A scene from “Before Sunset.” (2004)

Deadline reports that fans of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's onscreen romance have a great deal to look forward to: Before Midnight, directed by Richard Linklater, has just completed shooting and is entering the market at the Toronto Film Festival for possible distributors to bid on. The last Before [TKTime] film, Before Sunset, came out in 2004 and featured its lead characters reconnecting in Paris after nine years apart; it continued the story commenced in 1995's Before Sunrise, wherein the pair first meet in Vienna and spend a night exploring together. The new film takes place in Messinia, Greece--little did Ethan Hawke know when he signed on to these movies that he'd get to jaunt around Europe once a decade or so!

Black and MacLaine.

One of the many delights of Bernie, the offbeat new comedy by Richard Linklater, is that it is fresh, surprising and funny without going for sitcom punch lines or ridiculous, contrived situations inserted for guffaws. It’s not hilarious. It’s just warm and real enough to keep you smiling and awed at the same time. It is also the only movie I have ever liked Jack Black in, one of the few times Matthew McConaughey, a terrible actor, has ever come anywhere close to giving a tolerable performance, and features Shirley MacLaine’s best role in years. A lot to like here, and I liked it all.

Bernie, based on a Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth called “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas,” is the eccentric true crime story of a 1997 murder in Carthage, Texas, in which 81-year-old Marjorie Nugent, the richest, meanest and most hated woman in East Texas, was found stuffed in the bottom of her freezer, hammered to death by her lover, best friend and devoted heir, a porky mortician named Bernie Tiede. It was a headline-making scandal, but the friends and neighbors of the beloved Bernie rallied to his defense and turned him into a hero. This is the story, told in a mock documentary style that derives most of its humor from interviews with actual citizens of Carthage who showered Bernie with support and rallied no sympathy for his murder victim. It is quite a story, and an unusual movie more merry than morbid.

From his arrival in Carthage, Bernie was a hands-on, give-it-all-you-got kind of guy, tending his corpses at the local funeral parlor with loving care—shaving facial hair from their nostrils, inserting super glue on their eyelids to avoid embarrassing last-minute surprises in the coffin, even filling their mouths with rubber balls to prevent drooping jaws in open-casket viewings. Bernie won kudos for his tender talent for body removal and his artistry for embalming and cosmetology. With no experience, he was a fast learner and in no time became an expert on car wrecks, heart attacks and household poisons, making his clients feel special. Business boomed and everyone went to Bernie. Then he met his match in a monstrous old trout named Marjorie Nugent.

When her husband, a Texas oil man named Bubba, passed on, “Miss Margie” went through the motions of a funeral like everyone else, hating everything and every mourner, cutting her relatives out of the will, and living up to the town’s assessment of her as a “mean old hateful bitch.” When we first see Shirley MacLaine, scowling with venom, her face screwed into wrinkled ridges of sour dough, her eyes slits of reptilian fury reducing everything in sight to ashes, she looks like a pterodactyl. But Bernie was determined to win her over. Considering it part of his job to visit widows after their husband’s memorials, he delivered gifts to her gated manse only to get the door slammed in his face. But eventually she started to thaw when he took her to events like the Van Cliburn piano competitions in Fort Worth. (This is Texas. Expectations do not run high. You do what you can to hold on to your sanity.) Soft as dough, fastidious to a fault, smelling of cologne and more than a wee bit androgynous, Bernie even sang show tunes in local stage shows and collected men’s fitness magazines. Was he gay? Small-town rumors dominated front porch gossip, but Miss Margie didn’t care. She had found a devoted new slave, appointed him her business manager, and even took him on vacation trips, platonically sharing the same bedroom. Her appalled relatives grew more aghast when she left her entire estate to Bernie in exchange for pedicures, makeup applications and Lysoling her kitchen counters. Whenever he got out of line, she would chew her food 20 times, noisily and annoyingly, to drive him to distraction. But as Bernie grew more disillusioned with his meal ticket, the citizens of Carthage cemented their affection for Bernie as he bought them gifts, offered financial advice and paid for a new prayer wing at the Methodist church. Growing more jealous by the day, Miss Margie turned possessive and so unbearable that convenient garden tools became irresistible. But Mr. Linklater’s talent for drawing out the most intimate, unedited and inadvertently charming responses from people in coffee shops and wicker rocking chairs turns even tragedy into chuckles of joy.

Jack Black displays an unctuous, mustachioed sweetness punctuated by a welcome restraint he’s never shown before. (He even sings “Love Lifted Me.”) It can’t be easy for the great Shirley MacLaine to find juicy roles at this time and place in movie history, but she is both fearless and miraculous in her total concentration on playing a human dragon. Age and the weather have robbed her of nothing in the way of comic timing and technique. The events in Bernie are tied together by interviews with corny down-home locals who, without knowing it, could easily do skits on Saturday Night Live. When Bernie goes to trial, the State of Texas even moves to change the location because the defendant is so popular the prosecutors fear they can’t get a conviction. The only person who seeks justice (for highly suspicious personal reasons) is the district attorney who acts like a sheriff, Danny Buck Davidson, played by Matthew McConaughey with his usual tongue-swallowing drawl but more charisma than usual. Even his questionable dedication to law and order has limits; the town turns the trial into a picnic, selling pimento cheese sandwiches on the courthouse lawn.

