Directed by Jim Sheridan, he of those rabble-rousers My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father , In America centers around an Irish immigrant family making a new start in the States after the death of their young son. It's loosely based on Mr. Sheridan's own experience-the screenplay was written with the help of his two daughters, Kirsten and Naomi-and the most poignant scenes of the film are those spent basking in the warmth of the family as they deal with typical immigrant obstacles, struggling to make ends meet, etc.

But what starts off as a quaint tale about the American Dream quickly descends into pathos-one might even say bathos.

Mr. Sheridan admits in the director's commentary that his initial experience in the U.S. was not as vexing as the film suggests. He didn't lose his son to a brain tumor; that part was based on his brother, who perished of a brain tumor when both were young. There was an artist in the family's building, but he didn't suffer the harrowing decline of Djimon Hounsou's character, whose affliction with AIDS provides the film with an especially lugubrious climax (inspired in part by another New York artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat). Mr. Sheridan has chosen to supplant his natural source material with hackneyed conflict-"drama doesn't deal well with a lack of conflict," he argues lamely-and the film sags under its weight. It appears he had some trouble making the transition from sweeping epics to the nuance of everyday life.

But you can't fault the acting. Both Mr. Hounsou and Samantha Morton, who plays the main character's wife, earned Academy Award nominations for their performances. And Emma and Sarah Bolger, who play the kiddies, are scrumptious little pints.

[ In America (2002), PG-13, 107 min. $27.98]

Thalberg's Last Night and Day

It's hard to say where the Marx Brothers fit into today's pop culture, let alone where their influence can be found in the smugly self-deprecating humor of the Ben Stillers and Owen Wilsons of this world. Their inheritors' slapstick routines have become so hackneyed that they've been replaced by the Farrelly Brothers gross-out gags. The witty quip, which still has a home of sorts in the occasional Friars Club roast, has lost out to the sly sarcasm of Jon Stewart. And when was the last time you saw a comedy sketch that involved a harp? So when The Marx Brothers Collection , a DVD boxed set of their films sans Zeppo, is released on May 4 by Warner Home Video, it will be a tough sell to a younger generation culturally ill-equipped to appreciate the Marx Brothers' anarchistic brand of humor.

Two movies in the group are especially noteworthy: A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races . They stand as a testament to the spectacle that made Irving Thalberg, who died during the production of Races , a legend in his own time-if not in our own. He is credited with structuring the unwieldy comedy of the Marx Brothers around a plot-typically involving a love story to bring in the female audience-and adding song-and-dance numbers with high production values, giving the Marx Brothers the two greatest commercial successes of their careers. The question is whether anyone of the O.C. age cohort knows who Irving Thalberg is.

As recently as 1992, a failed attempt was made to introduce a new audience to the zany antics of the Marx Brothers: Brain Donors , which starred John Turturro doing a respectful-if not uniquely humorous-impression of Groucho's Dr. Hackenbush, was a commercial flop. The old fogies stayed away, probably insulted by someone trying to imitate their crowned kings of comedy; nor did the Gen-Xers or -Yers show up, much to this Gen-Y reviewer's embarrassment (I still consider Donors one of the all-time great movie comedies).

So who is going to pay attention to the original? Judging by the cameo appearances on the DVD's extra tracks, Warner Brothers wants to lure two demographics: those born in the 1930's, during the height of the Marx Brothers craze, who will wax nostalgic about the sublime nature of the brothers' timing; and those baby-boomers who still argue over which instrument-smashing scene was funnier, Harpo banging a grand piano to pieces or John Belushi doing his best imitation of Peter Townshend in Animal House . Both are represented in the DVD's documentary, On Your Mark, Get Set, Go! , which extols the many virtues of the Marx Brothers' humor (the famous Tootsie-Frootsie ice-cream scene is central).

Whether it sinks or swims, it's a great film. And as Groucho might have replied, "Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?"

[The Marx Brothers Collection: A Night at the Opera (1935), A Day at the Races (1937), A Night in Casablanca (1946), Room Service (1938), At the Circus (1939), Go West (1940), The Big Store (1941), $59.92.]

