Film Clips 

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P.S. I LOVE YOU It's possible for this to have been a winner had its running time been capped at 100 minutes. That way, it could have focused on the most interesting aspect: the palpable sense of loss a wife experiences after her husband dies of a brain tumor, and efforts to insure that she doesn't forfeit her life to misery. This is prime tearjerker material, and Hilary Swank and (to a lesser degree) Gerard Butler demonstrate that they're capable of pulling this off. Instead, this runs 126 minutes, and that extra half-hour bloats the material into an ugly mishmash in which the attempts at comedy are excruciating and the drama gets diluted by needless set-pieces (Swank not only sings along to Judy Garland's "The Man That Got Away" in her living room but also merits two karaoke scenes). The central thrust, dopey but sweet, is that Butler's Gerry knows that Swank's Holly will have a hard time coping with his passing, so he arranges for her to receive a series of letters after his death to help her cope. Yet it's hard to focus on this storyline when, for instance, Lisa Kudrow (as Holly's cock-hungry friend) regularly shows up to lust after stray men, or when Holly and her best buds (Kudrow and Gina Gershon) get stranded in a fishing boat in the movie's worst scene. And don't get me started on Harry Connick Jr.'s maddening performance as Daniel, a potential love interest who's either A) mentally challenged; B) autistic; C) suffering from Tourette's syndrome; D) auditioning for a "This is your brain on drugs" TV spot; or E) a serial killer. So does the possibly psychotic Forrest Gump get the girl? Only suckers who shell out for this pap will ever know. *1/2

STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING Frank Langella has aged beautifully, hasn't he? A bit of a dullard in his younger years (I never understood the appeal of his drowsy turn as Dracula back in the 1970s), he's lately been knocking it out of the park in choice supporting roles in Good Night, and Good Luck and the otherwise disposable House of D. He's now been entrusted with the central role in this adaptation of Brian Morton's novel, and the result is a perfectly modulated performance in a film so quiet that just the crunch of buttered popcorn might drown out some of its subtleties. Langella stars as Leonard Schiller, a once-prominent author who's been forgotten over the course of time. Working on his fifth novel, Leonard is visited by Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), a graduate student urging him to be the subject of her thesis. Leonard refuses until he acknowledges to himself that any publicity might be a boost to his now-invisible career; this leads to a rocky relationship between the pair, as the 70-ish author and 20-ish student embark on an unorthodox May-December romance in which the older man refuses to completely open up to scrutiny and the younger woman fluctuates between literary companion, loving fan and sly opportunist. With this modest picture, writer-director Andrew Wagner and co-adapter Fred Parnes offer an elegy of sorts to the continual passing of the New York intellectual, and Langella movingly embodies this literary lion as a rigid disciplinarian so out of step with modern-day vulgarities that he might as well have stepped out of the 1850s. ***

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET Sweeney Todd is an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's 1979 Broadway smash, but it hides its stage roots so thoroughly that it often feels like a piece created exclusively for the screen. There's no trace of the often limiting theatricality that has marred other stage-to-screen transfers, though that's hardly a surprise given that Tim Burton remains one of our most visually adept filmmakers. In refashioning Sweeney Todd for the movies, he and scripter John Logan have created a big, bold musical that functions as an upscale slasher film: It's bloody but also bloody good, with the gore tempered by the melancholy love stories that dominate the proceedings. Johnny Depp delivers a haunted performance as a barber who returns to London after 15 years in prison to exact his revenge on the judge (Alan Rickman) who ruined his life; he's aided in his efforts by lonely widow Nellie Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter). As partners-in-crime, they're matched beautifully: He slits the throats of all who sit in his barber's chair, while she grinds up the corpses to use in her popular meat pies. Burton's decision to stylize the film to within an inch of its life (his most theatrical flourish is to retain a Grand Guignol sense of the melodramatic) was a sound one, resulting in a visual feast that dazzles even through the setting's necessary grime. And while neither Depp nor Carter are classically trained singers, both are just fine belting out Sondheim's tunes. More importantly, they provide this rousing musical with the emotional heft necessary to prevent it from merely becoming an exercise in Gothic chic. ***1/2