The late Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky's swan song, The Aura (El Aura) is a throwback in spirit and execution to the grim, inward-gazing paranoia dramas of the 1970s. Hero Esteban (Ricardo Darin) is an epileptic taxidermist who wakes up, as the film opens, in a bank vestibule; we proceed to follow him into a credits sequence that sees him resurrecting, in his meticulous craft, a fox for a museum panorama. The title The Aura might refer to that illusion of life to which Bielisnky's sadsack loner endeavours to manufacture--to imbue--in his projects; or maybe it refers to the vicarious pleasure he takes in planning out imaginary heists (like the father and his friend in Shadow of a Doubt) before ultimately becoming embroiled in an armoured-car robbery scheme after accidentally shooting the plot's kingpin. The title could even point to the spirit of The Aura itself, buoyed as it is by the spirits of the films from the American New Wave, which Bielinsky counted among his favourite eras in cinema. (I wonder if Bielinsky didn't think of himself as born too early or too late, trapped in a film industry eating itself from the inside out.) Whatever the case, it's a detective story in its purest incarnation, with the hero on a journey to find himself amidst the ruin of what he's made of his world; and it's a caper flick, one where the prize--that is, the only prize that matters--is a friend for Esteban as he finishes out his life on the desolate outskirts of truly living. The picture, then, is gripped by a reverence for genre (noir especially) stripped down and reconstructed as a weary attitude and a flawed protagonist ultimately driven by loneliness to become a member of the world rather than just a chronicler of its past and possibilities. Reminding of Jules Dassin's expat heist flicks, it's infused with a whiff of the outsider's stale regret.

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Stylishly shot, enough so that the neophyte might mistake it for a sparkling example of J-horror, Starfish Hotel addresses that old saw of a character wondering if he's a "character" as mysterious events unfold around him. Handled with more care and intelligence by the first 4/5ths of Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction, Starfish Hotel acts as a survey of other pictures (most notably the mascot motifs of Donnie Darko and Kontroll) as it goes on its merry non-horror, In the Mouth of Madness way. In this one, workaday Tokyo stiff Arisu (Koichi Sato) begins to believe he's a construct in his favourite novelist's latest when his wife disappears and he becomes unable to stop reliving his brief encounter with seductress Kayoko (the smoking hot Kiki). Aided by a mysterious pamphleteer in a grey bunny suit, Arisu traces his wife to a high-class brothel that matches a recurring dream in addition to conveniently evoking a Kubrickian set-piece that is likewise unerotic and tainted this time around by the feeling inescapable that not only have we been down this velvet-rimmed, cigar-tainted alley before, but that each time the returns have diminished. Starfish Hotel is beautiful to look at, but for all its desperation for surreality and mystery (it ends with a series of oblique nothings), it resolves itself as not much more than a reminder that guys like Takashi Miike are doing it better half a dozen times a year without breaking this kind of sweat.

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I am sick to death of pieces of shit like Matt Tauber's The Architect--sick of the White Guilt Trip, which here finds architect Leo (Anthony LaPaglia) the boogeyman behind all the cultural evils housed in the Cabrini-Green tenement he designed. When he protests to neo-Alfre Woodard Neely (Viola Davis) that he's just the mastermind behind the building's outline and thus unaccountable for the collapse of urban civilization housed therein, the effect is one of outrage not at the arrogance of The Man, but at the cult of victimhood nursed by people like Tauber. By disempowering the film's blacks of even their own fall, Tauber performs an act of racism so odious that his next picture should be about these stock ghetto characters (the righteous mom, the good girl, the drug dealer, the dreamer) demanding an explanation as to why he's perpetuated these damning stereotypes in the guise of laying the paddle to hapless whitey. The picture meanwhile casts Isabella Rossellini as a variation on the same crazy suburban housewife Edie Falco played in The Quiet (and Juliette Binoche played in Bee Season--the better analogy for its complementary boy/girl child and rich/poor sub-dramas) and Hayden Panettiere as the teen-queen doing her best to get raped in the back of a semi-trailer, the better to allegorize her parents' disintegrating marriage and her brother's (Sebastian Sans) simultaneously-unfolding realization that he'd very much like to shag project-hustler-with-a-heart-of-gold Shawn (Paul James). Said events do not and do happen, respectively, with the gay union punished in typical gay-union fashion as Shawn swan-dives off Leo's precious edifice in an act of society-restoring self-loathing. Would that Shawn and Leo do the same as they gaze moonily into one another's eyes while the curtain falls on this umpteenth revival of contemptuous liberal cinema. My only question, doubly rhetorical because he might as well be if he isn't: is Tauber a Canadian filmmaker?

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Carefully modulated for maximum inoffensiveness and awards-season consideration, Anthony Minghella's King's Cross diary Breaking and Entering plays less like a London native's Crash than like Woody Allen's solipsistic version of the same. Find the Aryan faction led by architect Will (Jude Law) and girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn) and the foreigners by Croatian single-mom Amira (the increasingly one-note Juliette Binoche) and, in another star-making turn by Vera Farmiga, a Polish hooker named Oana. A weary detective (Ray Winstone) verbalizes the social schism Minghella doesn't trust his broadly-drawn depiction to articulate by itself and the storylines begin to mingle when Will follows, yes, a burglar back to his tenement flat. The wink and nod, of course, is that "breaking and entering" also refers to Will's intrusion into Amira's life, the immigrants' intrusion into London, Will's ambition to rebuild a marginal neighbourhood, and so on and so forth. Stunned with angsty white gentrifiers and tortured immigrants, it's the British Quinceañera, the kind of film that pans so desperately for importance that long passages of dialogue are wordy mission statements while the finale, in the ultimate concession to sloppiness and condescension, caves to that fatal compulsion to tie things up in tidy, attractive little passages. (Squint just a little and rainbows and ponies burst out of Will's ass.) Minghella's only ever been good when writing fairytales, but making a children's story out of this material is a betrayal of a dedicated cast and a middlebrow demographic that deserves better than this handsome, pedagogical tongue bath whether it asks for it or not.

