Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes (Getty Images)

Welcome to New York Observer's Golden Globe coverage of the 2012, where you'll be able to read (and participate!) in real time as Drew Grant and Dan D'Addario take bets on which acclaimed actor will be the first to slap that lopsided grin right off Ricky Gervais' face. Let the fun begin!

Irvine.

Steven Spielberg at the top of his powers as one of the most successful and creative film directors of the past century is the best reason I can think of to get off your duff and head for the cinema on Christmas Day. You will not believe the epic splendor, sweeping drama and heart-stopping passion he brings to War Horse. It’s a rare and genuine movie masterpiece that deserves the label in a thousand ways.

Turning a beloved play into a movie is a job for either a fool or a daredevil. Mr. Spielberg is neither, but he is a visionary with unflinching faith in his own instincts. He must have known going in that he couldn’t satisfy the myriad fans of the London and Broadway hit about the cruel things the British did to their horses in World War I. On the stage, the familiar theme of a boy’s unshakable love for his horse was innovative in its use of life-size puppets with real feelings and expressions that moved like Tinker Toys. The film uses actual horses to tell the story of a colt named Joey, sold to the cavalry to lug the cannons of war through the German trenches, and a farmboy named Albert Narracott, who enlisted to travel halfway across Europe to rescue him from the front lines. On screen, Albert is played by impossibly handsome newcomer Jeremy Irvine, whose career is already reaching rocket force (he follows War Horse as Pip in the new production of Dickens’s Great Expectations). Instead of puppets, Joey is played by 15 different horses, but the one featured most prominently is American equine Finder, who starred in Seabiscuit. Finder is a four-legged superstar who can do everything but talk, even though he has a way of communicating with Albert that is awesome. What he goes through in War Horse is so rending that never before has the disclaimer “No animals were harmed in the filming of this motion picture” carried so much badly needed reassurance. Finder deserves an Oscar for—well, for being the best and most beautiful horse on the screen.

Based on the 1982 children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo, War Horse is an elegiac film that clocks in at two hours and 20 minutes, but I treasured every single second. Mr. Spielberg brings so much decency and integrity to the familiar theme of a boy in love with a horse that I didn’t miss the puppets at all. The humor and spirit that had such a profound impact on audiences young and old are not only preserved, but enhanced by the personalities of real animals. The careful result is a personalized experience that inspires the same kind of love audiences used to have for Lassie.

The vast and sprawling screenplay by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis respects the story enough to leave it unchanged, without embellishment. A hardscrabble sharecropper named Ted Narracott goes to auction to buy a plow horse, but instead he arrogantly outbids his greedy, mean-spirited landlord (David Thewlis) for a magnificent animal of no real value to a crop planter, bringing down the wrath of his pragmatic, long-suffering wife, Rose (Emily Watson). Their besotted son, Albie, names the horse Joey and vows to teach him how to pull his weight and till the soil. Joey is stubborn and willful with a mind of his own, and when the crops fail, the only way to pay the rent is to sell Joey to the military. The next hour is told from the horse’s point of view as the camera follows him through the French battlefields in 1914, where he is cared for by a kind British officer, to enemy lines, where he bonds with a headstrong black stallion, a German deserter and a Dutch girl who protects him by hiding him in a windmill. Captured by the enemy, Joey finally ends up in the Somme where Albie sees combat at last. In one particularly sensational sequence, Joey is trapped in barbed wife and rescued by two soldiers, one German and one British, who momentarily put aside their differences through a mutual compassion for an injured animal, use wire cutters to save the horse’s life, and take a minute to share memories of their homes on opposite sides of the conflict. If you are not moved to tears by that scene, or by Albie’s eventual reunion with his horse, then you need to see a doctor.

