Radcliffe.

This is it, kids. Absolutely, positively the end of the Harry Potter series. I feel good about that, knowing I will never have to sit through another installment. The franchise that started 10 years ago and seems more like 10 lifetimes ago has at last written an ultimate “The End.” I’ve outgrown Lilliputian witches and goblins with flying broomsticks, and so have they. With boobs, hairy armpits and other star-making accoutrements, the time has come for them to pursue headier goals, like Broadway musicals and Vogue covers.

But before we wave adieu, let it be said that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the eighth and final installment, goes out with Fourth of July fireworks. For dedicated children who are aging along with the spellbinding midget warlocks they adore, a new Harry Potter movie is always a call to arms. They won’t be disappointed in this one. The three heroes are as panting and breathless as Liza Minnelli, and even to an aging Muggle like me, the movie makes sense for a change. As boring and deadly as the last one was, it’s now obvious why director David Yates and ace screenwriter Steve Kloves (let’s pray that with Harry out of his system, this fine craftsman will get back to serious business of writing superior scripts, like his Wonder Boys, Flesh and Bone and The Fabulous Baker Boys) put us all to sleep with the plodding narrative details in Part 1. They were saving the best for last.

You still need a deep foundation in J.K. Rowling’s fertile Potter history to make sense of the mystery Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) must at last solve in th e spectacular battle to save Hogwarts, continue fighting against evil, discover the missing horcrux and save the world from Lord Voldemort. The book devoted hundreds of pages to the final resolution, which is why it had to be divided into two films instead of one. (They also needed extra time and double the budget to perfect the myriad digitally mastered 3-D special effects that magically unfold before your eyes in Part 2 like an exploding theme park.) Mercifully, the film wastes no time cutting straight to the chase as the kids gather in an underground hideout to plan their strategy to seek and destroy the remaining horcruxes, which are the wands made of unicorn hairs and the heartstring of a dragon that make Lord Voldemort invincible. The goblin Griphook leads them to the first one, hidden deep inside a bank vault, where the first effective use of 3-D hits you right between the eyes on an underground railway that looks like a ride on the Cyclone at Coney Island. Escaping over the rooftops on the back of a flying, fire-breathing monster, Harry has two of the wands that make up the Deathly Hallows. In order to save his life and destroy the forces of darkness, he must locate the third, called the “elder wand,” which Voldemart needs to rule the world. The search takes you on an adventure full of unprecedented thrills that will take your breath away.

Everyone returns, including the brother and dead sister of the beloved Professor Dumbledore, who live in an oil painting, and even the ghost of Dumbledore himself, played once again by Michael Gambon. Hogwarts is now in the malevolent hands of the sinister Severus Snape (hissing, sniveling Alan Rickman), who is holding students and staff hostage as they wait for Harry to rescue them. The walls and platforms that hold up Hogwarts crumble and collapse like Tinker Toys in a masterpiece of destruction, turning the school of magic into the world’s most colossal rubbish heap. A humongous man-eating snake with fangs that strike the audience in 3-D almost devours Hermione, while Ron narrowly escapes a cauldron of flames on a broomstick. With Hogwarts gone and almost every member of the cast killed off by Voldemort, there could obviously never be another installment. But there’s still time for tender-hearted Professor Minerva McGonagell (Maggie Smith) to save the day with a spell she’s been waiting for years to try. There is even a flashback that explains the sinister role Snape played in Harry’s life story that I found unexpectedly touching. The only thing left to do to bring this saga to a heart-stopping conclusion is for Harry to enter the forbidden forest of death like a true hero and face his destiny with Voldemort, played one last time by the hatchet-faced Ralph Fiennes, who actually shows his human side for the first time. Frankly, I’m sorry to see him go.

