In person, Ms. Polley is startlingly small. Not small in the typical Hollywood wow-I-can’t-believe-how midgety-that-big-star-with-all-the-teeth-is, but naturally fine-boned and delicate, with milkweed coloring that seems more suited to a Vermeer painting than a movie star turned auteur. Sitting in an office above Times Square last week, Ms. Polley was clad casually in a brown, long-sleeved scoop-necked shirt, jeans and candy-apple-red shoes. At first glance, she looks a lot younger than her 28 years—and if you passed her on the street, she could almost (almost) be any noticeably pretty and fresh-faced girl visiting town. But the illusion is shattered once she starts to speak. Her thoughts—clearly considered—tumble out in fast, articulate bundles. And she has the steady gaze and tell-tale habit of stopping and waiting for the next question when she’s finished answering the last that speaks to a lifetime spent in the public eye.

Ms. Polley was born into a showbiz family in Toronto, to a stage-actor father and casting-director mother. She got into the business at the age of 6, landing her first major role a few years later as Sally Salt in the Terry Gilliam film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (not always the most positive experience, she’s since intimated) and finding stardom in her own country with the TV series Road to Avonlea.

“I think it was my idea, originally,” she said of acting, admitting that by the age of 8 she probably would have been happier to be back in school, but also quick to assure that her mother and father weren’t typically pushy stage parents. “But what happens is that you get so much pride from your parents for accomplishing that kind of thing that it becomes a pressure all in itself. For me, it would have been hard for me to let go of all that attention.”

Slideshow: "The Cutest Auteur"As True Hollywood Stories has helpfully cataloged for us, and as Ms. Polley described it, the road of child stars is a notoriously fraught one. “It’s a toxic combination for a child actor, one of pampering and neglect which leads to a kind of absolute insecurity and absolute egotism,” Ms. Polley said. “It’s an unfathomably difficult thing to unravel. Even it its subtlest form, the idea that you’re forming your own identity as a child while you’re in this job where you’re being congratulated for pretending to be other people is really bizarre.”

One consistency in the characters that Ms. Polley has portrayed is their tendency to be almost heartbreakingly wise, with a weary-before-their-time pathos brought on by the absence of childhood naiveté. Was it a quality she was aware of?

“I think as a childhood actor you acquire a kind of precociousness,” she answered carefully. “But I don’t know how deep it goes. Do you know what I mean? I think most people I’ve met that have grown up as child actors have been able to convey a sense of being older than they are, but it doesn’t necessarily go a lot deeper than having learned that behavior, and”—she laughed—“in fact, it masks a very deep immaturity.” She has no regrets, but she is aware that “it was kind of luck-of-the-draw that it didn’t turn out badly for me. There were a lot of moments when it really could have.”

Ms. Polley’s mother passed away from cancer when she was 11, yet she continued to work with characteristic intensity, all the while becoming more politically active, toiling alongside like-minded lefties to oust Mike Harris, the Conservative premier of Ontario. In 1997, she starred in The Sweet Hereafter, a quietly devastating film that won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and nabbed two Oscar nominations for screenwriter/director Atom Egoyan (an executive producer on Away From Her and “a huge influence,” Ms. Polley said). Her performance as the lone, wheelchair-bound survivor from a school-bus accident drew raves.

Hollywood took notice. The blockbuster-shy actress continued to stay within the independent-film realm, but after solid performances in the late 90’s in films like Guinevere, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and Doug Liman’s Go, she found herself at a crossroads when she was cast in the part of Penny Lane in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous. Two months into rehearsals, she quit the production. Kate Hudson replaced her to great acclaim, and the rest is Us Weekly history. “I just found myself in a situation where I was playing this part I didn’t think I was right for,” she said. “Cameron felt like I was right for it, but I couldn’t quite see it. There was just this sort of machine around it, you know? You felt like whoever was going to play this part was going to have, like, this giant life, and I didn’t want a giant life. I wanted a pretty normal life. It was a kind of survival for me, because I actually don’t know if I would have survived that life.”

Around that same time, Ms. Polley became interested in writing and directing; she made her first film short when she was 20. “I made this one thing on a whim and discovered by accident that I loved it more than anything I had ever done,” she said. When she was 21, after completing the Hal Hartley film No Such Thing (co-starring Julie Christie), she picked up The New Yorker on the flight home from Iceland and read Alice Munro’s short story, “The Bear Comes Over the Mountain.” “It wouldn’t stop growing in my head as a film. It felt like such an urgent thing in my life to make it. And I couldn’t stop imagining Julie Christie in that part,” she said. Years ticked by, but Ms. Polley continued to think about it. “I thought there was no way I was going to be able to get the rights,” she said. “I thought they’d be taken or too expensive—something. Then all of a sudden we had the rights, and I thought: ‘Oh my God, I have to make this into a film!’

