I've always admired the work of director Ang Lee for its quiet authority. But I never would have guessed he'd have the folkloric, razzle-dazzle Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in him. (Brother) Chow Yun-Fat stars as Li Mu Bai, a disillusioned warrior (in a meditative search for enlightenment, he has found only "endless sorrow") bound by honour to avenge the murder of his Master and stave off the affections of his dearest friend, Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh), a skilled fighter in her own right. When a thief (Ziyi Zhang) enters their lives, one equipped with the knowledge of defying gravity, Li offers to hone her impetuousness. Instead, she steals his fabled sword, "The Green Destiny," and embarks on a de facto journey of self-discovery.

Almost Famous is a fictionalized account of writer-director Cameron Crowe's previous career as a reporter for "Rolling Stone" (the youngest they had ever hired), and it plays like one. Which is to say that a forced and pandering whimsy occasionally undercuts the too-perfect narrative; textbook one-liners arrive at regular expense to the dissection of a rock 'n' roll band--here "Stillwater", an amalgam of the various groups Crowe followed on the road. Then again, some emotional paraphrasing is inevitable when telling any story from a virginal (in many senses of the word) fifteen year-old boy's point of view. Certainly, Crowe's memory of the nineteen-seventies appears dictated by adolescent nostalgia: William (Patrick Fugit), his alter ego, becomes fixated on the starry-eyed gaze of groupie Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) during a Stillwater tour, and Almost Famous remains more or less stuck there, too. (At least in this version; DreamWorks apparently ordered cut some thirty-odd minutes from Crowe's edit.) Good thing that that subplot, and its major players, have charm in spades. And any movie that ends with Led Zeppelin's "Tangerine" has its heart in the right place. Featuring Billy Crudup as a conflicted guitarist and a brilliant Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Crowe's real-life mentor Lester Bangs. (Reviewed: Sept. 11) *** (out of four)

If you thought Magnolia was self-indulgent, wait 'til you get a load of Tom Tykwer's ungainly follow-up to his art-house smash Run Lola Run, The Princess and the Warrior. Slack where Lola was airtight, gimmicky where Lola was stylish, this story of an asylum nurse's ("Lola" herself, Franka Potente) desperate attempts to make a connection with the ex-soldier (Benno Fürmann) who performed her emergency tracheotomy overstays its welcome by a good half-hour and groups dozens of disconnected themes for the sake of one powerful image after another. Lensed in the manner of Luc Besson's Léon, a plus, especially during the lone Lola-esque sequence (right down to the utterance of "and then...") in which Fürmann runs for dear life. (Reviewed: Sept. 11) ** (out of four)

Once upon a time in America, Wong Kar-wai was being touted as the next John Woo, but anybody who actually saw his first major import, the fabulous Chungking Express, sensed that romantic yearning, not action, was Wong's specialty. With In the Mood for Love, Wong will surprise audiences once again as he abandons his loose, avant-garde style in favour of Kubrickian fastidiousness, right down to the repetitious employment of Mike Galasso's score. The result, sorry to say, is a dull and rather aimless mood piece about two attractive Hong Kong neighbours (Tony Leung Chiu Wai and an overly remote Maggie Cheung) united by the knowledge that their respective spouses are having an affair with one another. (Reviewed: Sept. 12) ** (out of four)

Pi director Darren Aronofsky has gone on record as saying he wanted Requiem for a Dream to be the movie equivalent of a hip-hop mix, and indeed, I can think of no more musical film to hit theatres this year. To explain: the preparation of heroin, the popping of pills, powering up a television--each is broken down into quick, stinging beats, so often that they become refrains we unconsciously bop to. (It's the junkie equivalent of "Stomp".) The movie's structure, essentially three increasingly grim vignettes, lends itself to these rhythmic transitional montages, which, incidentally, distinguish Requiem for a Dream visually and sonically from, say, Trainspotting. Yet Aronofsky manages to avoid the trappings of a funky cinematic approach by not also glamorizing or glossing over his subject matter (Trainspotting again, or Go), the various drug dependencies suffered by an unconditionally loving mother (Ellen Burstyn), her son (Jared Leto), his girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly), and their friend (Marlon Wayans). Because they're puppets of their addictions from the kick-off, the characters played by Leto, Connelly, and Wayans are forever at arm's length to our emotional receptors, but Burstyn's downward spiral into a gruesome amphetamine habit is poignant and shattering. With her story, the filmmakers also perspicaciously comment on the assembly line insensitivity of America's health care system. (Reviewed: Sept. 12) *** (out of four)

Camera d'or winner A Time for Drunken Horses is an important but by no means great film. I was definitely upset by it on a political level, for writer-director Bahman Ghobadi presents the border of Iraq Kurdistan and Iran in an unforgiving light, a place at which, in example, uneducated children face the threat of ambush and landmines as they attempt to smuggle textbooks from one country into the other. The film focuses on three orphaned Iranian siblings as they struggle in harsh weather and near destitution; Amaneh (Amaneh Ekhtiar-Dini), the only girl, enters into an arranged marriage with a wealthy family hoping they will foot the bill for her crippled younger brother Madi's (Madi Ekhtiar-Dini) operation. On a personal level, Madi's illness registers as bogus, in spite of his dwarfism (casting at its most glib) and real-life relation to Amaneh. And, like all disabled people in movies, he remains symbolic of the other characters' saintliness, permitted no interesting personality of his own. A penetrating portrait of a lifestyle unknown to Westerners, but the sentimental positioning of Madi really sticks in my craw. (Reviewed: Sept. 13) **1/2 (out of four)

