A Sit-Down with Saint Joan

Tonight the 48th Chicago International Film Festival bestowed a Silver Hugo for Career Achievement on the actress Joan Allen, an Illinois native, Tony winner, co-founder of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and three-time Oscar nominee.  With candor falling just shy of tact, CIFF executive director Michael Kutza conveyed how long he has wanted to give Allen this award.  Appearing at the end of a 90-minute career retrospective, he recalled a Steppenwolf anniversary celebration from years ago where he first seized on the idea of the film festival honoring one of that company's crossover stars.  "But Gary Sinise is mostly a TV personality by now, and so definitely not for us," Kutza publicly confided, before classifying John Mahoney as even more of a small-screen name and admitting, "Frankly, Malkovich scares me."

While staying all smiles, Allen manifested her signature knack for projecting multiple things at once—in this case, a sincere gratitude at being so warmly recognized and an element of perplexity at this abrupt if comically intended rundown of her close colleagues.  At least no one sitting in Screen 20 of the AMC River East could doubt Kutza's admiration for this consummate performer, or take issue with the formal language that came with the trophy: "For dazzling audiences with your radiant performances on stage and screen, whatever the character, genre, or budget."  Had this actually been engraved on the silver plating, I would have been able to read it. Showing up early to the ticketholders' line meant I snagged a first-row seat, from which I could literally spot the holes in the buckled straps on Allen's boots.

"Dazzling" and "radiant" indeed in all black, Allen came across as open and easygoing, while still giving something of a performance.  She happily offered production-side memories of every movie that the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips asked her about, while choosing adjectives carefully for subjects that might have required some diplomacy, especially before a large audience.  Most of all, she gave the impression of a cheerful and thoughtful Midwesterner, eager to chat but vigilant against oversharing or impoliteness, fond of her work and touched at the room-filling show of public affection, but rarely inclined to linger over past triumphs.  She admitted, for example, to not having seen Nixon (a Nick's Flick Picks favorite) since it premiered in theaters, and a wordless reaction to one of Phillips's questions suggests she hasn't screened The Ice Storm in a while, either.  Devotees like myself who have read a lot of Allen interviews may not have left with an embarrassment of new stories, and I don't know why the planners didn't schedule any time for an audience Q&A.  Still, the anecdotes ranged far and wide, even when they demurred from going too deep. And as loyal readers knew I would, I managed to get my question in anyway.

The funny, avuncular Phillips was, as ever, an ideal choice to moderate.  He has worked as both a theater critic and film reviewer, making him knowledgeable and enthusiastic about both of the arenas where Allen has achieved greatest distinction (though she has made memorable impressions on television as well, in projects like Michael Mann's truncated HBO series Luck and the 2009 Lifetime movie Georgia O'Keeffe, for which she was executive producer).  In fact, Phillips recalled visiting Chicago from the University of Minnesota in the early 1980s to see Allen and her Steppenwolf cohort in And a Nightingale Sang..., the play that eventually brought the actress to New York.  Meeting her after this performance "turned me into Don Knotts," Phillips confided, before charmingly if unintentionally failing to find the right adjective to capture her flexible, charismatic incisiveness on screen: "She's what I call an excellent working actor," he offered by way of introduction, "who's so... so...," and we all knew just what he meant.  The clip-reel that played before Allen's entrance evoked the longevity of her career across bigger and smaller parts, while still hewing closely to the best-known titles on her résumé—a greatest-hits framing to which the conversation mostly adhered.

Early topics included Allen's admission that it took about five years after her first film role (a small part in 1985's Compromising Positions) to feel that "the penny really dropped" in terms of comfort before a camera.  She described the boons of being a student at Eastern Illinois University, where the small size of the program allowed her to tackle during her early college years meaty parts like Nurse Ratched, Laura Wingfield, and even Linda Loman, however "ludicrously" age-inappropriate some of these were.  She also got rich educations in lighting, costuming, and scenic design, since the program was geared toward producing jack-of-all-trades theater professors to teach at other schools, and thus forced actors to know their vocation from many sides.  Phillips inquired, too, about the ethos and conversations in the early years of Steppenwolf, especially after Malkovich's breakout success in films opened a new route for Chicago actors into national acclaim.  Allen described this period as exciting but difficult for the company, with ambitious troupe members somewhat at odds with those who felt protective of the specific identity and talent base of Windy City dramatics. She remembers her own position as somewhere in the middle, glad for New York opportunities and (she wasn't too proud to add) New York paychecks, but more than contented with her lot as a member of a thriving Second City ensemble.