It’s a delectable slice of Southern Gothic humor, a side show of rednecks and Bubbas and Aunt Tooties—probably actors, but so convincing they seem like real people playing themselves. But it’s all true, and so is the dialogue. Mr. Linklater has always demonstrated a keen ear for what people say and his direction, of both pros and amateurs, has compassion and insight for details. Actual newspaper clippings act as visual guides, illustrating the mayhem. Even in prison, Bernie’s indefatigable adventures continue. Would you believe he now gives cooking lessons to the other inmates and conducts Bible studies behind bars while his friends await his return to Carthage? This is all public record, and the story is far from over. I, for one, eagerly await the sequel to Bernie.

rreed@observer.com

BERNIE

Running Time 104 minutes

Written by Richard Linklater and Skip Hollandsworth

Directed by Richard Linklater

Starring Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey

3.5/4

Need a movie to keep you company until you literally can't keep your eyes open? Join us tonight when we pass out to Dazed and Confused [starting @ 12:50 a.m. on HBO2]

Why we'll try to stay up and watch it: Has it become a cliché to like, no, scratch that, love Dazed and Confused? Probably. But we don't care. To this day it remains one of the most watchable movies to come out in the past 15 years. Seriously? Fifteen years? This movie is old. We were in high school when it came out! [Ed. note--speak for yourself.]

From the opening, with the now defunct Gramercy Pictures logo fading up under the beginning chords of Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion," to the very end, a drive into the great unknown with Foghat's "Slow Ride" blaring, nearly every minute of Dazed and Confused is pitch-perfect. Richard Linklater has never done better and more assured work as a director. He's like a stoner Altman mixed with a southern Scorsese, and his camera swoops in and out of scenes capturing all that happens during the last day (and night) (and following morning) of school with a voyeuristic grace. In the end, Dazed and Confused works so well because, like the best high-school movies, it manages to be absolutely timeless.

Of course the cast is absurd: Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, Joey Lauren-Adams, Parker Posey, Anthony Rapp, Adam Goldberg, Milla Jovovich. Supposedly, Renee Zellweger has a walk-on in Dazed and Confused , too, but in the 30 times we've seen the movie, we haven't actually caught her anywhere. Maybe we're not looking hard enough.

When we'll probably fall asleep: Normally we'd stay up to the end of Dazed, but since it's starting so late, there is no chance we'll make it until 2:30 a.m. We have this little thing called work in the morning. So how about we make it until 2:10 a.m. instead? About 80 minutes in, Adam Goldberg gets his ass kicked by Nicky Katt, and "Tuesday's Gone" plays on the soundtrack. Best music cue ever? Perhaps.

In any event, Billy Bob Thornton fits almost seamlessly into the old Matthau role after his hilariously anti-Christmas-spirit exuberance in Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003). Mr. Ficarra and Mr. Requa, the screenwriters for Bad Santa, are on hand again to collaborate with Mr. Linklater on the new edition of Bad News Bears.

The results are at best mixed. So why am I leading off this week’s column with a movie, the subject and genre of which I have found singularly unappetizing for all of my adult life? The answer involves a resurgence of my auteurist inclinations. Since I decided recently that I was going to live forever, I figured that I had enough time to update The American Cinema, Directors and Directions 1929-1968 to the 21st Century, beginning with Richard Linklater, whom I am tentatively placing in the category “The Far Side of Paradise.”

Still in his 40’s, Mr. Linklater may have a stab at making my pantheon of English-language auteurs, which takes in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the British Isles. Among the other recent auteurs I am following (though sometimes from a great distance) are: Robert Altman, Harold Becker, Robert Benton, the Coen Brothers, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Clint Eastwood, the Farrelly Brothers, Peter Jackson, Jim Jarmusch, Ken Loach, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, Errol Morris, Mike Nichols, David O. Russell, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Gus Van Sant and Terry Zwigoff … but I am still very early in my research.

Part of my motivation in studying the present for clues to the future is to escape the spiritual paralysis of an unforgiving nostalgia for the past. André Bazin (1918-1958) once tried to exclude Hollywood directors from the purview of François Truffaut’s La Politique des Auteurs by invoking “the genius of the system” as an alternative theory to explain the large number of Hollywood classics. I raised my very tentative and respectful objections to Bazin—a film theorist I admired above all others—in my 1963 essay in Film Culture Magazine, entitled “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” This piece of critical writing annoyed Pauline Kael sufficiently to write the much more widely read “Circles and Squares” in Film Quarterly Magazine, launching a 40-year war for which I was polemically unprepared. The trouble was that the cultural establishment seized on the Sarris-Kael imbroglio as a way to keep critical theory out of a “fun” field like movies. Hence, I was suddenly catapulted from obscurity to notoriety without passing “Go.” Now, almost half a century later, I can refute Bazin’s “genius of the system” argument more succinctly simply by asking: If the “system” was responsible for the good films, then who or what was responsible for the much more numerous bad films?

