terra Treme (1948), plays like a catalog of Italian neo-realist tropes (location shooting, nonprofessional actors). The thing, however, is that Visconti is as far from a neo-realist as possible. He’s operatic, voluptuous, his movies spill over. This contrast between control and abandon is a tension that follows him throughout his career.

Bellissima (1951) was a vehicle for Anna Magnani, while Senso (1954), with Alida Valli and Farley Granger, was the first of his portrayals of febrile emotion corseted by the strictures of society. The White Nights (1957) is a really ravishing transposition of Dostoyevsky, even though I can’t stand Maria Schell’s tireless smiling. Rocco and His Brothers (1960), with Alain Delon as the prettiest boxer ever, again suggests opera without the singing, though it wasn’t until The Leopard that Visconti’s themes and styles came together beautifully (few movies can be positively compared to Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons). I still haven’t seen Sandra (1965) and The Stranger (1967); The Damned (1969) is sort of a turning point, since after it Visconti seemed to simply stop caring about plot and characterizations to focus exclusively on mood and gorgeous images of decay. Death in Venice (1971) and Ludwig (1972) and long and slow, unmistakably heartfelt but hard to sit through for somebody who doesn’t share Visconti’s obsessions. Weirdly enough, Conversation Piece (1974), the Visconti nobody seems to like, is my favorite of his late movies, a surprisingly mellow comedy. The ailing filmmaker died before completing editing of his last film, The Innocent (1976).

I wonder if many fans of ultra-hardcore porn princess Sasha Grey will seek out The Girlfriend Experience and squirm their way through a chilly, artsy drama in which their goddess appears naked for half a second (and in a darkened room). But the ones really getting the blue balls will be apologists for Steven Soderbergh, who directed this wan misfire. Grey plays (“plays” being maybe too strong word, since she just mopes around making eyes at the camera) a high-priced Manhattan escort (her prices are in the fourth digits) with a relatively understanding boyfriend (Chris Santos) and a sudden pang of emotion toward her latest client, a married screenwriter. There’s no story, just a bunch of wandering in lofts, warehouses and restaurants, which Soderbergh cuts and shuffles in chronological order in a vain attempt to make things interesting. And since the story is set in 2008 before the presidential elections, there’s a lot of talk about “the economy” and “the bailout,” which I guess is meant to reflect the way the characters, the call-girl above all, use themselves as merchandise. An intriguing idea, but it’s lost in a morass of clumsy improvisation (only critic Glenn Kenny, as a deliberately repulsive “erotic connoisseur,” can ad-lib in a funny way) and misshapen scenes. Grey is a dark and mysterious camera subject, but she doesn’t bring much to the party emotionally. And Soderbergh, after his lumbering two-part epic Che, is left to find new boring ways to be “unpredictable.”