“It was nerve-wracking and thrilling,” she said about stepping onto the set for the first time. “But you know, this was a story that I absolutely loved and, in a strange way, making the film was just an excuse to walk around inside it for a few years. It’s such an amazing thing to fall in love with th
is fictional world and then get a chance to inhabit it.”

Away From Her, adapted for the screen by Ms. Polley, is about Fiona (Ms. Christie) and Grant (Gordon Pinsent), a couple who have been married for 44 years when Fiona starts showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s. When she voluntarily chooses to be put in an assisted-living establishment, Fiona ends up developing a strong attachment to a fellow patient and no longer recognizing her mate, much to the confusion of her dogged husband. The disease dredges up issues long buried from the couple’s past, and the end result is terrifically poignant. It’s a grown-up film that examines what fidelity, devotion and love look like from the end of the journey rather than the start. “I was so interested in the fact that it was told from a male point of view, the coming to terms with who they’ve been and actually becoming capable of something that they’ve never been capable of in their life when it’s almost too late,” Ms. Polley said. “It was gorgeous to think about unconditional love in that way.”

Julie Christie, as beautiful on-screen in her mid-60’s playing Fiona as she was in the 60’s (“When I first met with Julie about it, I was looking at her perfect legs in the mini-skirt she was wearing that day and her perfect hands, and I was thinking, ‘This isn’t going to work—no one will ever believe me that she’s someone in a retirement home!’”) is pitch-perfect (the inevitable Oscar chatter has already begun). “I was in love with her in Darling and Doctor Zhivago, just like everyone else,” said Ms. Polley, though Ms. Christie took some convincing, turning Ms. Polley down repeatedly before agreeing to take the role. “She’s a reluctant actor, and she definitely requires a bit of convincing to get her off her farm and into a movie. It did take a lot of persistence.”

Ms. Polley’s husband of four years, David Wharnsby, served as editor on the film. “It’s sort of a crazy thing, in a way—to edit a movie with your husband, when it’s a movie about marriage. We learned a ton about ourselves and about our relationship. It was great to be in an environment where you can’t walk away from disagreements.” They met when Mr. Wharnsby edited Ms. Polley’s first short. “We had a bizarre coming-together,” she said. “We were sort of friends, and I think in the first two or three weeks I met him, I sort of felt like, We should be in love at this point. I remember him saying that his definition of love is not what happens in the first three weeks. His parents had this 45-year marriage where they’d been through some really hard stuff, but at the end of the day, he’d still see these incredible moments of tenderness between them that were possible even after everything they’d been through. I think it was really getting to know their relationship and seeing them together that made me really captivated. They inspired a lot of what’s in the film.”

Cinematically speaking, love stories tend to be told from their beginnings, during the time of passion and discovery. But that conventional line didn’t interest Ms. Polley. “What happens when real life thrashes you around?” she said. “I think it’s so weird we’re not willing to embrace the most interesting part of a relationship. It’s full of failure and it’s never what you expected. It’s like we need these fairy tales somehow, but it really does us a disservice. It’s far more interesting to go through life and really let each other down. And then what? That’s what’s interesting.”

The process of directing has given her a fresh perspective on acting. “I see it as a really interesting job now,” she said, crediting Ms. Christie and Mr. Pinsent’s work on the film as inspiration. “It made me want to give that much of myself the next time I acted.” She’s due to start work in a week on a mini-series about John Adams for HBO, and plans both to write an original screenplay to direct and to adapt another one. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said of her new multitasking lifestyle. “And I’m acting at the same time—so I have no idea what will come of anything.”

Despite this uncertainty, Ms. Polley’s life is just what she wants it to be. She lives with her husband in what she describes as a great neighborhood in Toronto, where they do “nothing exciting.” She picks her projects by whether or not she’d pay to go see them in a theater. “For me, this is a perfect life,” Ms. Polley said. “I get to work with filmmakers I love, be in independent films I’d see in a theater, but my life is completely manageable and not spiraling into something I can’t handle. It’s a perfect balance.”

AWAY FROM HER
 Running Time  110 minutes
 Written and  Directed by Sarah Polley
 Starring  Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent
 
The subject of aging, illness and letting go are not mainstream subjects for commercial films, but Away From Her, which marks the feature-film directing debut of popular Canadian actress Sarah Polley, is a devastatingly honest and understated new work that addresses all three issues with admirable maturity and a refreshing absence of sentimentality. Much of the praise must be reserved for the sublime Julie Christie, who has moved into middle age with subtle self-assurance and unretouched natural beauty, as a woman disappearing inside the unforgiving prison of Alzheimer’s disease, and Gordon Pinsent as the anguished husband who watches her slip away. Fiona and Grant are people who have loved each other, hated each other and learned to live with each other’s faults and virtues until they have established a 44-year marriage rooted in romance and solidarity. When all of that disintegrates like cigarette smoke, the husband is lost and hurt and confused about how they came to this defining detour in the road. It is to the everlasting credit of Ms. Polley that she draws the audience into their lives without being manipulative or sentimental. Her movie just states the facts, and the actors get under your skin, welcoming you to the material without handing you a hankie.  
  