The logistics are overwhelming. According to the Imperial War Museum, more than four million horses perished in the so-called Great War, and Mr. Spielberg puts you right into the middle of their pain and terror in sequences using as many as 5,800 extras and 280 horses without computer-generated images. What an accomplishment. Like the play, the emotional high point of the film is when Albie finally finds Joey. By this time, you’re so weary from the gas masks, the grenades, the rats and the cannon fire that you can hardly summon the strength for tears, but when Albie, blinded by mortar, and Joey, lame and half-dead, reach the green pastures and rose gardens of Devon, the tears are evident without coaxing.  Will Rogers always said, “Horses are smarter than humans. You never heard of a horse going broke betting on people.” True, but when Albie and Joey reunite, two wounded soldiers of war going home together, you feel the values horses and humans can share through love, loyalty, persistence and understanding. It left me emotionally wrecked.

War Horse is a don’t-miss Spielberg classic that reaches true perfection. It’s as good as movies can get, and one of the greatest triumphs of this or any other year. For maximum enjoyment, I recommend both a box of tissues and a box of popcorn.

rreed@observer.com

WAR HORSE

Running Time 146 minutes

Written by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Starring Jeremy Irvine, Emily Watson and David Thewlis

4/4

Emily Watson gives her usual fresh-faced and dedicated performance as the social worker from Nottingham who defied the government, searching court records, newspaper archives, and church files to expose the systematically organized abuse and indifference heaped on institutionalized children labeled degenerates. Told they were orphans with no one to care for them, thousands of children were rounded up and forced to migrate to Australia, where they were promised “oranges and sunshine”. Instead, they found only the lash and ended up sold into slavery by a respected organization of religious extremists called the Christian Brothers. Decades later, Mrs. Humphreys, in her efforts to locate them and reunite them with their lost families, was so overwhelmed by the volume of victimized parents and displaced children, now adults, that she established the Child Migrants Trust without any hope or expectations of help from the British government. Appeasing the press and trying to save face with the outraged public, officials insisted the abuses must be placed in the proper historical context. What was done, they suggested, was done with good intentions, to give disenfranchised children “a fresh start in life”. What Mrs. Humphreys demanded was government responsibility for separating these discarded remnants of the empire from their families and robbing them of their identities. The movie does a masterful job of showing the effect of abandonment on bewildered children and the emptiness in their hearts, morphing into lifetime depression. And it shows the toll so much courage and focus took on Mrs. Humphreys herself—neglecting her own family (one man’s memories of being raped at Christmas even leads to her near cancellation of the holiday season in her own home), endangering her health, and risking her life when Australians defending the Christian Brothers tried to murder her.

Her obsession eventually paid off. In February, 2010, while Oranges and Sunshine was shooting, British prime minister Gordon Brown formally apologized to each and every one of the 130,000 children whose cries for help went unheeded as the U.K. turned its back on them. The damage is done, the wounds will never heal. But progress has finally been made. Some of Mrs. Humphreys’ “clients” have become lifelong friends and supporters of her cause. Hugo Weaving is excellent as a man who gives so much of himself but too late to find his mother still living. Richard Dillane is sturdy and compassionate as Mrs. Humphreys’ loyal, compassionate husband Merv, who helps her balance her priorities and hold on to her fragile sanity. And David Wenham adds a calm reserve of strength as a cynical, rugged Australian alpha male who finds his mother still alive, then overcomes his childhood pain to rebuild the wasted years. There’s one powerful scene where he takes Mrs. Humphreys to the Christian Brothers “boys home” near Perth built by child labor, where so much of the torment took place, and forces them to pour her a cup of tea. Later, they stand on a hill overlooking the property, awed that a place of such inhuman cruelty could be so beautiful. It’s one of the few moments when Emily Watson is allowed to show frailty or tears. Most of the time she’s too controlled to display emotion and the film suffers from it.

