Two Lovers (Magnolia): Best known for somber gangland thrillers like Little Odessa and We Own the Night, James Gray lightens up a bit and tries the romantic road. The lovers of the title are played by a pre-meltdown Joaquin Phoenix and a miscast-but-affecting Gwyneth Paltrow, two damaged characters coming together in Brooklyn. He’s a moody bachelor with some unexplored mommy issues (no wonder, since mommy is played by Isabella Rossellini), while she’s a kept girl who tries to party the angst away but inevitably ends up moping by Phoenix’s side on the top of a building. I was unimpressed by Gray’s earlier rip-offs of The Godfather, despite some critics insisting that he’s a big-deal director. So I was pleasantly surprised to find a quite moving, emotional story here, nicely played by the two talented actors. I just hope Gray steps out of this familiar territory for a while, go do a horror movie or something. Oh, and note to Mr. Skin: Paltrow boobage around the midway point.

Do the Right Thing (Universal): Another view of Brooklyn, and oh man, this one cooks. Spike Lee’s incendiary snapshot of a melting pot boiling over is enough to make movie-buffs forgive the director’s shameless self-promotion, race card-playing hijinks and big-mouthed theatrics on the sidelines of basketball games. It takes place over one very hot summer day in a multiracial neighborhood, with temperatures rising in tandem with people’s prejudices. Everybody is always getting into each other’s faces, spewing anger and pent-up frustrations. The central conflict comes when white pizzeria owner Sal (Danny Aiello) refuses to include a black face among his Italian-American wall-of-fame portraits, which starts a mini-revolution. Lee’s confrontational visual style is at its boldest, and the cast is full of memorable characters, including Ossie Davis’s Da Mayor, Giancarlo Esposito’s Buggin Out, Bill Nunn’s Radio Raheem, and Samuel L. Jackson’s Mister Senor Love Daddy. I’ll take Lee’s fierce, no-we-can’t-get-along comedy over any of Paul Haggis’s drippy dramas.

Tokyo! (Liberation): Why do directors keep going for omnibus movies? Sure, it’s easier to contribute a slim episode than stressing over a whole feature, plus you get to hang out with the other filmmakers, but c’mon, are these projects ever really a good idea? (I guess I’m still suffering from Eros.) This one, offering three takes on Japan’s capital, is only occasionally tolerable. The first episode is directed by Michel Gondry, who made one of my all-time faves, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; it deals with a young woman who, I guess because she feels unnoticed by her boyfriend, turns into a piece of furniture. Ooookay. The second one deals with a filthy, half-blind bum who terrorizes the city like a human-sized Godzilla; it’s directed by Leos Carax, a much-admired French director whose movies I still have to see, and it’s very funny in a crude way. The last one is from Joon-ho Bong, and it has to do with robots and loneliness. Meh.

Fulci Frenzy (Severin): Oh yeah, that’s more like it. Two from the great Lucio Fulci, though neither of them are the usual horror flicks we usually associate with “The Godfather of Gore.” The Psychic is more of a mood piece, following a woman (Jennifer O’Neill) who has strange visions of death. Very slow, but it holds you all the way through. The other one, Perversion Story, is also an offbeat thriller, this time set in San Francisco and focusing on a woman (the yummy Marisa Nell) who starts out as a dour, sickly housewife dressed all in black, apparently dies, and somehow reappears as a bouncy stripper. It’s a total ripoff of Vertigo, and a fascinating one. A savory item for Fulci completists like myself.

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (Fox): How many boys used to play the old Street Fighter video game just to see Chun-Li’s boobs bouncing after her victory jump? Can’t have been just me. Anyway, the character is the focus in this dismal, should-have-gone-straight-to-cable sequel to the terrible 1994 live-action Street Fighter movie. She’s played, sadly without jiggle or much of anything else, by Kristin Kreuk (Lana Lang from TV’s Smallville). Where’s Jean-Claude Van Damme when you need him?

