Grandma goes to a war zone

Alexandr Sokurov, the much-admired Russian director, returns to the screen with "Alexandra," a movie about a grandmother (opera soprano Galina Vishnevskaya) who visits her grandson (Vasily Shevtsov) at a military outpost on the Chechen front. The idea that a soldier's grandmother could visit a battle zone seems startling and preposterous, but it sets the stage for a quietly determined drama in which Vishnevskaya's character becomes both commentator and witness.

The young soldiers serving in Chechnya take a liking to her, perhaps because she represents a touch of familial warmth that they've nearly forgotten. But Vishnevskaya's character isn't exactly warm and cuddly. She's a tough old bird.

Sokurov, who directed "Russian Ark," a true masterpiece, has made another film that's bound to tax the patience of multiplex addicts who seem to control summer's moviegoing. We don't know exactly why Alexandra made this visit to her grandson Denis; we're taken aback by a late-picture scene in which Denis braids his grandmother's hair with a tenderness that's nearly erotic; we're not entirely sure how Sokurov feels about war, although an aura of futility overhangs everything that the soldiers do and say. This feeling of fatigue seems as real as the ravages of age that work on Alexandra. She frequently comments on how dirty everything is. The soldiers hardly notice. The dirt has become part of them.

The film's meaning seems to live in Vishnevskaya's every gesture. She's 81, and her character is presented as a woman whose aches and pains have real weight. She moves in slow, labored fashion, as if she's walking against the long tide of history. Sokurov leaves plenty of room for us to interpret just what the character of Alexandra represents -- all grandmothers, the Russian soul?

If you know Sokurov's work, you know that not much will happen, that much will be suggested and that you'll be able to talk for a long time about what the film is trying to say. I think Sokurov poses a haunting, awful question: When all the illusions are gone, what's left? It's a question that Sokurov rightly suggests we answer for ourselves.

The imaginative bloat of "Hellboy II"

Can there be-- as cliche insists -- too much of a good thing? I'm not sure, but I began to wonder during "Hellboy II: The Golden Army,'' a movie that seems afraid to let a minute pass without introducing one more impressive creature. In this edition, director Guillermo Del Toro's like a generous kid who wants to share every toy in his toy chest. I appreciated the cinematic largess, but wondered whether I was watching inspired creativity or B-movie bloat? Maybe "Hellboy II" offers a bit of both.

When "Pan's Labyrinth" played the Toronto International Film Festival, del Toro told me in an interview that he couldn't have made his eerie, brilliant anti-Fascist fantasy had he not done "Hellboy" first. Del Toro said he learned much from "Hellboy" that became useful to him as he worked on "Pan's Labyrinth."

Watching "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," it struck me that the obviously talented Del Toro, who'll be directing the upcoming "Hobbit" movies, had found himself a new laboratory. The sequel to 2004's "Hellboy" can be seen as an elaborate creature feature, a display of unleashed (and sometimes over-indulged) imagination built around a story that's not nearly as interesting as the movie's visual pyrotechnics.

Ron Perlman returns as the big-fisted, cigar-chomping Hellboy, and Selma Blair and Doug Jones reprise their roles as Liz Sherman and Abe Sapien. This time, Hellboy must stop Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), a brooding warrior who wants to awaken an army of golden soldiers so that he can destroy all mankind. The prince's sister (Anna Walton) doesn't share her brother's ambitions. She's sympathetic to humans.

Perlman's amusing gruffness, a few humorous scenes (Hellboy and Abe Sapien getting drunk on Tecate whle listening to Barry Manilow) and an ending that's morbidly loopy keep the movie from derailing. "Hellboy's" fans may not mind that del Toro's script feels scattered, but I was slightly disappointed by a movie that -- for all its amazing monsters -- seems to lack the gripping intensity of some of del Toro's previous work.

RECOMMENDED READING:
If you want to know how the "Hellboy" series has grown, take a loot at this article from Variety.. Writer David S. Cohen, who interviewed del Toro, begins by noting that this edition of the "Hellboy" series features 32 monsters as compared to five in the original.