From here, Phillips advanced to questions about the first proper auteurs she worked with, Michael Mann on Manhunter and Francis Ford Coppola on Peggy Sue Got Married (both 1986). Using gingerly euphemisms about the former, which she remembers as "quite a shoot," Allen recalled Mann as a "very, very... driven" filmmaker who would make every day a 20-hour call if he could.  Still, she sounded fully sincere in praising his work with actors and his visual eye, even if "we'd make jokes when he'd switch a man's necktie for the twelfth time before a shot."  Going from Mann, who barely held rehearsals, to Coppola, who relished and even videotaped them, involved quite a leap.  A bigger jump involved getting used to an invisible director: "I remember Francis as one of the pioneers of watching on a monitor, not from behind a camera or near the actors.  So someone would yell 'Action,' and we'd be going, 'But where is he?'"

Around that time, Allen entered a period where her second- or third-tier parts on film and television suited her relative comfort in these media, even as she was headlining and winning major prizes for plays like Lanford Wilson's Burn This, which she played for almost two years, and Wendy Wasserstein's Tony and Pulitzer winner The Heidi Chronicles, where she anchored every scene.  Phillips skipped a lot of this supporting-actress journeywoman work in films like Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988, again for Coppola) or Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993) and moved to that mid-90s trifecta that marked many filmgoers' whiplash introduction to this quiet powerhouse: Nixon (1995), The Crucible (1996), and The Ice Storm (1997).  The audience saw short clips of the memorable scenes, respectively, where Pat first threatens to walk out on her petulant husband; where Elizabeth Procter is being hauled off to jail; and where Elena Hood charges her husband, in a rain-battered car, with knowingly taking them to a key party.  Among this group, Phillips actually started with the last in the sequence, naming Ice Storm one of his favorite films of the 1990s and "one of the most tonally complex pictures of that decade," a feeling Ang Lee apparently facilitated by keeping his actors off-guard.  Enlisting more euphemisms, or else just combing her mind for the mot juste, Allen remembers Lee as "gentle, yes," to use Phillips's word, "but... very... specific, also."  Adding, "I think he's maybe a little tougher than people think," Allen recalls him banning actors absolutely from seeing dailies of their performances. "'You don't know what you're doing, but I do,'" he'd insist.

Many readers, I imagine, would have longed as I did for more probing of Allen's less touted projects.  She was clearly thrilled when Phillips cued up a clip from Sally Potter's Yes (2004), calling that stylistically eclectic drama, written wholly in iambic-pentameter, "a movie that about 50 people saw," but one that she loved as both a working experience and a final product.  Clearly the film was new even for this savvy audience of festival-goers, who might have enjoyed seeing more Alleniana they didn't already know.

That said, Allen's recollections about her Academy-nominated turns in Nixon and The Crucible were among her most detailed and revealing.  In the first case, responding to Phillips's query about whether it was difficult to empathize with Plastic Pat, Allen avowed quite the opposite.  Reprising biographical details as though she had just researched the role yesterday, she feelingly reported that Pat Nixon lost her mother around age 13 and then nursed her father through the last stages of cancer at 17 or 18, pooling tuition money with her two brothers so that one of them maintained the household while the other two attended college at any given time. They rotated this arrangement until all of them finished.  Even so, Pat's acquaintances from youth universally described her as outgoing and "happy-go-lucky"; clearly she was both prepared for marriage to a man who would require lots of careful tending and yet emotionally transformed by that union.  Allen described as a cornerstone of her performance a story she heard from a White House consultant who spotted Pat one evening left alone by her husband, dancing by herself with arms outstretched to music that was still emanating from a just-finished state dinner downstairs. In the actress's words, "This was not a president like Mr. Obama, who has dinner with his family every night.  Or so we've been told."