Bruno: King of the Cartoon Dogs

Why they changed the French-Canadian title of Sylvain Chomet's Oscar-nominated animated film from Belleville Rendez-Vous to the Triplets of Belleville for its U.S. release, I will never know.

This is not to denigrate the importance of the film's three titular songstresses: The elderly women, in a now familiar if still effective film device ( Little Shop of Horrors , anyone?), serve as the three Fates, cheering the film's grandmother on and lamenting her misfortunes as she quests to find her bicyclist grandson, kidnapped by the French mafia.

But the true star of Belleville is Bruno the dog. Driven by a traumatic encounter with a toy train-it ran over his puppy tail-Bruno makes a point to station himself by the upstairs window every hour to bark at the elevated commuter train that passes by. This requires the portly mutt to carry his enormous bulk up the stairs-a scene that is at once endearing and saddening in its futility. His dreams, which feature a curious-looking train running in circles around a doggy bowl, display the degree to which the dog is obsessed with trains, and also serve as a projection of the circular nature of the psyche of the decidedly non-emotive main character-the boy who becomes infatuated with cycling following the apparent death of his parents. And so Bruno, apart from being devilishly cute, provides the added benefit of being the subconscious that generates the most compelling imagery in this very psychological animated film. And it is because of his explicit futility that the audience comes to understand the ensemble's dour obsessions-the grandmother and her grandson, the boy and his bicycling, the dog and its trains, the triplets and their bygone singing careers; the characters are like several Wile E. Coyotes, but without the laughs.

By this dark film's happy ending, Mr. Chomet, with the his bizarre landscapes and unique characters, delivers on the audience's belief in the grandmother's great love for her grandson. The artistic and emotional stakes in this animated film stretch the form into new territory-which is nothing to laugh at.

[ Triplets of Belleville (2003), 78 mins., PG-13, $24.96.]

Billy Bob Thornton plays Willie, the bad Santa in question, with a perpetually hung-over scowl for anyone foolish enough to seek holiday cheer on the basis of his seasonal attire. In fact, Willie is a professional safecracker who merely uses his Santa costume as a cover for casing the department stores that hire him with his partner in crime, Marcus (Tony Cox), a mean-spirited African-American dwarf who masquerades as Santa's elf. Much of the movie is merriment, and the dramatic arc arises from our gradual realization that Marcus is not only the brains and driving force of the covertly felonious team, but that he is also becoming ominously displeased with Willie's drunkenness and un-Santa-like womanizing. Willie and Marcus are initially so broadly drawn as diabolical inversions of all that is supposed to be lovable about Santa and his elf that the moral divergence between Willie and Marcus is much less perceptible-which is part of the film's subtlety. Also, as much as Willie and Marcus present themselves as cynical predators, the world in which they find themselves is hardly all sweetness and light and limitless credulity. Indeed, the only out-and-out "straight" character in the mix is Bob Chipeska (the late John Ritter), the store manager whom Willie and Marcus terrorize with the threat of an anti-discrimination lawsuit on behalf of minority "little people" when he proposes firing them both for improper behavior.

Willie and Marcus are less successful in gulling the store's security chief, Gin (Bernie Mac), an unflappable African-American con man in his own right. Having seen through their scam from the outset, Gin coolly cuts himself in for half the booty following a hilarious session of one-sided haggling between the supremely confident security chief and an extremely frustrated Marcus. But this little transaction sets up a surprisingly dark dénouement that rearranges the moral alignment, with death and near-death disrupting the genre conventions.

Willie's moral redemption is realistically slow in coming, but Mr. Thornton's restraint in his moments of potentially explosive surliness enables him to control the pace of his character's gradual awakening out of an alcoholic haze to the feelings of tenderness and love that had been slumbering in him. If Mr. Thornton had pulled out all the stops in his initially roguish period, he would've gotten a few big laughs from the audience, who would then rapidly tire of his one-note character. By keeping so much in reserve, and letting it out without much fuss, Mr. Thornton gives one of the best performances of the year in a part that could easily have degenerated into facetious farce. That it didn't is also a credit to Mr. Zwigoff's direction.