As a complex look at adoption, the film reminded me of Blossoms in the Dust and Greer Garson’s noble performance as Edna Gladney, the legendary crusader who changed the adoption laws in Texas. If only Ms. Watson had displayed some of that emotional longitude this movie might be more touching. In his first feature, director Jim Loach shows a lot of the social upheaval in the U.K. pioneered by the films of his father, veteran director Ken Loach. But the style is so muted it fails to consistently hold attention. It also fails to show what possessed Mrs. Humphreys to neglect her own children in order to repatriate total strangers. The dialogue in Rona Munro’s script is a bit too research heavy to feel like anything outside of a filing cabinet. What Emily Watson says is artificial instead of raw, and she never demonstrates anger over her country’s sins. None of the story flashes back in time to the years when the deportations actually happened. It is stubbornly set in 1986 Nottingham and the Australian outback, when a shot of the terrifying sea voyage that carried the children to another world might have given it the feeling of a docudrama it often misses. But if larger truths have been overlooked, the subject is still wrenching enough to make Oranges and Sunshine an inspired work of dignity and purpose.

rreed@observer.com

ORANGES AND SUNSHINE

Running Time 105 minutes

Written by Rona Munro, Margaret Humphries (book)

Directed by Jim Loach

Starring Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving, and David Wenham

3/4

Sam Mendes, the director of both productions from the Donmar Warehouse of London, is tipping us off that the plays are united by the common theme of love-unstated, disguised, thwarted, maddening love. (Until, that is, the happy end of Twelfth Night .) He's packaging the productions and the message for us in a pretty bow-very adept he is at it, too. But the truth beneath the stylish surface of things is that Twelfth Night has nothing in common with Vanya at all. For the one is a romantic comedy about the mystery of identity, gender and fate, while the other is a tragedy of self-delusion and despair.

To be sure, Twelfth Night has its troubling, sour undertone. Shakespeare gave the play a subtitle, "What You Will." (Implying "What You Make Of It," as well as the jolly in-joke, "What You Will Shakespeare.") It's the last of the romantic comedies and the bridge to the great tragedies, beginning with Hamlet . It's a revel, then, that takes place in a fairy-tale land, Illyria. Yet a darker, surprisingly colder note is struck in the unnecessary, cruel humiliation of this pompous fellow, Malvolio, killjoy steward to Olivia. Who does him in? Unhappy, middle-aged, feckless drunks in league with an abusive "gentlewoman." It's as if they've nothing better to do.

When all is said and done-when the dawn breaks on blinding hangovers and the cakes and ale are gone-"the madly used Malvolio" has been jailed, straitjacketed and blindfolded in a hovel as an outcast madman. And Feste, the clown, the "allowed fool," is no barrel of laughs, either, with his melancholy, rainy songs of golden youth and romance never-lasting:

In delay there lies no plenty;

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

Youth's a stuff will not endure.

But Mr. Mendes' version is an atmospheric romp, a Twelfth Night lite. I failed to warm to designer Mark Thompson's emblem for the Vanya production-a dominating, 30-foot-long dining-room table. With Twelfth Night , it's a huge picture frame center stage, and I'm afraid I'm none the wiser. Why the empty frame? The stage is also decorated enchantingly with candles and lanterns. There's no hint of the ocean that almost drowned Viola "after our ship did split." Mr. Mendes has her entering magic Illyria carrying a suitcase like a wide-eyed ingenue in the big city about to ask, "Which way to Broadway?" Fortunately, Viola is played by Emily Watson, who is magic.

But that intrusive picture frame is just an arty effect. Characters sometimes pose in it pictorially before entering, or Mr. Mendes will leave someone framed in it for a while-creating blatant dramatic ironies. The straitjacketed Malvolio, usually unseen, thus sits silently in the picture frame lest we forget about him as the surrounding comedy continues merrily on as usual. But the last thing Twelfth Night ought to suggest is a tableau vivant or still life. It's a play that's constantly mutating and on the move.

O learn to read what silent love hath writ:

To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.

The complete couplet from Sonnet 23 suggests that we read between the lines. But Mr. Mendes, underlining all before us, gives us no lines to read between. Mystery is imposed and true enchantment absent. Orsino, Duke of Illyria, finds himself strangely attracted to Viola, who's disguised as a young man, and Viola falls madly, secretively in love with him. In Elizabethan times, women were played by guys, of course. So it would have been Duke attracted to boy, who's really a girl, who's really a boy. The fun and gender games need an innocent dawn of erotic attraction. But Mr. Mendes spells it out by soon having the two of them in a passionate kiss (followed by knowing embarrassment).

