Blessed with an achingly beautiful score by Alexandre Desplat, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is a more tasteful Blackbook, which is odd considering how much more graphic it is in its depiction of not just sexuality but, thanks to a darkly-comic homage to Torn Curtain, violence as well. Where Blackbook director Paul Verhoeven is a vulgarian, though, Lee projects civility and cultivation. That's how he so often manages to shank you. The affair between secret service man Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu Wai, never viler) and a young freedom fighter masquerading as a Mahjong-playing housewife (the incandescent Tang Wei) in pre-revolutionary Shanghai plays out in an interminable series of rape scenarios from which Lee never flinches, fostering an impression of artistic integrity that Lee has been only too happy to perpetuate by blithely accepting the MPAA's ruling of an NC-17 rating for the film. Alas, post-Brokeback Mountain, the intensity of the In the Realm of the Senses-style sex scenes is too conspicuous for its own good, prompting extratextual questions about Lee's motives. Friend and colleague Norman Wilner said something in passing that really got me thinking: that he would feel like Lee is rhetorically asking us, "Is this what you wanted from Brokeback?" had he more faith in Lee's intellect. At any rate, in light of the sheepishness of Brokeback Mountain's same-sex encounters, the gratuitousness of Lust, Caution's hetero liaisons does strike a note of methinks the lady doth protest too much. Yet the picture gets around to honouring its pretensions towards truthfulness in a climax that exposes the sham of Blackbook's romantic sacrifices and narrow escapes (Mata Hari will always face down a firing squad), even if it's only later, at home in the dark, that the full weight of Lust, Caution's misanthropy comes crashing down on you. If Lee is ultimately too prosaic to ever be anything but a great middlebrow filmmaker, consider what an oxymoron that is; we're lucky to have him. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

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When I say that The Tracey Fragments applies the Tarnation method to fiction filmmaking, I say it exasperated with the whole Pied Piper mentality that follows any aesthetic innovation. I admire Tarnation, don't misunderstand, but a big part of that admiration rests in the picture's total invention and definitive application of a form that fits its function. Unfortunately, for every E.T., there's a Mac and Me--and for every original like Jonathan Caouette there's a dilettante-in-waiting like Bruce McDonald. The Canadian Kevin Smith, McDonald burrows into Tarnation like a tapeworm to nourish this anaemic faux-diary of a would-be runaway. Ellen Page is predictably dynamic in the title role, but in all honesty, I'm already sick of her coy nymphet routine, and there's no real relief from it here; you can't shake the feeling that Page, twenty years old offscreen, is condescending to the character, a late-bloomer who lives in her head. If you stop and think about it, The Tracey Fragments' tacit correlation of Tracey's demons with Caouette's--far fewer of which are imagined or self-created--is at best clueless and at worst downright offensive. Gay men are not teenage girls! (Consider how superficial are the similarities between Tracey's and Jonathan's mutual retreat into fantasy realms dominated by pop-cultural signposts: Tracey has Rupert Pupkin-esque skylarks about people falling down to worship her, whereas Jonathan mainly seeks catharsis by placing himself in the shoes of other lost souls.) I did find it interesting that only women left my screening early, though I suspect this was just a coincidence: even with the film's scant running time of 77 minutes, the unrelenting use of splitscreen is bound to give anyone a headache. PROGRAMME: Visions

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The problem with 2005's Land of the Dead is that it could've been made by virtually anybody at virtually any time. While I imagine that George A. Romero, stalwart hippie that he is, has an anticapitalist streak a mile wide, that picture's "eat the rich" trajectory ultimately felt like a rather flimsy pretext for Romero to resume chronicling social change through the prism of his precious undead. Given that the "Dead" films have typically had long incubation periods, it's surprising to see Romero return to the well so soon, but then it was probably best to hit the reset button post-haste. George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead does just that in more ways than one: here, Romero disentangles himself from the cul-de-sac of a zombie-human détente by starting from scratch in the present tense, making this the Casino Royale of the series. Technically, this is a film-within-a-film that shares its title with John Owen's definitive text about the concept of Limited Atonement; credited to one "Jason Creed," a film student who obsessively documents the road trip undertaken by his friends in the wake of a zombie outbreak, "The Death of Death" recasts the antihero of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom as a snuff filmmaker of societal (as opposed to parental) conditioning. One of the most appealing aspects of Diary, in fact, is that it brings to mind Romero's stories of staying up all night with Martin Scorsese, projecting films like Powell's on a bed sheet and idealizing cinema as the Lefty's secret weapon. To that end, it combines the spirit of youth--HD seems to have reawakened in Romero a sense of mischief--with the wisdom of age; this is the least hopeful entry since the first, Night of the Living Dead, probably because Romero has lived long enough to see history repeat itself. Unfortunately, Diary is almost ruinously tainted by the modern compulsion to spell out the subtextual commentary on the zeitgeist for the stupid kids--you'd be under the table pretty quick if you had to take a shot every time the abrasively-sanctimonious heroine (Eliza Dushku clone Michelle Morgan) sneers into the camera some variation on the line, "So if you don't film it, it's like it never happened." (Imagine a character in Dawn of the Dead observing, "Wow, zombies descending on a shopping mall is quite the metaphor for consumerism." (Okay, so that did kinda happen, but still.)) By rarely allowing the movie's meta aspects, Abu Ghraib parallels, etc. to speak for themselves, Romero throws the fundamental cheapness of the Toronto-lensed production into stark relief, giving the material basic a Sci-Fi Channel patina it simply doesn't deserve. PROGRAMME: Midnight Madness

