It's a classic catch-22: Dear Wendy reveals that Jamie Bell was born to play Billy the Kid, but it probably also squanders his chances of doing so. As Dick, the orphaned son of a miner, Bell dons Michael J. Fox's effeminate cowboy duds from Back to the Future Part III and transforms the town's social lepers into a gang of gun fetishists known collectively as the Dandies; director Thomas Vinterberg and screenwriter Lars von Trier give us the gay burlesque version of the NRA, because nothing sticks it to the red states like calling them a bunch of queers. Other low blows: Dick has a mammy (I'm now officially dreading the forthcoming Manderlay, von Trier's slavery-themed sequel to Dogville); the token girl (Canadian dynamo Alison Pill) with the impressive rack seems most attracted to the token black guy (Canadian dynamo Denso Gordon); and Dick's girlfriend, for all intents and purposes, is a revolver--the titular Wendy. At the core of Dear Wendy is a surprisingly airtight allegory of how pacifism is by nature a fallacy in a country (the U.S., natch) saturated with firearms, but as usual, the sheer audacity of von Trier and his formalist puppet Vinterberg--both as exploitation filmmakers and as satirists basing their image of the States on assumption rather than on experience--hijacks the discussion. Like the creators of "South Park", everything they make is ultimately a vanity project.

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Heading South (Vers le sud) represents such a departure from the milieu of Laurent Cantet's previous film (2001's brilliant psychological thriller Time Out (L'Emploi du temps)) that you can't really say it rounds out a trilogy he started with Human Resources. Nevertheless, it resumes his fascination with people in transience, people who've erected complex façades to avoid the repercussions of personal or professional failure; Cantet's pictures are screwball comedies played straight, and we see ourselves reflected in them like Athene saw herself in the water. Thanks to a chilling, if red herring-laden, prologue wherein a Haitian mother tries to "give" her endangered teenage daughter to a respectable-looking islander, a black cloud looms over the piece--and it's just one of the many ways in which Cantet shrewdly exploits Haiti's mystique without falling back on Serpent and the Rainbow-isms, paving a road to doom down which three middle-aged spinsters defiantly walk. Wellesley professor Ellen (Charlotte Rampling), willowy Midwesterner Brenda (Karen Young, who gets to deliver the screen's finest erotic monologue since Persona), and earthy Montréaler Sue (Louise Portal) are returning guests at a kind of sex resort where they take turns patronizing Legba (Ménothy Cesar), a young gigolo who makes them feel not only beautiful but, critically, maternal, too. (When we first meet Legba, he's curled up in a foetal position on the beach, only to be 'awakened' by Brenda's touch.) Unfolding towards the end of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's reign of terror, the 1978-set film relies a little too much on a working knowledge of Haiti's political history to sort out its narrative ambiguities, but by the same token, this seems to stave off noble-savage syndrome--of which the characters are guilty but the filmmaker, for a change, is not.

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These days, when I think of Larry Clark, I think of Stephen Wiltshire, the outsider artist profiled in Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars. Diagnosed with autism early in life, Wiltshire soon after began doing immaculately detailed sketches of animals before moving on to buses and eventually cityscapes. So advanced was Wiltshire's technique at such an early age that Sacks and co. were fascinated to learn that his talent came pre-evolved: as a child, he drew like a grown-up, but he drew like that same grown-up in adulthood. Whatever you think of Clark's directorial debut, Kids, there's no denying that he's a natural--a savant, if you will--at harnessing the prickly energy of youth. And yet, although he's since moved on from "animals" (the mindless fuck-bunnies of Kids and Bully) to "buses" (the emotionally shipwrecked fuck-bunnies of Teenage Caveman and Ken Park) to "cityscapes" (the El Salvadoran fuck-bunnies of the new film, Wassup Rockers), he hasn't--and I don't mean this in the pejorative sense--matured; you can essentially start anywhere in the Clark canon without missing a beat. It's nice to see him grapple with the "other" in Wassup Rockers, but all he's really done is turn the tint down on his usual band of utopia-seeking skater punks, and as the picture's relatively tame surface works to offset its intensely nihilistic underbelly (Clark has never had this little regard for human life--and that the victims of the film's Rube Goldberg deathtraps are by and large pedophiles isn't nearly as self-flagellating as you might presume), the cumulative effect is one of déjà vu. Treating the Latino characters' sojourn into Beverly Hills like a social experiment, Clark remains a compelling, primal anthropologist--and the mischief-making in Wassup Rockers spreads a surprisingly infectious joy. But there are only so many times you can applaud a one-trick pony.

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Named after an initiative of the Italian Development Cooperation's Ministry of Foreign Affairs that supports Unicef and other global charities, this omnibus project assembles seven short subjects about children from a handful of world-class directors, all of whom were instructed to locate their contributions in their home and native land. Poverty seems to be the unifying theme until Jordan and Ridley Scott's vaguely autobiographical segment, which sticks out like a sore thumb but subversively suggests that if All the Invisible Children proper has any lessons to impart, they revolve around the auteur theory. Having never seen a film by Mehdi Charef or Stefano Veneruso, I don't know how closely their episodes hew to their previous work, but I can tell you that Emir Kusturica, Spike Lee, the Scotts, Kátia Lund, and John Woo tread familiar ground in an almost egotistical fashion.