It takes the illicit romance out of things (as well as the Shakespearean). The black-veiled Olivia, officially mourning the loss of her brother, falls in love at calamitous first sight with Viola, thinking she's a man: "How now! Even so quickly may one catch the plague?" But Helen McCrory's coarse Olivia makes her intentions too eagerly clear from the outset. Desperate for Viola's love, she later throws off her dress for "him," stripping down to reveal her little black panties. It's less Twelfth Night , more West End sex comedy. But Ms. McCrory's Olivia is what the English call "a goer." She and the smirking Sebastian (Viola's twin brother) therefore go to bed immediately, reappearing wrapped in bedsheets rather than the innocent "wonder that enwraps."

Simon Russell Beale first appears as a showily comic Malvolio, playing him like a fastidious, campy butler. Mr. Beale is seen to be acting, going for laughs (and getting them). His Uncle Vanya is pathetic rather than tragic; so Malvolio goes. Some of us prefer a Malvolio who isn't in the least bit funny, as pompous pricks are fatally humorless. But he makes him an innate figure of fun. We don't pity Malvolio as we should, though his mad scene is as hard as nails in a cross.

In fact, Malvolio appears in relatively few scenes, as Shylock does in Merchant of Venice . Yet, like Shylock, he should dominate and trouble our memory. Mr. Beale's portrait amounts to an affectionate parody of the Puritan rudely awoken in his hair net by Sir Toby Belch and Co. He looks unusually chic in the yellow-stocking scene. But if Malvolio possesses no genuine dignity in the first place, he has no dignity to lose-no lofty height of maligned seriousness from which to fall into tragic public contempt.

Alas, Mark Strong as the narcissistic Orsino, like his flat Dr. Astrov in Uncle Vanya, is technically accomplished, but unexciting. He's too much the same in both productions. So, too, Ms. McCrory's actressy Yelena and Olivia. I thought Selina Cadell overplayed Vanya's crone of a mother, but she's a fine, spiky Maria here. Anthony O'Donnell, good and self-effacing in the cameo role of Ilya Telegin, makes a first-rate, dangerous Feste and looks the part, as if he were born in that raggedy costume of his. The Sebastian of Gyuri Sarossy is too fey (but for a change, Sebastian actually looks like his twin). Skillful David Bradley, the burnt-out Professor Serebryakov in Vanya , plays that old fool Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Paul Jesson makes a traditionally blustery, low-comedy Sir Toby Belch, who might also be renamed Sir Toby Fart.

Emily Watson's Viola saves the day! As Sonya, lapdog to Astrov in Uncle Vanya, she touches the heart. Ms. Watson herself was never plain, but her Sonya believes herself to be, which is the important thing. Her Viola is memorable and naturally poetic, her unfussy intelligence and seriousness very alive, her sense of wonder just lovely. Some prefer their Violas on the butch side, but Viola's appeal is found in her mercurial femininity. Ms. Watson speaks the lines as if saying them spontaneously for the first time. When you've seen Twelfth Night once, or twice, or three or four times-and you will-to hear it made fresh and renewed is some kind of enchantment.

Night at McCool's , from a screenplay by the late Stan Seidel (1952-2000),

is the kind of movie that, as I was watching it, I was preparing to dismiss as

a broad, cartoonish sex farce, straining for

as many cheap laughs as it could get this side of Three Stooges–like

smuttiness. That is, until its wow ending, with one of the funniest and most

imaginative sight gags I have seen since the golden age of the great silent

clowns. Obviously, I can't and won't tell you what it is, or even hint at it,

because that would eliminate the elements of shock and surprise that make it so

hilarious. So don't read the reviews and gossip columns, and stay away from the

Internet know-it-alls who love to spoil everyone else's fun.