Not too sure if these are good news or bad news. The Academy of Arts and Sciences has recently announced that there will be ten (rather than the usual five) nominees for the Best Picture Oscar this year. Jeez, it’s hard enough getting five exceptional movies, now we’re going for ten? Does that mean that the voters will start reviewing the top-ten lists of critics instead of seeing which studio sends them the most gift baskets? And will audience members get to vote from their cell phones and eliminate the most boring entries? Then again, this could be a good thing. Maybe the Academy’s elitist shackles will loosen a bit and they will nominate some more offbeat works instead of just the glossy period pieces and phony-baloney biopics that get released at the end of every year like clockwork. Imagine an animated film (Pixar’s Up) or a horror movie (Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell) getting a crack at taking home the Best Picture Oscar. Recent winners have been pretty blah (Slumdog Millionaire? A Beautiful Mind?? Crash???), so with more choices there will be a bigger chance of netting a worthy movie outside the Academy’s usual safety zone. One thing I’m not thrilled about, though: There will be more clips and tributes to slog through, as if the Oscars already didn’t go on for long enough.

As somebody who actually enjoyed (in a brain-dead way) the action in the first Transformers movie, I was quite surprised at how unentertaining the blockbuster sequel turned out. Make that noisily, poundingly unentertaining. Stumbling out of Michael Bay’s latest, I felt like my brains had been scrambled until they were ready to run out of my nose. And let’s not even get into my eyeballs. The story picks up on that ugly kid from the first one (Shia LaBeouf), who’s going to college but still has trouble with his nagging parents. He’s still seeing that hot chick (Megan Fox), but she’s got competition from another babe, who turns out to be a robot-in-disguise. Yup, those dastardly Decepticons are at it again, after Shia because he’s somehow found out that the Transformers are related to ancient Egyptians. Or something. Seriously, this movie is just about impossible to follow. Bay keeps cutting and cutting to give the impression of kinetic movement happening all the time, but instead it just gives you a headache. When in doubt (and boy, does he have doubts), he just blows something up and has the characters running in slow-motion in front of it, because, you know, you can outrun an explosion. But what about the Transformers themselves, you ask. Pretty cool, no? I sincerely couldn’t tell, because a) they’re designed like pieces of scrap metal attached to more scrapped metal, and b) they’re filmed too close and too quickly to matter anyway. And did I mention the fart jokes and the dangling nutsack jokes? Or the robotic sidekicks who talk in ebonics and flash gold teeth? Do I have to? When does the audience get its revenge?

The life of Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-1973) was almost as fascinating as his movies. One of the earliest cinephile-filmmakers, he developed a voracious taste in movies (especially American dramas) from an early age, and became a connoisseur of classic Hollywood. He was also part of the French Resistance during the Nazi invasion, a milieu he would pay homage to years later in Army of Shadows (1969). The occupation also marks his first cinematic triumph, Le Silence de la Mer (1947), which deals with a German soldier’s stay with a French father and daughter in their country cottage. Though the subject is very removed from the gangster stories Melville is most famous for, his style is already evident. A peculiar and intense interiorization of emotion, with an emphasis on the force of gestures and the masks that characters wear, seem to anticipate the work of Robert Bresson, whose Diary of a Country Priest would come out four years later. (For his part, Melville would insist that Bresson ripped off his style.) Also famous is Les Enfants Terribles (1950), Melville’s adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s drama about an unruly trio that seems likewise to predate Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962). Bob le Flambeur (1956) was an atmospheric tribute to the silent men in trench coats of American pictures, with a protagonist who could have stepped out of a John Huston movie. Leon Morin, Prete (1961) showed how close Melville’s world was to a certain religious dimension (churches and underworlds rise or fall by their rituals), and was the first time he worked with Jean-Paul Belmondo.

By this time, Melville had become the unofficial older brother of the young critics-turned-filmmakers from Cahiers du Cinema. (He has a famous cameo in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless in 1960.) It was also in the early 1960s that he began his run of existential crime movies, starting with Le Doulos (1962) and following with Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966), Le Samourai (1967) and Le Cercle Rouge (1970). Like the domestic dramas of Yasujiro Ozu or the romantic comedies of Eric Rohmer, Melville’s mobster tales are often hard to tell apart. They inescapably have Alain Delon and deal with moody loners involved with violence and betrayal, often featuring sardonic police officers, torturously complex plots and attitudes that would be at home in a Hollywood noir thriller from the 1940s. I’m not saying that this sameness is a bad thing, just pointing out that Melville created a whole world of his own by repeating and tweaking the same elements from movie to movie. This process of lapidated cinema continued until his last movie, Un Flic (1972), where just the sight of Delon narrowing his eyes under a fedora is enough to know this is a Melville movie. I have to admit to admiring Melville more than really loving him (perhaps it has to do with his indifference to female characters). As for as French crime dramas, I tend to prefer Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954) and Claude Sautet’s Classe tous Risques (1960). But try telling that to the many fans of the Melville “cool,” from Jim Jarmusch to John Woo to Quentin Tarantino.