As for crossing paths with Elizabeth Procter, Allen confessed it was a genuine first for her: "I kind of couldn't believe I was as old as I was, having worked so long in theater, and I had never seen or read The Crucible." Forced to audition for the part (indeed, to read many times for director Nicholas Hytner), Allen felt freed by her lack of pre-conceptions about a role that fellow actors kept describing as a trap: "I guess they felt she easily became kind of holier-than-thou, or too pious or something."  Unaware of choices prior interpreters had made, Allen simply made the choices that felt right for the script and found out later whether these were familiar ones—resulting in what I still consider a peak performance in a stellar career.  I would say the same of Daniel Day-Lewis's lead work in the same film, which may be no coincidence.  "People often ask, 'Hey, aren't you intimidated to work with actors like Anthony Hopkins?' or whomever, but I always feel like, 'No, they'll probably make me better!'"  This prospect, of course, works both ways, though as Phillips facetiously chirped, "It's a shame you've had to work with so many hacks!  I mean, Kevin Kline? Day-Lewis?"

Allen side-stepped a can't-win question about seeking good women's roles in Hollywood, holding to specific comments on particular roles and projects.  These ranged from humorous confessions (The Bourne Supremacy was rewritten so constantly throughout production that she didn't even bother bringing her script to the set) to more nervous admissions (she held out against taking Pleasantville, a movie she's now very proud of, because "if there was any typecasting in my work at that point, it was a little bit like, 'The Wronged Wife'").  She probably got her biggest laugh when answering honestly Phillips's probe about whether her 18-year-old daughter has a favorite among Mom's movies.  "Oh, I don't know.  She hasn't seen a lot of my work.  Probably Death Race?"  The event's peremptory wrap-up began here, with Kutza replacing Phillips onstage, Allen receiving her as-yet unengraved Hugo, and the audience realizing there would be no questions from the floor.

I, of course, take the view that God did not give me a larynx so that I could sit in Joan Allen's presence and not engage her in conversation.  Close friends will already know the pet question I was eager to pose after sidling up to her, while she amiably signed Upside of Anger posters and posed for iPhone snaps with beaming, seemingly speechless admirers.  Struck at close range by her uncanny luminescence (fawning to admit, but completely true), I thanked her for all her tremendous work, and I told her about the great response Bobby Fischer got from my college freshmen last year.  I also introduced her to the two new friends I had made while waiting in line, united by our adoration for Campbell Scott's Off the Map, a tender Southwestern memory piece with a never-earthier Allen, a heartbreaking Sam Elliott, and a Nick's Flick Picks favorite, The Wire's Jim True-Frost.  "Ohhh, Off the Map!" Allen cooed, hand going to her throat, with (to me) thrilling affection for a quiet little movie I really love, and which waited two years for its minuscule release. "Is there another movie that you're especially fond or proud of that isn't in the group you normally get asked about," I asked, "or that maybe didn't get the commercial shake you feel it deserved?"  She laughed and aimed those incredible almond eyes toward the ceiling for a moment. "Well, Searching for Bobby Fischer is certainly one of them. And Off the Map is definitely, definitely another. And the Sally Potter movie, which I was so glad he included," referring to the earlier exchange about Yes.  "That's probably the group."

What's wonderful about Allen is that "the group" is in fact so large. She's appeared in so many movies that make striking first impressions and pay such rich dividends on return visits that even 90 minutes is not enough to scratch the surface. Face/Off (1997) and Upside slid under the radar, as did When the Sky Falls (2000), her barely-veiled Veronica Guerin biopic that went straight to video in the U.S., despite her tough, involving performance.  We heard nothing about A Good Marriage, the Stephen King vehicle that will soon restore her to leading-lady stature, even if she doesn't necessarily aspire to that.  "The thing with The Contender," she stated near the end of her confab with Phillips, "is that even though I was recognized as a leading actress for that role, that's a very 'ensemble' film, which is one of the things I love about it."  One of the things I love about Allen is that she still perceives herself as a team player, even as evidence constantly reveals her as a cut above even her most distinguished company.