Herzog in the land of penguins

Anyone familiar with the work of Werner Herzog knows that the German-born director has a taste for extremes. Herzog makes features ("Rescue Dawn") and documentaries ("Grizzly Man"), and his filmography virtually brims with one eccentric dare after another. So if Herzog takes his camera to Antarctica, it's a safe bet that he's not coming home with something conventional. It's an even safer bet that Herzog's movie will reflect his vision, which in this case comes wrapped in a doom-laden, somber package.


"Encounters at the End of the World" is no Al Gorish warning about global warming. It's not an occasion for liberal hand wringing, either. Rather it's an ominous rumble of doom concocted by Herzog from ingredients that should be incompatible, but somehow aren't. Odd bursts of absurdity (an interview with a woman who drove across Africa in a garbage truck) mingle with prophetic pronouncements (interviews with scientists who look ahead to a time when all humanity resides in history's bone yard). To further up the ominous ante, Herzog accompanies his images with music that sounds as if it had been composed in some mysterious cavern where the cosmos retreats to ponder itself.


Could it all be some sort of monumental goof? I wondered. It's difficult not to laugh when Herzog asks a scientist whether penguins have been known to suffer from insanity. It's a purely Herzogian question, and it doesn't necessarily require an answer. Rather it reflects the director's view that all creatures probably suffer terrible deviations from normalcy. He also wants to know about "prostitution" among penguins, activities in which the females engage in deception and award sexual favors for gain. He chooses the word "prostitution," as if he's imagining female penguins of easy virtue standing provocatively on the corner of ice flows, whistling to prospective Johns. It's preposterous, of course, an imposition of a morally charged word on creatures that live beyond such conceptual judgment.

Upon arriving at the grim-looking McMurdo research station at the South Pole -- Herzog rightly compares it to an outpost on an alien planet -- the director unpacks a kit full of bleak lyricism: He interviews scientists and induces many of them to acknowledge that man's life on Earth may be drawing to a close. He also finds many kindred spirits, including a plumber who talks about his Aztec roots. He presents McMurdo as a repository of weirdness, the place at the bottom of the world to which brilliant misfits inevitably tumble, strange filings drawn to a powerful magnet. As attracted as he may be to these eccentrics, Herzog can't wait to get away from McMurdo, which carries what he regards as the taint of civilization, abominations such as an ATM machine and a yoga studio.

None of this is to say that Herzog can't be awestruck. He makes spectacular use of undersea footage, some of it shot by the film's producer Henry Kaiser, who also wrote the music. And his view of Antarctic tends to underscore its beautiful severity: One scientist describes the world under the ice -- i.e., the ocean -- as one of rampant hostility, an environment full of cruel, life-crushing jokes. One creature entraps its victims. The more they struggle, the more ensnared they become. So the movie is about impending doom, but also perhaps about the abundant horrors that go along with survival.

As for insanity among penguins...Herzog discovers that some penguins buck the tide. Instead of walking toward the ocean with his fellows, one penguin insists on waddling toward the mountains, a journey that will bring certain death. Isolated from his companions, he marches dutifully toward his demise. Is he a stand-in for Herzog? For all of humanity? What makes a creature -- any creature -- bring such inexorable will to his own self-destruction?

Herzog seems less interested in providing answers than in casting a grave spell with this documentary, one of his best, I think. Rather than inundate us with information, he travels across terrain so forbidding, it's clear that humans don't belong there. And he raises an awful question that rumbles through the entire movie: How long will it be before we don't belong anywhere?

China: sailing up a river of contradictions

This week, the Discovery Channel is airing Ted Koppel's "The People's Republic of Capitalism," a four-part look at contemporary China with an emphasis on the contradictions that have resulted from China's heady immersion in capitalism. For another -- and far more lyrical view -- of such contradictions, try Yung Chang's "Up the Yangtze," a documentary about the strange consequences of building the Three Gorges dam. Mao Zedong was keen on the idea of building the dam, which required massive flooding, which -- in turn -- meant relocating the populations of entire cities. Without being preachy, Yung exposes problems and peculiarities that have resulted from the Three Gorges project. He focuses, for example, on a family of subsistence farmers whose 16-year-old daughter, Yu Shui, goes to work on one of the tour boats that carry foreigners up the Yangtze, trips that partly focus on the glories of China's achievements. You won't see many Chinese on such tours. Maybe that's why workers on these ships are given English names -- Yu Shui becomes Cindy -- and are expected to serve the tourists with smiles and an unsullied optimism that doesn't always match the reality of their lives. Beautifully shot by cinematographer Wang Shi Qing, "Up the Yangzte" captures the hopes of those who aspire to prosperity in the new China and those who are being left behind.