What a strange and sad day, yesterday. Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, two pop culture icons, passed away within hours of each other. Despite all his weirdness, Jackson was still an important musical artist, and his death came out of nowhere. Fawcett was 12 years older than him and had been suffering from cancer for years, yet it was her death that hit me the hardest. It had been such a ghastly contrast between the illness that took over her and the vibrant health that’s still projected in our memories. But, as I always say, let’s focus on how people lived rather than how they died. More than a few teenage boys surely nursed a crush on her from her heyday as America’s sweetheart as Jill Munroe in the 1970s TV hit Charlie’s Angels. The tawny mane, the great rows of smiling teeth, the Amazonian physique, the hint of Native American heritage that gave her valkyrie look something extra… She was a fine specimen, memorably displayed in her famous, red swimsuit poster. Her movie career was peculiar, starting out with decorative parts in Myra Breckinridge (1970), Logan’s Run (1976) and Saturn 3 (1980) and then, as if to prove that there was more to her than a feathery ‘do atop a luscious figure, taking a full-on turn into battered-women, noble-martyr territory. The Burning Bed (1984), Extremities (1986) and Double Exposure (1986) are like hardcore Lifetime Specials. Were the guys who had lusted after her being punished? But Fawcett would always be a lovely bird who would keep surprising us with her eccentricities on a talk show appearance or unexpected pools of feeling in an interview. She fought till the end. She’ll blend right in with the other angels up there.

Confession time: As far as sci-fi space operas went, my heart had already gone out to The Last Starfighter long before I had ever heard of Star Wars. To be fair, the George Lucas juggernaut was too rich to play in the movie matinee shows I used to catch on TV while growing up, while Nick Castle’s 1984 considerably less successful space adventure used to pop up on the telly at least once a month. Still, I feel no shame in my fondness for it. I was going through my brief yet intense obsession with video-games, so I could relate to the main character, a youngster (Lance Guest, whose stardom never really took off) who uses his expertise at an arcade game to escape the frustrations of having to live in a God-forsaken trailer park. All the same, my young self would often squirm through these early, earthbound sequences. “Where the hell are the aliens and the spaceships,” I would ask. As if on cue, a visitor from outer space (Robert Preston, who’s delightful) materializes to inform Guest that he’s been recruited to join an alien force and defend the galaxy against slimy invaders. So we’re off into the stars along with the hero’s girlfriend (Catherine Mary Stewart, another one of those ‘80s whatever-happened-to mysteries) and a reptilian sidekick (the great Irish actor Dan O’Herlihy, hidden under scaly latex). Crammed with action, jokes, and not-bad special-effects, this one is still a blast. And, yeah, I still prefer it to any of the pricier, more humorless Star Wars movies.

My Dinner with Andre (Criterion): I wonder what Hitchcock would have thought of Louis Malle’s 1981 movie, which is the epitome of the “pictures of people talking” that the Master of Suspense so reviled. I actually think he would have loved the sheer audacity of the stunt, which is the verbal equivalent of the disguised long-takes from Hitchcock’s Rope. Malle chronicles a meeting between actor Wallace Shawn and stage director Andre Gregory, who pretty much play themselves. That’s it. There are a few glimpses of New York City as “Wally” arrives and later leaves the restaurant, and occasionally a waiter with bushy eyebrows enters the frame, but for most of the running time it’s just the camera drinking in the talkfest between the eggheads. And weirdly enough, it becomes fascinating—not because of the dialogue itself, but the very subtle philosophical give-and-take between Gregory (who’s an agreeably searching intellectual) and Shawn (who’s more of a down-to-earth turtle). Not for everybody, though, since I’ve watched it with people who were just about stabbing themselves in order to stay awake.

