At the time of China Is Near, Mr. Bellocchio had joined the Italian Communist Party, which was no big deal for Italian artists and intellectuals, then or now. Yet there is some irony in the fact that the Red Brigades, a fanatical Communist Party splinter group formed in 1969, staged its most famous action as an extremist protest against the collaboration of the party with the Christian Democratic majority. If Mr. Bellocchio ever had the slightest sympathy for the methods and objectives of the Red Brigades, it was apparently transformed into a sickened sense of revulsion by the brutal murder of Aldo Moro, the president of the Christian Democratic Party, by the group in 1978.

Of the title of his film, Mr. Bellocchio says: “Good Morning, Night is [from] a verse by Emily Dickinson that I read some time ago. The exact title of the poem is actually ‘Good Morning, Midnight,’ but thinking about that verse, I thought it touched on the spirit of the film exactly; as this play on words, ‘good morning/night,’ is both a contradiction and a contrast. This interplay interests me.”

Mr. Bellocchio goes on to make an unusual statement about his modus operandi for this film, one that I’ve never heard from an American filmmaker about a bona fide historical subject: “Since I’m not a historian, I’m not interested in the factual truth, but more in telling a story in a new and unconventional way. Of course, I needed to dramatize certain elements in the film which didn’t exist in reality, so I invented certain parts of the story, focusing on the young woman’s character and on a young man who’s not part of the terrorist group. I couldn’t just passively recreate the story—the historical truth, that is—if any definite truths in the Moro tragedy exist.”

Mr. Bellocchio has also invented a screenplay within the screenplay with the same Emily Dickinson title. It’s a screenplay written by Enzo (Paolo Briguglia), a worker in the same government office in which the female terrorist Chiara (Maya Sansa) toils at a routine job as a cover for her activities in the Red Brigades. The characters of Chiara and Enzo seem to have been invented at least partly so that Mr. Bellocchio could stage supposedly disinterested debates about the humanity or inhumanity of the individual members of the group. Not that Chiara feels inhibited about expressing her own moral outrage, even to her revolutionary comrades, over the prospect of having to kill Moro if the government refuses to negotiate with them.

As much as Chiara clearly represents Mr. Bellocchio’s calculated aversion to the Red Brigades, the clinching proof of his feelings toward the kidnappers is in his heartfelt humanization of Moro. As Mr. Bellocchio describes the process: “When I was imagining Moro’s character, I often thought of my father, who died when I was a child. My father had something in common with Moro, whom I have never met. Like Moro, he was a very strong man, a conservative, who also had a very profound sense of humanity. My father’s figure has entered the movie and has given life to a character I have never met. Maybe I chose Roberto Herlitzka [as Moro] because he’s from Northern Italy and speaks with a northern accent, as did my father.”

Thus, Mr. Bellocchio’s Moro comes to serve as a paternal presence to his four much younger captors. This may not be the way it was in real life, but it definitely is the way that Mr. Bellocchio imagines it in Good Morning, Night. The film is thus not an effort at an objective re-creation of a historical event, but instead what the French describe as a personal meditation on that event. Whether this approach is acceptable, even among art-house filmgoers, remains to be seen.

What suspense there is arises from Chiara’s dreams and fantasies, imaginatively filmed by the director. In the wishful mental universe he has created, the real and the surreal merge into a plea for a kinder world that now seems further out of reach than ever. Still, the film plays by the rules of crime thrillers for the longest time before yielding to the dream-like consciousness of Chiara and her gifted creator. The satirically ultra-bourgeois opening scene—of an apartment being shown to a supposedly married couple, who later turn out to be Chiara and her fellow terrorist and make-believe husband, Ernesto (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio)—makes the glib salesman showing the apartment an almost comic reminder of everything that hard-core Marxists and Leninists find reprehensible in the capitalist system. Later, the hapless Enzo is arrested by the police as a possible terrorist simply because of the screenplay he has written on the subject, a work he has indiscreetly circulated far and wide in a futile effort to sell it.