Away From Her is based on an Alice Munro short story called “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” a terrific piece of writing so explicit and linear that too much tinkering and “opening up” for film would have ruined its delicacy. Most of the work was already done, and luckily for us all, Ms. Polley has respected it enough to let it speak for itself. That trust pays off. The film is not only the story of a great romance fading and a beautiful woman disintegrating, but also the tragedy of a caregiver watching the foundation of his world eroding. Ms. Christie shows the spark in Fiona’s eyes slowly dimming to gray. Wandering aimlessly from room to room, trying to remember what she’s looking for, putting away the saucepan in the freezer instead of the cupboard, she laughs off her slips. But as the gaps grow more frequent and her mind deteriorates, she fears saddling her husband with the burden of her declining health, eventually overruling Grant’s protests and making the quiet decision to enter a rest home. While one strand of the narrative follows Fiona’s peaceful transition from strong, independent wife to docile, childlike patient, a second thread follows Grant’s tortured resignation to the trauma of separation after four decades together and his determination to make as happy a homestretch for Fiona as possible. He feels guilty about all of the hurts, real and imagined, he might have caused in the past, and his own mental state is worsened by the cruel rules of Fiona’s new residence, which prohibit visits for a lengthy period of adjustment. One moving moment among many occurs after the first month-long orientation separation, when Grant watches through a palm and sees Fiona’s attentions drift to another patient named Aubrey (Michael Murphy). Sitting devotedly at the side of her mute and wheelchair-bound new friend, Fiona sees Grant and doesn’t even seem to know him. Another occurs after Aubrey’s release plunges Fiona into a pit of depression, when Grant bravely (but vainly) tries to persuade Aubrey’s own frank, no-nonsense wife (Olympia Dukakis) to return him to the institution. There is great potential for a cascading tearjerker here, but the impeccable actors and Ms. Polley’s smartly adapted script keep it tightly bottled. The emotional force remains, as well as the underlying turbulence in Alice Munro’s keenly calibrated writing, and Ms. Polley also has a keen ear and eye for the little humiliations of Alzheimer clinics, their coldly detached administrators, and the glum ritual of family visitation. The luminous and vivid face of Julie Christie, losing focus as it gazes across vast distances, is both openly expressive and internally dark, her eyes registering the unknown landscape that is creeping up, taking over and melting her life away.  Never has the theme “Nothing lasts forever” been so truthfully wrenching. Dealing with the slippery slopes between memory and forgetting, guilt and freedom, Away From Her has even more to do with compassion, empathy and enduring love. It’s inescapably sad—a heartbreaking and memorable cinematic experience.
  

Curiously, Letters, like Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, is essentially a foreign-language film with English subtitles, but neither film is technically eligible to receive an Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, which leaves them in a kind of no-man’s land as far as Oscars are concerned. But this kind of quandary is appropriate for a year in which there is likely to be no consensus on Best Picture, now that Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls seems to have fallen by the critical wayside.

Friends and foes of Mr. Eastwood—and both are legion—may differ on the artistic quality of his massive diptych on a ferocious bloodbath that took place on a tiny volcanic island in the Pacific more than 60 years ago. But no one can deny the sheer size and scope of the effort and achievement. The film opened earlier this year in Japan and was reportedly well-received—as well it should be for its sympathetic portrayal of the Japanese officers and men trapped, in effect, on the desolate island of Iwo Jima. This humanization of a one-time bitter enemy by an American filmmaker is not entirely unprecedented. Richard Fleischer’s 1970 Tora! Tora! Tora! comes immediately to mind for its dramatization of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor from both the Japanese and American points of view, with a little revisionist history thrown in the mix. The once-demonized Germans in World War I were morally rehabilitated in Oscar-winning fashion by Lewis Milestone’s 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front, adapted from German writer Erich Maria Remarque’s international best-seller, which won acclaim for its pacifist viewpoint on a war regarded with revulsion in both Europe and America in retrospect for its perceived uselessness and futility. Similarly, Jean Renoir’s sympathetic treatment of German officers and enlisted men—who were despised two decades before in France—in The Grand Illusion (1937) manifested itself as a pathetic plea for European brotherhood on the eve of World War II.

By contrast, Mr. Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima arrives at a time when neither pacifism nor international brotherhood figures very prominently on the nation’s agenda. We have long since overcome our most virulent prejudices unleashed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but 9/11 has opened up a new can of worms with Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Islamic extremists in general. At the very least, however, Letters may help modify our thinking about our present enemies as a monolithic mass of malevolence, as we were once conditioned to think of the Japanese people as a whole.