See the movie first, even though you may find, as I did, Liv

Tyler's second-string siren, Jewel, too literal and derivative as the

lace-edged lure for three oversexed and dim-witted knights in tarnished armor

named Randy (Matt Dillon), Carl (Paul Reiser) and Detective Dehling (John

Goodman). Randy starts off the foolishness by searching for a hitman named Mr.

Burmeister (Michael Douglas) in a St. Louis bingo parlor. When Randy finds

Burmeister, they play bingo together while Randy explains why he is paying

Burmeister $10,000 to kill Jewel. Flash back to McCool's, where Randy works as

a big-hit college-town bartender who serves drinks with a toilet plunger. This

low-rent parody of Tom Cruise's bartending dexterity in Cocktail (1988) lasts no longer than the time it takes to cut to

closing time. Indeed, McCool's disappears as a setting after this first and

last night of Randy's career as a bartender.

Randy's cousin Carl drunkenly urges Randy to join him in

some after-hours amusements, since Carl's wife and child are away visiting her

mother. Randy declines and is instead thrust

into a situation where he rescues Jewel from an apparent rape attack. We learn

later that Jewel is in cahoots with her alleged "rapist" in a convoluted scheme

by which the two prey on chivalrous saps like Randy. The killing starts right

after the sex, with Jewel shooting her confederate just as he is about to shoot

Randy. We gradually realize that Jewel is consumer-crazy and has fallen in love

with the ramshackle house that Randy has inherited from his late mother, along

with two snow globes reminiscent of the maternal emblems in Citizen Kane (1941).

As Randy continues his flashback narrative to an attentive

Burmeister, Carl and Detective Dehling become enmeshed in the silken web woven

by Jewel. They begin telling their

stories, Carl to a sexy psychiatrist played by Reba McEntire with the leggy

suggestiveness with which we have become familiar in The Sopranos . Carl, however, is too besotted with the leather and

whips provided by Jewel in her dominatrix phase to make a play for the provocative lady shrink. For his part, Detective

Dehling is easily seduced by Jewel while he is investigating two of her

murders. He confides in his brother, a priest known as Father Jimmy (Richard

Jenkins), who is horny as all get out as he presses his brother for all the

lascivious details, wrenching his collar loose in the process. This lecherous

priest received more than his share of cheap laughs. Too easy, I kept saying to

myself, too easy-but then I was swept away by the aforementioned ending, and I

began to wonder if I had missed something in the movie in my haste to dismiss

it.

Could it be that the slick direction of Mr. Zwart, and the

wildly satiric script by Seidel, to whom the film is dedicated, had more grace,

wit and substance than I had imagined? A merely brilliant ending can do that to

you; an explosively funny ending is rarer still. Still, I don't care. Ms. Tyler

lacks the magic this slight exercise in style requires to transcend its

built-in limitations. It is not that she fails to project a physical

desirability in her person, nor that she is incapable of expressing a womanly

cunning without an excess of fatuous narcissism. It is simply that she cannot intuit

a forceful consistency in her characterizations to bind together the many

guises she is asked to assume.

The other characters are left adrift in a sea of gratuitous

gunfire that leaves One Night at McCool's

somewhere between the cinema of Robert Rodriguez and the cinema of the Farrelly

brothers, with its tongue ever so distractingly deep in its cheek. Much of the

credit or blame should go to what appears to be a long-range artistic strategy

of co-producers Michael Douglas and Allison Lyon Segan, based on their readings

of popular taste. Right or wrong, they at least seem to have a plan in the

midst of the almost hopeless chaos that passes nowadays as mainstream

movie-making.

A Murky Nabokov

Adaptation

Marleen Gorris' The

Luzhin Defence , from the screenplay by Peter Berry, based on the novel by

Vladimir Nabokov, brings some warmth and consolation to the cold Nabokovian

world of obsessive existence, but at perhaps too high a price in lost

believability. After all, what is the point of adapting Nabokov at all if one

cannot swallow his most bitter pills of perception? Yet one can understand why

John Turturro and Emily Watson were attracted to the roles of troubled chess

genius Alexander Luzhin and Natalia, the beautiful daughter of Russian émigré

parents, who falls in love with Luzhin despite the objections of her mother,

Vera, and despite Luzhin's seemingly insurmountable social maladroitness. In

movie terms, it's not exactly a case of Beauty and the Beast, but at least

Beauty and the Hyper-Nerd.