Mr. Bellocchio is not without nostalgia for a more edifying time for the left, in the struggle to overthrow the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. The occasion is the funeral of one of the aged partisans in that much-honored struggle. Scenes from filmed Stalinist spectacles, faces from Soviet silent and Italian neorealist films, flit across Chiara’s troubled dreams. Mr. Bellocchio also seems to go out of his way to emphasize the banality of the party-line rhetoric spouted by the more fanatical cell members, Primo (Giovanni Calcagno) and Mariano (Luigi Lo Cascio). The kidnappers do allow Moro to write letters to his family, Christian Democratic officials and even the Pope, in a vain effort to get the authorities to negotiate.

One morning, Ernesto opens the blinds of the safe house and sees graffiti on the courtyard’s opposite wall. It reads: “People die from heroin. People die at the factory. Who gives a shit if Moro dies too.” The sentiment expressed is all too familiar in our media-saturated age, in which the always-impatient public demands the immediate resolution of every crime and disaster. At this moment, the film shows how terribly alone Moro must have felt, with even his followers hoping he would die quickly so as to end their own agonies. What finally does happen is part reality, part fantasy and all compassion. It is a strangely moving experience for the historically aware filmgoer.

Lost

Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, from a screenplay by Mr. Abu-Assad and Bero Beyer, is a Palestinian film about suicide bombers—or, rather, would-be suicide bombers, since we don’t know until the very end of the film if lifelong friends Said (Kaias Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) will go through with their mission or not. It is not an easy call, because Mr. Abu-Assad and Mr. Beyer have balanced the arguments for and against the bombings from a uniquely Palestinian point of view. In this entirely fictional scenario, the voice of non-violence is given (as in Good Morning, Night) to a woman—in this instance, Said’s girlfriend, Suha (Lubna Azabal).

The most depressing aspect of the production is the director’s account of the ongoing violence between Palestinians and Israelis that interrupted the filming in the West Bank city of Nablus. “To get into the area,” Mr. Abu-Assad recalls, “you have to get friendly with the Israeli army. To survive inside the area you have to work with the Palestinians.”

On one occasion, the location manager was kidnapped by Palestinian insurgents, and the late Yasir Arafat had to intervene to get the location manager returned to the production crew. Even so, many other members of the crew returned to Europe to escape the constant crossfire of Israeli and Palestinian bullets and missiles. Many of the Palestinians were suspicious of the film’s political intentions regarding the suicide bombers—as well they might be, since Mr. Abu-Assad in no way proselytizes for the taking of innocent lives, even in a cause he deems worthy. The point here is not to turn fact into fiction—as in Good Morning, Night—but to make the actors feel more authentic in delivering their angry litanies of grievances on the firing line where the refugee camps are located. That the film was made at all under these fearsome conditions attests to the filmmaker’s sincerity and conviction. And the performances of the actors come close to being heroic.

There is a moment in the film when the two suicide bombers in transit are told that two angels will be on hand to escort the martyrs to Heaven once the deed is done. Even so, I felt that I was no closer to understanding the psychology of suicide bombers than I had been before this moment of blind faith. Nor am I sure that one can fictionalize the grim realities of the Middle East, both before and after 9/11. Said and Khaled are likable enough and sympathetic enough as low-paid West Bank auto mechanics to qualify as working-class heroes in a Marxist allegory. This is to say that their grievances have a bread-and-butter component that is hardly relevant to many if not most suicide bombers. As for Suha, the voice of reason and forbearance, one can hope she will prevail over the louder and more insistent voices from the mosques preaching hatred and revenge. But as a Greek-American who was brought up on a steady diet of ancient hatreds, I wear my pessimism about a happy and peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on my frayed sleeve. And not even a well-meaning movie like Paradise Now is likely to help matters apprec

At the time of China Is Near, Mr. Bellocchio had joined the Italian Communist Party, which was no big deal for Italian artists and intellectuals, then or now. Yet there is some irony in the fact that the Red Brigades, a fanatical Communist Party splinter group formed in 1969, staged its most famous action as an extremist protest against the collaboration of the party with the Christian Democratic majority. If Mr. Bellocchio ever had the slightest sympathy for the methods and objectives of the Red Brigades, it was apparently transformed into a sickened sense of revulsion by the brutal murder of Aldo Moro, the president of the Christian Democratic Party, by the group in 1978.

