The story is built around a bullfight and its aftermath-the slaughtered bull, the gored toreador. The various body parts of said bull are transported across Europe, from Madrid to Brussels to France, entering the otherwise unrelated lives of, among others, an epileptic little girl on Valium and her large black dog named Fred. In one extraordinary shot, Fred jumps onto the couch where the girl is watching (by sheer coincidence) a bullfight on television. It seems as if the black bull itself is jumping out of the television set to menace this strangely imperturbable little girl. Shortly thereafter, Fred is seen in close-up, peering at the spectacle of a kindred creature meeting its inevitable fate.

I recommend Carnage only to serious-minded moviegoers, but with the proviso that it might not be easy to follow. This isn't because it sets out to mystify its audience by shifting zones of reality and fantasy, as was the case in this year's conversation piece, François Ozon's Swimming Pool . The characters in Carnage never dream or fantasize, no matter how grotesquely they behave or how outlandishly they adorn themselves. Every incident transpires on the same level of reality, though nothing about the narrative is conventionally linear. A single gunshot is heard off-screen, but no one is injured. The action leading up to the gunshot is closer to Samuel Beckett than Anton Chekhov. There are three deaths, but no pattern of violence. There is nudity without eroticism, a bit of stalking but minus the malicious intent, and a series of regenerative endings without undue sentimentality.

Still, for all its originality-perhaps because of it- Carnage never generates the frisson of a fully realized emotional experience. It seems too proudly theoretical, too relentlessly fatalistic, too safely suspended between comedy and melodrama without paying the price for either. Indeed, it plays like a Buddhist parable, with its characters often captured compassionately at their most awkward, ungainly moments without ever becoming objects of ridicule, either on-screen or off. There is also a touch of the Buddhist in the film's spiritual focus on the two animal characters: Fred, the black dog, and the foredoomed black bull, Romero, which in Spanish means "rosemary," the herb of healing.

All in all, Carnage is an intellectually disciplined French film with an overlay of Spanish exuberance. (If my review seems vague, it's because I'm not sure that this is the way the cinema-even the French cinema-should be going.)

Poor Little Rich Girls

Uptown Girls , directed by Boaz Yakin, from a screenplay by Julia Dahl, Mo Ogrodnik and Lina Davidowitz (based on a story by Allison Jacobs, Ms. Ogrodnik and Ms. Davidowitz), reverses the once-upon-a-time tradition of the Cinderella story by imagining the plight of Molly Gunn (Brittany Murphy), the orphaned daughter of a late rock legend who goes from riches to ragtag when her business adviser absconds with all her millions. Poor Molly is expelled from her penthouse palace with her pet pig and forced to take a job as a nanny for Ray Schleine (Dakota Fanning). This neglected but bossy little 9-year-old terrorizes the household help during the frequent absences of her mother, Roma Schleine (Heather Locklear), a music-industry executive. I had a strange reaction to all this seemingly predictable nonsense. Though I found Mr. Yakin's direction unexpectedly imaginative, and the script often incongruously subtle, I couldn't get into the spirit of all the whimsy, the reason being the surprising lack of charm in the two leads. Ms. Murphy was well cast as the good-time girl in Eminem's 8 Mile (2002), but in this vehicle, she looks like she's too worn out from one too many late nights clubbing to pull off even a reverse-Cinderella fantasy. As for Ms. Fanning, she's one of the rare contemporary child actresses whom I find eminently resistible. With most mainstream movies, it's usually the other way around-there's nothing to talk about besides the charm and talent of the performers.

So there I was, watching a trivial entertainment with a growing respect for the people who made it and an abiding aversion for the two leads. As often happens, I began paying more attention to the unsympathetically programmed but more capable performances of Marley Shelton as Ingrid, Molly's false friend, and Heather Locklear as Ray's shamelessly neglectful mother. Perhaps Ms. Murphy's disenchantingly decadent eye makeup is part of the film's strategy of making this reverse-Cinderella cater to contemporary PG-13 audience tastes.

I also found an eerie echoing of Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002), when Molly advises her young charge to talk to her comatose father in the chance that he might hear her and recover. When this hope is dashed by the father's sudden death, a crisis erupts in the relationship between Ray and Molly, one that is more strongly motivated and more realistically resolved than is usual with movies in this too often coy genre.

The idea of a pig as a pet was something I liked. Was it Winston Churchill who observed that pigs make the ideal pets, because though dogs look up to us and cats look down on us, it is only pigs who treat us as equals? George Orwell understood this when he made pigs his human equivalents in his immortal political fable, Animal Farm . I should add something about Molly's tepid romance with an Aussie rock musician, who betrays her with Ray's mother to get ahead in the music business and still winds up as a good guy. But I shall resist the temptation to fulminate any further. After all, there's a limit to how mean I can allow myself to be before I begin frothing at the mouth in public and endanger my own reputation as a nice guy.