What is more clear in the novel than in the film is how

deeply Nabokov identifies with Luzhin's obsession with chess. In this respect,

Nabokov is much harder on Natalia than Ms. Gorris and Mr. Berry are in the

movie. Indeed, Nabokov's Natalia is shown to be a bit foolish in thinking that

Luzhin can eventually turn his chess genius to other aspects of life, and thus

be a huge success in anything he undertakes. On the printed page, Natalia never

appreciates how much chess has drained away from Luzhin's ability to cope with

the simplest tasks of normal life. He has no friends, no conversation, not even

much awareness of his own appearance in public. He is a social misfit and a

mental cripple. Yet, Natalia sees something in his gleaming eyes at the chess

table that she thinks she can harness for her own happiness. As it turns out,

she is fatally mistaken.

In the film, Ms. Watson endows Natalia with a beautiful,

nurturing quality that makes us want her to connect with Mr. Turturro's gawky

Luzhin. This rise in emotional temperature is something movies often do to

books-not in the way of conscious betrayal, but in the natural order of things

in the transition from a comparatively cerebral medium to an inescapably

visceral one. Hence, the potential union of Luzhin and Natalia is of less

import in the novel than it is in the film. Some critics complained that the

movie did not do justice to the chess being played. I do not know how that

could have been done with any precision in normal movie time. Ms. Gorris

performs some striking visual gymnastics on the chess board to suggest how

chess masters think many moves ahead. Yet, though Nabokov himself knew a great

deal about chess, he did not end his book-as the movie does-with a posthumous

vindication of Luzhin and his defense by dragging Natalia to the chess board.

The movie also fails to

record one of the interesting subtexts of the novel, and that is the grotesque

impression made by colonies of Russian exiles abroad, who speak Russian and

thus contribute to Luzhin's feverish feeling of dislocation. This is something

the eternally traumatized Nabokov understood firsthand and never entirely

eliminated from his exquisite prose. Finally, Luzhin's madness reminds me of no

one so much as Bobby Fischer, whose chess genius did not leave him much room to

be a human being. Still, The Luzhin

Defence is well worth seeing for Mr. Turturro and Ms. Watson.

Great Cinema: Greek

and Italian

Anthology Film Archives is presenting, from May 4-10, a

program of 17 recent Greek films which I-and maybe you-should see for both

ethnic and artistic reasons. There is reportedly nothing quaint or folksy about

these works, of which I have seen only one, Tonia Marketaki's The Price of Love (1984), playing May 8,

which I recommend to Greek and non-Greek viewers alike. The Price of Love presents the dark side of the dowry system

celebrated joyously in John Ford's The

Quiet Man (1952). The setting is the island of Corfu at the turn of the

century, when Greece was nominally independent under a constitutional monarchy,

but economically dominated by a consortium of the Great Powers. Greek cabinets

rise and fall with chaotic regularity. A young couple see their love wither

away because of endless squabbles over the girl's dowry. There are no easy

villains, only ancient anxieties that recall stories my father and mother told

me about life in the provinces.

The other films are Day Off , Desire , The Love of Ulysses ,

Jaguar , Edge of Night , Life on Sale ,

The Red Daisy , Love Wanders in the Night , A

Drop in the Ocean , Eastern Territory ,

The Very Poor , Inc. , The Canary Yellow

Bicycle , Cheap Smokes , I Like Hearts Like Mine and 2000+1 Shots . (Call 505-5181 for show

dates and show times.)

I would also like to call belated attention to the

Guggenheim's magnificent program entitled

Conversations Between Shadows and Light , featuring some of the great

Italian cinematographers known around the world, such as Vittorio Storaro and

Giuseppe Rotunno. The series began on April 4 and runs through July 28. (Call

423-3500 for dates and show times.)