The two essential instruments of Willie's redemption are a fat, easily bullied little kid (played with marvelously imperturbable patience by Brett Kelly) and a sweetly amusing lady bartender named Sue (Lauren Graham) with an unrealized sex fetish for Santa since childhood. The kid, whose father is away in prison for embezzlement, invites Willie into his luxurious home, in which the only other occupant is his comically somnolent grandmother (Cloris Leachman), while Sue invites Willie-in his Santa suit-into her bed without coyness or conditions.

In contrast to Willie's easy, uncomplicated relationship with the very maternal Sue, Marcus is hitched up with Lois (Lauren Tom), a cold-as-ice Asian barracuda as ruthless as he is. The clues are all there for the film's final confrontation between good and evil, except that there's still an element of surprise involved. Willie and Marcus make such an engaging comedy team that we're conditioned to expect them to exit together smiling and happy. But Mr. Thornton's (and Mr. Zwigoff's) Willie is made of much sterner stuff.

Cerebral Cartooning

Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville has received rapturous notices from most of my esteemed colleagues, but my first reaction was somewhat different: It was too cerebral, too strange and too art-gallery conscious for my taste in animation-which, I'm embarrassed to say, hasn't progressed much since Dumbo (1941). Part of the problem is that I've spent my life in the fantasy apparatus of narrative live-action cinematography-a tantalizing medium that merges creative art and recorded reality. Animation, for better or worse, is all creativity with varying degrees of anthropomorphic allegory. Though I've been moderately amused by some animation over the years, it's not really my turf.

Still, as more and more of my friends have talked to me about The Triplets of Belleville , I've begun to savor isolated images that have stuck in my memory. Above all, I love Bruno, the dog that grows old, fat and clumsy pursuing his obsession for barking at moving trains ever since a toy train ran over his tail as a puppy. Significantly, Bruno is the only character in Belleville with a dream life of his own; the sight of him lumbering up the stairs is as moving an image as any I've ever seen. Perhaps it's the recurring rear view that makes Bruno so, well, doggedly human.

There are some other, equally interesting characters in the story (besides the triplets themselves). The old, round-faced grandmother and her equally round-faced grandson are drawn in minimalist lines, making them emotionally distanced from the more accessible parent-child figures of conventional kids' cartoons. The grandmother single-mindedly looks for something to interest her mostly catatonic grandson, and when he shows a liking for his new tricycle, she begins training him in earnest for the Tour de France. He grows up to be a perpetually exhausted, beak-nosed freak with outsized leg muscles. But on his first race, he's kidnapped by the French mafia, who force him to compete in a bizarre indoor replica of the Tour de France. (Using a process-shot screen simulating the distance traversed by the cyclist, the gamblers in the gallery bet on the computed outcome.)

The triplets themselves are a French version of the Andrews Sisters, but much jazzier. They are first seen in their youth as performers on a televised variety show, but for most of the film they're withered yet still rhythm-conscious hags who help the grandmother rescue her grandson from the hoodlums in ways that defy gravity and every other law of physics and probability. Belleville itself is part Paris, part New York and part Montreal, though entirely populated by the clinically obese-a painterly mannerism that reads as an anti-American message to some reviewers. I think that's a bit of a stretch.

When the grandmother puts her foot out and sends the pursuing gangsters' cars tumbling to their doom, I couldn't help thinking of my own brave mother, who once faced down a gun-toting would-be burglar and made him run for his life when she picked up an ax. The comparative abstractness of Mr. Chomet's vision allows the mind to wander freely. So I guess I must've liked the Triplets of Belleville after all.

War Crimes

Norman Jewison's The Statement , from a screenplay by Ronald Harwood, based on the novel by Brian Moore, makes the most reprehensible antihero imaginable into its protagonist. Pierre Brossard (Michael Caine) is still on the run, 40 years after he is shown murdering French Jews during the Vichy era. Now in his 70's, he's the object of a two-pronged manhunt: the first by an avenging half-Jewish magistrate (Tilda Swinton) and a conscientious French Army officer (Jeremy Northam); and the second by mysterious forces within the Catholic Church and the French government intent on silencing Brossard before he reveals the identities of his protectors for the last four decades.

