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CURRENT RELEASES
AMERICAN SPLENDOR Like Adaptation, this misfit movie about a misfit man draws its strength from its ability to play around with the very structure of the motion picture form. In relating the true-life tale of underground cartoonist Harvey Pekar (aptly played by Paul Giamatti), this piece cleverly whiplashes between using movie actors and using the real-life personalities; the inventiveness even extends to the visuals, as parts are animated and framed like comic strips. For all its audacity around the edges, though, the movie rarely offers anything more than Teflon pleasures; unlike the magnificent documentary Crumb, it's content to stay on the surface, never digging deep in an attempt to examine the demons that drove Pekar's life. 
COLD CREEK MANOR This weak thriller is like a dead-end street in a swanky neighborhood, offering some interesting glimpses along the way but ultimately leading nowhere. Dennis Quaid and Sharon Stone play an NYC couple who, tired of the big-city bustle, purchase a mansion out in the sticks. Once the previous owner (Stephen Dorff), a rube just released from prison, shows up, bad things start happening, and the family soon suspects that their new home may have once been host to tragic events. What Richard Jefferies' script lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in gaping plotholes -- hardly a fair trade-off. Director Mike Figgis also composed the score, which during the tense scenes sounds like a two-year-old incessantly banging on random piano keys.
FREDDY VS. JASON Qualifying as both the 11th picture in the Friday the 13th series and the eighth entry in the Nightmare On Elm Street saga, this combines the two franchises in a manner that's sure to make mutual devotees of the Police Academy and Rambo series green with envy. By virtue of its plot, which brings Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) and Jason (Ken Kirzinger) together, this is a cut above most of the previous yarns, though there's still plenty of time for routine kid-gutting before the climactic showdown. This final battle will probably satisfy gorehounds, though anybody who thinks the outcome will rule out any possibilities of yet another sequel has probably been living in their mom's basement for too long. 1/2
JET LAG In this delightful French import, a chatty beautician (Juliette Binoche) and a curt fussbudget (Jean Reno) are forced by an airport strike to pass the time together in a hotel room, where they quickly become hostile toward each other's philosophies before finding common ground that allows them to blossom together. In a formulaic Hollywood comedy, this set-up would have resulted in wall-to-wall slapstick shenanigans, but here the emphasis is on talk, talk, talk -- and most of it is absorbing, intelligent, and often very funny. It's just too bad the filmmakers didn't let the story run its natural course rather than tacking on a phony ending.
LE DIVORCE The Howards End team of James Ivory, Ismail Merchant and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala attempt to recapture their former glory with this adaptation of Diane Johnson's 1997 bestseller about Americans in Paris, yet what they whip up isn't a spry look at the clashing of two cultures as much as a clumsy series of missteps -- a movie that never finds the right tone to punch across what could have been a perceptive and poignant tale. Naomi Watts works hard to create a character from among the wafts of vague characterizations that flood the film, but for the most part, the high-caliber cast finds itself adrift in a weightless confection that won't exactly add further strain to Yankee-Franco tensions but won't help build a bridge of understanding, either.
LOST IN LA MANCHA We've seen several documentaries about the making of a particular movie, but here's one that examines the "unmaking" of a movie. Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe were allowed to film the behind-the-scenes happenings regarding Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, an ambitious screen epic starring Johnny Depp and (as the windmill-fighting eccentric) Jean Rochefort. Instead, Fulton and Pepe ended up with reams of footage depicting an unbelievable string of calamitous events that ended up destroying the project after only a few days of shooting. Gilliam simply couldn't catch a break, and this movie, like a sadistic voyeur, peeps around every corner to view how Gilliam's dream project never stood a chance.
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