The story told by Mr. Eastwood and his collaborators—both living and dead—consists of a very gradual mutual understanding of Japanese and Americans that neither was as lacking in humanity as each side’s wartime propaganda preached. Two of the characters who come most vividly to life in the film are aristocrats who know America firsthand from having visited there long before international travel became as commonplace as it is today. Ken Watanabe’s General Kuribayashi has been to America on a very friendly military mission, and Tsuyoshi Ihara’s Baron Nishi had won an equestrian event at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics and still carries a picture of himself on his winning mount. Quixotically, he makes his entrance at Iwo Jima on another horse, a relic of his onetime membership in the military cavalry—its horses now replaced by colder and more technologically advanced tanks. The ex-cavalry man joins the baron in lamenting the loss of their animal companions and soulmates. The baron’s horse is later killed in an air raid on the island, and he mourns the beast’s demise.

The common soldiers are represented by Kazunari Ninomiya’s Saigo, a baker in civilian life, with a wife and child left behind. It is Saigo who declares that the island is not worth defending, echoing many other voices of dissent among the troops. Curiously, there are no battle scenes as copious and furious in Letters from Iwo Jima as there are in Flags of Our Fathers, but the characters are more effectively depicted and differentiated in Letters than they are in Flags, and the tone is much less cynical with the losers of the battle in Letters than it is with the winners of the battle in Flags. But isn’t this always the case with winners and losers, from The Iliad to Letters from Iwo Jima—one of the better movies of this maddeningly overcrowded holiday season?

The Anti-Casablanca

Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, from a screenplay by Paul Attanasio, based on the novel by Joseph Kanon, turns out to be, sadly, a failed attempt to pay homage to Hollywood romances of World War II and its aftermath, most notably Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) and Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, (1948), with an infusion of political ex-post-facto sophistication. The point of the tortured narrative of The Good German seems to be that there was no such thing as a “good” German during the Nazi era, but it is the silly and chilly plot-twist ending that makes The Good German less of an homage to Casablanca than its coldly anti-romantic antithesis. And let’s not talk about the idealism of the Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid characters; their likes do not appear in The Good German.

I have long championed Mr. Soderbergh for his canny survival skill in the New Hollywood, with his shrewd alternations between art and commerce. In this context, The Good German bombs as both art and commerce in its puzzling inept­ness. After almost 60 years, it is of course impossible for Mr. Soderbergh to cavort in the bombed-out ruins of Berlin as Billy Wilder did at the time on location in A Foreign Affair, one of the few Wilder movies I didn’t like because of its brutalization of Jean Arthur so as to enhance Marlene Dietrich. Ms. Dietrich has been invoked recently to demean Cate Blanchett’s Lena Brandt, a fatally tentative attempt to replicate the Dietrich character’s amoral-temptress persona.

With black-and-white, fake-looking backgrounds and badly synchronized process shots, Mr. Soderbergh finds himself becalmed on the kind of Hollywood backlot on which Curtiz fashioned his fantasy world of Casablanca. George Clooney may be the closest replica we have of a ’40s leading-man hero—certainly not as distinctive as Bogie in Casablanca, but just as certainly more talented than John Lund in A Foreign Affair. The only problem is that Mr. Clooney’s character, foreign correspondent Jake Geismer, is repeatedly beaten up like no romantic lead should ever be. Tobey Maguire’s callow Tully, Geismer’s terminally corrupt personal driver, delivers one of the beatings to Geismer when the latter tries to prevent Lena, Geismer’s old girlfriend, from running off to the Russian zone of Berlin with Tully for one of his scams. Tully is later found dead on a riverbank, and when Geismer tries to investigate, he is beaten up a few more times for his efforts.

Eventually, as the Potsdam Conference gets under way with Truman, Churchill and Stalin determining the shape of Europe after the war, we suddenly learn that the Cold War has just begun, which was the last thing on the minds of Curtiz and Wilder when they fashioned their simple anti-Nazi love stories. This revelation in The Good German only compounds the confusion in the picture.

Open Up!

Isabel Coixet’s The Secret Life of Words, from her own screenplay, builds its very convoluted, almost abstract narrative around the contrasting personalities of Sarah Polley’s Hanna and Tim Robbins’ Josef, as they partially confront each other on an oil rig off the Irish coast, she as a nurse and he as a badly burned patient. I say “partially” because Josef’s accident has left him temporarily blinded, and Hanna’s own partial deafness—and a still-to-be-revealed traumatic experience in her life—has left her unwilling to communicate with other people.

When we first meet Hanna, she is presented as a solitary and mysterious young woman working in a factory somewhere in Europe—though everyone there seems to speak English. Her self-willed solitude is amplified when she turns off her hearing aid, as if to isolate herself from an outside world from which she apparently feels she has to be protected. When her boss calls her to his office, she turns on her hearing aid, but otherwise she is very sparing in her responses to his questions. Actually, he seems as uncomfortable with the situation as she is. He tells her that she has a perfect attendance record and, strangely, has never taken a vacation in the years she has worked for the company. Some of her co-workers have complained about her long and strange silences. He then virtually orders her to take a vacation, which she reluctantly agrees to do. It is hard not to identify with the boss in this scene. He knows he can’t fire her merely because she chooses to remain silent at her work. The best that he can do is to send her on a vacation and hope that she will be more communicative when she returns. Anyway, he has postponed the problem.