None of it makes one lick of sense and a lot of the dialogue is pure jabberwocky, decipherable only by those who know the books by heart. This includes billions of rabid fans, so I don’t think anyone is even slightly worried that a little formality like incoherence will affect the box office. The movie never wore out my patience like Part 1 did, because the awesome effects take over where the plot used to be, and although this is the end, my guess is that it will fire the imagination for years to come. What fun to feel like a kid again. I had a marvelous time.

rreed@observer.com

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 2

Running time 130 minutes

Written by Steve Kloves

Directed by David Yates

Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman

3/4

We justify watching this show by pretending to be engaged in a sociological experiment: Why is it just so much more weird and squirmy when it’s the woman who has to choose from a bunch of dudes as opposed to some blockhead picking among a gaggle of silicone? We haven’t figured it out yet, but tonight should be interesting as bachelorette Jillian Harris takes her final three men to Hawaii— Reid, who we totally have a crush on and looks remarkably like Matt Perry; Kiptyn, who has a silly name and weird parents; and hunky Ed, who has the banged-up visage of Clive Owen but in a totally Midwestern way. Tonight, one of the gents has a little trouble in the bedroom, if you know what we mean (and we know you do!). Wow, ABC—you really are a bunch of evil geniuses. [ABC, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday: The English Patient

Remember just how intensely people felt about this movie?  If not, take a trip back to 1996 and the romance that is The English Patient. The 1996 film, directed by Anthony Minghella, stars Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas as doomed passionate lovers, with Colin Firth as the cuckolded husband (can you imagine such a thing?), Williem Defoe as yet another slightly creepy guy and pretty Juliette Binoche who has an affair with … Sayid from Lost! (Naveen Andrews). [FLIXe, 2:05 a.m.]

Wednesday: Starter For 10

Here’s a fun little romantic comedy you probably haven’t seen: Starter For 10, set in 1985 Thatcher-heavy England, is about a young man (pre-Atonement James McAvoy) who goes to the University of Bristol and tries to get in and win the college quiz show “University Challenge.”  A love triangle develops, with Vicky Cristina Barcelona’s Rebecca Hall and blonde-to-watch Alice Eve. The best part about all of this is the movie’s soundtrack, which boasts tunes from the Cure, New Order, the Buzzcocks, The Smiths, and just about anything else moody and melancholy. Wheeee! [3:30 p.m. MOMAXe]

Thursday: Away From Her

Here’s the winner of the movie-that-made-us-cry-the-hardest-in-2007 award! Away From Her, directed by the young and totally awesome Sarah Polley, is based on the soul-crushing Alice Munro short story “The Bear Comes Over the Mountain,” about a couple who have been married for 44 years when one starts showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s. It’s a totally grown-up movie that examines what fidelity, devotion and love look like from the end of the journey rather than the start, and both the luminous Julie Christie and gruff Gordon Pinsent couldn’t be better. [TMCe, 2 p.m.]

Friday: Lucas

Ah, Lucas. This 1986 film left a pretty strong impression on our young mind about how love looks (answer: Charlie Sheen in a football uniform). The film stars Corey Haim as the title character—a hopeless nerd in love with his pretty red-headed friend (Kerri Green, where is she these days, anyway?) who in turn loves the captain of the football team (honestly, the best Mr. Sheen has ever looked). Look out for Melrose Place’s Courtney Thorne-Smith as a bitchy senior, and a very young Winona Ryder making her film debut. Best of all, Jeremy Piven shows up and he has hair! [AMC, 10:30 a.m.]

The early reviews have been split down the middle, with the fanboys drooling (spoiler alert: Harry Knowles loved it!) and the real critics meeting the film with a shrug or worse. Says The Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt in his pan: “Bottom line: Ouch."

That hurt! Still, love or hate, everyone seems to agree that “visionary” director Zack Snyder has succeeded in painstakingly recreating Alan Moore’s graphic novel. (Just prepare to be disappointed if you’re looking for the giant squid.) But from where we sit, the one thing he missed is the casting!

Oh sure, Little Children co-stars Patrick Wilson and Jackie Earle Haley, playing Nite Owl II and Rorschach respectively, are ideal. Mr. Haley is adept at doing creepy and pathetic; Mr. Wilson, the very definition of “hot, but impotent." And while in some quarters the feeling is that Robert Downey Jr. should have been The Comedian, we think Jeffrey Dean Morgan will be just fine. Simply, Mr. Downey Jr. is way too nice to play a role like that. Mr. Morgan, on the other hand, has always seemed like a bit of a jerk (playing a ghost on Grey’s Anatomy who got to have sex with Katherine Heigl might have something to do with that). It’s the rest of this motley crew that leaves a lot to be desired! So join us as we recast Watchmen.