WHEN WHERE YOU LIVE ISN'T HOME
Of note: Based on a novel by Monica Ali, "Brick Lane" chronicles the life of a young woman (Tannishtha Chatterjee) whose father ships her from Bangladesh to London to marry a supposedly prosperous emigre (Satish Kaushik). Chatterjee's Nazneen lives according to plan -- call it quiet desperation -- until she meets an attractive young man (Christopher Simpson) who opens her eyes to new possibilities. Director Sarah Gavron doesn't plow much fresh ground, but she presents a telling portrait of the lives of those who occupy a kind of limbo, people trying to understand where exactly they can feel at home in the world. Because the main characters are Muslims, Gavron also is able to show the kinds of anger that develops when a population feels that it's being excluded from the mainstream. In brief: Solid, if not inspired, filmmaking about an interesting and increasingly important subject.

The life and career of Hunter S. Thompson

Alex Gibney won an Oscar for his documentary "Taxi To the Dark Side," a probing look at the effects of torture and wrongful imprisonment in the fight against terror. Prior to that, he scored with "The Smartest Guys in the Room," a zesty documentary about the Enron debacle.

Now, comes "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," a big-screen biography of the writer credited with inventing gonzo-style journalism. A renegade capable of monumental and unashamed self-indulgence, Thompson remains a figure who may be more important for his legend than for his work. How you respond to Gibney's documentary may depend on how you respond to Thompson. Fans will devour it the way Thompson claimed to have gobbled pills. Others may find themselves tuning in and out.

Most of the people Gibney interviewed can't recall Thompson without smiling, which says something about the guy, but Gibney's movie -- composed of interviews, archival footage and home movies -- tends to overdo. It goes on about Thompson -- and then goes on some more. Maybe that's unavoidable. The movie is built around Thompson, a writer who became a countercultural star and who watched the passing circus through his own peculiar, drug addled consciousness.

It remains to be seen whether Thompson's most important work -- "Hells Angels,'' "Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas," and "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72" -- will have lasting value. But even after his death, Thompson continues as a figure who makes readers long for the emergence of another rebel with a typewriter. The man had fans. I attended a packed preview screening of "Gonzo." The audience's often-vocal responses made me believe that Gibney -- whose more significant documentary about torture didn't attract much of an audience -- will score bigger this time.

Say this: Thomson had a powerful ego. If that ego drove much of his work, its power seems to have extended beyond death, finding posthumous expression in this overly long movie. Still, "Gonzo" has its virtues -- as a summation of a tumultuous period in our semi-recent history, as a look at someone who tried to live in perpetual extremis and as a document that proves that the vices of the self-indulgent often are excused by devotes who dabble, though far less adventurously, in some of the same behavior.

At times, I found the movie indulgent, as well. I wish, for example, that "Gonzo'' -- which is narrated by Johnny Depp -- had used less footage from Terry Gilliam's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." One viewing of that movie was quite enough, thank you. But even someone as dubious as myself found some laughs in Thompson's more outrageous ploys and enjoyed revisiting some of his descriptions of Richard M. Nixon, a man he regarded as a shabby crook who represented the worst part of the American spirit. Or better still, there's Thompson's bizarre assertion that Ed Muskie, at the time a vice presidential candidate, had fried his brain with a drug called Ibogaine. People evidently believed Thompson, who blurred the line between satire and journalism, was onto something.

Still, I couldn't help making a mental comparison: Thompson's career took a major downturn when he was sent to Zaire to cover the famous Ali-Foreman fight. Convinced Ali would get clobbered, Thompson spent the fight bobbing in a hotel pool. At the same time, Norman Mailer -- a better writer and a more courageous thinker -- was writing some of the best boxing prose anyone ever authored.