Of the title of his film, Mr. Bellocchio says: “ Good Morning, Night is [from] a verse by Emily Dickinson that I read some time ago. The exact title of the poem is actually ‘Good Morning, Midnight,’ but thinking about that verse, I thought it touched on the spirit of the film exactly; as this play on words, ‘good morning/night,’ is both a contradiction and a contrast. This interplay interests me.”

Mr. Bellocchio goes on to make an unusual statement about his modus operandi for this film, one that I’ve never heard from an American filmmaker about a bona fide historical subject: “Since I’m not a historian, I’m not interested in the factual truth, but more in telling a story in a new and unconventional way. Of course, I needed to dramatize certain elements in the film which didn’t exist in reality, so I invented certain parts of the story, focusing on the young woman’s character and on a young man who’s not part of the terrorist group. I couldn’t just passively recreate the story—the historical truth, that is—if any definite truths in the Moro tragedy exist.”

Mr. Bellocchio has also invented a screenplay within the screenplay with the same Emily Dickinson title. It’s a screenplay written by Enzo (Paolo Briguglia), a worker in the same government office in which the female terrorist Chiara (Maya Sansa) toils at a routine job as a cover for her activities in the Red Brigades. The characters of Chiara and Enzo seem to have been invented at least partly so that Mr. Bellocchio could stage supposedly disinterested debates about the humanity or inhumanity of the individual members of the group. Not that Chiara feels inhibited about expressing her own moral outrage, even to her revolutionary comrades, over the prospect of having to kill Moro if the government refuses to negotiate with them.

As much as Chiara clearly represents Mr. Bellocchio’s calculated aversion to the Red Brigades, the clinching proof of his feelings toward the kidnappers is in his heartfelt humanization of Moro. As Mr. Bellocchio describes the process: “When I was imagining Moro’s character, I often thought of my father, who died when I was a child. My father had something in common with Moro, whom I have never met. Like Moro, he was a very strong man, a conservative, who also had a very profound sense of humanity. My father’s figure has entered the movie and has given life to a character I have never met. Maybe I chose Roberto Herlitzka [as Moro] because he’s from Northern Italy and speaks with a northern accent, as did my father.”

Thus, Mr. Bellocchio’s Moro comes to serve as a paternal presence to his four much younger captors. This may not be the way it was in real life, but it definitely is the way that Mr. Bellocchio imagines it in Good Morning, Night. The film is thus not an effort at an objective re-creation of a historical event, but instead what the French describe as a personal meditation on that event. Whether this approach is acceptable, even among art-house filmgoers, remains to be seen.

What suspense there is arises from Chiara’s dreams and fantasies, imaginatively filmed by the director. In the wishful mental universe he has created, the real and the surreal merge into a plea for a kinder world that now seems further out of reach than ever. Still, the film plays by the rules of crime thrillers for the longest time before yielding to the dream-like consciousness of Chiara and her gifted creator. The satirically ultra-bourgeois opening scene—of an apartment being shown to a supposedly married couple, who later turn out to be Chiara and her fellow terrorist and make-believe husband, Ernesto (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio)—makes the glib salesman showing the apartment an almost comic reminder of everything that hard-core Marxists and Leninists find reprehensible in the capitalist system. Later, the hapless Enzo is arrested by the police as a possible terrorist simply because of the screenplay he has written on the subject, a work he has indiscreetly circulated far and wide in a futile effort to sell it.

Mr. Bellocchio is not without nostalgia for a more edifying time for the left, in the struggle to overthrow the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. The occasion is the funeral of one of the aged partisans in that much-honored struggle. Scenes from filmed Stalinist spectacles, faces from Soviet silent and Italian neorealist films, flit across Chiara’s troubled dreams. Mr. Bellocchio also seems to go out of his way to emphasize the banality of the party-line rhetoric spouted by the more fanatical cell members, Primo (Giovanni Calcagno) and Mariano (Luigi Lo Cascio). The kidnappers do allow Moro to write letters to his family, Christian Democratic officials and even the Pope, in a vain effort to get the authorities to negotiate.