Demi Moore as Silk Spectre I: Watching the two female leads in Watchmen was a difficult task. Between the nudity and the general misogyny directed towards all women in the graphic novel, we doubt a lot of A-list actresses were banging down Mr. Snyder’s door to appear. That being said, is it written, Slumdog Millionaire-style, that Sin City co-star Carla Gugino has to appear in every adaptation of an acclaimed graphic novel? Give us the older and just plain better Demi Moore instead.

Cameron Diaz and Maggie Grace as Silk Spectre II: If you’re going to cast Cameron Diaz look-alike Malin Akerman in this role, why not just go for the real thing? As for those pesky flashback scenes, we’d slide in former Lost castaway Maggie Grace. If she can play a teenager in Taken, we’re sure she can do it in Watchmen. Too bad we can’t find any room for Boone.

Javier Bardem as Dr. Manhattan: Billy Crudup possesses a lot of useful character traits, but being laconic isn’t one of them. And unfortunately for him, Dr. Manhattan is a soulless and dead-eyed bore—words like “tachyon” are just not said in anything other than a Ben Stein-like monotone. So how about we go with Javier Bardem? Dr. Manhattan might be an All-American, but Mr. Bardem’s rumbling baritone, used so effectively in No Country for Old Men, would suit the big blue guy just perfectly. And this time, he wouldn’t need that ridiculous haircut.

Ralph Fiennes as Ozymandias: We really like Matthew Goode—so effete in Match Point, so dastardly in The Lookout—but he’s way too young for this role. And, no offense, we have a hard time thinking of him as the smartest man in the world. Ozymandias is the type of guy who would affect a British accent just for the hell of it; a man who seems bored with his own intelligence. Mr. Fiennes, come on down! An actor of his caliber could liven up the pages and pages of exposition that Ozymandias is forced to deliver in the final third of the story. We’re already trembling at the thought of Mr. Goode pontificating about the greater good while wearing a gold lamé headband that’s straight out of Barbarella.

Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, from a screenplay by David Hare, based on the semi-autobiographical novel The Reader, by Bernhard Schlink, has lost much of the emotional power of the book, which was published in 1995, translated into 40 other languages and became the first German novel to top the New York Times’ best-seller list. The problem with the film arises from a miscalculation on the part of Mr. Daldry, and his screenwriter, Mr. Hare, which involves breaking up the linear narrative of the novel into flash-forwards and flashbacks over a period of 30 years. What remains intact from the book is the emotional and carnal relationship in post–World War II Germany between 15-year-old Michael Berg, played by David Kross, and 36-year-old Hanna Schmitz, played by 33-year-old Kate Winslet.

Eight years after Hanna has suddenly disappeared from Michael’s life, he sees her again as a defendant in a gruesome war-crimes trial while he is a student in law school. He is so profoundly shocked by the revelations at the trial that he does not venture to see her again until her life sentence is commuted after 20 years. Ralph Fiennes plays the 46-year old Michael Berg, and though he has only one scene in person with Ms. Winslet in old-age makeup, the rupture of the acting synergy inherent in the switch diminishes the heart-rending effect made possible in the book, where Michael and Hanna are imagined to age together.

As it turns out, in both the book and the movie, Hanna was illiterate for most of her life, and hid her disability from the young Michael Berg, her streetcar company employers, and even the judge at her war-crimes trial. In the latter circumstance, it is as if she were more ashamed of being illiterate than of the atrocities committed with her tacit consent. She only learned to read and write late in her prison term, when Michael sent her tapes of the books he had read aloud to her during the year of their affair.

Mr. Daldry is quoted in the production notes on the subject of the banality of the Nazi Holocaust as a movie subject: “There have been 252 films made about the holocaust, and I hope there are at least as many more.” Still, he regards his own film as something of an exception, or, “an odd piece,” as he defines it, in that a lone survivor who has written a book on the horror is treated as a moral pillar instead of a pathetically weakened victim. Still, despite the efforts of Mr. Hare, Mr. Daldry, and producers Donna Gigliotti, Redmond Morris and the late Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, the Holocaust remains the elephant in the room that deadens the elements of surprise and suspense we have been conditioned to expect in screen narratives.

