Life is tough -- even for stars

Clouds of Sils Maria examines the woes of an aging actress.

There are two important characters in Clouds of Sils Maria -- and only one of them is human.

The latest collaboration between director Olivier Assayas and actress Juliette Binoche revolves around an aging actress who's being pushed from center stage. She's the obvious human in this drama.

Then there's the other character: time, a relentless accumulation of years that's pushing the actress out of the spotlight.

Binoche plays Maria, an accomplished middle-aged French actress who spends most of the movie in the company of her impressively efficient assistant (Kristen Stewart).

In addition to handling Maria's affairs -- everything from an impending divorce hearing to press requests -- Stewart's Valentine also interprets an increasingly youth-oriented culture for a skeptical Maria.

The movie opens on a train with Maria and Valentine headed for a tribute to the director who launched Maria's career. In the midst of the trip, they learn that the director has passed away, turning the pending tribute into a sad affair.

At what was to be a celebration, Maria meets an actor with whom she once had an affair, but on whom she has soured. The movie then slips away to Switzerland, where Maria and Valentine ensconce themselves in a mountain home owned by the late director's wife.

Clouds of Sils Maria has backstage allure. Assayas takes us into Maria's private world. She's capable of putting on good front, but her laugh reveals a bit of desperation, as well as the wear of too many cigarettes.

Despite various digressions, Clouds revolves around a single event. A hot-shot director (Lars Eidinger) offers Maria a part in a stage production of The Maloja Snake, the movie that established her career.

This time, though, Maria must play the older of two women engaged in a love relationship that falls apart as the younger woman becomes increasingly assertive.

The more incendiary role has gone to Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moritz), a youthful actress who can't seem to keep her face out of the tabloids. Jo-Ann, who has appeared in sci-fi blockbusters, is either a Hollywood A-lister or about to become one.

Stewart's character occupies a middle ground between Maria and her youthful challenger. She respects Maria, but appreciates Jo-Ann's gift, an admiration that's revealed when Maria and Valentine go to a theater to watch one of Jo-Ann's 3D, sci-fi extravaganzas.

When Maria and Valentine run lines from the upcoming play, it becomes clear that they're also acting out portions of their complex relationship, sometimes in ways that seem too on-the-nose.

It may help to know that the movie has an insider component: Binoche and Assayas worked together on Rendez-vous (1985), an Andre Techine-directed movie that Assayas co-wrote and which helped bring Binoche to prominence. They also teamed for 2008's Summer Hours.

After her fine work in the Alzheimer's drama Still Alice, Stewart continues to impress. She plays the least defined and, therefore, most interesting of the three women.

Assays is no speed demon when it comes to pacing, and he isn't exactly breaking new ground here. Clouds sometimes seems to be drifting, and the insular world of these performers can narrow to the point of off-putting self-absorption.

It's also not clear why Assayas made Binoche, who's 51, into a 40-year-old for his movie. Perhaps he wanted to emphasize that show business so values newness and youth that 40 is considered old for an actress.

As for Maria and Jo-Ann, they're jockeying for position -- not only with each other -- but, in Maria's case, with the inevitability of advancing time. Her tragedy, one supposes, is that she's smart enough to know that she's not going to beat the clock.

A remake that sticks close to the original

Moretz and Smit-McPhee locked together.

We’ve seen so many vampire movies lately that these blood-sucking creatures of the night have come to seem like neighbors, a bit more remote perhaps but also distressingly familiar. It’s worth remembering, then,that the Swedish movie, Let the Right One In (2008), was one of the strangest,most original and emotionally resonant of all the vampire movies to hit the screen within the last several years.

Built around the torments of a lonely boy living in the chill of what seemed an endless winter, Let the Right One In echoed with the sadness of something that felt like eternal soullessness. The 12-year-old boy at the movie’s center was caught in a trap that never allowed the kind of triumphant release we’ve come to expect from horror movies.

Now comes the inevitable American remake, and the surprise, I suppose, is that Let Me In (a slightly altered title) doesn’t betray everything about its bleak predecessor. A little more vivid, a little more graphic and significantly less ambiguous than the Swedish original, Let Me In nonetheless follows a course that’s steeped in horror – not only the shock of bloody attacks – but also of being caught in an unbreakable cycle of deterioration and woe.

Kodi Smit-McPhee's Owen lives with his single mom (Cara Bouno) in a nondescript apartment complex in what seems to be a small town in the middle of nowhere, the kind of remote place where the cold invades bones.

One evening, a man (Richard Jenkins) and his daughter (Chloe Moretz) move into one of the apartments. Director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) quickly establishes that there’s something different about 12-year-old Abby. Abby doesn’t wear shoes, even in the cold. She doesn’t attend school. She seems tougher (and smarter) than most 12-year-old girls. And maybe the man who accompanies her isn’t her father.

Reeves mostly follows the lead of the original in a story that deals with the way Owen is bullied at school. His mom – intentionally photographed in ways that never allow her to emerge as a full presence -- doesn’t understand her son’s loneliness. His father isn’t around. He’s one of those kids left to cope with difficult situations without adult help.

Reeves slowly develops the relationship between Owen and Abby, and for those who haven’t seen the Swedish original, the movie may seem a revelation, the antithesis of the garish shock machines that typify most American horror, as well as a kind of commentary on alliances formed at a time when one is too young to make significant decisions.

It’s no surprise that Jenkins gives a fine performance. Same goes for Elias Koteas, who plays a cop. But the movie couldn’t possibly work if its two young actors weren’t up to the task. Smit-McPhee, who played the boy in the unrelentingly grim big-screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, has a wounded quality that’s perfect for the movie, and Moretz, last seen as a profanity-spewing dynamo in Kick-Ass, projects just the right amount of eerie resolve.

If there must be remakes of foreign movies, Let Me In probably qualifies as a model for how it should be done. The movie may be have moved from Sweden to the U.S., but in a way location hardly matters. The story really takes place in the land of loneliness and in the bruised areas of the human heart.