For no apparent reason, Hanna travels to Northern Ireland for her vacation and, on a whim, volunteers to be a nurse on an oil rig in the Irish Sea to tend to one patient, Josef, whose temporary blindness has not diminished his flirtatious impulsiveness. He keeps badgering her with questions about what she looks like, the color of her hair, her name—all of which she deflects with questions about how he feels and what he needs to be comfortable.

She is equally mysterious to the rest of the rig’s crew, even its cheerful, seemingly overqualified gourmet chef, Simon (Javier Camara). There are only a few other men on the oil rig, which may be on the verge of being decommissioned. At this point, despite my unrequited passion for Ms. Polley as an actress, I felt I had to consult the production notes to figure out what was going on with Hanna’s aversion to words.

According to Ms. Coixet: “Someone said that from the moment you have an inner life, you are already leading a double life. Words—like shoals of fish—teem around in our heads and crowd against our vocal cords, fighting to get out and be listened to by others. And sometimes they get lost on the journey from head to throat. This film is about those lost words that wander for a long time in a limbo of silence … and then one day come pouring out, and once they start nothing can stop them.”

This is exactly what happens when Hanna decides to confide in Josef, a kindred wounded spirit; and one can feel with Hanna—as one often does with Ms. Polley in these histrionic climaxes—a veritable blossoming out of a long-suppressed womanhood. Her revelations turn out to be shocking enough to justify the long silences that preceded them.

Julie Christie contributes an extra iconic charge to the film as a mysterious presence in Hanna’s post-traumatic existence. It is ultimately a beneficent presence that enables Hanna and Josef to find solace and mutual redemption in each other’s arms. Though I continue to have strong reservations about the stylistic abstractions in Ms. Coixet’s narrative, the performances given by Ms. Polley, Mr. Robbins and Ms. Christie take me a long way in accepting and recommending the whole package.

Ann (Ms. Polley) lives just above the poverty line in Vancouver in a tiny trailer in her mother's backyard. She shares these cramped quarters with two young daughters and a husband (Scott Speedman), who is only intermittently employed. It's never much explained why Ann's mother (Deborah Harry) lives alone in the big house while her daughter and two grandchildren are squeezed into the trailer outside. To make ends meet, Ann works the night shift as a janitor at a local university she could never afford to go to in the daytime. But she remains remarkably unresentful of her bitterly ungenerous mother, her loser husband and her two children, whose needs keep her working like a dog. She hasn't spoken to her father in the 10 years he's spent in prison, and she bears the brunt of her mother's unhappiness over her failed dreams. (At this point, if someone stopped the film to preach the injustices of the North American capitalist system, you'd be hard-pressed to argue the contrary.) The film goes on as Ann receives her most crushing blow: She's told by a shyly hesitant doctor (Julian Richings) that she has an incurable illness and has only three or four weeks to live.

It's here that Ms. Coixet makes a crucial change in Ms. Kincaid's short story. The setting had already been shifted from sunny Louisiana to foggy, rainy Vancouver. But much more importantly, the aftermath of the doctor's revelation has been completely changed. Ms. Coixet describes the deviation in the film's production notes: "In the short story, once Ann discovers she's going to die, she tells it to everyone. And I thought of the same situation but with a complete different reaction: what would happen if this person didn't tell anyone that she's going to die, what if she discovered that the greatest gift she could ever do to her family, especially to her kids, was not to burden them with the weight of her future death?

"'Cause I would do exactly the same as the character of the short story, I would tell everyone that I'm going to die. I mean, I would get out of the hospital screaming and I would get into a taxi and I would tell the taxi driver that I'm going to die. I would share my grief with everyone around me; I would be commiserating myself all the time. But I wanted to make this film about a heroine, about the woman that I'd like to be and I am not. Because Ann is a heroine. She's not flawless, but there's no doubt she's a heroine."

If I applaud Ms. Coixet's creative decision, it's partly because I am more a romanticist that a realist, and in these times, particularly, we need genuine heroes and genuine heroines. Still, Ann would not function as movingly as she does as a secular saint if she were not surrounded by characters coping seriously and honorably with problems of their own, though of a lesser urgency and magnitude than Ann's. But almost miraculously, because of her own misfortune, Ann is endowed with the capacity to empathize with her troubled mother, her emotionally insecure husband, her flaky co-worker Laurie (Amanda Plummer), her celebrity-obsessed hairdresser (Maria de Medeiros) and her worshipful lover Lee (Mark Ruffalo), whom Ann lifts up from despair and disarray after he's abandoned by his own wife. Ann even breaks down and visits her imprisoned, guilt-ridden father for her one final expression of a daughter's eternal debt to her father, whatever his failings.