This is not to say that the performances of Ms. Winslet, Mr. Kross and Mr. Fiennes are anything less than convincingly heartfelt. This is especially true of Ms. Winslet, who is appearing later this month in Revolutionary Road, directed by husband Sam Mendes and adapted from the much-admired novel by Richard Yates. Ms. Winslet is to be reunited with Leonardo DiCaprio for the first time since they made box-office history together in James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), after she made her sparkling debut at 19 in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994). She has never been adequately appreciated for all of her strikingly offbeat performances, but now her time may have come at last. Finally, more than a footnote should be devoted to the curiously ambivalent performance of the legendary German actor Bruno Ganz, as young Michael Berg’s relentlessly skeptical questioner in law school.

asarris@observer.com

The turkey’s in the soup, the retailers are praying for a Merry Christmas, and the year-end movie countdown is in full swing. I’ve still got a few items on my screening list, but I will go out on a limb right now and predict I will see nothing greater, more haunting, wrenching or profound, than The Reader. I’m preparing you in advance. One viewing is not enough. It opens next week and I can’t wait to see it again.

Adapted by David Hare from the renowned best-selling literary sensation by German novelist Bernhard Schlink; meticulously directed by the formidable Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot); and starring Kate Winslet in an Oscar-caliber performance that is one of the most devastating of her career, with a supporting cast that includes Ralph Fiennes, Lena Olin, Bruno Ganz and young newcomer David Kross—one of the most sensitive and charismatic discoveries in years—The Reader arrives with artistry stamped all over it. But no expectation can prepare you for its emotional impact. It has left me dazed.

The Holocaust figures into the plot, but instead of being a movie about the horrors of World War II, The Reader bridges the controversial gap between two generations—the Germans who lived and committed crimes under Hitler, and the generation of young postwar Germans who still don’t understand their country’s past. The emotional probing, spiritual shame and moral confusion that connect the people from these diverse generations is the glue that makes The Reader such a vital, important and timeless motion picture. I am so passionate about it that I think it should be taught in film schools. It is certainly a work of overwhelming accomplishment.

Berlin, 1995. The wall is long gone. It’s a new world, but successful lawyer Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) cannot forget the events that shaped his manhood. When he was 15, he fell ill in a doorway with scarlet fever and was rescued by a lady streetcar conductor who bathed him and took him home to his family. After two months of recovery, he returned with flowers, and a sexual relationship began that changed his life forever. Empowered by first love, the naïve, virginal schoolboy learns many things from the older woman. His grades improve; he develops self-confidence; and he spends an erotic summer passing the time between country picnics and rainy-afternoon orgasms reading aloud the great literary works of Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, Chekhov and Homer to a woman old enough to be his mother, who calls herself simply Hanna. One day he arrives to find her apartment empty. Hanna has disappeared without a trace, and the boy is left alone, tormented and confused by a haze of memories.

By 1966, Michael is a bright, promising law student in Heidelberg whose class attends a trial of Nazi war criminals accused of murdering 600 Jews. In the courtroom docks, one of the defendants turns out to be his beloved Hanna, who is accused of being an SS guard at Auschwitz. Stricken mute and overcome with conflicting emotions that leave him shattered, Michael is further astonished when she confesses to personally writing the orders that condemned 300 of the inmates to death. But wait. Michael knows his old friend could neither read nor write. That’s why he was the reader and she was the grateful listener. Knowing she has given a false confession to save her pride, Michael is the only person with the one piece of evidence that can save her. Torn between the embers of a lost love for her and the truth of who and what she really was in a war that was before his time, the young man makes his own pilgrimage to Auschwitz, where the ovens are now tourist attractions. Will he save her, or will he remain quietly and morally indignant along with the rest of his generation? This story is far from over, and what happens in the next 20 years and leading up to present-day Germany will leave you with your mouth wide open. To say more would spoil what I promise unequivocally will be one of the most uplifting movie experiences of your life.

Magnificently photographed by both Chris Menges and Roger Deakins, two of the most distinguished cinematographers of our time, The Reader is a miracle of delicacy, psychological insight and surprising hopefulness as one generation seeks retribution for the sins of their fathers. The acting is superb. Lena Olin has a scene near the end that deserves a supporting-actress Oscar; Ms. Winslet surpasses all promise; and as the boy who grows into a man paying a supreme price for the loss of innocence, David Kross has such range and sensitivity that he wraps himself around your heart and builds a permanent home there. I can think of no praise high enough for Stephen Daldry, whose compassionate direction obstinately resists the lure to indulge any sentimental slush. The Reader is a masterpiece.

rreed@observer.com

In true and dubious movie fashion, The Duchess transforms a serious, carefully researched biography of historical significance by best-selling British writer Amanda Foreman into a bucket of frothy banality overwhelmed by wigs, costumes, gilt-edged ceilings, sumptuous country manors and expensive period furniture as imagined by Sofia Coppola. It looks like outtakes from the nauseating bubble-gum fantasy Marie Antoinette.