One of her notable coups is her ability to simultaneously get big laughs and audience sympathy by making her character the butt of ridicule and humiliation in that most hellish of hellholes for most us through the ages: high school! Ms. Barrymore's Josie Geller gets to go through it twice without any supernatural or time-machine intervention. She is compelled as a nerdy, 25-year-old copy editor at the Chicago Sun-Times to get her big break as an investigative reporter by going undercover as a faux 12-year-old high school student to dish the dirt on today's kids and their teachers.

Sounds awful, doesn't it? And much too familiar besides. Haven't I been frothing at the mouth lately in print over all the teenage garbage foisted on us by the first-week's-gross-conscious Hollywood studios? Well, Ms. Barrymore and company have made me eat my words with a display of wit, warmth and sheer comic energy similar to that of Groundhog Day , Clueless and, yes, Shakespeare in Love . Indeed, Ms. Barrymore's Josie Geller is so intuitively Shakespearean that her royal Barrymore ancestors, John, Ethel and Lionel, should be popping the bubbly in Actors' Heaven.

What makes Josie so endearing as a character is her desperate let's-be-friends smile in the most unpromisingly grotesque situations. But the goofy side of her never obliterates her warm sensuality, made all the more alluring by her emotional reticence. She is ably supported by David Arquette as her slightly dysfunctional but loyal brother; Molly Shannon as her best friend at the office and a comical man-eater besides; John C. Reilly as her hard-boiled and softhearted boss; Michael Vartan as her heartthrob English teacher (of Shakespeare, what else?); Leelee Sobieski as her nerdy best friend the second time around, and Jeremy Jordan as the dreamboat who takes her to the prom the second time, thus finally erasing the trauma of the horrible first time, when she was fat and ugly.

Much of the story line can be dismissed as excessively derivative–even if one believes, as I do, that there can never be too much of Shakespeare in mainstream movies. Still, there is the utterly banal and utterly predictable misunderstanding situation mixed with a dash of The Truman Show via hidden lapel camera and microphone. But the script pulls a clever switch by having Josie disconnect the camera and microphone at the beginning of her confession to the teacher, thus frustrating the enthralled viewers in the newspaper office but freeing the story line from an inessential "obligatory scene."

Trust me, Ms. Barrymore transcends the limits of youthful fantasy and folly to bring the spirit of springtime and emotional maturity onto the silver screen. Josie is a dream come true, such as I haven't seen since the faux-Lolita of Ginger Rogers in The Major and the Minor (1942).

Back then, the censors forced the girls to say No, and they did so with style. Now, with the censors gone, the girls say Yes too easily, and the romance goes out the window. But Ms. Barrymore's Josie in Never Been Kissed and newcomer Julia Stiles' Katarina (Kat) Stratford in 10 Things I Hate About You may be the harbingers of what may seem like an antipromiscuity backlash, but may in fact represent a rediscovery of the essence of Shakespearean romance with its disguises and gender reversals serving to give young women time to explore their feelings before surrendering their hearts.

Yet another terrific movie about high school students in yet another fantasy high school with yet another dazzling female performance, this time by Ms. Stiles, with her expertly timed line readings of witty put-downs and brushoffs–reminding me of such 30's comediennes as Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers and Claudette Colbert–Gil Junger's 10 Things I Hate About You , from a screenplay by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, presents me with the problem of maintaining my credibility with my readers while I try to explain why I am recommending two high school films in the same week.

What particularly heartens me about shrewish Kat is that she is given such sharp feminist and mock-feminist lines to read from the screenplay by Ms. Lutz and Ms. Smith. It remains to be seen whether Ms. Stiles will be as lucky again in the characters she is given to play. There is no shortage of performing talent these days. There is only a lack of audacity in giving the green light to projects that seem to fly in the face of the conventional box-office wisdom.