Thompson, Mailer and Tom Wolfe, who's interviewed by Gibney, helped radicalize journalistic style -- if only for a moment. Of them all, I find Mailer the most interesting. Watching "Gonzo" only reinforced that belief, but it did make me nostalgic for a time when the there seemed to be more virtue in antagonizing the mainstream than in trying to appease it.

A super-senseless superhero movie

SUMMARY: Will Smith stars as a foul-tempered, drunken superhero in "Hancock," an action movie whose blockbuster scale is matched by its failure to make even a little bit of sense. Smith, who has made his name synonymous with big-budget, big-ticket entertainment, might well benefit from giving up the burden of having to carry tent-pole movies on his back. A career shift might lead him to more interesting acting choices -- and not just the occasional digression we saw with "The Pursuit of Happyness." Smith is a talented, likable presence and a true movie star, and, yes, I'd like to see him use his stardom for something more than anchoring the latest Hollywood money machine.


This time out, Smith plays John Hancock, a Los Angeles drunk who happens to have superpowers. Hancock often saves the day, but not without alienating those whose lives he reluctantly protects. A Hancock rescue mission is likely to result in as much as $9 million in damages, causing city officials to wish he'd ply his trade elsewhere. When this guy plunges out of the sky, he becomes a human wrecking ball. Tarmac flies.

Early on, Hancock rescues a PR man whose car gets stuck at a railroad crossing. Realizing that Hancock has an image problem, a grateful Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) offers professional help. He wants Hancock to smile more and make sure to thank the cops for whom he previously has shown only contempt. For reasons that eventually become clear, Hancock makes a combustible connection with Embrey's wife (Charlize Theron).

For a while it appears as if the movie is going to be a scattershot series of episodes built around jokes that arise when Hancock (who at one point agrees to a rehabilitative jail sentence) tries to make the transition from renegade to socially acceptable superhero. He even dons a black leather uniform that Embry has designed for him.

So far, so good.

But "Hancock" is very much like a poker game in which one of the players goes all-in too early. A major plot twist pushes the movie into realms where script logic is vanquished. It's always a bad sign when the characters explain the movie's mysteries rather than allowing them to be revealed during the action.

To make matters worse, scenes of Hancock taking flight don't look real, and director Peter Berg's reliance on woozy close-ups proves disorienting. It's as if the actors are being photographed from a rowboat on a choppy lake.

Smith and Theron have a few good comic moments together; Bateman is stuck playing second fiddle. Overall, though, Smith -- who must give the movie its center -- does a one-note dance that relies too heavily on the fact that he is unshaven, unkempt and unrepentant.

The longer it goes on, the more "Hancock" seems to put its worst foot forward. It abandons the comedy that results from Hancock's ragtag dissolution and tires for something more. Dissatisfied with amusing variations on a one-joke theme, the movie turns into one of summer's biggest messes.

BETTER THAN EXPECTED
The G-rated "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl" should hit the spot with its target audience: girls between seven and 12. Derived from a series of dolls and books, the movie centers on Kit (Abigail Breslin), a Cincinnati girl who wants to be a newspaper reporter. The time: The Depression. Amazingly, the movie doesn't soft-pedal the difficulties of economic deprivation. Director Patricia Rozema can't always keep plot seams from showing, but she manages to entertain while also letting kids know about some of the difficulties of living through hard times: Kit's father (Chris O'Donnell) leaves home in search of work, and Mom (Julia Ormond) is forced to take in borders. OK, we're not talking "Grapes of Wrath" here, but "Kit Kittredge" is better and less condescending than you'd expect.

Having said that, I'd caution you not to be entirely swept away by some of the movie's more positive reviews. This is not "Grapes of Wrath" for kids; it's a decent movie inspired by a doll.

Robots with heart and a movie with none

SUMMARY: "Wanted" is a movie that richly deserves to have what's known in the trade as a "target" audience. That's because the movie scores many hits, executing its mission so quickly and skillfully that some are bound to view this super-violent speedfest as entertainment. I did - but only up to a point."WALL-E," the latest animated film from Pixar, deserves cheers for tugging at the heartstrings rather than splattering blood.

WANTED: A LITTLE RELIEF FROM THE POUNDING

It came down to this: I didn't want to die during a preview screening of "Wanted," a viscerally charged movie from director Timur Bekmambetov, who holds the distinction of having directed the highest grossing films in Russian history: "Night Watch" and "Day Watch," pulsating affairs that were longer on action than coherence.