Confessions of a Shopaholic (Walt Disney): They say timing is all in comedy. Well, this comedy had the bad luck of coming out at the worst possible time. Didn’t the studio realize that now, with the economy standing one step ahead of the abyss and millions of jobs down the drain, was not the best release slot for a movie about an obscenely wealthy airhead who is a compulsive spender? Instead of helping moviegoers forget the green realities outside the theater, it probably acted as an arrogant, let-them-eat-cake gesture. In all fairness, the movie itself (directed by PJ Hogan of My Best Friend’s Wedding fame) is no less offensive than, say, The Devil Wears Prada, or any other chick-flick that asks us to delight in a spirited comedienne going through clothes and boyfriends. As the shopaholic of the title, Isla Fisher is charming enough (I’m still unconvinced that she and Amy Adams are not the same person, though).

Last Year at Marienbad (Criterion): One for hardcore cinema students. Back in the 1960s, when there seemed to be a movie by Ingmar Bergman or Michelangelo Antonioni out every week (or so my father tells me), Alain Resnais set out to create the ultimate cinematic puzzle, a movie that’s pure symbol and mystery. Set in a luxurious hotel that’s shot like a giant chessboard, it follows the inscrutable relationship between “A” (Delphine Seyrig), “X” (Giorgio Albertazzi), and “M” (Sacha Pitoeff). Apparently there’s been an affair between “A” and “X” from their meeting last year… or has there been? People pose like statues, draw their lines, and breathe in the enigmatic air. What does it mean? I’m not even sure there’s a moral or a theme to it, though, having seen some other movies by Resnais (Night and Fog, Hiroshima Mon Amour), there may be something to do with memory. Even if there’s nothing underneath, though, I still like it as a movie version of Rubik’s Cube.

Waltz with Bashir (Sony): A one-of-a-kind but unsatisfying experiment. Director Ari Folman wanted to make a documentary about former members of the Israeli armed forces who took part in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon (and were involved, whether directly or otherwise, in the slaughter of civilians that followed). The problem: The subjects were willing to speak, but only after their identities had been masked. The solution: Folman used a lifelike yet surreal style of animation that not only gave body to the voices of the interviewees, but also illustrated their memories (situations that would be impossible or unwatchable if recreated using live-action methods). Fascinating idea. Unfortunately, the animation is so stiff that it might as well have been dashed off from the nearest laptop computer. Critics comparing it to the experiments of Richard Linklater (Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly) obviously haven’t seen those movies and are just assuming that all “adult” animation is the same. Instead of illuminating the events, Folman just queasily sketches them.

The Pink Panther 2 (MGM): Steve Martin, back as the latest incarnation of Inspector Clouseau. Not as good as the first one, which, considering how shoddy the first one was, is really saying something. Stick to the Peter Sellers classics, or revisit one of the cartoons.

Away We Go turns out to be every bit the arch, quirky indie-fest that its trailer promised. Some folks are defending it and comparing it to Juno, as if Juno were actually a great movie. The snarkiness from that movie, where the oh-so-ironic protagonist sarcastically passes judgment on everybody else on the screen, is present here, though it’s more cunningly disguised. The two main characters, played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, are the type of too-cool-for-school folks who give hipsters a bad name. Turns out Rudolph is preggers, so the couple head out on a road trip across the country (and into Canada) to find the perfect place to raise their baby. Trouble is, everywhere they look they see unfit parents or distraught parents or just generally uncool people. There’s Krasinski’s parents (Catherine O’Hara, Jeff Daniels), who will miss the birth because they’re heading out to Europe; Allison Janney (overacting like crazy) and Jim Gaffigan as a vulgar-slash-paranoid Phoenix couple; Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton as Wisconsin hippies (are there hippies in Wisconsin?); and Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey as unhappy Montreal folks who adopt children because she can’t herself have any. Rudolph and Krasinski turn up their noses at all of them, but the ironic thing is that I’d much rather spend time with any of them than with the protagonists. Rudolph looks like she always has a headache, and Krasinski, beard or no beard, is still the goofball from The Office. Sam Mendes, the American Beauty guy, directed this with his usual fastidious condescension. And the Alexi Murdoch soundtrack? Pee-you, man. Definitely a road not worth taking.