The rest of the film comes up with more than its share of quirks and twists in which no fewer than seven teenage characters are involved in an intrigue that is barely worth synopsizing in the first place. The film is based very loosely on the Bard's Taming of the Shrew with two sisters, Kat and Bianca Stratford (Larisa Oleynik), and their single father Walter Stratford (Larry Miller), who is so obsessed with the threatened virginity of his daughters that he forbids Bianca to go out on a date until her older sister Kat does likewise. The thinking is that, since Kat is a notoriously feminist man-hater, both sisters will be grounded until their graduation. Fat chance.

As the plot thickens, Bianca is wooed by two suitors, Joey Donner (Andrew Keegan) rich, smug and obnoxious, and Cameron James (Joseph-Gordon Levitt), sincere, idealistic and romantic. Joey pays a mysteriously moody Heathcliff-type student coyly named Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger) to date Kat so that he can make a move on Bianca. Cameron is infatuated with Bianca in his own pitifully clumsy way. So there is not much suspense there. What is slightly unusual is that Bianca turns out to be more sensible and sympathetic than the formula demands, and Kat and her father have one lovely scene reminiscent of the old Molly Ringwald movies for John Hughes.

Not everything works, and very little matters in these two high school romances, but they both bounce along on their own buoyant high spirits. For one thing, they manage to serve as the closest thing to the old musicals, and for another, Ms. Barrymore and Ms. Stiles make saying No exquisitely romantic.

You're Not Dreaming, There Is No Real Plot

Érick Zonca's The Dreamlife of Angels , from a screenplay by Mr. Zonca, has fully lived up to its rave advance notices from last year's Cannes Film Festival, at which its two female co-leads shared the Golden Palm for Best Actress. Élodie Bouchez plays Isa, a scruffy happy-go-lucky vagabond traveling with her rucksack from city to city, taking odd jobs when she can find them, and somehow surviving with her spirit intact. Natacha Régnier plays Marie, moodier and less mercurial than Isa. The two young women meet in a garment factory, and Marie decides to let Isa in on her temporary house-sitting gig for a married couple, whose daughter is in a coma.

Isa and Marie never become the most steadfast of friends because of the contrasting trajectories of their personal destinies. There is not much else to the plot. The three male characters who cross the paths of the two roommates serve to illuminate the differences between Isa and Marie more than to project personal destinies of their own.

Fortunately, Ms. Bouchez and Ms. Régnier exude enough talent and charisma to enliven the drably proletarian pallor of the milieu. Mr. Zonca has created a piece of morbidly erotic realism, and taken it to a tentative conclusion. While I was watching the movie, I was thoroughly entertained by the volatile chemistry between the two actresses and the two contrasting characters they played. But the more and more I have thought about it since, the less and less I remember about what held my undivided attention at the time. What the movie lacks are magically defining moments that can never be forgotten. This is frequently the problem with anti-Aristotelian enterprises with sociologically diminished characters in the larger scheme of things offered on the altar of a grayish realism.

London Suburbia, Beyond the Beatles

Philip Saville's Metroland , from the screenplay by Adrian Hodges, based on the novel by Julian Barnes, presents a positive view of British suburbia as the final destination of a once vaguely artistic young man with a yen for the liberating bohemianism of Paris. The time is the early 60's before Carnaby Street and the Beatles transformed the deadly conformism of British life into the temporarily chic look and sound of youthful rebellion.

Chris (Christian Bale) and Toni (Lee Ross) sneer at all things British and bourgeois in their naïve Francophilia. Chris actually takes off for Paris, where he finally gets properly and graphically laid by a sophisticated Frenchwoman (Elsa Zylberstein), but when he meets a young and proper English girl named Marion (Emily Watson), he realizes that sex alone is not enough for a lasting relationship. Chris returns to England with Marion, marries her, has a child and settles down with a steady job in Metroland, described in the production notes as the suburban sprawl at the end of London's Underground Metropolitan Line.

Meanwhile, Toni has gone around the world in search of adventure, and now enjoys an open marriage with an American heiress. He returns to Metroland to coax Chris into leaving his wife and child for freedom beyond Metroland. The film is almost as sketchy and schematic as it sounds, but the acting, particularly Ms. Watson's as the decisively levelheaded wife, takes up much of the slack.