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Sanity and fatigue are ineluctable corrupting influences on an aging filmmaker, but it brings me great pleasure and no small relief to be able to report that while Mother of Tears: The Third Mother--Dario Argento's long-gestating conclusion to his "Three Sisters" trilogy--is neither as artful as Suspiria nor as quixotic as Inferno, it nevertheless surpasses expectations fostered by Argento's recent work to emerge as his best movie in decades. Fitting that Argento should choose to tell the Rome-set story of Mater Lacrimarum last, marking this as a homecoming in more ways than one. In what feels like an in-joke, a better-than-usual Asia Argento (who else?) plays Sarah Mandy, the curator for the same museum that served as the locus of her character's problems in The Stendhal Syndrome. Here, it's ground zero for the eponymous witch's evil, unleashed after one of Sarah's colleagues unwisely disturbs the contents of a freshly-excavated urn. In no time flat Sarah is dodging cops and ghouls (and baboons and fashion models) in pursuit of her boyfriend, his son, and some satisfactory explanation as to her role in bringing down the Big Bad's coven; if this sounds vaguely reminiscent of last year's feature-film adaptation of Konami's "Silent Hill" series, consider how indebted the cause-and-effect nature of plot-driven video games is to the nightmare logic Argento legitimized as a narrative mode in his supernatural period. In all honesty, Mother of Tears has a propulsive momentum that feels out of synch with the dreamlike tempo of its predecessors, and, unlike those earlier films, it doesn't make much of an aesthetic impact--there's nothing to burn it onto the retinae like the Escherian backdrops of Suspiria or the submerged ballroom of Inferno. There's a flipside to that nonconformity, though, in that this might actually be the only film of the trilogy to engage the zeitgeist directly, first by portraying the Mother's evil as epidemic rather than contained (a seemingly crucial acknowledgment of our 'viral' culture), then by satirizing the Harry Potter flicks with increasing transparency. It's also bloody as fuck, marrying CGI to Guignol whimsy in ways so tasteless that you can hear the crackle of Argento's mojo working. PROGRAMME: Midnight Madness

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Another pansexual odyssey from Christopher Honoré; this one has singing. Honoré's skeezy ventriloquist dummy Louis Garrel, who's maturing into a facsimile of Vincent Gallo, plays one third of a bizarre love triangle as Ismaël, a free spirit (some might say jackass) living in sin with long-time sweetheart Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and co-worker Alice (Clotilde Hesme). The three take turns sleeping together, pairing off into couples, and suffering through jealous episodes and bouts of insecurity. Then--SPOILER--Julie pulls a River Phoenix outside a Parisian hotspot, leaving Ismaël to flounder until Cupid deposits on his doorstep a stalkerish, babyfaced college student named Erwann (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet). (Death as a catalyst for stasis is Honoré's shrewdest gambit--and one he seems intent on hammering into the ground.) Even for a French movie, Love Songs is pretty goddamn French, the sort of precious, laughless comedy where the main character entertains at brunch with charades for words like "tranquility" and "despondency." Oui oui. I kept waiting for mimes to show up, on screen or off, and the hook that these people occasionally break into song, Jacques Demy-style (though without Demy's courage to dispense with dialogue altogether or what Jonathan Rosenbaum called his "poetic exaltation of the ordinary"--Love Songs is more an ordinary exaltation of the poetic), only intensifies the suffocating provincialism of it all. Too little, too late, but a fleeting homage to One from the Heart near the end of the picture feels like a beacon from another planet. PROGRAMME: Vanguard