On the individual pieces: set in North Africa, Charef's Tanza is a disturbing portrait of pre-pubescent freedom fighters (in particular the titular sharpshooter, who's outlived many of his peers) undercut by wholly unnecessary exposition; in Blue Gipsy, Kusturica visits his blend of absurdity and pathos on some gypsy boys being released back into the wild after a cushy stay in juvenile hall; Lee idly tugs at the heartstrings in Jesus Children of America, the story of an adolescent girl coming to terms with the fact that she was born HIV-positive; the Scotts' drab Jonathan finds an ailing photojournalist (David Thewlis!) regressing to his childhood in war-torn England; Lund tells the spirited tale of Bilu e João, a resourceful brother and sister hatching "Our Gang"-style moneymaking schemes on the streets of São Paolo; Veneruso pays tired hommage to The 400 Blows in Ciro; and Woo's Song Song & Little Cat is an unapologetically mawkish salute to Chaplin that contrasts the lives of two little girls, one an orphan raised in squalor by a lovable tramp, the other a child of divorce raised in affluence by her self-centered mother. Lund and Woo clearly have something to prove, making theirs the true stand-outs of the curiously ephemeral septet (I've already forgotten how half of these shorts end), with Lund laying to rest any doubt that she deserved the co-directing credit on Fernando Meirelles' City of God and Woo showing that despite the weird ways his sentimental side has manifested itself in his Hollywood output, his skills as a master manipulator remain sharp and at hand. Aye, there's the rub: All the Invisible Children is actually fairly unremarkable from a non-auteurist perspective, at once betraying a certain apathy for the project's propagandist agenda and soliciting the same.

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The Myth, or: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Turdbath. Sabotaging a potential comeback by trying to catch a wave (not unlike the myriad has-beens in the music industry who jumped on the disco bandwagon), Jackie Chan dips a toe in the unfriendly, nay, hostile waters of the wu xia genre recently revitalized by the likes of Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou. Although The Myth is cruddy-looking (HD's fine for George Lucas excretions and Robert Rodriguez fantasias, but it has a long way to go before it'll be ready for this kind of quasi-epic) and beset by shoddy effects work, blame for its near-unwatchability falls squarely at the feet of Chan and his frequent collaborator Stanley Tong, who directed the film and co-wrote its infantile screenplay; the pitch-meeting must've sounded like kindergarten--after all, it's got meteorites! And sword-fighting! And princesses! And archaeologists! And rooms without gravity! And swamis! And ghosts! It doesn't help that Chan's face has petrified with age and distress into a single, constipated expression, making his reaction shots so opaque as to be dramatically ineffectual. There's a decent set-piece involving a conveyer belt slathered in super-glue, but just the fact that the heir apparent to Fred Astaire would rather contrive reasons to move as little as possible during an action sequence than retire is proof of the production's mid-life crisis.

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Dennis Potter was a genre unto himself, and when he died, he took his recipe for what Heinz Antor called "humanist postmodernism" with him. It's painful to watch writer-director John Turturro, one of the great character actors of our time, invoke the writer in Romance & Cigarettes, as he reduces Potter's notion of pop music as existential catharsis to exactly what it wasn't: a gimmick--an alibi for air band. In the spellbinding film version of Potter's Pennies from Heaven, Christopher Walken comically menaces Bernadette Peters by lip-synching and doing a show-stopping striptease to Irving Aaronson and His Commanders' "Let's Misbehave"; in Romance & Cigarettes, Walken's performance of Tom Jones' "Delilah" is seemingly motivated by a weakness for junk musical numbers. Considering the applause the film elicited from the typically unresponsive press/industry crowd, I guess the technique alone is visceral enough, but instead of illuminating the inner lives of the characters (which even a novelty ditty like "Teddy Bear Picnic" managed to do in the original The Singing Detective), Turturro's prosaic song choices superficialize the inner lives of his characters, making glorified jukeboxes of them all. Granted, once James Gandolfini's Nick Murder--a palooka cheating on his wife (the ubiquitous Susan Sarandon, who's really starting to wear out her welcome) with an English tart (Kate Winslet, too good for this)--is diagnosed with lung cancer, the movie becomes less arbitrary, but we're left to do the heavy-lifting required by the tonal shift; suture and respite come only briefly in the form of perennial pinch-hitter Elaine Stritch (see: Monster-in-Law)--give her an Oscar, already.