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Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck makes his hyphenate debut with The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), a picture revolving around the days leading up to and immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall as experienced by prominent playwright Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), his actress girlfriend Christa (Martina Gedeck), and the Stasi investigator Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) assigned to listen in on their conversations for evidence of dissent. The premise--monster grows a soul in the presence of humanity--is tired, but the execution is solid and smart from script to performance, replacing sentimentality and cliché with keen observations and long, wordless passages in which Wiesler moves through his victims' empty apartment before returning to his own with a hooker for desperate, lonesome encounters. The separation between East and West (and, fascinatingly, between the artist and the audience), then, transcends the ideological and becomes a story about isolation and voyeurism. The Lives of Others pulls off the neat trick of being truthful without being meticulous, and of universalizing a very particular place and time by creating three-dimensional characters and putting them in an impossible situation. A scene where Wiesler confronts Christa and speaks to her about the "truth" of her profession as a stage performer touches on one of Donnersmarck's key inspirations, Thomas Mann's writings about the nature of desire and how that desire is nourished by separation and fantasy. The Lives of Others is intensely literate and, as a consequence, slipperier than just another Eastern Bloc genre exercise. Brecht is referenced visually and literally in the appearance of a purloined manuscript, suggesting that the author's carefully-armoured politicism is mirrored here and, more, that we've been invited to peel away the layers with which Donnersmarck has overlaid his own little melodrama. It's that wonder of a populist, bittersweet-but-ultimately-feel-good piece that has a heart you believe in and a working brain to match.

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Eric Byler's follow-up to his haunted, blue Charlotte, Sometimes is this adaptation of Shawn Wong's American Knees, which, like Charlotte, Sometimes, follows the day-to-day of Asian-Americans--though unlike that film, it fails to find that buried thrum to tie together the little glimpses comprising the whole. It's not for lack of trying, as Byler (over)uses the dissolve as his primary editing tactic in what tracks as an attempt to poeticize the essentially mundane and to literalize what, in the novel, is completely internal. Being Chinese-American myself, a lot of the emotional frigidity and distance the film's central figure Raymond (Chris Tashima, a dead ringer for Bruce Campbell) exhibits required little clarification, yet because Americanese is left without a dramatic centre, once frayed-wire Betty (a tremendous Joan Chen) is introduced as a love interest for lovelorn cipher Raymond, its tonal shift and narrative acrobatics strain patience and credibility. It's not the glacial pace that fatigues, but a lack of connection with the characters, while the feeling that long passages have been left out in the interest of mood distracts instead of entrancing us. It's refreshing and lovely to see Asians on-screen as conflicted, romantic, flawed characters, but for all the patience and inarguably good intentions of Americanese, Charlotte, Sometimes remains a much more affecting contribution to the conversation.

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Though a perfectly serviceable actioner, one that avoids almost every pitfall and cliché of the POW genre while supporting a singularly eccentric performance, Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, sadly, could have been directed by any one of a dozen directors. Gripping but not especially memorable, it lacks the mad Bavarian's insanity: his belief that nature is obscene, as well as his ability to make a trance from the mendacity of routine. (Because Herzog is a rare talent, his films butt up against greater expectations.) The irony of this being Herzog's most accessible film is that it's still probably best appreciated by Herzog fans, who will note--besides the obvious link to Herzog's Little Dieter Needs to Fly--an early moment where a sadistic Laotian guerrilla regards a giant butterfly on his arm like Kinski in B-roll for Fitzcarraldo. German-born Dieter Dengler is brought to life in Rescue Dawn as a bizarre pastiche of nervous tics and unrestrained energy by Christian Bale (the most impressive Method actor in Hollywood who still manages to leave no lasting impression whatsoever); here Dieter, after getting shot down over Laos on a covert bombing run early in the Vietnam War, serves as leader to--and inspiration for--a group of prisoners-of-war closed off somewhere in the lush South Asian jungle. If it's meant as a continuation of Herzog's interest in blurring the lines between fiction and documentary, consider that Little Dieter Needs to Fly is already a near-perfect example of that particular auteurist concern, with even recent Herzogs like Grizzly Man addressing the same issues (and others, such as the horror of the Natural and the futility of man's struggle to transcend) with more subtlety, tragedy, and wit. Exactly no more and no less than what it is, Rescue Dawn is a Vietnam flick without a discernible political agenda; another opportunity for Jeremy Davies to act like a paranoid, emaciated junkie; and another chance for Steve Zahn to cement his second-banana status. There is one moment, however, that sings with poetry as Dengler hallucinates a lost buddy and offers him the tattered sole of a shoe they'd been sharing through the wilderness. It's Herzog peeking through a canopy of expert nullity.

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