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A political thriller in the sense that it's bound to polarize audiences, King of the Hill (El Rey de la montaña) is if nothing else gripping from beginning to end. The effective, switcheroo set-up finds lost souls Quim (Leonardo Sbaraglia) and Bea (María Valverde, who from certain angles suggests Monica Bellucci's hot little sister) hooking up anonymously in the bathroom of a gas station, after which Bea makes off with Quim's wallet. Giving chase, Quim is shot at by a shadowy figure, and soon enough he and his would-be inamorata become the targets of vicious, relentless snipers deep in the wilds of Spain. Blessedly light on exposition (Bea is arguably a more tragic figure because the filmmakers leave her psychological profile wilfully incomplete), the picture ineffably conjures the spirit of Fabián Bielinsky and his swan song The Aura while easily outclassing its own most obvious source, The Most Dangerous Game. King of the Hill is also the rare movie that--by taking it allegorically rather than literally--actually honours Deliverance in repurposing it. But ay, there's the rub: you can't tell this kind of story honestly without some sub-culture feeling persecuted, and I suspect the film may ultimately bite the hand that feeds it with its au courant choice of avatar for the grim reaper. At the very least, its casual condemnation of gaming culture is not going to bridge any generation gaps, though I'll take King of the Hill's old-fashioned alarmism over the nihilism of American horror's current wave. PROGRAMME: Discovery

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A "Never Forget" PSA done up as a Bergmanesque psychodrama, the destined-to-be-retitled Emotional Arithmetic at least has the good sense to co-opt Bergman veteran Max von Sydow, who turns in the kind of twilit performance that functions as both a compendium of and an exquisite gateway to a storied career. Asked point-blank how he managed to survive the Holocaust, a prison sentence, and shock therapy, Sydow, as the noble but senile Jewish poet Jakob Bronski, snarls, "I'm hard to kill." It's a goosebumps-inducing moment that has already indelibly etched itself on Sydow's iconography for me, and it fleetingly transforms Emotional Arithmetic into the elegy I think it wants to be--maybe even a savvier one at that. But the movie--in which childhood sweethearts Melanie (Susan Sarandon) and Christopher (Gabriel Byrne) are reunited at the farm of Melanie's college-professor husband (Christopher Plummer) by/with the man, Jakob, who facilitated their release from the French internment camp Drancy--is just a little bit maddening. Part of the problem is that director Paolo Barzman seems to see only in macro. A perfect example of this is an encounter between Plummer and Byrne that must've taken hours to light but is virtually unravelled by a stray hair on Byrne's person: it becomes an almost hypnotic distraction. And so it follows that the film's didactic façade doesn't really hold up under scrutiny; the moral of the story is hard to wrap one's head around, since it laments history's short memory while advocating selective amnesia as a survival mechanism. Admittedly I also have a pretty low tolerance for Sarandon, Roy Dupuis (struggling with an Anglo accent as Melanie's son), and countrified intellectuals in general, but that's my cross to bear. PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

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François Ozon is what David Bordwell might call a "polystylist" in the Fassbinder vein, though his eclecticism has mostly yielded diminishing returns. His latest finds him suiting up for yet another genre, and although it could be considered something of a throwback to his early features Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women (if by virtue of its roots in someone else's material), he's too tony now for the vaguely subversive pastiches with which he made his mark. Based on a book--unread by yours truly--by the other Elizabeth Taylor, Angel on the one hand arguably corresponds to the historical biopic (or sprawling period pieces in general) the way the upcoming Walk Hard does to Walk the Line or Ray, with the contempt seemingly manifested in Romola Garai's silent-movie gesticulations and a globetrotting sequence that has less aesthetic credibility than Conan O'Brien's wild desk rides betraying the film as a turn-of-the-century Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. And yet, there's a kind of lazy veneration for stalwart tropes like the shell-shocked veteran, the tragic miscarriage, the mistress in the city, and, my personal favourite, the death-by-heartbreak--all of which serves to undercut the singularity of Angel's protagonist, a woman who writes her way to wealth and privilege in Edwardian society. (Perhaps Ozon's playing it safe because this is his first film entirely in English.) While Garai is very good in the title role, ingratiating even at the character's brattiest, only Sam Neill, as the henpecked publisher of Angel's potboilers, transcends the movie's cumulatively-disengaging tonal fluctuations. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

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Just Buried (formerly Pushing Up Daisies) stars Jay Baruchel as Oliver Whynacht (get it? "Why not?" Me neither), a neurotic with a really annoying affection (his nose bleeds when he's nervous) who inherits a small-town funeral parlour from his estranged father. He's ready to hand over the reins of the money-hemorrhaging business to a competitor when he falls under the spell of the Lady Macbeth-like mortician, Roberta (Rose Byrne), whereupon the two hatch a scheme to drum up business that rather rapidly transforms them into makeshift serial killers. The casting of Baruchel triggers acid flashbacks to the similarly tactless Fetching Cody, but to its detriment, Just Buried has far more shame, its every Guignol set-piece an exercise in Greedo-fires-first evasiveness. Indeed, until the inevitable unleashing of Roberta's inner castrating bitch (the underlying misogyny of which is tempered by how tiresome Baruchel and his character have become), the movie is so terrified of complicity that it's downright sterile. Blame the Brits for making this kind of morbid farce look easy and Canada's nation of amateurs for dabbling in yet another genre incompatible with our core decency. In all, not the sinfully delicious good time one expects, though it does put the sphinxlike Byrne to good use. PROGRAMME: Canada First!

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