Still, the “system” in Old Hollywood can be credited with giving its employees longer and more copious filmographies than most in the medium can count on today. Mr. Linklater’s comparatively “independent,” catch-as-catch-can career is a case in point. To begin with, his “Hollywood” was Texas, particularly Austin, which enabled him to find his first subject and the genre that established his identity. He was helped also by a technical versatility in the medium that he acquired without much instruction.

Mr. Linklater was born in Houston, Tex., in 1960, and dropped out of Sam Houston State University in 1982 to work on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He later parked cars before relocating to the state’s capital in Austin, where he founded a film society and raised funds to make his first film, a short entitled It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1987). Three years later, he released his first feature, Slacker (1991), a series of many brief conversations in constant transit between a shifting mise-en-scène of Austin’s youth culture spinning out of the University of Texas into the outside world. Slacker, widely circulated on the burgeoning film-festival circuit, received a big boost at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, where it was hailed as a generational call to arms for disaffected rebels without a cause.

His subsequent films were more structured and plot-driven than Slacker, though equally youth-oriented. Dazed and Confused (1993) dealt with a varied group of Texas suburban high-school graduates in 1976. Performers like Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey and Joey Lauren Adams were somewhat lower-billed here, and that new Texas girl, Renée Zellweger, flashed by in an early screen appearance.

Mr. Linklater somehow made his next film, Before Sunrise, in Europe, with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as strangers meeting on a train in Vienna and falling quickly and perhaps hopelessly in love on his last night in Europe. Mr. Linklater sustains this fragile conceit—very talky for a 90’s movie—with moderate success. But what’s most impressive in terms of Mr. Linklater’s overall career is his ability to shift gears from his collectivist orientation, with its generational alibis, to the romantic humanism of two such sharply etched individuals.

His next film, subUrbia (the title is gimmicked up in upper- and lower-case pretentiousness), was much darker and more despairing, as a group of alienated 20-year-olds hangs out in a suburban convenience-store parking lot, part of an aimless, growing drug subculture. When an old buddy of the group’s—now a rock star—shows up in a limo after playing a concert in town, the pent-up frustrations explode.

With The Newton Boys in 1998, Mr. Linklater suffered his first out-and-out creative setback. In this period crime saga of four Texas brothers who robbed banks across the country from 1919 to 1924, Mr. Linklater was unable to control the tempo of his material and the conviction in his characterizations. In many current “independent” careers, a flop like The Newton Boys could be the last picture for a director without any commercial blockbusters to his credit.

But at this point, Mr. Linklater’s aforementioned technical versatility came to his rescue with Waking Life (2001), an anime-like cartoon shot in video, but even more realistically enhanced than anime itself. The hyper-cerebral script consists of little more than a young man’s philosophical discussions with numerous people he encounters at random. Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and Steven Soderbergh—no stranger to metaphysics in film himself—are among the real people who appear via their enhanced animated replicas.

One factor in Mr. Linklater’s ability to keep his head above water is his ability to work cheap. After all, Slacker, the film that first introduced him to the world, was made from $23,000. I don’t know what Tape (2001) cost, but it couldn’t have been much even with its respectable cast of Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard. It was shot on digital video in a dingy hotel room for all of its 86-minute running time. Can you get any cheaper than that?

Then suddenly and triumphantly Mr. Linklater is back in the system with his first big commercial success in The School of Rock (2003). Off to Paris Mr. Linklater goes to film his brilliant sequel to the 10-year-old Before Sunrise. It is called Before Sunset, and it made the top of my 2004 10-best list. Mr. Hawke and Ms. Delpy managed to be more affecting in the twilight of their affair than they were in its blazing beginning.

And so here we are in 2005, with Mr. Linklater’s Bad News Bears. The important thing is that he has survived and even thrived in a particularly treacherous period in film history. Jean Renoir once said of Leo McCarey that he was the one director in Hollywood who knew and liked people. And I can say much the same for Mr. Linklater, after I think about it a little. This may explain why I liked his version of Bad News Bears perhaps more than I should. There is a moment in Before Sunset in the middle of a long traveling shot in the Luxembourg Garden when Ms. Delpy impulsively reaches out to touch the back of Mr. Hawke’s head while he is turned away from her, but aborts the affectionate gesture when he starts turning toward her. In that short interval, Mr. Linklater has generated the most complex and most intense feelings one can imagine between these two people. It is for such privileged moments that one seeks to unravel the mysteries of directorial style.

There is nothing quite that revelatory in Bad News Bears. But there are many lingerings over communal feelings other directors might pass through more quickly to get to the next giggle or guffaw more efficiently. Mr. Linklater lingers one or two beats longer to let the feelings sink in for an audience. It may not be what the audience wants on all occasions, and it may not work with every story. But I have seen a wide enough range of lyrical expression in Mr. Link-later’s career to accord him an auteurist eminence I seldom encounter these days.