Joan Allen breathes life into the blandly realized Sinead Hamilton, a reporter determined to crack down, in print, on Dublin's drug problem. Inspired by factual events involving the late journalist Veronica Guerin, whose death provoked overdue changes in Irish law, When the Sky Falls is sketchy as a biopic yet effective as a snapshot of the heroin scene--in a TV movie sort of way. Ages ago, John MacKenzie directed the unsettling West End gangland drama The Long Good Friday, but he's made too many cable features in the interim; the result is that this, his first theatrical release in years, is efficient to the point of being detrimentally streamlined. Still, it's a difficult film to shake, and Patrick Bergin contributes an immensely likable performance in a change-of-pace role as a terminally pissed-off cop. (Reviewed: Sept. 14) **1/2 (out of four)

Frankly, I'm too embarrassed by the prospect to abbreviate the plot of Terence Davies' period piece The House of Mirth here, for I can barely fathom its myriad convolutions. With confidence, I can tell you that Gillian Anderson turns in an idiosyncratic lead performance as Lily Bart, a spinster coasting through life under the financial support of her moralistic aunt. As Lily's securities begin to fall apart, so does Davies' script, which is based on the novel by Edith Wharton. Regardless, Anderson and the rest of the cast, including Eric Stoltz and Dan Aykroyd (!), seem transplanted from one of the great silents, which is not just a delicate way of saying that everybody overacts--really, the players help give devilish, old-fashioned melodrama its due 'til the bitter end. (Reviewed: Sept. 14) ** (out of four)

John Greyson is fast usurping Denys Arcand's position as one of the three most prominent Canuck directors (after Cronenberg and Egoyan--and yes, this list is personal conjecture), but his latest film, the corruptly insincere The Law of Enclosures, represents a creative nosedive. T.O. darling Sarah Polley stars as a checkout clerk who spies on a young man (Brendan Fletcher) she mistakes for an AIDS victim (how improbably Canadian), and in an alternate timeline, we meet the clerk (Shirley Douglas) and the boy (Sean McCann), in truth a cancer patient, as an old, squabbling married couple. The Gulf War is intended to parallel the tumultuousness of their relationship in both eras; instead, it's just one more pretentious layer of metaphor that keeps the story at a cold remove. Additionally, Polley ought to stay away from romances, tragic or otherwise, for she is incapable of generating warmth; smarmy, pug-faced Fletcher ought to stay away from movies, period. (Reviewed: Sept. 15) *1/2 (out of four)

I was hit by a memory of the following passage from Pauline Kael's famous Raging Bull review as Catherine Jelski's uncinematic The Young Unknowns crawled into its third or fourth reel: "Jake says, 'You dumb fuck,' and Joey says, 'You dumb fuck'...and I think, What am I doing here watching these two dumb fucks?" Likewise, in this thoroughly obnoxious drama, a couple of spoiled L.A. 'wigger' producers, Charlie ("My So-Called Life"'s Devon Gummersall) and Joe (Eion Bailey), trade unimaginative, profane insults and abuse the beautiful women in their lives (including one played by Blade's Arly Jover, deserving of better both on and off the screen) in an attempt to mimic Rabe-ian histrionics. Dick-flaunting from people who barely understand men, and once again we have the industry calling card standard: a movie about showbiz. To coin a popular phrase, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in the young filmmaker's philosophy. A closing credit claims that Jelski is the sole owner of this motion picture--she can have it. (Reviewed: Sept. 15) * (out of four)

Perhaps the international availability of CNN and the like has helped spread the American virus of media celebrity into a cross-cultural phenomenon. Andrew Dominik's repulsively violent, observant feature debut Chopper studies real-life Aussie convict Mark Brandon Read (Eric Bana, a stand-up comic in his native land), a charismatic lowlife who fantasizes becoming a historic crime figure, which may have at one time implied some Robin Hood-esque nobility; today, the motive itself is getting a book deal and television appearances. I knew nothing of "Chopper" Read going in and remained fascinated by his screen counterpart's arrogant stupidity--regardless of how accurate Bana's portrayal is, it gets at universal truths about the Modern Killer. The film could use some pruning, however, and its bleached visual style is nothing short of banal. (Reviewed: Sept. 15) *** (out of four)

A genteel, earthbound comedy about those Australian satellite dish operators responsible for tracking the exploits of Apollo 11, the space mission that gave us Neil Armstrong's historic moonwalk, The Dish brought a relieved smile to my face after a week of glossy, pseudo-intellectual nonsense. But the film is nice to a fault--the story's edges have been sandpapered away, and characters rarely confront us with traits that aren't implied by appearances the first time we meet them. The end product is comfort food that's neither particularly nourishing nor remarkable, capped by the lamest framing device in recent memory. Sam Neill is his ever-reliable stalwart self, and Patrick Warburton ("Seinfeld"'s Puddy) is dryly amusing as the token American. (Reviewed: Sept. 16) **1/2 (out of four)

Every aspect of Julien Temple's sporadically anachronistic, opium-drenched retelling of the friendship between 19th-century poets Wordsworth (John Hannah) and Coleridge (Linus Roache)--performance, visuals, sound design--is executed at a stylistic fever pitch, so as to drown out a thesis that poets were the glam icons of yesteryear and turn the film into a furiously empty rock concert of its very own. While Temple bravely asserts that Wordsworth's writing isn't very good (contrary to his widely recognized moniker) and imposes successful images on Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," he fails to divine the fundamental differences between the two men--why one is an artist but the other's a craftsman. Such questions deserve a more complex answer than, "It's the drugs, man." The screenwriter is at partial fault: Frank Cottrell Boyce mostly substitutes Wordsworth and Coleridge for musicians Hilary and Jackie Du Pré, whose very different story he told much better with Hilary and Jackie. (Reviewed: Sept. 16) **1/2 (out of four)