Supporting Actress Sundays: 1996

Hold tight on the countdown and other features while Nick picks his family over his flicks—both my mom and my brother have been visiting all weekend, and I'm enjoying every minute of their time before moving next week to a totally different time zone. I'll be back on regular duties come Monday, but in the meantime, I'm still piping in to the Supporting Actress Sundays feature chez StinkyLulu.

Our subject for scrutiny this month is the roster from 1996, a sensational Oscar vintage for actresses billed above and below the title. It's a shame that the very best supporting performance of them all went unnominated: I speak of Katrin Cartlidge's cold-fusion synthesis of frustration, bewilderment, compassion, and fury as Emily Watson's sister-in-law in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves. Also regrettably MIA: Renée Zellweger making the case for romantic allegiance in Jerry Maguire, Kristin Scott Thomas barely tolerating her life as a governess in Angels & Insects, Claire Rushbrook as the daughter soured early by life in Secrets & Lies, and Elizabeth Peña as the lost object of love in Love Star. If AMPAS obeyed international release dates instead of just US debuts, we'd also have to make room for Nathalie Richard's frazzled, hot-tempered, and turned-on costume supervisor in Irma Vep (which I mini-reviewed here. Still, the fact that Oscar still found four tremendously deserving nominees without picking any of these contenders speaks very highly indeed about the quality of competition that year. (Sure, they also picked one lame duck, but don't worry—despite everyone's predictions, in a rare display of Oscar keeping faith with art, she lost.)

Image © 1996 PolyGram Entertainment/Gramercy Films.

Picked Flicks #47: JFK & Nixon

People often ask me when my addiction to movies began, and I think I'd have to trace it to the years 1990-92, when I was growing up on an Army base in Hanau, Germany, where one of the most reliable and accessible entertainments for people my age was the single-screen movie theater. Movies arrived from America on a 3-6 month time delay, which at the time only added to their mysterious allure, since hype built for so long and under such different, more relaxed, and more reliable word-of-mouth conditions from the hypermediated onslaught of today's advertising. Living in a foreign country with only one English-speaking TV station (commercial-free to boot) further slowed the faucets of standard PR. These were also the years when my family bought our first VCR, so I could finally see both old and new movies of my own choosing, and with relatively little cultural noise dictating my opinions about what I was seeing. The only impediment on the theatrical side of things—a huge consideration then, though it seems now like another life—was having to finagle admission into R-rated movies. The fellow who worked the ticket counter didn't give me too much trouble despite disliking me, growling once that "you sure seem to have a lot of aunts and uncles" (read: strangers in line who agreed to shepherd me inside). The only two times I really had a problem hurdling over the R-rating, when the sleepy theater on cobblestoned Pioneer Kaserne suddenly sprang into high alert, were for Madonna: Truth or Dare, which outraged my ardent fandom and confirmed the evident social panic about uninhibited women, and for Oliver Stone's JFK. The censorious, highly disapproving vigilance that swirled around this movie was an altogether weirder case to me. American talking heads only ever supply "sex and violence" as the Scylla and Charybdis waiting to assail wayward youth, but neither appeared to be at issue in JFK. Granted, the theater staff did attempt to couch their quivering stinginess about Stone's images in terms of gore, of all things: no teenager, ostensibly, could possibly handle those wrenching replays and closeups of the Zapruder film, even though the predatory flayings in The Silence of the Lambs and the cheek-biting, family-stalking, capsizing menace of Max Cady in Cape Fear had just come and gone without similar caveats. Synthesizing the bizarrely fraught atmosphere at Pioneer with the cyclone of debate echoing from American media, I was perplexed as to what particular candy, laced with exactly what barbiturate or perverting element, JFK was offering to its endangered, corruptible audiences.