This is not to say that I endorse all the conventional plot contrivances in Bad News Bears. Yet I was a bit surprised by the ending, and wondered both what it was supposed to demonstrate, and how closely it hewed to the original. I remain amused by the complaints of some people less for the profanities uttered by 12-year-olds than for the coach’s exposure of the children to the forbidden delights of Hooters’ waitresses. It reminds me of the indignant mother suing the distributors of the homicidal video game “Grand Theft Auto,” not for all the killings of cops, but for a sex scene hidden among all the homicides. Apparently, it is better for a child to play at shooting policemen than to be exposed to simulated sexual activity.

Finally, let me say, though it has never seemed worth saying, that actors are as much subject to the discriminatory apparatus of auteurist theory as directors. In this context, I dragged myself off to see Bad News Bears despite my misgivings, as much for Mr. Thornton as for Mr. Linklater.

Threesome

Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators, from a screenplay (in German with English subtitles) by Katharina Held and Mr. Weingartner, turned out to be an unusually suspenseful film for me because I didn’t want anything bad to happen to the three co-protagonists, Danuel Brühl’s Jan, Julia Jentsch’s Jule and Stipe Erceg’s Peter. Jan, Jule and Peter are three very likeable non-violent revolutionaries who remain bourgeois enough to mess up a potential ménage à trois when Jan betrays his best friend Peter by falling in love with Peter’s girlfriend Jule and she with him. Instead of devising a now old-fashioned communal design for living à la Noel Coward, Peter flies into a rage while Jan and Jule figuratively hang their heads in shame and guilt. Despite the brilliant performances of the three leads, if this were all the film was about, it would not be worth your time or mine.

As it happens, The Edukators becomes by stages this year’s most articulate statement on film about the current disillusion with politics among young people everywhere in the Western world. But what is most fascinating about The Edukators is that it gives the other side, the ruling class, if you will, an intelligent and devilishly ingenious spokesmen. There is no hope of change, the film demonstrates, for people of good will if they insist on retaining a shred of their humanity and decency. Yet the other way has led in the past to Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.

Unfortunately, movie audiences are traditionally unkind to well-meaning but indecisive characters. So it is no surprise to me that The Edukators is not doing well commercially, even on the rarefied art-house level. Hence, it may not get the discerning customers it deserves. The class warfare starts early with Jule, a waitress in an upscale gourmet restaurant, having to endure the snobbery of a picky patron who complains about the inappropriate glass in which an alcoholic beverage is served. In an American movie, the waitress would retaliate with at least a cutting remark. But Jule needs the job to keep her head above water for reasons that we learn later. So she grins and bears the verbal abuse without raising a storm. She later displays her political feelings by grappling with police as they jostle striking workers on a picket line.

Meanwhile, Jule’s two buddies in non-violent revolution, Peter and Jan, engage in a curious nighttime form of rebellion by invading the temporarily unoccupied homes of the rich, drastically rearranging the furniture and other bric-a-brac (without stealing anything), but leaving behind a cautionary note about the occupants’ “days of plenty” soon coming to an end. Jan is the more cerebral and idealistic of the two, and when he discovers that Peter has pocketed an expensive watch on their most recent foray, he angrily throws the watch out the car window.

While Peter is away on a pleasure trip, Jule loses her job for standing by a fired co-worker. Though she has been sleeping with Peter during her employment, she now turns to Jan for consolation. When he reveals what he and Peter have been up to all these months when they are supposedly employed on night shifts, she asks Jan to take her along in Peter’s place to the luxurious home of a man whose Mercedes she wrecked when her brakes failed. Because her license had been suspended, she was compelled by the court to pay the full cost of the Mercedes, which would take five years to pay on her wages as a waitress. When the owner, Hardenberg (Bughart Klaussner), returns unexpectedly, Jan and Jule struggle with him and knock him out temporarily, sending them into such a childish panic that they call up the cooler-headed Peter to come get them out of their mess.

At this point it is clear that they can’t kill him in cold blood, and yet they can’t let him go either. Jan and Jule are guilty also for having betrayed Peter during their merrymaking in Hardenberg’s mansion and swimming pool. The three tie up and gag Hardenberg, and drive up to the deserted mountain cabin owned by Jule’s uncle. At this point, it becomes clear that Jule, Jan and Peter, like most revolutionaries, are not among the most oppressed of the victims of capitalist globalization, but belong in the ranks of the disaffected intelligentsia.

Hardenberg proves to be a wily captive as he describes his youthful experiences as a German revolutionary, and the sexual experimentation that went on in his commune, and by intimating that Jule, Jan and Peter know all about it, he slyly raises Peter’s suspicions about what went on between Jan and Jule while he was away. This causes a temporary rupture between Peter and Jan. But in the end nothing has really changed in the stalemated power struggle. The point is that I fully identified with Jan and Jule and Peter in their collective political despair. Let’s face it: Things are pretty bad, and they’ll probably get a lot worse before they get any better. Still, having survived the “good old days” of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust, perhaps I shouldn’t complain.

In any event, Billy Bob Thornton fits almost seamlessly into the old Matthau role after his hilariously anti-Christmas-spirit exuberance in Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003). Mr. Ficarra and Mr. Requa, the screenwriters for Bad Santa, are on hand again to collaborate with Mr. Linklater on the new edition of Bad News Bears.

