Metro Pulse Online: Movies, Past &Amp; Future

Armed only with his mysterious mental connection to the feral minds of studio executives, the Movie Guru reveals just how good or bad this week's new releases will be:

Dogville (R)
Lars von Trier’s Depression-era morality tale involves Grace (Nicole Kidman), a woman on the run from mobsters who finds refuge in the small Rocky Mountain town of Dogville, pop. 15. The townspeople warily agree to hide her in exchange for menial tasks. But when the police offer a $5,000 reward for her capture, the terms of her protection change, revealing the unsavory parts of human nature. Read the review.
Now Showing:

New York Minute (PG)
The multi-million dollar industry known as Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen star as twin sisters (now that’s a stretch) with different goals on a school day in the Big Apple. Jane is headed to deliver a speech that could snag her a major college scholarship; Roxanne’s along for the ride to sneak backstage at a video shoot. The adventure includes cute boys, cute dogs and a wacky (and sort of cute) truant officer played by Eugene Levy. Just don’t call them the Olsen Twins.
Now Showing: Tinseltown USA, Knoxville Center, Farragut Towne Square , Halls Cinema 7, Foothills 12, Wynnsong 16

Van Helsing (PG-13)
Monster lore goes topsy-turvy in this creature feature rife with special effects. Hugh Jackman is Van Helsing, a monster killer sent to Transylvania to stake Count Dracula. He meets up with Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale), who wants the ancient vampire dead to break a family curse. Clad in stylish black, the two of them battle vamps, werewolves and even Frankenstein’s monster.
Now Showing: Tinseltown USA, Knoxville Center, Farragut Towne Square, Halls Cinema 7, Foothills 12, Wynnsong 16

Women in Love

Folk singer Derek Webb once conjectured that love is a force too complicated for a three-minute pop song. Describing the origin of his tune “Love is Different,” he quipped that if a song can’t support a sequel or two, then it probably wasn’t love in the first place.

The same can be said of the movie industry. Finding a romance in Hollywood that has the trappings of reality is a bit like finding W’s pesky weapons of mass destruction: it just ain’t happening.

Though Birthday Girl (R, 2001) doesn’t quite succeed in shedding the clichés of big screen romance, you’ve got to give it credit for trying. The film stars Nicole Kidman, fresh off her stints in Moulin Rouge and The Others, as Nadia, a Russian mail-order bride. Nadia comes into the life of John (Ben Chaplin), a British bank employee with a penchant for porn collecting and kitchen ant infestations. Nadia speaks little English, leaving the couple to forge a relationship based on little more than steamy sex.

Things get interesting when two men posing as Nadia’s cousins show up to celebrate her birthday. John learns the marriage is a fake, designed to swindle the bank at which he works. After completing their heist, the hustlers abandon John and Nadia, giving their complex relationship a chance to blossom.

The film has its problems. The ending, while not quite a typical Hollywood romance denouement, is hokey in its own right. And John has the personality of a dining room chair. Even so, Kidman’s risky performance is intriguing and alone worth the price of admission.

Kidman is also at the top of her game in The Hours (2002, R). She gives a passionate performance as a suicidal Virginia Woolf struggling to craft the novel Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s creation later impacts the lives of two women, a depressed 1950s Los Angeles housewife (Julianne Moore) and a modern New Yorker (Meryl Streep) hosting a party for a novelist dying of AIDS. Common threads weave through the lives of each woman, resulting in a movie that is complex, moving and mysterious.

—Lloyd Babbit