The scandalous lady in the title is 18th-century socialite Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, and if the movie has any longevity, it’s because she was the great-great-great-great aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales. What else of significance defines her? As played by the photogenic but vacuous Keira Knightley, Georgiana was a trendy fashion plate, gossip-column celebrity and miserable wife, married off in 1774 by her monstrous mother (a wasted Charlotte Rampling) as a virginal 16-year-old child bride to the titled William Cavendish, the Fifth Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes, who looks like he stepped out of a Gainsborough). Poor Georgianna produced two daughters but not the son her husband craved, so he cut her out of his affections early. A brutal pig and domestic tyrant with the servants, he never took to his wife in or out of bed (although there is a scene of marital rape), but instead made her the centerpiece in a threesome with his mistress, Lady Elizabeth Foster (Hayley Atwell), that lasted for 25 years. When the duke married “the other woman” after the duchess died in 1806, everyone conveniently forgot she had been the one who brought out the sexual passion in the duchess her indifferent husband ignored. Yes, she was not only adored and powerful, but a latent lesbian, too. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Playing a woman who grew in stature from a spoiled child to a woman of enormous political influence, Keira Knightley demonstrates nothing beyond the emotional depth of a Cosmopolitan cover. It’s a vain and empty-headed performance, worsened by a thin, chipped little voice (echoes of Princess Di) and the kind of glossy, superficial direction (by Saul Dibb) that relies on rosy close-ups of the star posing for 8-by-10 glossies. Mention is scarcely made of the historic footnote that at the time of the American Revolution, Georgiana was so popular and politically influential that she exerted a tremendous impact on the pro-U.S. Whig Party, eclipsing her husband’s clout in Parliament. Instead, there’s too much disposable time spent on her infatuation with drinking, gambling and flirting with the future prime minister of England, Charles Grey, played like a randy fawn by the disastrously miscast Dominic Cooper, one of the students in The History Boys. The dialogue is so absurd that you wonder if Jeffrey Hatcher didn’t write it after watching too many BBC reruns of Coronation Street. Upon hearing that the distinguished politician Charles Grey has just returned from Paris, she gurgles: “No revolution yet?” Reproaching an adversary, the duke sounds alarmingly modern (“Deal? I don’t do deals!”), and when the duchess enters a room, she’s introduced to a crowd of her admirers with “what we see her wearing tonight, I look forward to seeing the rest of you wearing tomorrow!” Can anyone prove this stuff wasn’t written by Joan Rivers?

The trappings are lush, but this is not a great, or even worthwhile, movie. Eventually, as her adulterous affairs become public knowledge, the full weight of 18th-century morality crashes down on her powdered wigs (and matching hats so elaborate Hattie Carnegie would retch), and the sad fate of Princess Di’s celebrity ancestor is sealed in scandal. Opening, of course, the unavoidable knowledge that nearly two centuries later, in 1981, history will be doomed to repeat itself.

rreed@observer.com

Noted playwright Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, from his own screenplay, is set and literally immersed in the well-preserved medieval Belgian city described as the “Venice of the North,” a title once held by Dresden before it was virtually obliterated by Allied bombers in World War II. Over the years, Bruges has become a great tourist attraction, though Mr. McDonagh and his resourceful cinematographer, Eigil Bryld, have rendered it in more sinister terms as the misty, ghostly background for a gothic gangster tale full of unbridled violence, and yet graced with a perversely soulful spirituality in the exposed feelings of its three major characters, killers all.

Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) are two Irish hit men who have been dispatched by their London boss, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), to take a few weeks’ holiday in Bruges just before Christmas. We learn later that Ray has shot a priest in his confessional booth on a contract from Harry, but has accidentally also slain an altar boy, which was not in Harry’s contract. These murders, like all the violence, are rendered very vividly.