The results are at best mixed. So why am I leading off this week’s column with a movie, the subject and genre of which I have found singularly unappetizing for all of my adult life? The answer involves a resurgence of my auteurist inclinations. Since I decided recently that I was going to live forever, I figured that I had enough time to update The American Cinema, Directors and Directions 1929-1968 to the 21st Century, beginning with Richard Linklater, whom I am tentatively placing in the category “The Far Side of Paradise.”

Still in his 40’s, Mr. Linklater may have a stab at making my pantheon of English-language auteurs, which takes in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the British Isles. Among the other recent auteurs I am following (though sometimes from a great distance) are: Robert Altman, Harold Becker, Robert Benton, the Coen Brothers, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Clint Eastwood, the Farrelly Brothers, Peter Jackson, Jim Jarmusch, Ken Loach, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, Errol Morris, Mike Nichols, David O. Russell, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Gus Van Sant and Terry Zwigoff … but I am still very early in my research.

Part of my motivation in studying the present for clues to the future is to escape the spiritual paralysis of an unforgiving nostalgia for the past. André Bazin (1918-1958) once tried to exclude Hollywood directors from the purview of François Truffaut’s La Politique des Auteurs by invoking “the genius of the system” as an alternative theory to explain the large number of Hollywood classics. I raised my very tentative and respectful objections to Bazin—a film theorist I admired above all others—in my 1963 essay in Film Culture Magazine, entitled “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” This piece of critical writing annoyed Pauline Kael sufficiently to write the much more widely read “Circles and Squares” in Film Quarterly Magazine, launching a 40-year war for which I was polemically unprepared. The trouble was that the cultural establishment seized on the Sarris-Kael imbroglio as a way to keep critical theory out of a “fun” field like movies. Hence, I was suddenly catapulted from obscurity to notoriety without passing “Go.” Now, almost half a century later, I can refute Bazin’s “genius of the system” argument more succinctly simply by asking: If the “system” was responsible for the good films, then who or what was responsible for the much more numerous bad films?

Still, the “system” in Old Hollywood can be credited with giving its employees longer and more copious filmographies than most in the medium can count on today. Mr. Linklater’s comparatively “independent,” catch-as-catch-can career is a case in point. To begin with, his “Hollywood” was Texas, particularly Austin, which enabled him to find his first subject and the genre that established his identity. He was helped also by a technical versatility in the medium that he acquired without much instruction.

Mr. Linklater was born in Houston, Tex., in 1960, and dropped out of Sam Houston State University in 1982 to work on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. He later parked cars before relocating to the state’s capital in Austin, where he founded a film society and raised funds to make his first film, a short entitled It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1987). Three years later, he released his first feature, Slacker (1991), a series of many brief conversations in constant transit between a shifting mise-en-scène of Austin’s youth culture spinning out of the University of Texas into the outside world. Slacker, widely circulated on the burgeoning film-festival circuit, received a big boost at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, where it was hailed as a generational call to arms for disaffected rebels without a cause.

His subsequent films were more structured and plot-driven than Slacker, though equally youth-oriented. Dazed and Confused (1993) dealt with a varied group of Texas suburban high-school graduates in 1976. Performers like Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey and Joey Lauren Adams were somewhat lower-billed here, and that new Texas girl, Renée Zellweger, flashed by in an early screen appearance.

Mr. Linklater somehow made his next film, Before Sunrise, in Europe, with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as strangers meeting on a train in Vienna and falling quickly and perhaps hopelessly in love on his last night in Europe. Mr. Linklater sustains this fragile conceit—very talky for a 90’s movie—with moderate success. But what’s most impressive in terms of Mr. Linklater’s overall career is his ability to shift gears from his collectivist orientation, with its generational alibis, to the romantic humanism of two such sharply etched individuals.

His next film, subUrbia (the title is gimmicked up in upper- and lower-case pretentiousness), was much darker and more despairing, as a group of alienated 20-year-olds hangs out in a suburban convenience-store parking lot, part of an aimless, growing drug subculture. When an old buddy of the group’s—now a rock star—shows up in a limo after playing a concert in town, the pent-up frustrations explode.

With The Newton Boys in 1998, Mr. Linklater suffered his first out-and-out creative setback. In this period crime saga of four Texas brothers who robbed banks across the country from 1919 to 1924, Mr. Linklater was unable to control the tempo of his material and the conviction in his characterizations. In many current “independent” careers, a flop like The Newton Boys could be the last picture for a director without any commercial blockbusters to his credit.

But at this point, Mr. Linklater’s aforementioned technical versatility came to his rescue with Waking Life (2001), an anime-like cartoon shot in video, but even more realistically enhanced than anime itself. The hyper-cerebral script consists of little more than a young man’s philosophical discussions with numerous people he encounters at random. Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and Steven Soderbergh—no stranger to metaphysics in film himself—are among the real people who appear via their enhanced animated replicas.