I can't remember now if my parents were unavailable or just uninterested in JFK, but my brother (good man!), hooked me up on the underground railroad with his high-school government teacher, and I was in. The movie totally blew my mind, as the phrase goes, but without just circumventing or opiating it. JFK's unimpeachable technical brio and its breathless dicing together of what feel like millions of film-fragments are enormous achievements in themselves. I can see where, as rhetorical devices, and even more as historicizing methods, they would leave much to be desired, but to cite an axiom that somehow always needs defending, JFK is not a legal brief but a movie—admittedly a movie with bullish designs on levering open the locked and sealed government case files, but also, quite patently, a "movie-movie" whose self-conscious flourishes of sound, music, montage, visual embellishment, changes in film stock, exaggerated characters, a highly caffeinated supporting cast, and pivotal arias of exposition and deduction (Laurie Metcalf's, Donald Sutherland's, and finally Kevin Costner's) all flagrantly announce the artifice and constructedness of what Stone has assembled. He and his crack team of collaborating artists devise stunning visual and audio analogues not just of paranoia but of outraged collective justice and of the massive, wormy coral reef of history, with its infinite chambers and pores, many of which never see the sunlight. Yes, it's a flawed film: Costner is too lightweight, Sissy Spacek's perspective as the lonely and agitated wife is almost nothing when it could have been something, and every time the film comes within a hundred feet of homosexuality, the performances, dialogue, and filmmaking all start stinking like wilted Southern verbena. Still, in a strange way, the lapses of JFK have always corroborated what is artful and almost frighteningly earnest about it: Stone works so fearlessly from the gut, with such unembarrassed fidelity to his sensibility, that the warts-and-all pursuit of ugly truths feels truly impassioned in this film. Not for Stone the decorous boilerplates of most courtroom dramas or tasteful liberal-historical tableaux, and almost single-handedly, JFK eliminated any need to make excuses for detritus like Ghosts of Mississippi, half-efforts like Mississippi Burning, or even decoy denunciations of invented crises, like the decidedly minor Guantánamo crisis in A Few Good Men. Stone already knows that both literally and figurally, we can't handle the truth—we can't touch it, and we can't accept what we can't touch—but he's able to use far more than foot-stomping speeches to register the point and its implications. In fact, conjoined with JFK's scalpel-edged critique of mainstream historical record is an equally sharp dismantling of our most naïve habits of image-reception. Not only does Stone recombine fresh and archival footage with the fervor of a mad geneticist, but he gamely stages illustrated versions of Jim Garrison's conjectures as well as the Warren Commission's, and of several gradations in between. Even when the script is one-sided, the film never is. JFK drives so many nails into the comortable conflation of filmed imagery with reality, is it any wonder that the film was so willfully misunderstood?

As with the Minghella duo a few rungs down on this list, JFK stimulated new appetites and ideas in my filmgoing which were even better rewarded by a subsequent effort from the same creative team. I've already posted a full review of Nixon, but if you've got seven hours free to watch the two films back to back, they remain fascinating companions. Whereas the coin of the realm in JFK is its vertiginous scrim of lightning-historical collage, asserted as an inherently greater force than the individuals scurrying around with their treacheries and truth crusades, Nixon remembers that history is still shaped by people, and that the unease and extremes of history cycle backward as the groundwater in our psyches and our private biographies. Again, some of Stone's touches are just too much: summits in China and in Texas and at J. Edgar Hoover's poolside still feel like trips to the fruitstand. Still, the broad, stentorian strokes in the dialogue and the visuals are plausibly illustrative of Nixon's mostly unsubtle grasp of his own life, and of what he was doing with everyone else's life. The ensemble of actors feel more like a united organism, rather than a series of showy walk-ons, and by allowing us more time and a slower pace to absorb the film's structure and its ironies, Nixon achieves what film biographies almost never do: it proposes a complex, counter-intuitive, and intricate new idea about an extremely well-known figure, portrayed against a detailed canvas of his intimates and his era. Nixon is almost certainly my favorite film about American politics, but it's also my favorite film of a Shakespearean tragedy. That Shakespeare didn't happen to write it is the result only of his living at the wrong time—a 400-year historical accident, though of course, in Stone's world, there are no historical accidents. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Images © 1991 Warner Bros. Pictures/Ixtlan Corporation/Regency Enterprises and © 1995 Hollywood Pictures/Cinergi Entertainment.

Saint Joan

The birthdays this week are just totally out of control: first Madonna, then Sean Penn, and now Joan Allen, quite possibly the best actress in Hollywood, give or take Julianne Moore, and quite possibly the sexiest actress in Hollywood, even if no one else agrees with me. And no, not because she is rail thin, which actually makes me worry, but because talent. is. sexy. (See also Penn, Sean; Crowe, Russell; Lange, Jessica; Elliott, Missy.)