One morning, Ernesto opens the blinds of the safe house and sees graffiti on the courtyard’s opposite wall. It reads: “People die from heroin. People die at the factory. Who gives a shit if Moro dies too.” The sentiment expressed is all too familiar in our media-saturated age, in which the always-impatient public demands the immediate resolution of every crime and disaster. At this moment, the film shows how terribly alone Moro must have felt, with even his followers hoping he would die quickly so as to end their own agonies. What finally does happen is part reality, part fantasy and all compassion. It is a strangely moving experience for the historically aware filmgoer.

Lost

Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, from a screenplay by Mr. Abu-Assad and Bero Beyer, is a Palestinian film about suicide bombers—or, rather, would-be suicide bombers, since we don’t know until the very end of the film if lifelong friends Said (Kaias Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) will go through with their mission or not. It is not an easy call, because Mr. Abu-Assad and Mr. Beyer have balanced the arguments for and against the bombings from a uniquely Palestinian point of view. In this entirely fictional scenario, the voice of non-violence is given (as in Good Morning, Night) to a woman—in this instance, Said’s girlfriend, Suha (Lubna Azabal).

The most depressing aspect of the production is the director’s account of the ongoing violence between Palestinians and Israelis that interrupted the filming in the West Bank city of Nablus. “To get into the area,” Mr. Abu-Assad recalls, “you have to get friendly with the Israeli army. To survive inside the area you have to work with the Palestinians.”

On one occasion, the location manager was kidnapped by Palestinian insurgents, and the late Yasir Arafat had to intervene to get the location manager returned to the production crew. Even so, many other members of the crew returned to Europe to escape the constant crossfire of Israeli and Palestinian bullets and missiles. Many of the Palestinians were suspicious of the film’s political intentions regarding the suicide bombers—as well they might be, since Mr. Abu-Assad in no way proselytizes for the taking of innocent lives, even in a cause he deems worthy. The point here is not to turn fact into fiction—as in Good Morning, Night—but to make the actors feel more authentic in delivering their angry litanies of grievances on the firing line where the refugee camps are located. That the film was made at all under these fearsome conditions attests to the filmmaker’s sincerity and conviction. And the performances of the actors come close to being heroic.

There is a moment in the film when the two suicide bombers in transit are told that two angels will be on hand to escort the martyrs to Heaven once the deed is done. Even so, I felt that I was no closer to understanding the psychology of suicide bombers than I had been before this moment of blind faith. Nor am I sure that one can fictionalize the grim realities of the Middle East, both before and after 9/11. Said and Khaled are likable enough and sympathetic enough as low-paid West Bank auto mechanics to qualify as working-class heroes in a Marxist allegory. This is to say that their grievances have a bread-and-butter component that is hardly relevant to many if not most suicide bombers. As for Suha, the voice of reason and forbearance, one can hope she will prevail over the louder and more insistent voices from the mosques preaching hatred and revenge. But as a Greek-American who was brought up on a steady diet of ancient hatreds, I wear my pessimism about a happy and peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on my frayed sleeve. And not even a well-meaning movie like Paradise Now is likely to help matters apprec