One factor in Mr. Linklater’s ability to keep his head above water is his ability to work cheap. After all, Slacker, the film that first introduced him to the world, was made from $23,000. I don’t know what Tape (2001) cost, but it couldn’t have been much even with its respectable cast of Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman and Robert Sean Leonard. It was shot on digital video in a dingy hotel room for all of its 86-minute running time. Can you get any cheaper than that?

Then suddenly and triumphantly Mr. Linklater is back in the system with his first big commercial success in The School of Rock (2003). Off to Paris Mr. Linklater goes to film his brilliant sequel to the 10-year-old Before Sunrise. It is called Before Sunset, and it made the top of my 2004 10-best list. Mr. Hawke and Ms. Delpy managed to be more affecting in the twilight of their affair than they were in its blazing beginning.

And so here we are in 2005, with Mr. Linklater’s Bad News Bears. The important thing is that he has survived and even thrived in a particularly treacherous period in film history. Jean Renoir once said of Leo McCarey that he was the one director in Hollywood who knew and liked people. And I can say much the same for Mr. Linklater, after I think about it a little. This may explain why I liked his version of Bad News Bears perhaps more than I should. There is a moment in Before Sunset in the middle of a long traveling shot in the Luxembourg Garden when Ms. Delpy impulsively reaches out to touch the back of Mr. Hawke’s head while he is turned away from her, but aborts the affectionate gesture when he starts turning toward her. In that short interval, Mr. Linklater has generated the most complex and most intense feelings one can imagine between these two people. It is for such privileged moments that one seeks to unravel the mysteries of directorial style.

There is nothing quite that revelatory in Bad News Bears. But there are many lingerings over communal feelings other directors might pass through more quickly to get to the next giggle or guffaw more efficiently. Mr. Linklater lingers one or two beats longer to let the feelings sink in for an audience. It may not be what the audience wants on all occasions, and it may not work with every story. But I have seen a wide enough range of lyrical expression in Mr. Link-later’s career to accord him an auteurist eminence I seldom encounter these days.

This is not to say that I endorse all the conventional plot contrivances in Bad News Bears. Yet I was a bit surprised by the ending, and wondered both what it was supposed to demonstrate, and how closely it hewed to the original. I remain amused by the complaints of some people less for the profanities uttered by 12-year-olds than for the coach’s exposure of the children to the forbidden delights of Hooters’ waitresses. It reminds me of the indignant mother suing the distributors of the homicidal video game “Grand Theft Auto,” not for all the killings of cops, but for a sex scene hidden among all the homicides. Apparently, it is better for a child to play at shooting policemen than to be exposed to simulated sexual activity.

Finally, let me say, though it has never seemed worth saying, that actors are as much subject to the discriminatory apparatus of auteurist theory as directors. In this context, I dragged myself off to see Bad News Bears despite my misgivings, as much for Mr. Thornton as for Mr. Linklater.

Threesome Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators, from a screenplay (in German with English subtitles) by Katharina Held and Mr. Weingartner, turned out to be an unusually suspenseful film for me because I didn’t want anything bad to happen to the three co-protagonists, Danuel Brühl’s Jan, Julia Jentsch’s Jule and Stipe Erceg’s Peter. Jan, Jule and Peter are three very likeable non-violent revolutionaries who remain bourgeois enough to mess up a potential ménage à trois when Jan betrays his best friend Peter by falling in love with Peter’s girlfriend Jule and she with him. Instead of devising a now old-fashioned communal design for living à la Noel Coward, Peter flies into a rage while Jan and Jule figuratively hang their heads in shame and guilt. Despite the brilliant performances of the three leads, if this were all the film was about, it would not be worth your time or mine.

As it happens, The Edukators becomes by stages this year’s most articulate statement on film about the current disillusion with politics among young people everywhere in the Western world. But what is most fascinating about The Edukators is that it gives the other side, the ruling class, if you will, an intelligent and devilishly ingenious spokesmen. There is no hope of change, the film demonstrates, for people of good will if they insist on retaining a shred of their humanity and decency. Yet the other way has led in the past to Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.

Unfortunately, movie audiences are traditionally unkind to well-meaning but indecisive characters. So it is no surprise to me that The Edukators is not doing well commercially, even on the rarefied art-house level. Hence, it may not get the discerning customers it deserves. The class warfare starts early with Jule, a waitress in an upscale gourmet restaurant, having to endure the snobbery of a picky patron who complains about the inappropriate glass in which an alcoholic beverage is served. In an American movie, the waitress would retaliate with at least a cutting remark. But Jule needs the job to keep her head above water for reasons that we learn later. So she grins and bears the verbal abuse without raising a storm. She later displays her political feelings by grappling with police as they jostle striking workers on a picket line.

Meanwhile, Jule’s two buddies in non-violent revolution, Peter and Jan, engage in a curious nighttime form of rebellion by invading the temporarily unoccupied homes of the rich, drastically rearranging the furniture and other bric-a-brac (without stealing anything), but leaving behind a cautionary note about the occupants’ “days of plenty” soon coming to an end. Jan is the more cerebral and idealistic of the two, and when he discovers that Peter has pocketed an expensive watch on their most recent foray, he angrily throws the watch out the car window.

