New

(AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Narberth; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

THE BANGER SISTERS

Goldie Hawn loses her job at the Whiskey a-Go-Go and, finding herself unable to work the street as she once did, decides to head to L.A. to ask one-time best friend and fellow groupie Susan Sarandon for a little stopgap cash. When her car breaks down, she hitches a ride with twitchy, neurotic writer Geoffrey Rush, whom she quickly beds in her expert manner, transforming him suddenly into a happy, generous soul. She has a similar experience with Sarandon, whose currently uptight beige family life (with stiff lawyer husband Robin Thomas and rebellious daughters Erika Christensen and Eva Amurri) needs serious retooling. How heartening to see that a haircut, followed by a night of drinking, dancing and perusing collected photos of rock-stars’ cocks, brings on such miraculous self-recovery! Put another way: as everyone knows, it’s perennially difficult for women over 40 to get much action in Hollywood, and seeing the enormously vibrant and courageous Sarandon and Hawn reduced to these schematic roles only underlines the problem.--Cindy Fuchs (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

THE FOUR FEATHERS

Though Shekhar Kapur’s tale of bloodshed in the Sudan is front-loaded with former colonial subjects -- Kapur is Indian, while stars Heath Ledger, Kate Hudson and Wes Bentley hail from Australia and the U.S. -- it’s a surprisingly non-revisionist take on British imperialism. Beginning, almost literally, on the playing fields of Eton, the film focuses on issues of character rather than politics -- Ledger quits the military as his regiment is about to ship out to Khartoum, then follows on his own to make up for his cowardice. As in his Elizabeth, Kapur is too enamored of royal splendor to mount a serious critique. Though Ledger has a (conveniently English-speaking) native (Amistad’s Djimon Hounsou), the ending still comes down to who fares best against the “Mohommadan fanatics.” It’s a little late for Lawrence of Arabia II, don’t you think? --Sam Adams (AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

IGBY GOES DOWN

Burr Steers’ first feature is populated by extremely quirky characters, most related by blood. Bad mom Susan Sarandon dies in the first scene, attended by her sons, harried Igby (Kieran Culkin) and supercilious Oliver (Ryan Phillippe). Flashbacks recount how they’ve come to this moment, part liberation, part horror show. Participants in this disaster include increasingly incapacitated dad Bill Pullman, wealthy godfather Jeff Goldblum, his junkie-dancer girlfriend Amanda Peet, her performance-artist caretaker-friend Jared Harris and Igby’s inadvertent girlfriend Claire Danes, who really wants to be sensible but can’t help but be sucked into the eccentric vortex. Though it’s structured as a series of clever dialogue exchanges (the sort of things people don’t say, but wittily literate characters do), striking compositions (shot by Wedigo von Schultzendorff), and dire, occasionally violent vignettes (the things these characters do to one another!), Igby Goes Down doesn’t feel remote, strangely. In part, you may be sucked in by Culkin’s admirable performance, subtle and not too earnest. --C.F. (Bala; Ritz 16; Ritz Five)

IN PRAISE OF LOVE

Widely derided as anti-American, Jean-Luc Godard’s latest (which did the festival circuit as Éloge de l’amour) does indeed have some pretty simplistic things to say about this here country of ours, not least, “You have no history, so you buy other people’s.” History and memory are central concerns here -- you can tell by the way people keep saying “histoire” and “mémoire” -- in a story tied together by a filmmaker’s attempts to turn a tale of Holocaust resistance into filmic art. Once the representatives from “Spielberg and company” turn up, it’s clear Godard’s taking potshots at Schindler’s List, but his thoughts on the degradation of history are well-honed, the film’s beautifully grainy black and white cinematography a vivid rebuke (at least for the first half; with typical perversity, Godard stages the second half flashback in saturated color video). Praise is demanding, even obtuse -- Godard flirts with narrative but spurns its advances -- but far kinder than anything he’s done in many years. --S.A. (Roxy)

MAD LOVE

Based on the real-life story of Juana la Loca, put-upon daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, 76-year-old Vicente Aranda’s film is rife with passion, desire, and betrayal (enhanced by Paco Femenia’s luscious cinematography). Pilar López de Ayala plays Juana of Castile, married as a 16-year-old virgin to Philip the Handsome of Flanders (Daniele Liotti, who might easily pose for a the cover of a bodice-ripper) in 1496. At first, all is bliss: much sex and babies. Then Juana learns her man is untrue, bedding ladies-in-waiting as well as whores; her jealousy appears overboard to the court, quite used to such goings-on. When Philip’s attention settles on a spell-casting Moor (Manuela Arcuri), Juana begins devising her own schemes, losing sight of the fact that the Flemish nobles are plundering Castile (where the couple reigns, following her mother’s death). The film hinges on de Ayala’s riveting, all-exclamation-points performance (most everyone else tends to fade away in her presence), but the film’s linked metaphors -- women as property as masculine prerogative -- are equally compelling. Facing the same sort of intrigues as the brutal and self-creating Elizabeth 100 years later (see, for example, Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 film), Juana is defeated by her husband’s court: they deem her mad and lock her away in a tower for the rest of her life. -- C.F. (Ritz at the Bourse)

SNIPES

There’s no getting past the absurd contrivances that (barely) hold this hip-hop drama together. Just in the first half-hour, the film’s hero accidentally walks in on a crime scene, leaves his bag behind so the killers can track him down, jumps into a car that won’t start and then walks up right after his best friend, fleeing said killers, has been hit by a car. Does that sound like a movie you’ve seen before? Or a hundred of them? It’s a shame, too, because Rich Murray gets uniformly solid performances out of his talented cast, which includes Nelly and Schoolly D, in a story about an ambitious, young street-team poster-hanger (Sam Jones III) whose hero-worship of up-and-coming rapper Prolifik (Nelly) takes a dark turn when the latter is violently kidnapped after failing to deliver his contractually obligated first album. Despite an occasional tendency to go Batman with the camera angles, Murray’s direction is reasonably effective as well, though fading out between scenes robs the momentum that the movie desperately needs. Next time, he should let someone else come up with the story. --S.A. (AMC Orleans; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

SPIRITED AWAY

As impossible as authorship is on any commercial film, it’s trebly so for animation -- who could divine the difference between John Lasseter’s Toy Story 2 and Peter Docter’s Monsters, Inc.? But his singular vision is only one of Hayao Miyazaki’s accomplishments. The most success ful director in Japan, Miyazski pursues his visions with unbridled imagination, and Spirited Away is as pure an expression of that vision as we’ve seen. Melding the child’s-eye view of Kiki’s Delivery Service and My Neighbor Totoro with the dark, spiritualist overtones of Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away takes Chihiro, its young female protagonist into an enormous bathhouse for wayward spirits, where she’s mystified, occasionally enchanted, and often threatened, most notably by the tyrannical Yubaba, who resembles John Tenniel’s drawings of the Queen of Hearts -- if her head inflated to equal size with the rest of her body. Miyazaki never fails to reimagine each aspect of his world; you can get the greatest joy from the tiniest of details. Chihiro’s adventures take her throughout the towering bathhouse and include run-ins with polluted river gods and ill-tempered, oversized babies, not to mention the dragon spirit (who’s also a cute boy) who volunteers to help rescue her parents who’ve been turned into pigs after stumbling into spirit territory. Chihiro’s escapades don’t always proceed one from the other, but let yourself go and you’ll be swept away as well. --S.A.(Ritz East; Ritz 16)