Weighty 21 Grams

21 Grams , the second feature by Mexico's Alejandro González Iñárritu, director of the highly regarded Amores Perros , is a trilogy of interconnecting stories that cross economic, geographic and social barriers to weave a fabric of colliding fates like cinematic needlepoint. Jack (Benicio Del Toro) is a reformed alcoholic and ex-con who, under the guidance of a priest, has become a born-again Christian counselor for troubled teenagers and a sober, loving husband and father. Paul (Sean Penn) is a 41-year-old university mathematics professor with cardiac disease who has been given one month to live. Christina (Naomi Watts) is a sunny source of positive energy with a healthy and loving life as a suburban wife and mom. There is no reason, under normal conditions, why any of these people would ever know each other. But suddenly Christina's husband and two daughters are killed at an intersection by a runaway car, and three diverse people from three separate walks of life find themselves linked in more ways than one. Paul is the patient who receives a heart transplant from an anonymous organ donor who turns out to be Christina's husband. Jack's guilt and fury with God turn him blasphemous and cynical. Christina turns in her pain, sorrow and despondency to drugs and promiscuous sex. Paul's marriage fails and so does his new heart, but a sensuous affair with Christina provides some respite, until she becomes consumed with finding and getting her revenge on Jack. Life takes a devastating turn for all three, while the tragic and redemptive intersections of their lives are gradually revealed in a rich narrative that encompasses many violent shifts of emotion as well as some shocking and complicated character intersections. The three main stories focus attention with riveting yet wrenching simplicity, but the structure of the film is anything but conventional. Time and space pulse subliminally with a challenging tempo. Flash-forwards and flashbacks move in mysterious patterns that blend with overlapping sensibilities to create a feeling of longing and dread. The movie has the feeling of a jazz fugue; the camerawork and the editing create cadences from a jam session. And each of the three leads play solos that stun and stagger. Mr. Penn won the Best Actor award in Venice for his ripe portrayal of the conflicted Paul, but his two co-stars keep up with him scene by scene. Ms. Watts has grown mercurially with each film since the rancid Mulholland Drive . Mr. Del Toro is powerful even when he does nothing but stare with those poisonous darts he calls eyes. Rare is the American film with this much emotional texture. A sad movie about the irony of inescapable destiny, it left me captivated and trembling. The "21 grams" of the title refers to the amount of weight a human body is said to lose at the moment of death, but I felt as though I lost as much just from the exhausting free-fall of this movie's impact.

Barge of Boredom

For nonstop sex and dreary, dopey pointlessness, Ewan McGregor has returned from his catastrophic Hollywood spoof of Rock Hudson–Doris Day movies and is back to his old self again-unwashed, unshaved and stark naked. In the stultifying tedium of British director David Mackenzie's Young Adam , he plays Joe, a lonely, lost drifter floating through the dark, misty canals and rivers of Scotland on a barge owned by a miserable, loveless couple played by Tilda Swinton and Peter Mullan, the director of The Magdalene Sisters . As the boredom grows, so does the eroticism, until the hired hand and the wife try out all of the Kama Sutra positions in a blur of sex on an endless array of uncomfortable surfaces under dripping drainpipes. Ms. Swinton is so sinewy and flat-chested that sometimes, in the swirl of sweat and pubic hair, it looks like two guys going at each other full throttle. Then Ms. Swinton disappears from the movie completely when the naked body of a woman Joe made pregnant is fished from the murky water. An innocent man goes on trial while Joe watches from the gallery. The man is sentenced to death. Mr. McGregor walks into a long tracking shot and vanishes in the fog. Duh. Young Adam makes no sense and doesn't seem to be about anything except dirty floors, splintered fingernails and eye sores. There isn't a single character in it, young or otherwise, named Adam.

Tired Italians

I barely endured one hour of the six-hour-and-six-minute Italian saga The Best of Youth . What I saw of the social, economic and political forces that spanned 40 years in the lives of a Roman family and changed the course of Italian history-well, it had its moments. I admire the ambition and arrogance of a director (Marco Tullio Giordana) with no regard for editors or audiences, who doesn't give a damn whether anybody ever sees his work or not. If you have better eyesight and a stronger lower lumbar than I do, you might confront the challenge of reading six hours and six minutes of subtitles with more enthusiasm than I did. But it's still six hours and six minutes out of your life.

The Italian film I did sit through, fool that I am, was Good Morning, Night by Marco Bellocchio, a once-great director whose smashing 1965 debut feature film Fists in the Pocket made him an instant icon in Italian cinema on the level of Visconti and Bertolucci. What happened to that rage, energy and vision? Good Morning, Night is as tired and inconsequential as week-old pasta. The subject is the kidnapping and brutal, politically motivated murder of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigade in 1978-a primal act of terrorism that plunged Italy into politicized economic and emotional chaos. Mr. Bellocchio treats both terrorists and Christian Democrats with compassion, which robs the film of the edge it desperately needs, and in the end it's not clear what kind of point Mr. Bellocchio is trying to make, if any. In reality, Moro's bullet-riddled body was found after all negotiations failed, but in the movie's fanciful postscript, thanks to one bleeding-heart Red Brigade radical (the only woman in the group, natch), Moro escapes and walks through the streets of Rome, a free man smiling in the sunlight. A dull, unsurprising and unexceptional retelling of a familiar event with a fairy-tale finale.

