Film Reviews

GO LA PETITE JÉRUSALEM Laura (Fanny Valette), the broody philosophy student at the center of Karin Albou’s absorbing tale of coming of age in a multi-ethnic Paris suburb, is a square peg in the apparently round hole of her devoutly Orthodox Tunisian-Jewish family. For all her cerebral attachment to Kantian ethics, Laura has more in common with her married older sister Mathilde (Elsa Zylberstein), who never goes out without her sheitel, than either cares to admit. Each sister has, in her own way, renounced sensuality and desire in favor of attachment to protective but muddled ideologies. Albou’s sympathies may lie primarily with Laura, but her movie is refreshingly free of the reflexive savaging of orthodoxy that trivializes so many films about religion in a secular age. Indeed, the sage who guides Mathilde and Laura through their respective crises — one falls in love with an Algerian Muslim, the other struggles with her husband’s adultery — turns out to be a ritual-bath counselor with some exhilaratingly radical advice about sex that’s fully grounded in Halakhic doctrine. If La Petite Jérusalem (named for the predominantly North African Jewish-Muslim neighborhood in which it’s set) is a story of escape and liberation, it also shows a calibrated respect for tradition and the ancient pull of family loyalty. And if, at times, the movie seems a touch too versed in postmodern French theories of the body for its own good, that’s more than offset by Albou’s opulent lyricism and her tender attachment to two women who discover that freedom can be achieved both through transgression and submission to a higher authority. (Music Hall; Fallbrook) (Ella Taylor)

ONE LAST THING... In this formulaic but refreshingly low-key weepie, 16-year-old Dylan (Michael Angarano), dying from cancer, uses the wish he’s been granted by a Pennsylvania charity foundation to request a weekend with Nikki Sinclair (Sunny Mabrey), a famous model. Trying to counter her bad-girl rep, Nikki drops by and leaves within five minutes, but Dylan and his two best pals (Gideon Glick and Matt Bush, charmers both) chase her to New York. Director Alex Steyermark (Prey for Rock & Roll) and first-time screenwriter Barry Stringfellow, who were childhood chums, drop a lot of humor into alarmingly sappy material that includes Dylan’s visions of his long-dead father (Ethan Hawke) and Nikki’s dreams of her equally dead boyfriend (Warren Ko). If the filmmakers keep the sob factor at bay, it’s because Angarano and Cynthia Nixon, who plays Dylan’s mom, keep things honest. People forget this, but Nixon has been acting since she was 14 (her first flick was 1980’s Little Darlings), and you have to wonder if she didn’t recognize herself in Angarano, who, like Nixon, has a natural gift for revealing his character’s thinking process, which is how good actors earn audience empathy and tears. He’s one to watch. (Fairfax) (Chuck Wilson)

GO THE PROMISE Master filmmaker Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine, Temptress Moon) here spins a fairy tale from those high-energy Asian ingredients so familiar of late here in the West: swords, silk robes and whirlybird fights involving airborne wirework. There is a beautiful nomad (Cecilia Cheung), who made a diabolical bargain when she was a child, trading all hope of love for riches; and a noble slave (Jang Don-Kun`), cut off from his native Kingdom of Snow, secretly in love with the cursed beauty but sworn to protect his crimson-armored master (Hiroyuki Sanada), who in turn lusts after this same woman. There’s also a bitter duke (Nicholas Tse) and a sorrowful assassin (Liu Ye) made invincible — well, almost — by his all-powerful cloak. Whenever he’s dealing with these human, emotionally grounded twists and turns, director Chen is as richly in his element as Ang Lee was in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or Zhang Yimou was in Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Alas, whenever the action incorporates digital animation — such as in a big buffalo stampede or in battles between big armies — the results can be clumsy to the point of irritating. That’s a pity, but so is the fact that some critics are badly selling the film short, when the story it tells, measured strictly in terms of emotional power and overall fun, is as moving and pleasurable as any matinee item by Ford, Hawks or Raoul Walsh. (Citywide) (F.X. Feeney)

GO PICK THE PROPOSITION The setting is rural Australia in the 19th century. The story, a sort of Heart of Darkness on horseback, is a high-voltage revenge Western in which an outlaw, Charlie (Guy Pearce), must hunt down and betray his elder brother Arthur (Danny Huston), the leader of a bloody massacre that has taken place before the story begins, in order to save their youngest sibling from an undeserved death on the gallows. The cunning lawman who proposes this devil’s bargain is Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone, of Sexy Beast), who knows full well that the high-strung third brother is innocent of any crime, and that the levelheaded Charlie has broken away from the charismatic Arthur in an effort to go straight. But this canny ploy to pit brother against brother inevitably backfires, and Arthur and his demonic entourage come swarming off the outback at full gallop toward Stanley and his sensitive wife (Emily Watson) — with Charlie racing to stay ahead of the impending disaster. As written and scored by rock legend Nick Cave and directed by John Hillcoat, The Proposition is a very hard and harsh movie, but it also has a hypnotic, lyrical velocity. As Arthur, Huston exudes dead charisma. Clearly this man once was mesmerizing — he may well have had greatness in him — but after perpetrating so much death, he now sits inert, Kurtz-like, in heavy judgment on himself, a magnetic Lucifer. Pearce’s performance is no less layered: From the moment the brothers are reunited, we can feel, as Charlie feels, that Arthur knows he has come to kill him, and Pearce lucidly communicates each silent move in the psychological chess match that follows. Cave’s screenplay is wise about the roots of brutality, and ruthlessly honest about how even the best of us may betray our own best intentions, yet it’s never preachy. As in his music, Cave pursues his themes unpredictably, but sure-footedly. Hillcoat’s lucid direction amplifies these virtues — especially in the casting of John Hurt as a grandiloquent bounty hunter, a fallen poet given to justifying his own bloody viciousness by referencing Charles Darwin. Beauty abounds in this raw universe, even as its inhabitants explode all ordinary, earthly justice. (Nuart) (F.X. Feeney)