If Joan Allen has ever given a bad performance, I haven't seen it. She's just a sublime presence; along with Moore and Tilda Swinton, and with Streep and Blanchett in their best moments, she has the gift of making not just her feelings but her thoughts almost uncomfortably lucid. It's like there's acting going on in her pupils, in her pores. Certainly there is acting going on in her neck and her limbs. That rail-thin body that can be such a challenge for awards-show gowns is impeccably expressive, swan-like, on screen. Allen is one of those actresses who make you realize that acting is supposed to be work as well as pleasurable as well as delicious. You can tell how subtly prepared she is, but she doesn't stand in the way of our acquaintance, our absorption in the character. I do not know how she does it.

If you're not a convert, a rough chronology of hits could begin with Manhunter, where she defies her future typecasting as the blind lab assistant turned on by a serial killer (the role Emily Watson inherited in Red Dragon). Next off the shelf could be Searching for Bobby Fischer, Steven Zaillian's gorgeously observed drama about a chess-playing child prodigy, with Allen immersed in a sea of gifted performers. Then the consecutive Oscar nods for Nixon and The Crucible; she is staggering in both, and deserved the Oscar for either one, though Mare Winningham, Kate Winslet, Barbara Hershey, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste were all her equals in exceptionally good years for that category.

In 1997, Allen was the best thing about Ang Lee's overrated Ice Storm, a film that is much stronger in its female characterizations even though the book was imbalanced in the other direction. In the same year, she nailed a supporting turn in the terrifically deranged crowd-pleaser Face/Off, which is basically where I decided she could do anything. Finally, she has great moments in Pleasantville, When the Sky Falls, and The Contender, but you could also slide forward to her bristling Pamela Landy in last year's The Bourne Supremacy; somehow, when she goes mainstream, Allen always seems to wind up in the summer's best blockbuster. And this year she's been everywhere, stunning and flexible in The Upside of Anger, frank and seductive in the treasurable Off the Map (just out on DVD), and apparently quite a hot dish in Sally Potter's Yes, which keeps eluding me in town after town... The worst part about moving is that it really screws with your moviegoing itinerary.

Anyway, happy 49th, Joan, and seriously, don't be bashful about calling or writing. You always have a place to stay in Hartford, CT.

The Following Previews Have Not Been Rated

Post-Oscar, and faced with the dross of most January-April releases (The Pacifier??), it can start to feel like no movie is ever going to be good again. Thank goodness for the following 25, which are my biggest mouth-waterers for the coming months of 2005:

1. The New World
   The Thin Red Line is the best English-language movie of the last ten years (that is, since Todd Haynes' Safe). Malick has made three masterpieces in three tries; he's the only filmmaker I can think of, from any period or culture, who can say that. Colin Farrell and the John Smith/Pocahontas narrative in general wouldn't necessarily get my heart leaping, but this artist is impossible not to trust. And the trailer gave me goosebumps I can still feel.
   
   
2. The Holy Girl/La Niña Santa
   No one has confirmed that this movie will be released this year, but after racking up some rapturous reviews at last year's Cannes, it seems like the right time. I'm always rooting for breakout female directors, especially from abroad, and Lucrecia Martel of Argentina already has an ardent following after two movies. The Almodóvar brothers in the producers' chairs and the hilarious Theremin version of Carmen on the soundtrack augur for something weird and likable; the still photos remind me of Buñuel or Campion, and that's a huge turn-on.
   
   
3. Yes
   Joan Allen anchoring a movie by landmark feminist/formalist director Sally Potter (Orlando, Thriller), about a middle-aged woman's passionate sexual affair with a Lebanese exile, all rendered in iambic pentameter. I have always had nerdy tendencies, but films like this I just can't wait to see. Joan!
   