Ray has become suicidally inclined over his killing of the altar boy, and Ken has to spend much of his time in Bruges trying to comfort and reassure Ray that all is well and accidents will happen. Ray refuses to be consoled, and he complains that he can’t wait to get back to London. By contrast, Ken is transformed by the city, and pushes Ray to explore and enjoy its rich history and culture on display everywhere they turn. Then, on a call to Ken from Harry, who insists that Ray not be present for the call, Harry reveals his purpose in sending the two men to Bruges. Ken is to dispose of Ray for mishandling the priest assignment, but not before Ray has had the dreamlike experience of discovering Bruges as Harry himself had done many years before. Such tender whimsy in the midst of callous ruthlessness is typical of the film as a whole.

What happens next is unusually convoluted, and I’d better not tell you in advance. As the homicidally and suicidally tangled narrative unfolds, Ray has time to discover a true and lasting love in the arms of a Dutch prostitute, Chloë (Clémence Poésy), who hangs around with a dwarf director named Jimmy (Jordan Prentice), who is making an art film on a Hieronymus Bosch-like set. In the course of consummating his courtship of Chloë, Ray savagely beats up a “Canadian Guy” in a restaurant for his loudly and profanely complaining about Chloë’s smoking, and ends up partially blinding Chloë’s jealous skinhead procurer, Eirik (Jérémy Renier).

The language Ray, Ken and Harry unload is unusually obscene in its casualness and instinctiveness. These are characters without civilized limits on their behavior, and their obscenities express their anarchic impulses, which makes their climactic submission to the morbid spirituality of Bruges all the more overwhelming. Ultimately, the plot contortions are less important than the film’s complex tone, which impels the three main characters to release all the demons of guilt and shame from their tortured souls, on a blood-soaked pavement in front of a holy bell tower.

In Bruges is not entertainment for the faint-hearted and mindlessly censorious, and in this particularly chaotic period, it seems right in tune with the times. It goes almost without saying that the acting of the three leads, and that of their colleagues, is, in a word, splendid.

You know the movie business is in trouble when producers hire theatrical playwrights who know nothing about movies to write original screenplays and then pay them extra to direct them. Ireland’s bizarre Martin McDonagh, author of a mixed bag of such grim, unsettling, Grand Guignol dramas as The Beauty Queen of Leenane (wonderful) and The Pillowman (dismal), has now been unwisely handed the reins for his first film, a gruesome, confused stumblebum of a movie called In Bruges, which is the most pretentious bucket of swill since I’m Not There. This one might be worse. Instead of Cate Blanchett as a man, it’s got a dwarf hooked on horse tranquilizers.

The movie that opened this year’s Sundance film bash, In Bruges has also got two Irish hit men hiding out in the beautiful medieval ruins of the Flemish fairy tale town called Bruges. Colin Farrell, who needs subtitles, plays a thug named Ray, haunted by the accidental murder of an innocent child while on assignment to murder a priest sitting in his confessional. Brendan Gleeson is Ken, a veteran killer who acts like a father figure to the trigger-happy younger psycho. While they wait for further orders from their boss, a reptilian creature named Harry (Ralph Fiennes with a crew cut and permanent scowl of a man whose breath smells like an open sewer), the sang-froid surfaces. Wandering around the cobblestone streets they run smack into a Dutch film crew shooting a movie that stars a horny, drug-addled midget, who keeps showing up symbolically, like the dead little boy whose blood was splashed all over a Catholic church by Ray. The movie is structured in little pieces, padded with vignettes that never make any sense. Ray falls for a Belgian drug dealer. When her boyfriend shows up to rob him, Ray blows out his eye with a gun that shoots blanks. The dwarf is a racist who shares two prostitutes with Ray. Ray smashes him to hamburger. A pair of Canadian diners seated next to Ray get punched unconscious because they complain about his cigarette smoke. At last, Harry arrives and informs the mortified Ken that the victim of his next hit job is none other than Ray himself! The coke dealer, the one-eyed thief, the dwarf and all three of the hit men all end up in the blood-soaked town square in front of the Gothic cathedral that allegedly houses the blood of Jesus Christ. The dwarf goes first, because he’s dressed like … are you ready? The little boy who lost his head in the church back in London, or was it Dublin? Oh, hell, by this time I didn’t have a clue what I was seeing, thinking, hearing or anything else. The whole miserable mess is like a brain concussion, ending with the voice of Ray’s corpse, waxing poetic: “Maybe that’s what hell is—the rest of fucking eternity spent in fucking Bruges!” No, 91 minutes is hell enough already.