While Peter is away on a pleasure trip, Jule loses her job for standing by a fired co-worker. Though she has been sleeping with Peter during her employment, she now turns to Jan for consolation. When he reveals what he and Peter have been up to all these months when they are supposedly employed on night shifts, she asks Jan to take her along in Peter’s place to the luxurious home of a man whose Mercedes she wrecked when her brakes failed. Because her license had been suspended, she was compelled by the court to pay the full cost of the Mercedes, which would take five years to pay on her wages as a waitress. When the owner, Hardenberg (Bughart Klaussner), returns unexpectedly, Jan and Jule struggle with him and knock him out temporarily, sending them into such a childish panic that they call up the cooler-headed Peter to come get them out of their mess.

At this point it is clear that they can’t kill him in cold blood, and yet they can’t let him go either. Jan and Jule are guilty also for having betrayed Peter during their merrymaking in Hardenberg’s mansion and swimming pool. The three tie up and gag Hardenberg, and drive up to the deserted mountain cabin owned by Jule’s uncle. At this point, it becomes clear that Jule, Jan and Peter, like most revolutionaries, are not among the most oppressed of the victims of capitalist globalization, but belong in the ranks of the disaffected intelligentsia.

Hardenberg proves to be a wily captive as he describes his youthful experiences as a German revolutionary, and the sexual experimentation that went on in his commune, and by intimating that Jule, Jan and Peter know all about it, he slyly raises Peter’s suspicions about what went on between Jan and Jule while he was away. This causes a temporary rupture between Peter and Jan. But in the end nothing has really changed in the stalemated power struggle. The point is that I fully identified with Jan and Jule and Peter in their collective political despair. Let’s face it: Things are pretty bad, and they’ll probably get a lot worse before they get any better. Still, having survived the “good old days” of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Holocaust, perhaps I shouldn’t complain.

I should note that although the film has been very favorably reviewed by most of my esteemed colleagues, audiences have not flocked to see it because it's been described-more or less accurately-as 80 minutes of pure talk almost entirely between two characters, Celine (Ms. Delpy) and Jesse (Mr. Hawke).

These same two characters had talked up a storm nine years earlier during an overnight encounter in Vienna in Mr. Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995). As I recall, I wasn't overwhelmed by their first talky entanglement, though I continued to be moderately impressed by Mr. Link-later's seemingly quixotic attempt to bring articulate dialogue back to the movies at the expense of action, spectacle and MTV kinetics.

Indeed, much of the low-rent independent-film movement has made an aesthetic virtue out of its limited means. Ever since his Slacker put Austin, Tex., on the maverick-movie map in 1991, Mr. Linklater has served as spokesman for a new batch of disaffected youth-a group that has lacked any common cause to rally around. Up to now, a lot of his work has been hit and miss, so I wasn't prepared for what I encountered in Before Sunset , at a lightly attended noontime screening at a lower Manhattan multiplex.

What I wasn't prepared for were the long, lyrical camera movements through the streets of the most accessibly beautiful city in the world. The Ophulsian amplitude of the spectacle was completely sustained by the shifting moods of the two former lovers, who try to strike one light note after another and fail, miserable and painfully. Mr. Linklater and his two creative leads have managed a miraculous transformation of the characters from once-callow lovers into grown-ups teetering on the edge of eternity.

Some reviewers have compared this film to the prolonged stunt that was Louis Malle's My Dinner with André (1981), written by its two principals, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, as a series of conversational power struggles. The audience-pleasing turnaround by the less presumptuous Shawn character over the ideologically overbearing Gregory is a much easier contrivance, and one that justifies the self-indulgence of the project. But nothing is really at stake for Mr. Malle's two conversational combatants. By contrast, Celine and Jesse find themselves on the edge of a cliff by the final fade-out.

Part of the surprise of Before Sunset can be attributed to its initially inauspicious premise. At the end of the first movie, the two were supposed to reunite in Vienna six months after their initial encounter; Jesse showed up but Celine didn't. At the start of the new film, Jesse finds himself in a Paris bookshop as part of the book tour for his best-selling novel-based, of course, on the events depicted in Before Sunrise . This is a big stretch, even for the long arm of coincidence, but in a way it makes sense: If Jesse were ever to meet up with Celine again, it would be in Paris, not Vienna. Still, can the movie survive the burden of all the expository back story needed to bring the two former lovers up to date? It does, and then some, as I have already indicated.

Along the way, Mr. Linklater performs prodigies of invention with the time and space coordinates of the mise en scène . His is the subtlest form of filmmaking, which is to say it's made to look and sound effortlessly minimal. Yet it is also marvelously fragile-as if at any moment the sheer improbability of the situation is going to blow up in our faces with a disillusioning blast of common sense.