The problem with the scenario is this: Who exactly are we supposed to root for? To his credit, Mr. Caine creates a credibly unheroic, guilt-ridden religious fanatic, a Mel Gibson–type reactionary Catholic who opposes the liberalizing tendencies in the church-explicitly in the movie, the church's abandonment of the Latin liturgy. Yet Brossard remains a formidable adversary for his enemies, managing to kill two of his would-be assassins during the chase.

Another problem: It's bad enough that the performers, a largely British cast of well-known actors, are pretending to be French-but on top of that, they're speaking English. (And this at a time when more and more English-language films set in foreign locales are resorting to incorporating the native tongue.)

Still, the human dimensions of the story are subordinate to the real moral issue at the center of the film: the Catholic Church's active role in the Holocaust. But as the youngest possible Holocaust criminals reach and pass their 70's, 80's and 90's, and the rest die off from natural causes, one wonders how much longer this subject will be relevant to the political situation in Europe. A new wave of anti-Semitism is being nurtured under the cover of supposed sympathy for the stateless Palestinians, and an antipathy to the state of Israel. (Why do these sentiments rarely correspond, for example, to a sympathy for the Tibetans, and an antipathy to China?)

Nonetheless, it's good to see such estimable performances from Mr. Caine, Ms. Swinton, Mr. Northam, Charlotte Rampling, Alan Bates and Ciarán Hinds, who are all gainfully employed on an increasingly outdated subject.

Film Classics

The adventuresome Film Forum is giving discerning cineastes an early Christmas gift: An 18-film retrospective of Josef von Sternberg's dazzlingly visual career runs from Dec. 12 to 25, beginning with the highly recommended new 35-millimeter print of Shanghai Express (1932) on Dec. 12 and 13, as well as the new 35-millimeter print of The Devil Is a Woman (1935) on Dec. 14. Even more strongly recommended are Underworld (1927) and Thunderbolt (1929) on Dec. 15, with both classic silent films being shown for a single admission. Less recommended are Jet Pilot (1957) and Anatahan (1954) on Dec. 16; but you can't afford to miss The Last Command (1928) and Dishonored (1931) on Dec. 17, and Morocco (1930) and The Docks of New York (1928) on Dec. 18. Also highly recommended is Blonde Venus (1932) in a new 35-millimeter print, screening on Dec. 19 and 20. Moderately recommended are An American Tragedy (1931) and Crime and Punishment (1935) on Dec. 22 and The Shanghai Gesture (1941) and Macao (1952) on Dec. 23. And the highest recommendation for last: The Blue Angel (1930) and the documentary The Epic That Never Was (1965) on Dec. 24 and 25. The Film Forum is located at 209 West Houston Street; call 212-727-8110 for further details.

The undeniably stunning Ms. Berry, stripped of all traces of comely appeal, not to mention cover-girl glamour, plays Dr. Miranda Grey, a psychologist in the psycho ward of an antediluvian women's prison where the lights are always going out and the generator doesn't work. Her patients are all criminally insane, but Penélope Cruz, who still sounds like Rita Moreno playing Googie Gomez, poses a special problem. She insists Satan is visiting her nightly and raping her in her cell: "He entered me like a flower of pain, filled me with fire, making me burn from the inside out." The dialogue is feverish and the laughs start early. Anyway, every time she thinks about looking for a better line of work, like flapping waffles at IHOP, she gets a fresh pep talk about probing deeper into the minds and souls of lunatics from her husband (Charles S. Dutton), who is the chief administrator of the cracker factory and patron saint of the loonies. Leaving work in the pouring rain one night, she narrowly misses crashing into a girl in a night gown on a bridge and smashes her car in a ditch. When she wakes up in a padded cell, her husband has been slashed to death in a pool of blood, she's the chief murder suspect, and now she's locked in the wacko ward herself, in the custody of the peculiar doctor (Robert Downey Jr.) who once tried to put the make on her in the never-ending blackouts. The staff hates her because she was married to the boss. The patients hate her because she used to be their doctor. In an overcrowded shower filled with naked women, she's stabbed 35 times with a surgeon's scalpel, and the wounds on her arm spell out the same cryptic words ("Not Alone") that were scrawled in blood at her husband's murder scene. Dr. Miranda doesn't believe in the paranormal, but the attacker is the girl on the bridge, who turns out to be dead for four years. Why is her ghost coming back from beyond the grave? Why is the devil raping the women inmates in the cracker factory? Why doesn't anybody pay the electric bill? Gothika is too dopey to provide answers that could ever be construed as acceptable logic to anyone except M. Night Shyamalan. What the movie does provide is a lot of laughable opportunities for Halle Berry to hide her beauty behind a parade of grotesque expressions and scream her head off in a mental ward that makes what Olivia de Havilland went through in The Snake Pit look like a tea party down the rabbit hole with the Mad Hatter. Her first day out of solitary, and wouldn't you think she'd head for a steak, a martini and a clean tank top? No, she sets out for a deserted barn with a trap door leading to an underground torture chamber. "You have to stop these delusions, Miranda." "I'm not deluded-I'm possessed!" If you can hear what's going on over the laughter and the audience talking back to the actors, you might be interested to know that, in the end, the doctor watches a bus drive through a little boy whose face peers from a missing-child poster on the street corner. Clearly, there's a job waiting for Halle Berry at Family Services.