Here's what happened. About ten minutes before "Wanted" ended, Bekmambetov's first Hollywood outing was interrupted by a fire alarm. Along with everyone else, I trudged out of the theater. It was a false alarm, but I didn't return for two reasons: I already had a pretty good idea about the movie's virtues. It's a fast-paced mixture of hyperactivity, violence and breathless narrative. I thought the movie was technically interesting, but, frankly, I couldn't have cared less about how it was going to conclude. I never really bought into either the characters or the story.

I've since been filled in on the movie's ending, but encourage you not to take this as a definitive review. Know, too, that a number of estimable critics enjoyed the ride. (As of this writing, "Wanted" had earned a rating of 64 at Metacritic, an aggregate review site.)

The movie, which stars James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, deals with a secret group of assassins that descends from an organization founded during the Middle Ages. Presumably, these assassins take out only those who deserve to die. Kill now, save lives later: That could be their motto. To figure out who's next on the hit list, the assassins consult something called "The Loom of Fate."

Based on graphic novels by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones, "Wanted" defines its characters with a familiar array of superhero ploys: A nerdy guy (McAvoy) acquires master-level powers; a cool and apparently unattainable woman (Jolie) sports multiple tattoos; and a sagacious old dude (Freeman) runs the show. Freeman's Sloan evidently is the only one who can read "The Loom of Fate," not to be confused with Fruit of the Loom, which suggests an entirely different direction.

Early on, McAvoy's Wesley Gibson -- a guy so lame his best friend has no compunction about stealing his girlfriend -- is recruited by an organization called "The Fraternity." The Fraternity wants Wesley to avenge the death of his long-lost father. In preparation for fulfilling this new-found destiny, Wesley is beaten to a pulp by those who train him. If he survives this massive application of sadism, he'll have learned a variety of violent techniques. Included among them: The ability to fire a bullet in a curved trajectory.

Say what? Bullets that don't travel in a straight line? It's all in the mind. Say your target is holding someone in front of him. That's no excuse for not completing your mission: You concentrate; you exercise your intuition; you fire the bullet and it curves around the hapless patsy and hits the bad guy.

"Wanted," which evokes memories of "The Matrix," comes equipped with a high "wow" factor, and if a big bloodshed quotient and Jolie's cool sexuality count for anything, it's likely to score at the box office. And, yes, I enjoyed some of it: There's some early-picture kick, for example, in watching McAvoy make the transition from dweeb to highly trained killer, a guy who stops taking guff from his boss, a portly woman who gets what she so richly deserves. He also has enough comeuppance left to take care of his supposed best friend.

The plot veers away from totally predictable scenarios, but the movie isn't really telling a story; it's jetting from one set piece to the next, kicking your teeth in as it goes. I'd already had enough of a pounding when the fire alarm sounded. I kept going. I followed the movie's advice. I used my intuition. I knew that what was pending: more blood, more speed, more bullets bending around more curves, all of it inching me one step closer to a migraine -- but a skillfully induced migraine to be sure.

FINDING CUTENESS IN A DESOLATE WORLD

Here's what WALL-E stands for: Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class. Knowing that, you can understand why Pixar chose to use the acronym, which if you stretch the point, sounds a lot like Wally -- friendly, approachable and unthreatening.

As it turns out, WALL-E is a pint-sized robot that functions as a mobile garbage compactor, collecting refuse on Earth. The movie's earliest and best scenes tell us that Earth has been abandoned by humans who basically turned the planet into a giant dump. The humans have departed on a massive spaceship; they won't return until signs of life appear.

Meanwhile, WALL-E dutifully beeps and putters through mountains of debris, a kind of downgraded take on R2D2. As if to emphasize the kinship, director Andrew Stanton ("Finding Nemo") has hired Ben Burt, who created R2D2's sound effects, to do the same job for WALL-E, who has big eyes and metal hands that fold one into the other. He's cute, has a personality and may be a trifle lonely. After a hard day's work, WALL-E relaxes by popping a video tape into a player and watching "Hello Dolly!," perhaps a sign that he misses humanity. WALL-E's only friend: an equally indestructible cockroach.