After all, Jesse has a wife and little boy in New York, and Celine has a lover, a war photographer, whom she tolerates only because he is away on foreign assignments most of the time. She has never been able to connect permanently with any man since that fateful night in Vienna. Jesse's marriage is far from idyllic, but he is content to spend his remaining years watching his little boy grow up. The two lovers discover, to their amazement, that they were both living in New York for several years at the same time without ever running into each other. But neither character broods over the vagaries of chance. Jesse, in particular, has been meditating lately on his own mortality and confesses with some embarrassment that he once entered a Trappist retreat. He was pleasantly surprised to discover that the monks were a cheerful lot who never tired of wishing him well. No Sturm and Drang there.

Still, most of the burden of self-analysis and self-recapitulation falls on Celine, as if she were talking aloud in a desperate attempt to chart her own future. In the few glimpses we are given of Celine and Jesse from the first film, it is clear that Ms. Delpy's face has changed more than Mr. Hawke's. Her features are thinner and less lush; it's as if she's grown out of her youthful vanity and is preparing for more rigorously existential challenges.

There is a breathtaking moment when Celine makes a furtive, caressing gesture toward Jesse's head while he is looking out the limo window, then withdraws it hastily when he begins turning back. It's a subtle sign, and even in the midst of her tirades against ex-lovers, Celine notes that they have all credited her with teaching them to respect women-though they've invariably applied the lesson not to Celine, but to the women they've gone on to marry.

As the time nears for Jesse to catch his plane to New York-and take him out of Celine's life again, perhaps forever-she intuitively prolongs the suspense with two improvised pieces of performance art that serve to bring the film to an exquisitely metaphorical conclusion. I doubt that there will be a sequel to this sequel, nor should there be. Before Sunset is perfect as it is.

Raiders of the Global Economy

The Corporation , a nonfiction film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, based on Mr. Bakan's book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power , is the winner of the Joris Ivens Special Jury Prize at the Amsterdam International Documentary Festival, the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and the People's Choice Award at the Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto International Film Festivals.

Among its more familiar corporation-demonizing interviewees are Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. So why, after 145 minutes of very ambitiously conceptualized Canadian agitprop, did I feel weary and depressed by the sheer futility of it all? At times, I felt as if I was trapped at a Ralph Nader rally; at other times, I couldn't help thinking of the German Communists in the last days of the Weimar Republic, confidently predicting that "After Hitler, us" as a rationale for letting the Weimar Republic perish without any resistance on their part. They were right, of course: The Communist Party came into power over a big chunk of Germany after Hitler perished, but only after millions and millions of people had been slaughtered.

If Fahrenheit 9/11 has been demeaned as preaching to the converted, The Corporation can be demeaned as preaching to the converted with advanced degrees in rabble-rousing. Speaking of which, I'm petrified by the thought of left-wing crazies pulling another Chicago '68 on the streets of New York during the Republican National Convention over the upcoming Labor Day weekend. All right, I admit it: I'm a centrist by temperament and conviction. I believe in voting for the lesser evil now over waiting for the absolute good of the future. I also believe that things can get a lot worse before they get better. And yes, I believe in incrementalism, and I believe in America.

However, The Corporation is very well informed about the legal origins of corporations and their current near omnipotence. The film outlines how the judiciary treats corporations as individuals, with all the requisite Constitutional protections, thus perverting the intentions of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which sought to protect liberated slaves, by giving corporations the same protections of due process. An environmental wrinkle is added to the traditional Marxist rhetoric against the capitalist system, but the word "capitalism" is seldom employed in The Corporation . To do so might've induced viewers to think about alternative systems, like socialism or communism. Nor is there much discussion of the ameliorative powers of representative democracy. There is no suggestion that Americans can ever use the ballot box to remove an oppressive government: We are all too brainwashed by corporate advertising to know what we really want.

This is all true, to a certain point. As much as anyone else, my tastes in consumer goods have been shaped by advertising. But where else in the world do I go to find a justly governed realm that's free of the brutal machinations of multinational corporations? I am too old to forage in the jungle. This is the only system I know, and if I'm farther from the top and closer to the bottom than I realize-like most of my equally deluded compatriots-I console myself with a vague awareness of the totality of human history, geography and sociology since the blessed days of the Garden of Eden. Everything I read about antiquity and the Middle Ages reeks of injustice and inequality and corruption.

So what do "we" do now? And how many of "us" does it take to make an effective "we"? The makers of The Corporation point to instances of group action-decertifying an irresponsible corporation in one locality, and restoring the water supply in a South American country to public control after a multinational company gouged the citizens for its own profit. But the movie really gets its adrenaline going with shots of milling crowds in the streets screaming and shouting for justice. Even so, no one goes so far as to preach the virtues of revolution, once such a rousing word for May Day speeches. Nowadays, even this workingman's holiday has gone the way of the dodo.

One can agree with The Corporation on the dangerously growing power of multinational corporations, which hide under the cloak of "globalization" and "free trade." And there should be no argument that the earth itself is imperiled by the excesses of a global manufacturing and consumer culture. As Walt Kelly's immortal Pogo once observed: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." How much environmental damage is caused by poor people in the Amazon rain forest chopping down trees to grow crops? Can a majority of the American people ever consent to be deprived of their gas guzzlers? If we all universally agreed to lead a more Spartan existence-regardless of the discomfort-I would have more hope for the future.