Shapeless Elephant

For trite, wearisome monotony, look no further than the flat, shapeless Elephant , a big prize-winner in Cannes that isn't likely to draw flies here. Gus Van Sant, another sometimes admirable director ( To Die For ) with an incurable lust for self-indulgence ( Gerry ), gives us a commissioned-for-television trifle that vainly attempts to dramatize a high-school killing spree modeled on the events at Columbine. Like the elephant right before our eyes that nobody notices, today's alienated, angst-ridden teenagers are easy to ignore but vital to the future of the world we live in. Troubled by the growing incidents of campus violence that are horrifying communities from coast to coast, Mr. Van Sant trains his cameras on a group of nonprofessional kids making up their own one-dimensional dialogue and improvising a typical day in a fall school term in an attempt to show the oppressive problems that turn ordinary teenagers into killing machines. It's an idea whose time has come, but there is not one scene in Elephant that broadens our scope, increases our understanding or makes us care. Making all of the students stereotypes has a numbing effect, and the film is more an exercise in style than a revealing sociological document. Flaunting every cliché in the yearbook, meet the ugly, masculine misfit girl who refuses to undress in gym class. The shutterbug geek who connects with total strangers through candid snapshots. The gossipy, bulimic flirts. The jocks in a game of touch football accompanied by Beethoven's "Für Elise." The effect is subtlety on the verge of anesthesia. When a lifeguard in a red sweatshirt walks the entire length of the campus while the camera follows slowly behind, the calculated banality looks and feels like freshman-class Directing 101. Absolutely nothing happens for nearly 80 minutes, until two abused nerds who research guns, rifles and automatic pistols on their laptops finally decide to strip naked, climb into the shower together, kiss each other passionately on the lips, then slaughter their classmates. The whole movie is a benign setup before the movie ends with the screen splattered in blood. What a waste of time. Elephant is so contrived and minimalistic that it has the dramatic effect of a line drawing.

Mindless Dogville

Finally there is the abominable Dogville , a mindless three-hour avant-garde experiment by Lars von Trier that schematically crosses Thornton Wilder's Our Town and Bertolt Brecht's Mahagonny with all the disadvantages of the proscenium stage and none of the limitless possibilities of cinema. A gang of baffled, miscast thespians, including Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzarra, Harriet Andersson, Patricia Clarkson, James Caan, Stellan Skarsgård and the ubiquitous Chloë Sevigny, all work their asses off trying to inject some kind of remote coherence into a pretentious, paralyzing bore. Nine chapters and a prologue played out on a Monopoly board with chalk marks for doors give Mr. von Trier a chance to exercise a rampant misogyny and pound home some ridiculous ideas about an America he's never seen. Dogville is a metaphor for American greed, avarice, suspicion and intolerance, and Ms. Kidman's beautiful fugitive from gangsters symbolizes the way Americans insult, enslave and spit on whatever they don't understand. Under the guise of kindness and offers of freedom, the town lets her stay but makes her work longer hours for less pay (like America's immigration policy?) By Chapter 6, Dogville turns vicious and repays her unselfish goodness with rape, betrayal, extortion and an iron wheel chained to her neck, replacing trust with revenge because the town can't live up to its false promises (America's foreign policy in action?). Instead of intelligence and compassion, Dogville reacts to honesty and truth by eliminating all detractors before their accusations spread (the Bush administration's reaction to the idealism of the liberal Democrats?). In the end, the criminals and capitalists win out over the oppressed masses, babies are massacred with machine guns, and shots of American poverty are intercut with air-brushed 8 by 10's of Richard Nixon. If you make it through three hours of this naïve bilge without a barf bag, you deserve what you get. Dogville is like climbing the Matterhorn with a cement block tied to your back.