The feeling radiating most from Year One is, weirdly enough, innocence. A strange thing to say about a movie that sets out to be so irreverent in sacred territory, but maybe that’s just the feeling that friendly, PG-13 comedies give in these days of Hangovers and Superbads. Speaking of Superbad, Michael Cera is still doing his stammering-teen bit here, though at least it’s still funny. Jack Black is still doing his thing, and, even though I laughed often at his wild-eyed leering, it’s possibly time for a new shtick. The two play a pair of prehistoric slackers who get banished from their village and end up meeting a handful of Biblical characters on their way to that famous party town, Sodom. The Judd Apatow stock company contributes some juicy cameos, from Christopher “McLovin” Mintz-Plasse (as Isaac) to Paul Rudd (as Abel). There are also good bits from Hank Azaria, Oliver Platt, and David Cross, each seizing their moments on screen and turning them into private arias of comic expression. It’s a shame, then, that the structure of the movie is so rackety. Harold Ramis, the director, is an experienced and underrated hand at comedy (he wrote and acted in Stripes and Ghostbusters, and directed Groundhog Day and Analyze This), yet his control is surprisingly slack here. Still, for a movie that, according to some religious groups was supposed to be downright blasphemous, it makes for quite a likable night at the movies. But next time, get Black and Cera together for a decent Flintstones remake.

Robert Aldrich was a welcome troublemaker at a time when American movies, like the rest of American society, was in danger of succumbing to conformity. Throughout the 1950s, he directed a series of startling movies that rattled Hollywood conventions and tastefulness. What film of that era is more powerful of the grinding anxieties behind the tidy surface than Kiss Me Deadly (1955)? Based on a Mickey Spillane novel, that movie remains a cherry-bomb of ballsy iconoclasm, from the opening credits that run backwards to the climactic meltdown that sends humanity back into the ocean. The excitement visible on the screen, the sheer strangeness of this lurid project, made it a cult movie and a favorite of the impressionable young French critics who would go on to become New Wave directors. Godard and Truffaut loved Aldrich, yet they felt betrayed when later on he made it big with The Dirty Dozen (1967). Indeed, many historians today speak of Aldrich’s decline, but the truth is that the later projects are every bit as important as the early classics in depicting the bulldozing rebellion of this director.

Aldrich started out as an assistant director, and the directors he assisted were quite an illustrious bunch: Jean Renoir, Charlie Chaplin, Joseph Losey, William Wellman, Max Ophuls, and Robert Rossen, among others. He directed episodes for TV series (China Smith, Four Star Playhouse) before graduating to features with Apache (1954), with Burt Lancaster playing the first of the director’s many angry outsiders fighting against an oppressive society. That same year he made Vera Cruz, which pairs Lancaster with Gary Cooper in a surprisingly cynical Western that anticipates Sam Peckinpah’s later, meaner work. Kiss Me Deadly was his breakout film, and still remains his greatest, filled with unforgettable images and characters as Aldrich works towards the literally explosive ending. The Big Knife (1955) was a hard-hitting Hollywood exposé, Autumn Leaves (1956) a bizarrely sadistic soap opera, and Attack! (1956) an intense vision of hell on the battlefield. So much amazing work in so few years! The Garment Jungle (1957) was Aldrich’s first bump, not because the movie was bad but because it got him in trouble with studios and saddled with projects he wasn’t interested in, like The Angry Hills (1959) and Sodom and Gomorrah (1961). As the 1960s started, Aldrich was at a low ebb.

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford screeching for our delight, was the box-office hit Aldrich needed to get back on his feet. In fact, the director’s career is a seesaw of highs and lows, daring movies that bomb and blockbusters that are safe only on the surface. There’s the Old West kinkiness of The Last Sunset (1961), the Rat Pack goofing of 4 for Texas (1963), the self-indulgent meta-exercises in The Legend of Lyla Clare (1968), and the censorship-defying dramatics of The Killing of Sister George (1968). Even the 1970s, which found a certain grubbiness creeping into his style, is full of offbeat gems, like The Grissom Gang (1971) and The Emperor of the North (1973). Hustle (1974) and The Choirboys (1977) are distasteful, and The Frisco Kid (1979) pretty bland. Still, what other movie of the time was as explicit as Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977) in its criticism of America’s involvement in Vietnam? Aldrich was a formidable artist, swinging low and high, turning out art movies disguised as action thrillers. He was at times down, but never out. It’s fitting that his last movie, All the Marbles (1981), is about athletes who refuse to leave the arena.