Celestial Temptresses

Agustín Díaz Yanes' Don't Tempt Me , from his own screenplay, turns a comic fantasy about the age-old contest between the forces of Heaven and Hell into a series of prescient metaphors. The globalization of capitalism, the chaos of sexual identities and the cheap melodrama of low-grade Parisian crime noir are all embodied in Victoria Abril and Penélope Cruz as Lola Nevado and Carmen Ramos, two luscious emissaries sent from Heaven and Hell to save the life and soul of a somewhat dimwitted boxer named Manny (Demián Bichir). After all the blows he's sustained in the course of his punishing career, Manny has been warned by doctors that if he fights again, he risks death. To answer his mother's prayer to Heaven-that her son doesn't commit suicide after being banned from the ring-God's minions send Lola, an angel who is supposedly Manny's estranged wife. The boxer is too edgy to suspect otherwise and accepts Lola without question, particularly when she gives him the "ride" of his life. Still, the problem in Heaven seems to be that God is depressed and apparently doesn't realize what's at stake in saving Manny's soul. Marina D'Angelo (Fanny Ardant) is director of operations for Heaven, and has recruited Lola, a sexy nightclub singer in Paris-but literally an angel in disguise-for her assignment to save Manny for Heaven.

Marina's counterpart in Hell-its C.E.O., no less-is Jack Davenport (Gael García Bernal), who might have worked for Enron if he were on Earth. Jack challenges Lola's mission with a delectable denizen of Hell, Carmen, to counter Lola's attempted coup with Manny. How all this is resolved is of less import than the opportunity this light-headed plot provides for Ms. Abril and Ms. Cruz to demonstrate how much chemistry they can generate from their inevitable collaboration on hold-ups, money scams and, ultimately, a sex-change in Hell for Carmen, who was originally a male gangster and would make a desirable partner for Lola. It's all harmless fun, I suppose, and mercifully free of all the cant usually associated with fantasies of Heaven and Hell. Mr. Yanes and his collaborators are obviously more attuned to the hellish than the heavenly in our lives and thoughts.

Film Notes

Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au Grisbi (1953), from a serie noire novel by Albert Simonin, is being revived at the Film Forum. It gives audiences a chance to catch Jean Gabin in a kind of comeback late in his career, as well as newcomers (at the time) Jeanne Moreau as the double-crossing moll and Lino Ventura (whom Gabin "discovered" in the wrestling ring) as the drug-trafficking villain who shoots it out in the end with Gabin's Max le Menteur. Along with his buddy Riton (René Dary), Max hopes to retire on their loot, or grisbi , until the troublemakers Moreau and Ventura intervene.

I remember Moreau when she first appeared in French noir films as an inscrutable temptress, and I thought she was fascinating, but I never dreamed that she would become the icon of fully bodied sensuality and womanly wisdom that she did. She was, in the beginning, more a young Bette Davis type with a potentially dark side to her nature. Gabin, young or old, was nonpareil as l'homme dur , but it's interesting to remember that he started out, in the early 1930's, as a song-and-dance man opposite Josephine Baker, much as our own great l'homme dur , Jimmy Cagney.

John Frankenheimer (1930-2002) is the subject of a three-week retrospective with new 35-millimeter prints of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Seconds (1966) and The Train (1964) at Film Forum (209 West Houston Street, 212-727-8110) from Sept. 19 through Oct. 9. I was very hard and a little overly technical about Frankenheimer in my book The American Cinema back in 1968, when I dumped him into the category of "Strained Seriousness." I can't really recant any of my reservations about his stylistic hysterics, but the fact remains that many of his films look much better today than they did back then. This is largely because today's mainstream film industry has abdicated its responsibility to make intelligent movies for grown-up audiences in their frantic pursuit of opening-week killings in multiplexes across the country.

In this context, several Frankenheimer films deserve a second look (and, in many instances, a first look)-not so much for being ahead of their time, but for being so seriously and so humanely of their time. The Manchurian Candidate (1962) breathtakingly anticipated a decade of political assassinations that were the 9/11's of the 60's. Black Sunday (1977) was even more uncanny in anticipating an age of terrorists. Seven Days in May (1964) is even more daring as political paranoia than Oliver Stone. And I Walk the Line (1970) is a treasure-not because of any political subtext, but because of the rueful tenderness of its May-December romance between Tuesday Weld and Gregory Peck.

John Frankenheimer is back in the saddle, roping in more excitement than the screen can hold. Reindeer Games is not great Frankenheimer. It is flawed and overly contrived and shot in a series of nostril-pumping close-ups that deprive the cinematic process of all the great things it can reveal for an audience. But it is also rude and rugged and constantly surprising. The man who gave the world such piercing character studies as All Fall Down and Birdman of Alcatraz and such a breathlessly imaginative thriller as The Manchurian Candidate falls short here. But Reindeer Games is still the work of a skilled director who knows how to tell a story and keep you on the edge of your seat. It's not boring.

The film centers on Rudy (Ben Affleck), a petty criminal serving time in a remote Michigan prison for auto theft, and his cellmate Nick (James Frain), a former employee of an Indian casino who got greedy. Rudy has spent most of his time behind bars listening to Nick read love letters from a dreamy pen pal he's never met named Ashley, and has become more than a bit fascinated with her himself. Two days before the two inmates are scheduled for parole, Nick is stabbed to death in the prison cafeteria and on a whim, Rudy, upon release, takes one look at Ashley(Charlize Theron) and innocently pretends to be Nick for a roll in the sheets. It's a Christmas wish that turns out to be the biggest mistake of his life.