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There are really three-tiers to Abel Ferrara's output, as indicated by his choice of avatar. Arguably the most commercial, at least until New Rose Hotel, his Christopher Walken movies have also been the director's most meticulously crafted, while his Harvey Keitel movies resonate as Ferrara's most personal, with Dangerous Game probably the closest he's ever come to a roman à clef. Then there is Matthew Modine, star of The Blackout and now Mary--relatively minor films seemingly motivated by an urge to commit abstract concepts to celluloid before sobriety kicks in. Juliette Binoche toplines an eclectic cast as Marie Palesi, an actress playing Mary Magdalene in a biblical epic directed by and starring (as Christ) Tony Childress (Modine). After production has wrapped, Marie finds herself shuttled at regular intervals between the present and Magdalene's time, and she elects to embrace this Billy Pilgrim affliction by staying behind in Israel. Meanwhile, on the promotional circuit for the film back in New York (perhaps the screen's most austere since the one Michael Almereyda gave us in Hamlet), Childress crosses paths with Ted Younger (Forest Whitaker), the host of a popular talk show focused on Christianity; in making an apparently Faustian bargain to publicly support the smarmy Childress, Younger, who's cheating on his pregnant wife (Heather Graham) with Marie's sister (Marion Cotillard), psychically tethers his unborn child to Marie's religious epiphanies. Because it all resolves into a lampoon of Mel Gibson's Jesus folly, Mary can't be said to have anything but honourable intentions, though as a caricature Childress doesn't land with any particular impact. As demonstrated by the nutty casting of Whitaker and Graham as marrieds, it doesn't matter how solid Ferrara's theology is if he doesn't read the trades.

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Canadian filmmakers tend to expose their limitations when they mimic American pop (see: the oeuvres of Jerry Ciccoritti and Mary Harron), and Atom Egoyan, who adapts his signature post-modernism to the Boogie Nights/Goodfellas paradigm in Where the Truth Lies, is no exception. Part of the problem is that it's almost impossible to empathize with journo Karen O'Connor's (Alison Lohman) attraction to the world of Lanny (Kevin Bacon, in a career-best turn) and Vince (Colin Firth), a quasi-Martin & Lewis rended asunder by a scandal years before--not only because these movies are morality tales and thus must initially offer some vicarious thrills, but also because Egoyan is such a fucking Martian that his looking glass isn't perversely seductive (like, say, Blue Velvet's), only off-putting. Indeed, at the forefront of one's mind throughout Where the Truth Lies is whether Egoyan intended it to be so ridiculous, from the inscrutable casting of Firth as a Vaudevillian entertainer to the cornball "Alice in Wonderland" imagery (he even uses Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" on the soundtrack as though he thinks its meaning is hidden) to the '70s period markers (big moustaches for the boys, big afros for the dark-skinned extras) to, my personal favourite, Lohman playing Karen as a nine-year-old by putting shoes on her knees. That being said, perhaps more disconcerting than Egoyan's failure to either beat 'em or join 'em is that after all these years, he's still making lugubrious, young-man's art that wallows in Sartrean despair.

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Richard Brooks' masterful screen translation of Truman Capote's true-crime (Tru-crime?) novel In Cold Blood is full of indelible imagery that at first seems to seep into the fabric of Capote beyond director Bennett Miller's control. But as the homages--most notably, both pictures postpone the pivotal slaying of the ominously-named Clutter family until showing it will subvert our expectations most effectively--accumulate and grow increasingly distinct, this tapered biopic begins to feel like a particularly vexing déjà vu. Except for his telltale slackjaw laugh, Philip Seymour Hoffman disappears into the title role, yet the movie is fundamentally superfluous: in presuming to tell the story of In Cold Blood from Capote's point-of-view, it presumes that In Cold Blood wasn't inherently told from Capote's point-of-view. And not only did Brooks' decision to leave the author out of his film as a character not dilute Capote's liberal sympathies, if anything it found them better disseminated than this Dead Man Walking redux does. An early scene of Capote-as-raconteur, which has the electricity of Faces-era Cassavetes, gets one's hopes up, but in retrospect it only portends Miller's knack for pastiche.

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Believe it or not, it's more taxing to watch Anand Tucker's Shopgirl than to read the Steve Martin novella on which it's based. As in his Hilary and Jackie, Tucker seems to be striving for something lyrical but winds up with something purple, submerging as he does nearly every scene in a syrupy score whilst failing to consolidate redundant emotional gestures. Consequently, Shopgirl is like Lost in Translation on steroids, with Martin's middle-aged lothario Ray Porter temporarily filling the void in the life of Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes), a culturally-displaced ethereal beauty several years his junior. All three leads--Jason Schwartzman plays a young bohemian, Jeremy, whose courtship of Mirabelle grinds to a halt once Ray enters the picture--do fine, idiosyncratic work (Danes hasn't been this good since her "My So-Called Life" heyday, though I could've done without the distracting po-mo glimpse of that show's DVD box set), but where the stark prose of Martin's book made the most of Mirabelle's depressive state ("[Jeremy] never complicates a desire by overthinking it, unlike Mirabelle, who spins a cocoon around an idea until it is immobile," Martin writes) and rendered palatable the characters' improbable relationships, an objective interpretation of the story, particularly one as overcooked as this, throws its essential hollowness into sharp relief. Still, Tucker has a fixation with Danes' feet that at least indicates a directorial presence, something Martin vehicles have lacked for too long.

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