None of these transformations in her relationships are forced, excessive, turgid or cheaply sentimental. Ann becomes just a little franker and straighter than usual. She leaves recordings for her children, her mother, her husband and her lover, urging them to find happiness when she is gone. She isn't on a hunt to find a lover for her last days, but she meets Lee in the laundromat as more a fellow sufferer than a dishing seducer. I almost didn't recognize Mr. Ruffalo, whom I hadn't seen since his acclaimed jaunty performance as the wandering brother in You Can Count on Me (2000). The production notes tell us that he recently underwent brain surgery for a cancerous tumor, in an eerie echo of Ann's illness on screen. At a time when the industry is breathlessly awaiting the onset of the various franchise blockbusters, it's good to know that films as exquisitely rendered as My Life Without Me can emerge from almost complete obscurity at a cost not much greater than that of Arnold Schwarzenegger's celebrated bikini wax.

Corporate Politics

Olivier Assayas' Demonlover , from his own screenplay, has been described by Mark Peranson in Cinema Scope magazine as "a graduate seminar in that oxymoron called 'business ethics.'" Mr. Assayas, a former editor at Cahiers du Cinema , is a formidable theorist and polemicist who could probably make a powerful case against my disappointment with the final doomsday images he presents in his film: that I'm one of those naïve defenders of the "classical values" cinema against the onslaught of the New Barbarians. Indeed, Mr. Assayas' Demonlover struck me as a tiresome exercise in self-demonization, and his most overrated work since Irma Vep (1996). Conversely-and perhaps quixotically as well-I much prefer his more "classical" works such as Late August, Early September (1998) and Les Destinées Sentimentales (2000).

From the outset of the film, we're acquainted with the poisonous rivalries between a group of media conglomerates with names like VolfGroup, TokyoAnimé, Mangatronics and Demonlover itself. Diane (Connie Nielsen), a high-level executive at VolfGroup, drops an emetic concoction into a rival colleague's drink so as to jump rank at the company. Like everyone else in the film, Diane is driven to seek power for its own sake and like everyone else she plays by the same cutthroat rules-it's like a snake-pit devoid of any good creatures for whom to root. Gina Gershon, Chloë Sevigny and Charles Berling play Diane's assorted antagonists with considerable brio and panache, but it's hard for these actors to sustain their impact amid the mystifying intrigues that unfold. The climactic thuggery that results in Diane's ironic undoing is executed with low-tech car chases and brute force that is somewhat chilling, but not sufficiently horrifying in effect. There's some titillation in the scenes illustrating the realities of pornographic "snuff" spectacles available on the Internet to children with credit cards.

I might add that the word "paranoia" might've been invented for movies like Demonlover ; indeed, the condition itself has been with us for a very long time both on and off the screen. But without a raisonneur or a sympathetic protagonist, Mr. Assayas is unable to generate any suspense about the outcome of his video-game-like maneuvers by mostly unseen evil forces operating outside any recognizable sociological or political context. Here the medium is not only the message, but also a mantra that becomes increasingly indecipherable. Are we supposed to care what happens to Diane? Not when she, like everyone around her, is dehumanized by the alleged subordination of the individual to a runaway technology.

Bowling for Conn.

Ben Coccio's Zero Day , from a screenplay by Ben and Chris Coccio, is the second of three cinematic meditations on the Columbine massacre, following Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine , which focused on American gun culture in 2002, and Gus Van Sant's Elephant , the Cannes prize-winner featured in this year's New York Film Festival.

Shot in and around the Connecticut suburbs, Zero Day seems to project a narcissistic coolness about the subject. Certainly, the self-named "Army of Two," made up of best friends Andre Kriegman (Andre Keuck) and Cal Gabriel (Calvin Robertson), do not fit any profile accessible to media punditry. Their self-satisfied expressions of a private and exclusive nihilism and their incongruously disciplined military posturing, combined with their upper-middle-class access to expensive video equipment and a virtual arsenal of lethal firearms, don't allow any intimations of their having been bullied or treated as outsiders by their eventual victims. Quite the contrary: Cal is seen to be very popular with the local girls, and Andre seems to get along fairly well with his own family. If there are any previous models for Andre and Cal in the ranks of teenage assassins, one would have to go back several decades to Leopold and Loeb, but without the gay subtext. Even so, Cal and Andre seem culturally light years ahead of the two homicidal-suicidal misfits who shot up Columbine High School.

My final judgment on Zero Day : that the Coccio Brothers have indulged in a filmmaker's fantasy by making a movie recording their characters' thought processes while loading up their weapons with the metaphorical bullets of self-expression. Unfortunately, I never found what the Coccio Brothers were saying through their surrogates, Andre and Cal, either convincing or compelling.