The opening scenes of "WALL-E" are beautifully conceived by Stanton and his team. These scenes have a wistful -- even mournful -- quality that reminded me a bit of Steven Spielberg's unfairly derided "A.I." The feeling of isolation is further accentuated by an absence of dialog in an environment in which the trash piles as high as the vacant skyscrapers. How does WALL-E keep on ticking? His battery is solar charged. Each morning, he awakens and allows himself to be renewed in the sunlight.

I wish, in a way, that the whole film had been silent -- or at least devoid of human speech. I think kids might be the perfect audience for "silent" movies, and it would have been ingenious of Pixar -- not to mention super-courageous -- to expose them to a contemporary version of "pure" cinema. As it stands, the movie may represent a challenge for little ones and may not make a powerful connection with the massive and eagerly sought teen audience either.

If the movie deserves any criticism, it's for a plot that could have used a little more battery power. Look, you can't spend an hour and 45 minutes watching a robot collect trash, which presents a mild script problem: The movie -- which brims with Pixar creativity -- eventually must get around to telling a story. Enter EVE, which stands for Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator and all the additional metaphoric weight you want to add. EVE's a sleek robot, sort of a cross between Casper the Friendly Ghost and a portable swamp cooler. She has been dispatched by the mother ship on a mission of discovery. She's supposed to determine whether the Earth can support new plant life.

The courtship between WALL-E and EVE is uneasy at first, but the movie eventually unites them in a common purposes, which they discover when the plot transports them onto the spaceship where Earthlings (grown fat and useless) are amusing themselves to death. They float around in big chairs, slurping down drinks and gobbling up snacks, sort of like...well... the average movie audience. Humankind evidently has spent thousands of years allowing muscles and will power to atrophy.

If Stanton has satire in mind, it's satire with the edges filed down. The movie doesn't drub you with its eco-message. Besides, the scenes on board the spaceship allow for amusing references to previous sci-fi movies, as well as for some faster-paced action.

The story runs a bit longer than it should, but there's no point knocking Pixar's work, which maintains an extraordinarily high standard, boasting a preference for unusual concepts (the rat chef of "Ratatouille," for example) and demonstrating admirably high levels of execution.

An indispensable contemporary voice

What makes a filmmaker important? Is it the ability to work with established stars and generate heaps of box-office revenue? Is it the skill required to employ an increasingly complicated arsenal of computer-generated effects? Is it the way a director sometimes connects with the urgency of a cultural moment, capturing the national mood as Steven Spielberg sometimes has done? Is it consistency over a long career?

I suppose the answer could be all of the above, but none of those seems entirely sufficient to me. Also to be considered: The ability of a director, particularly one who writes his or her own screenplays, to say something powerful and pertinent based on his or her own experience. A combination of exceptional skill and a strong subject can make for important filmmaking. Fatih Akin has both.

It took me a while to catch up with Akin's "The Edge of Heaven," but the director's new movie confirmed something I'd begun to suspect when I saw Akin's "Head On," one of the best movies of 2004. Akin is the real deal, a contemporary filmmaker whose work must not be ignored.

The 35-year-old Akin was born in Hamburg. His parents are Turkish. As a result, he's well-positioned to observe the kind of sweeping cultural changes that have seized much of Europe. Waves of immigration have forced country after country -- often with great reluctance -- to redefine national identity. But Akin's genius extends beyond the borders of his native Germany. He also knows that the great flow of immigrants has brought changes to the home countries of those who have landed in places such as Germany. He understands the amazing fluidity of the moment as its reflected in the increasingly elusive nature of social boundaries that long have been taken for granted. He locates his films -- particularly "The Edge of Heaven" -- on the fault lines that develop when cultures mingle, clash and, yes, sometimes, embrace.

Of course, Akin is neither a sociologist nor an historian. He's an artist, and, as such, he's especially skilled at creating characters, catapulting them into demanding situations and watching them react as history works on them and as they work on history. His films are both personal and expansive. He successfully accomplishes something that has eluded filmmakers such as Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Paul Haggis who also have steeped their films in the fractious, sometimes explosive ways that cultures intersect.