Th-Th-That's All?

As a rule, I'm not keen on cartoons in general, or the old Warner Brothers Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies that used to plague Saturday movie matinees in particular. I generally headed for the bathroom during Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, treating them as impertinent intrusions while I waited for Bogart, Davis and Stanwyck. They're b-b-b-back, as Elmer Fudd would say, and they all have their own tables in the studio commissary. Bugs now attends stockholders' meetings, while Daffy has become a faded action hero and nobody has a clue what to do with Tweety Pie. Looney Tunes: Back in Action blends animation with real people in a cockeyed script by Larry Doyle that looks and sounds like they made it up as they went along. Brendan Fraser plays a Warners security guard who wants to be a stunt man. When his father, a movie star famous for playing secret agents (played by former James Bond Timothy Dalton), is kidnapped by a gang of retarded spies headed by a lisping, limp-wristed crime boss (Steve Martin, in the most embarrassing performance of his life), Mr. Fraser-who is clearly slumming for big bucks-leaves Burbank for Vegas (wouldn't you?) to save him. What a crime to see the talented star of Gods and Monsters and The Quiet American fritter away his time and trash his talent on this kind of candy corn. His acting consists mainly of ducking flying objects and landing imaginary punches in the paunch. Jenna Elfman, who is clearly trying to prove that there can still be a career after TV's Dharma and Greg , tags along, with Bugs, Daffy, Porky Pig, Sylvester the cat and Yosemite Sam in tow. The plot has something to do with Dad, who is really a spy, battling the imbecilic crooks in pursuit of a blue diamond that can change people into monkey slaves like Margaret Hamilton's household staff in Oz, thus threatening the world population in the kind of crisis that can only be fully enjoyed by children after a kindergarten nap. The movie switches to Paris just so the cartoon characters can crawl around inside the Impressionist paintings on the walls of the Louvre. Otherwise, there isn't much space, dimension or depth perception to rave about. But a few inside jokes are worth a chuckle, as director Joe Dante sends up Psycho, Batman and Star Wars and Bugs Bunny fights the dark evils of the Force ("Eh ... what's up, Darth?") Did I mention the chuckles are very small chuckles indeed? This is a movie costing untold millions of dollars for no valuable reason except to entertain 7-year-olds after school. It should only be reviewed by a 7-year-old movie critic, and I will gladly provide a portion of this space if you know one.

Mythic Megalopolis

On the opposite side of the coin (and a few light years away in terms of originality and imagination), the French animated feature The Triplets of Belleville simmers with bizarre humor and awesome attention to visual and aural detail. Set in a heightened postwar world of bulbous pedestrians, eerie, rubbery frogs and the haunting whine of a hurtling commuter train, this enchanting film by Sylvain Chomet casts an irresistible spell over the senses.