Exodus

Michael Winterbottom's In This World , from a screenplay by Tony Grisoni, is a truly noble effort to take us overly complacent moviegoers in the West on a shared journey with two Afghan cousins traveling from Pakistan to London. Since they cannot afford the cost of the much easier air journeys to the same destination, Jamal (Jamal Udin Torabi) and Enayat (Enayatullah) travel a long and dangerous overland route from Asia to Europe. Their elders place them in the hands of people-smugglers, and the two cousins join the mass exodus of one million refugees a year, most of whom are driven by economic need rather than political oppression. By the end of the film, Mr. Winterbottom has taken us to London, but then circles back to the troubled lands left behind, showing us the faces of the children smiling and silently beseeching us for recognition. In This World is not a facile entertainment, but a prescribed cure for one's compassion fatigue.

Drug Wars

Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983), from a screenplay by Oliver Stone, has been dredged up from the swamps of violently self-indulgent flopperoos, after 20 years of well-advised neglect, to be made culturally respectable by Lillian Ross in the September pages of The New Yorker -including a generous citation of ghoulish tag lines from the soundtrack for the amusement of upstanding rappers like Snoop Dogg as well as C.E.O. types. The original Scarface (1932), by Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, was deemed more shocking in its own time than the remake. The biggest difference is that, in the 70 years since the original Scarface , we have retrogressed from the end of Prohibition to the dead end of the eternal drug wars. Plus ça change .

All About My Mother does not break any new ground or push the envelope or blaze a trail or do whatever opening night festival films are supposed to do. Indeed, the 47-year-old Mr. Almodóvar is such a reliably known quantity–and quality–that the American Museum of the Moving Image is mounting a 12-film Almodóvar retrospective beginning Oct. 2, hailing him as "the most prominent and successful Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel," which is high praise indeed. Mr. Almodóvar's overtly gay sensibility and his canny distancing through his flair for voluptuous color compositions and sinuous camera movements have enabled him to remain culturally respectable with the festival crowd as an unacknowledged guilty pleasure.

In this latest film, Manuela (Cecilia Roth), the mother of the title, sees her teenage son Esteban die in a traffic accident while chasing on foot a taxi carrying the star of a Madrid production of A Streetcar Named Desire . The actress, Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), sees the boy's face for an instant out of the back window of her taxi, but does not realize that he is a young admirer of her Blanche Dubois. Nor does her female lover, Nina (Candela Peña), a drug addict who plays Stella and is seated beside her in the taxi.

While Manuela is grieving for her son she finds his diary, entitled All About My Mother , a title inspired by Esteban's (and Mr. Almodóvar's) admiration for Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve . In his diary, Esteban notes that all his mother's photos have been cut in half, as if his father–who supposedly died before he was born, but whom he desperately wants to know more about–had been purposely obliterated from Manuela's memory. Moved by her late son's obsession, Manuela leaves Madrid for Barcelona to find Esteban's father and show him pictures of his dead son, of whom he is completely unaware.

En route, Manuela becomes involved with Sister Rosa (Penélope Cruz), a terminally ill social worker who has seen Esteban senior. She also joins the Streetcar troupe on the Barcelona stop of its tour and actually plays Stella on the stage on a night when Nina is indisposed by her addiction. Manuela also is reunited with Agrado (Antonia San Juan), a transvestite prostitute who lived with Manuela and Esteban's father 20 years ago, before Esteban senior decided to become Lola the Pioneer, a transvestite prostitute on the open meat market. From Agrado, Manuela learns that Esteban (Lola) is very ill, and it becomes a race against time to reunite Esteban père and Esteban fils , if only through a photo.

The homages to Tennessee Williams and Mankiewicz are really tributes to all the actresses who were glorified in old Hollywood. Curiously, the ending of Streetcar staged repeatedly by Mr. Almodóvar is not the original ending of the play, but the moralistic let's-punish-Stanley-for-raping-Blanche ending imposed by the censors. Still, All About My Mother , for all its self-deconstruction, is played with more sobriety and conviction than any of Mr. Almodóvar's previous films.

I can't say it made me cry–and I am a notoriously easy crier–even though it is drenched with death and mourning what might have been. I simply couldn't avoid the feeling that I was witnessing an old story retold from a universe parallel to my own with an intervening layer of high camp. Nonetheless, the film gurus at Lincoln Center could have done a lot worse for an opening night kickoff.

For those without tickets to the premiere, at 2 P.M. on Oct. 2 at the American Museum of the Moving Image, you can catch Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980), which is described in the program thusly: "Almodóvar's crude, rude and hilarious debut chronicles a woman's

revenge after being raped by a policeman. She arranges to have the cop's wife kidnapped by a lesbian punk rocker, only to

discover that the wife is a masochist who loves being mistreated." This is a plot line that touches all the bases with a vengeance,

and is typical of the farcical frenzy that is more or less typical of the pansexual pandemonium Mr. Almodóvar contrives in all his post-Franco frolics, liberated to a point some might consider sheer licentiousness.