   
4. All the King's Men
   Robert Penn Warren's novel (read it!!) is so good that even after a well-above-par screen adaptation in 1949, I am eager to see a second take, and with the year's best cast for an American film—Sean Penn as Willie Stark, Jude Law as Jack Burden, Patricia Clarkson as Sadie Burke, Kate Winslet, Anthony Hopkins, Mark Ruffalo, and James Gandolfini—lines should start forming now. Prestige screenwriter Steven Zaillian has proven to be a great director in both Searching for Bobby Fischer and A Civil Action, guiding more strong casts through complex stories, rendered with unexpected visual sophistication. Bring it, Steve. Set the Louisiana Capitol a'burnin'.
   
   
5. A History of Violence
   David Cronenberg is one of my favorite directors, bar none, although Spider didn't grab me the way a lot of his others have. This tale could be even more conventional, with grizzled men avenging their daughters (or something), but this auteur always commands attention, and Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen oughta help.
   
   
6. Manderlay
   Dogville didn't floor me across the board, though certain sequences, performances, and aspects were extraordinary. And I'm still a Dancer in the Dark disciple; in fact, even when I'm not into a Von Trier picture (see Zentropa or The Five Obstructions), I'm still piqued. So bring on this ante-bellum parable of American self-betrayal and fling modesty and artistic humility once more out the window, shall we? Payoffs could be major.
   
   
7. Savage Grace
   I can't tell whether the rumors that Clive Owen has been ousted from the cast are true; I hope they aren't. But there's plenty else going for this fact-based murder story set in '72: the return of New Queer Cinema director and mentor Tom Kalin (Swoon), another producing effort from the producer I most admire, Christine Vachon (Safe), and Julianne Moore working again in the post-New Queer niche where she's done her absolute best work. Shivers!
   
   
8. The Dying Gaul
   Could easily be one of those movies that only exists to indulge its tony cast, and friends at festivals haven't been raving, but when egghead sex symbols (and real-life sweethearts) Campbell Scott and Patricia Clarkson get together for a drama where they both bed Peter Sarsgaard as well as each other, you're not gonna dim my enthusiasm that easily.
   
   
9. Woman Is the Future of Man
   Of the recent Korean hits still making their way to these shores, this romantic comedy-drama that rocked the Cannes and New York Film Festivals in '04 is highest on my list. Close behind is Oldboy, which is rumored to be horrifically violent but formally impressive.
   
   
10. Howl's Moving Castle
    I'm not hearing that Howl's is the equal of Miyazaki's last film, Spirited Away, but I'm hearing that it comes close. Close would be enough: I haven't responded to a single other animé feature in any significant way, but Miyazaki may have the stuff to make me a believer.
    
    
11. 2046
    For some reason, I'm nervous that I'm not going to like this. I'm getting tired of the way Wong Kar-wai cultivates this rebel-hero persona with his perpetually delayed movies and sunglasses-only personal style, and I'm not as hyper-susceptible to either Tony Leung or Zhang Ziyi as some. Still, fetching actors in William Chang's swooning production designs (he's the one member of the Wong team who never, ever slips) offer plenty to be gassed about. And my hunch could easily be wrong.
    
    
12. Clean
    After Irma Vep and demonlover, it would be foolish not to be an Olivier Assayas fan. And Maggie Cheung: does this woman have more pure star charisma than any actress since Garbo, or is it just me? You can just sit and stare at her face, and infer all kinds of potential movies based on a single expression. And yet she's also a terrific actress, with a meaty part to play. Gimme, please.
    
    
13. Syriana
    Buzz around Hollywood for years has held that this long-completed screenplay marked a real attempt to characterize American-Middle Eastern relations and military frictions in mature detail, with genuine depth of character and political scope. Is that really possible, especially for a movie produced now? I certainly hope it is. I'm 10x more excited for this than for Sam Mendes' Gulf War film Jarhead, but I'm pulling for both of them to really have some ideas in their rucksacks.
    
    
14. Sin City
    I'm not generally one to get my knickers in a twist about comic-book or graphic-novel adaptations, but the trailers for Sin City are just too delicious for words (which, obviously, is exactly what screen images should be). For some reason, I'm not feeling this'll reveal itself as a Sky Captain-style tease; I'm banking on a genuine stylistic coup with some storytelling chops to back it up.
    