Perhaps because Akin's focus is narrower and more closely aligned with his own experience than some of his contemporaries, his films seem more credible. He deals mostly with Turks living in Germany. His movies are rooted in cultural specificity, but they also have a universal pull, an emotional quality that derives -- in the case, of "Edge of Heaven" -- from the devastations of a son who can't accept the brutish behavior of his father, from a mother who loses a daughter in a senseless bit of street violence and from the mixture of strength and desperation displayed by a Turkish woman working as a prostitute in the port city of Bremen.

If I ran a film festival, which of course I don't, I'd want to give a tribute to Akin. Although his filmography is not extensive, his interests are, and I would hope such an award would recognize the importance of his work and encourage him to stay on track.

Of course, any tribute would acknowledge and celebrate Akin's abilities as a director as well as his ability to explore fascinating, highly relevant subjects. "Edge of Heaven" puts a wide range of directorial skills on display. The acting in "Edge of Heaven," for example, is uniformly strong with standout work from Nurgul Yesilcay, as a rebellious young Turkish woman who travels from Istanbul to Bemen in search of her mother, and from Hanna Schygulla, once closely associated with the movies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. At 65, Schygulla's impish looks have mellowed into something calmer and more powerful, a woman who has attained certainty in her convictions but remains vulnerable to the life's cruel vicissitudes.

Early on, Akin's story focuses on a Turkish/German professor (Baki Davrak) whose widowed father (Tuncel Kurtiz) invites a Turkish prostitute (Nursel Kose) to live with him. The plot then creates a complicated network in which apparently disparate lives become linked. When Kose's daughter (Ysicay) arrives in Bremen from Istanbul, she meets Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), a young German student with whom she begins an affair. There's no need to reveal more about the plot, although it's helpful to know that Akin introduces sections with title cards that reveal significant developments and that the action alternates between Bremen, Hamburg, Istanbul and a smaller Turkish city.

Akin's screenplay, which insists on the power of coincidence, seldom feels contrived, mostly because Akin doesn't allow plot points to dominate characters. Nearly everything feels organic.

None of this is to suggest that Akin neglects the cinematic aspects of storytelling. An unhurried style, the real-world
gristle created by a broad range of intriguing locations and a terrific score give the proceedings sustained vitality.

So, yes, I'd say that Akin qualifies as an important filmmaker. As summer bombards us with one wannabe blockbuster after another, it's more than refreshing to see a movie such as "Edge of Heaven;" it's transformative. Akin presents life as its lived, and that may be the greatest and most deeply human art of all.

If you miss "The Edge of Heaven," which is being released this summer and which now is playing in Denver at the Starz Film Center, don't forget about it when it reaches DVD.

Rumbling with the great Genghis Khan

Summary: "Mongol" has the look -- if not the narrative polish -- of a major epic. Flawed, yes, but director Sergei Bodrov's dramatization of the early years of Genghis Khan's life has enough bloody action to keep even those who hate subtitles from slipping into coma.

"Mongol" basically covers Genghis Khan's rise, focusing on early tribulations: the murder of his father by rival clansman, separation from his family and the slow climb to power that led to Mongol unity. Bodrov also gives the Khan -- known as Temudgin and played as an adult by Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano -- a sustained romantic interest. Temudgin falls for and remains devoted to the bride (Khulan Chuluun) he selected when he was a mere boy of nine. The story also deals with the Khan's relationship with his blood brother Jamukha (Amarbold Tuvinbayar), at first a fierce ally and later a reluctant enemy.

Bodrov, who reportedly wants to expand the Genghis Khan story into a trilogy, mixes standard movie ploys with ethnographic filmmaking about Mongol life in the 12th century: The result is a historical saga as it might have been imagined by an anthropologist.

The movie doesn't stint on battles -- some of which allow their digital seams to show -- but it does shortchange dramatic development, occasionally leaping from one event to another without bothering to tell us how the jump was made. Such a schematic approach often hobbles the narrative, which doesn't quite achieve the greatness an epic of this magnitude seems to require.

Still, the broad expanses of the steppes, as well as a sustained sense of exoticism, make for an intriguing enough time at the movies. "Mongol" is a big movie that sprawls across the screen and seldom fails to take us with it.