At 4 P.M. is Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1987), presenting Mr. Almodóvar in a more somber light as the ironic inheritor of the already ironic Douglas Sirk and Ross Hunter Universal Technicolor woman's weepies of the late 50's and early 60's.

Another Try From Canada

Audrey Wells' Guinevere takes what starts out to be a May-September romance between sensational Sarah Polley's Harper Sloane and the old reliable Stephen Rea's Connie Fitzpatrick all the way to June and December. Harper, the underachieving daughter of an upper-class Montreal family, meets Connie, a low-key wedding photographer, at her sister's upscale wedding, and is immediately smitten with his bohemian knowingness and professional self-confidence. His "line" of seduction is expertly calibrated to attract emotionally insecure Harper, and he reels her in as if she were an only moderately reluctant goldfish. We learn later that Connie has had much practice "mentoring" nubile artistic wannabes into what virtually amounted to a serial harem.

Ms. Wells takes the two ultimately mismatched lovers to the point of no return and beyond, as Mr. Rea's Connie degenerates into a pathetic wreck of a failure with his pitifully exhausted cocker-spaniel eyes. Literally and figuratively long of tooth near the end, Connie is painfully humiliated when two teeth fall out at a restaurant rendezvous with Harper.

Harper and Connie nonetheless never become cautionary characters. The movie is much subtler than that even in the dregs of defeat and disillusion. The acting is exemplary, with Ms. Polley and Mr. Rea ably supported by Gina Gershon, Jean Smart, Carrie Preston and Jasmine Guy. In the final analysis, Ms. Polley is a charter member in my own vicarious harem, which grows more populous by the hour.

Sex and Cinema

Catherine Breillat's Romance crosses the arbitrary line between soft-core, or simulated, and hard-core, or explicit sex, in the cinema. Of course, there may be particularly degraded wretches out there among the raincoat brigades who insist on the creamy cum shot as the ultimate test of pornographic authenticity. I am not among them, since most, if not all, triple-X enterprises have always struck me as anti-erotic documentaries of a boring subculture with no fantasy life of its own.

When I say that Ms. Breillat has crossed the line, I do not mean to imply that she is not a serious, if eminently provocative artist. Still, I have not met a man who has seen the film who has not thoroughly hated it. Female viewers seem more ambivalent, and no wonder. Ms. Breillat's heroine Marie (Caroline Ducey) is clearly the aggressor in her relationships with her lover Paul (Sagamore Stévenin) and a pickup named Paolo, played by French porn star Rocco Siffredi. Even in her masochistic submission to Robert (François Berléand), a comparatively cerebral sadist, Marie is actually more worshipped than punished.

Ms. Breillat's previous films have been less explicit and thus not surprisingly more erotic, as a recent retrospective of her work at the Anthology Film Archives amply demonstrated. My reservations about Romance have less to do with Ms. Breillat's philosophical speculations on women's sexual desires and appetites than with the monotony of a film narrative peopled with characters who have nothing but sex on their minds at all times, and talk about nothing else as well.

Part 2 in a Stormy Trilogy

Deepa Mehta's Earth , based on the novel Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa, works best as a timely reminder that there is nothing new about the murderous and even genocidal atrocities generated by ancient ethnic and religious hatreds. More than half a century ago, in 1947, to be precise, the liberation of the Indian subcontinent from British rule precipitated a mutual slaughter of Hindus and Muslims in newly independent India and newly formed Pakistan. These hatreds persist to this day, particularly in the disputed province of Kashmir.

Ms. Mehta's child's-eye view of this period puts too great a burden on the observation and understanding of Lenny (Maia Sethna), a 5-year-old Parsee girl who is surrounded by acquaintances, both Hindu and Muslim, who are ultimately engulfed in the tribal hatreds of the subcontinent. Lenny's beautiful Hindu nanny Shanta (Nandita Das) becomes a tragic pawn as Lahore, Pakistan, slides into an unforgiving religious nationalism when trainloads of slain Muslims arrive from India.

While the background amounts to a mini- double holocaust, the foreground intrigue between two Muslim men, who in bitter competition for Shanta's affections precipitate her doom, fails to be as clearly focused as Mehta's previous film, Fire , the first of the filmmaker's proposed trilogy of elemental forces at work in her ever-stormy homeland.

Give Reese a Chance

I seem to be the only New York film critic who liked Mike Barker's Best Laid Plans , from a screenplay by Ted Griffin. Could it be that Reese Witherspoon, its female lead, has entered my vicarious harem, or is it that I succumbed to the film's ratty charm in showing how treacherous old-school friendships can be–especially when put to the test by the morally marginal characters played by the underappreciated Alessandro Nivola and Josh Brolin. Not edifying, certainly, but thoroughly entertaining.