Madame Souza lives with her lonely, melancholy nebbish grandson Champion on a hill outside Paris. One day she answers his dreams by giving him a tricycle. Years pass. As the city sprouts up around the house, the pudgy little misfit grows into a lean, serene cycling fiend on two wheels. Champion is such a great cyclist that he enters the Tour de France, but is kidnapped in the middle of the race by menacing strangers in black leather jackets. In the film's most beautiful sequence, Grandma and her faithful hound Bruno track the villains across the Atlantic to a glistening, towering Gallic version of New York City called Belleville. In this mythic megalopolis, the penniless Madame Souza and Bruno are rescued by the Belleville triplets, an eccentric trio of 1930's music-hall singers who were once a famous cabaret act. Now they're three old crones who have fallen on hard times but haven't lost their sense of rhythm. The triplets make music with the sounds of a vacuum cleaner, rustling newspapers, and by scraping the shelves of their empty refrigerator. Imagine Macbeth's witches doing the jitterbug.

With a vigorous nod to Jacques Tati, the movie is built around tempos and contrasts of sound and image. Digital technology creates a hilarious television montage of ancient vaudeville stars, featuring Josephine Baker's bananas and Fred Astaire tap dancing until his exhausted shoes detach from his feet and eat him alive. The skyscrapers move, Champion's calf muscles bulge like huge sacks of potatoes, and the inhabitants of Belleville are obese from the indulgences of capitalism. They all come to life in three dimensions, along with a chase through the narrow canyons of the city shot from dizzying heights, and even a massive train wreck. With virtually no dialogue, the stellar sound design does the talking, while the visual style is based on a combination of mime, Grand Guignol, Edward Gorey drawings and the amusing oils of Ludwig Bemelmans. The 3-D characters are exaggerated Katzenjammer Kids. Champion is a composite of strangely angelic concentration and the catatonic result of mind-altering drugs. The club-footed Madame Souza is a touching, feisty powerhouse with one leg that is longer than the other and a whistle to keep the world in line. The massive, square-shouldered French Mafiosi who imprison and torture Champion resemble walking armoires. Their purpose: an illegal gambling amusement using cycle slaves that looks like a sadistic video game. Musical notes emerge from household objects. A catchy score by Benoît Charest is inspired by the music of jazz legend Django Reinhardt. The impressive journey across the ocean is accompanied by Mozart's Mass in C Minor. The postwar era is evoked through a warm palette of antiqued browns and beiges. Cinematic pop-culture references create nostalgic ambiance instead of in-jokes. As sophisticated and awesome as animated films can get, The Triplets of Belleville is everything the brainless Looney Tunes movie doesn't have the intelligence or courage to be. Instead of pandering to kids, this remarkable co-production from France, Canada and Belgium elevates their minds and stimulates their imaginations, creating a truly captivating world unto itself that can be seen and applauded by audiences of every age. Simply marvelous.

Captivating

Barbara Brussell is a new singer with wit, style, warmth, drive and impeccable musical taste. She also has incredible chops. You can catch her every Friday night in November at Danny's Skylight Room on West 46th Street. She will captivate you. Without losing any of its humor, she finds a brand-new way to act the subtext of Ado Annie's "I Cain't Say No," and she can twist your heart into the shape of saltwater taffy on the exquisite ballad "Strangers Once Again". She treats music like architecture-slowly, meticulously building songs by Harold Arlen, John Bucchino, Tommy Wolf, Craig Carnelia, Cole Porter and others, brick by brick, until the mortar is in place and a total mood is created. Her voice is a happy voice, with a husky edge that can be sexy and slap-happy at the same time. Every number bears her unique stamp, and that includes the surprising aria "This Is My Beloved" from Kismet , performed in an introspective style refreshingly devoid of the usual histrionics. Whether she's examining Joni Mitchell or Oscar Hammerstein, she holds notes on descriptive words the way a great actor breaks up the thought patterns in a monologue. The voice is sunny, the arrangements are definitively B.B. (Before Barbra), and any singer who moves from Marc Blitzstein to Joni Mitchell in a matter of pulse beats has got to be called sophisticated. In a cabaret world that is glumly turning nightmarish, Barbara Brussell is a dream come true.