Ham acting and incompetent direction are anesthesized by a lot of Irish Catholic blarney about guilt, sin and redemption, but Mr. McDonagh’s trademark black comedy fails at humor, and although it is sort of creepy, it’s never creepy enough to talk about. Some people think In Bruges is the most nauseating thing since Guy Ritchie met Madonna. Others think it’s hilarious. I think it’s about good actors slumming, in a shameful waste of time and talent that personifies the four most lethal words in cinema today: “Big hit at Sundance!”

To the Editor:

What was the purpose of Sara Vilkomerson’s piece on Ralph Fiennes [“After His Tony Loss, How Fiennes Is Ralph?”, June 19, 2006], devoted largely to a prurient rehashing of gossip about his personal life? When Ms. Vilkomerson did bother to discuss his work, she chose to focus on listing awards he didn’t win and films he’s made that were unsuccessful. The headline alone was a cheap shot at a man who is widely acknowledged as one of the finest actors of his generation, with a diverse and uncompromising body of work.

As the writer/director of Mr. Fiennes’ new film, Land of the Blind, I know that the interview was under the pretext of discussing that project. But the film was given only a cursory and dismissive treatment, the better to save column inches for schadenfreude about Ralph’s private life and the Tonys. Ours is a tiny little movie with almost no advertising or marketing budget; we only had two press opportunities with Ralph, and chose to give one of those slots to The Observer.

We were rewarded with a character assassination. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that The Observer exploited Mr. Fiennes to get a movie star’s picture on the front page, then gleefully carved up his personal life in a manner more appropriate to a tabloid than a serious newspaper. Neither I nor your readers expect (or want) a puff piece. But we do expect (and want) responsible and informative journalism. On that count, it is Ms. Vilkomerson who deserves lambasting.

Robert Edwards

Manhattan

Hundred Years Bore

To the Editor:

Re “An Unmourned Death, An Unspeakable Cause” [The National Observer, June 19]: Richard Brookhiser writes with an eloquence that is completely absent from anything written in the past hundred years. I have forwarded [the column] to everyone I know.

Steve Bender

East Grand

Rapids, Mich.

In the winter of 2006, Dr. Kate Forster (Ms. Bullock) finishes her residency, leaves her beloved Illinois lake house and moves to an important job in a major Chicago hospital. Back at the tranquil sanctuary she left behind, the new occupant is budding architect Alex Wyler (Mr. Reeves), who finds a note asking that he forward the mail to her new address. He goes to the city to deliver it, but there’s nothing there but a construction site. In the odd exchange of letters that follows, the postmarks on his envelopes are two years old. They fall in love. They have the same dog, a female mutt called Jack, who plays chess with her paws and likes being read to from the works of Dostoevsky. (I do not lie. Who could make these things up?)

But as the movie drags on, it becomes clear that either he’s living in the past while she’s living in the future, or one of them doesn’t exist at all. When they first meet, it may be 2004. They make a date to meet on Valentine’s Day in 2006, but while she’s sitting on a bench in front of the hospital, he may or may not be the man who gets killed in a trucking accident. Wafting between whimsical and lugubriously romantic, the movie finally reaches the assigned day of the appointed year in time for a happy ending at—you guessed it—the bizarre lake house with the mailbox that raises its own flag and delivers its own mail without the aid of a postman. Excuse me, but none of this makes any kind of logical sense. I mean, if they are living two years apart and he finally meets the girl of his dreams on Valentine’s Day, 2006, wouldn’t the day for her really be Valentine’s Day, 2008? And if he’s the man struck dead in front of the hospital, what is he doing at the lake house two years later in the first place?

Obviously aimed at a youth market with no perception, The Lake House is a potboiler about meeting the right person in the wrong time and space and not giving up until time stops forever. But for anyone with a bit of life experience, the pieces of the puzzle don’t fit together to form a coherent or satisfying narrative, and all you’re left with is a big, dumb “Huh?”