Ashley turns out to be one Polaroid saint who is anything but. A glamorous tarantula with an incestuous, wacko brother named Gabriel (Gary Sinise, with Jesus hair and murder in his eyeballs) who plans to use Nick to rob the casino with a gang of murderous gun-running truck drivers, all dressed like Santa Claus. Poor Rudy doesn't know anything about casinos, but he has to pretend to be Nick to stay alive. It's no accident that Rudy is short for Rudolf, the red-nosed hero who wasn't allowed to play in any reindeer games, and the games continue until he can make his escape through the frozen wastes of Michigan, played by the frozen wastes of Canada.

As the plot thickens faster than cranberry sauce, Ashley isn't who she says she is, Gabriel isn't really her incestuous brother after all, and the double- and triple-crosses multiply so fast the movie turns preposterous. By the time the screen fills with dead, blood-splattered Santa Clauses and Dean Martin songs, you find yourself wincing instead of laughing. Only a cad would spoil the fun by revealing the twists and turns that keep this violent opus moving from one cliffhanger to the next. But I will tell you that by the time Rudy loses his cynicism (and almost his life), a Norman Rockwell turkey dinner in a Grandma Moses setting never looked so inviting.

I think it's a mistake to leaven the film's darker edge with flashes of humor. There is nothing funny about the hole in the ice of humanity into which Mr. Affleck's character falls, and repeated verses of "The Little Drummer Boy" sung under his breath only make the audience laugh at the film, not with it. Still, he has an easy, lumbering sweetness in this film he's never shown before. Mr. Sinise is such a good actor he can't hide his confusion about his own mixed-up role; every time he aims a gun at someone's brain, he seems to be suppressing a giggle. When they say they don't make movie stars like they used to, they haven't seen Ms. Theron in action. She's Lana Turner mixing a snake venom cocktail, killing you with a smile without a single regard for the value of your life. I love looking at her, but do we have to examine her pores with a magnifying glass? Mr. Frankenheimer's endless close-ups and two-shots really get in the way.

Although Reindeer Games is not on a par with his great work in the past, it proves Mr. Frankenheimer can still establish characters, set up complex situations and remove the safety caps on life's wilder fantasies with nimble feet and technical dexterity. Rarely has a Christmas Eve setting looked so terrifying.

An Old-Timer and a Newcomer

On the music front, two exceptional jazz singers are making a joyful noise. Sixty-five-year-old legend Teri Thornton, who just broke records at the Village Vanguard, has just released her first recording in 35 years on the Verve label, and it's a pleasure to report that on CD and in person, she's singing better than ever. Despite the long battle with

cancer that has kept her away from a microphone for the past couple of decades, she is in fighting form, the lush, rounded tones fully fleshed, the exemplary phrasing still unique and relaxed and surprising.

I'll Be Easy to Find is the title of both the CD and of a seldom-heard ballad by Bart Howard that is worth rediscovering. Show tunes, jazz standards and blues dazzle the ears, but the centerpiece is her own composition, "Salty Mama," the song with which she won the coveted Thelonious Monk International Jazz Vocals Competition in 1998. Recorded live, it's hard-swinging, juicy jazz that deserves the standing ovation you can hear on the CD.

Ms. Thornton pours not only her soul and her heart into her music, but a lifetime of musical savvy as well. And she is fearless, turning the "Lord's Prayer" into a Brazilian samba with startling panache. Her mother was a choir director, her godmother was an evangelist who attended Juilliard, her father was a Pullman porter. She's lived a lot, and it's all in the music. Hopefully, "I'll Be Easy to Find" is just the first step on the comeback trail of a great singer with a lot to give, still giving it all she's got.

Newcomer Steven Kowalczyk, at the Firebird Cafe, hails from Boston with a degree in African-American jazz from the University of Massachusetts, but there's nothing of the college egghead about him. He's a wildly accomplished blues-pop-jazz performer with a soulful intensity and movie-star sex appeal–soft, breathy, with an intricate sense of rhythm and an impeccable sense of time. He can swing, he can croon, and he scats like Mel Tormé. His own compositions are fresh and unique.

"My Lady Don't Dare" is a cool, snappy jazz tune in the old Bobby Troup style, while "Mother of Mothers" is a Brazilian free-for-all with a risky scat centerpiece that defies gravity. But he's got his own spin on standards, too: "You Don't Know What Love Is" reduces the room to a stunned hush, then he breaks up Cole Porter's "You'd Be So Nice to Come Home To" into short, punctuated, husky-voiced phrases like the valves on a bass trombone. Accompanied by a first-rate trio of Jon Cowherd on piano, Marc Ciprut on guitar and James Genus on bass, Mr. Kowalczyk takes risks and lands on his feet every time. I can't imagine who his idols are because he sounds completely original. All I can say is he knows more about music than a fellow so young has a right to know. The only thing wedged between Mr. Kowalczyk and stardom is his name, but his talent is so big you'll remember it, even if you can't pronounce it.