Like most bad movies today, the real actors are the ones who fill the supporting slots. The marvelous and enchanting Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who made a powerful impact as Ben Kingsley’s tragic wife in House of Sand and Fog, plays a wise and sympathetic doctor colleague that I cared more about than Ms. Bullock. Dylan Walsh, the impossibly handsome star of TV’s controversial series Nip/Tuck, plays the sexy boyfriend that Ms. Bullock incomprehensibly sacrifices for Mr. Reeves. And Christopher Plummer delivers a long, pointless lecture on the relationship between architecture and the nature that reflects it, which explains why the structures in Barcelona are different from the buildings in Tokyo. The writer is David Auburn, who won the Pulitzer for his play Proof, but this speech seems to belong to another movie, like almost everything else in the movie, including the limp direction by Argentina’s Alejandro Agresti. In their first collaboration since the 1994 action hit Speed, the Bullock-Reeves team has learned nothing. She can act, but she rarely appears in anything worth acting in. Like Bill Murray, he always appears to be waking from a nap—or looking for a cozy cot to catch one.

Leading Blind

If satire is the thing that closes on Saturday night, then political satire is usually doomed to close one night earlier. In the case of a pretentious monstrosity called Land of the Blind, it’s a miracle it ever opened at all. If this is the winner of the 2001 Motion Picture Arts and Sciences screenwriting competition, one can only assume the judges locked in their Hollywood hotel rooms with scoring pencils were sniffing something besides room service.

An admirable cast headed by Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland trash their talents big time in this futuristic political drivel about dictators, terrorists and corruption in an unnamed country with overloaded similarities and not-so-subtle references to Iraq, Chile, Nazi Germany and the good old U.S. of A. For 20 years, the insane son and heir of a President-for-Life who condemned all dissenters to the gallows has become a dictator even more vicious, brutal and evil than his father. Generalissimo Maximillian II, known as “Junior,” specializes in murder, rape and torture—in addition to which, he runs the country’s film industry. (An inside joke, for as we all know, it is sometimes hard to tell the difference.) Tom Hollander (Gosford Park) gives the most colorful performance in the movie as the mincing, pouty-mouthed Führer who conducts cabinet meetings during his bowel movements. The always-exotic Lara Flynn Boyle matches his perversions as the orgiastic First Lady, dressed like a Cher imitator in a drag revue.

For two decades, they have massacred all opponents, but now a revolution is hatching, masterminded by a political prisoner named Thorne (Sutherland), a liberal intellectual sentenced to 13 years for writing a play critical of the dictatorship, and head of the underground movement called “Citizens for Justice and Democracy.” While he writes revolutionary slogans on the walls of his cell with his own excrement, an idealistic guard named Joe (Fiennes) can’t resist his philosophy, let alone the smell. Ignoring Junior’s savage threats, Joe springs Thorne and organizes the assassination of the dictator and his wife while they are crawling around naked on all fours, oinking like pigs.

Thorne becomes the new liberation leader, and for his brave heroics in guiding him to power, Joe becomes his reluctant poster boy for democracy, although with the new vegetarian laws, book burnings and martyrs hanging from every rooftop, Joe sees through the sham and turns cynical, suspecting Thorne of becoming the same kind of fiend as the one he just dethroned. Barristers, attorneys, teachers, religious leaders and other loyal supporters of the new regime are shipped to “re-education classes” that are nothing more than New Age concentration camps. After refusing to sign a loyalty oath, Joe ends up locked in the same kind of prison-cell predicament Thorne was in when they first met. Having outlived his usefulness as a political puppet, he enrages his mentor by becoming a counterrevolutionary. After Thorne is silently executed in a bathtub by one of his deluded female followers (Marat stabbed by Charlotte Corday), it is clear that the time has come for a new leader. You don’t have be a political-science major to figure out who the next dictator will be.

Subtle as a hydrogen bomb, the messages in Land of the Blind are (Excelsior!) threefold: Change can only come about through a coup d’état of blood and gore; every new society succeeds by violently annihilating all traces of the old one; and after every revolution, the idealists end up ruled by another criminal tyranny worse than the one they had before. (For starters, see Cuba, Afghanistan, Russia and North Korea.)

How this naïve script by a former soldier in Iraq and nightclub doorman named Robert Edwards ever won a literary contest is a head-scratcher for the muses. Sample dialogue: “Show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy”; “If I catch you talking to that prisoner again, I’ll beat you like a red-headed stepchild, and skull-fuck your corpse!” Worse yet, he is also the director. Among the multitude of lessons he must learn if his career moves forward are the following: how to frame a shot, how to control actors from eating the sets, and where to place the camera in order to get more than two people in the same set-up. Everything else about Land of the Blind is as big a mystery to me as crib death.