    
15. Proof
    I didn't love the play, and I still wish they'd cast Mary-Louise Parker, who instantly made herself synonymous with this role. But I'm a lover of American drama, which is so rarely done well (or done at all) on American screens, so I'm rooting for this. My man Alwin Küchler (Morvern Callar, Code 46, The Mother) is the lensman, so it might even look smart.
    
    
16. Kings and Queen
    I actually don't know a ton or even an ounce about the plot of this French drama, but lotsa critics I trust singled it out at last fall's NYFF, and director Arnaud Desplechin is an up-and-comer I haven't sampled yet. I give credit to those recent American dramas that have chased tragic grandeur, but a lot of them haven't wound up with much to show for it. (The Human Stain was what the title promised, instead of what the book promised.) Let's hope the French know how to do it better.
    
    
17. The Upside of Anger
    One of my straight-up Hollywood picks, and lookee, it's coming out in a week! Probably destined to be described as Joan Allen's stab at a Something's Gotta Give crossover hit, and who deserves it more? The trailer makes her look sensational (not just physically, but in terms of her performance), and it even augurs well for Kevin Costner, who may re-center his early gifts for comedy. The actresses playing Allen's daughters are a who's-who of the best teen girlz in the biz. I'm ready to buy my bucket-sized Coke and drink it all up. (Will Joan win the Golden Globe for Musical/Comedy? Between this and Yes and perhaps Off the Map is it Her Year?)
    
    
18. Paint
    I like the Altman movies that hit big (Gosford Park), the ones that don't (The Company), and even the ones that actively annoy a lotta people (Dr. T and the Women), so whenever this redundant-sounding "exposé" of mean tempers and schemes in the art world bows, color me eager.
    
    
19. The Fountain
    I had reservations about Pi and even more about Requiem for a Dream, but I still don't think we've seen Darren Aronofsky show his real stuff as a director: those two films felt like workshops toward what a true, integrated directorial vision will be like. The plot and tone of this one sound even more elliptical and challenging, and the cast is intriguing. Third time's the charm?
    
    
20. The Ring Two
    Considering that I liked the first American Ring just fine but not extravagantly, I'm not sure why I'm so psyched about this. Wait, yes I am sure. The teaser trailer was terrifying, and the new, fuller-length preview is comparably so. Jesus, I'm nervous now just typing this. (That trailer for the similar-looking Dark Water is kind of a chiller, too.)
    
    
21. Saraband
    Reports imply that Ingmar Bergman himself isn't fully pleased with his 30-years-later postdate on Scenes from a Marriage, and Bergman in DV sounds like a shame, but "A New Film from Ingmar Bergman" is a phrase you just can't brush off, whatever caveats are attached.
    
    
22. The Constant Gardener
    City of God was good enough to make me wonder what else Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles has up his sleeve, and I'm ever hopeful that lead actor Ralph Fiennes will reignite his career, which was so exciting in the mid-90s. Here's hoping this is the right project with the right people at the right time.
    
    
23. The Interpreter
    Director Sydney Pollack has been short-changing his talent for years, and maybe the trailer has already said it all...but doesn't that seem a little too obvious? Are there even more surprises in store? Even if not, isn't there already Sean Penn, Nicole Kidman, and Catherine Keener in a UN-set thriller with paranoid undercurrents, James Newton Howard on the soundtrack, and Darius Khondji handling the images? That'd be plenty, unless it all somehow gets garbled. We'll know soon enough.
    
    
24. Brokeback Mountain
    Speaking of crossed fingers, I'd love to believe that this is going to work, but the literary self-seriousness of The Ice Storm (also directed by Ang Lee) really didn't work for me, I haven't cottoned to what I've read by Proulx, and the Heath Ledger/Jake Gyllenhaal love story seems destined to be watered-down. Still, if the studio (Focus) really nurtures it, if Rodrigo Prieto keeps up his streak of gorgeous-looking movies, and if the greenhorns in the cast discover unforeseen charisma, I'll be clapping loudest.
    
    
25. Even Bigger Unknowns...
    Will Batman Begins be as solid a summer blockbuster as last year's Bourne Supremacy? Will Theo Angelopoulos find a US distributor for Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow? Will these two movies ever be jointly considered again? Is Thumbsucker a boring American indie or a hint of genuine new talent? (Either way, it's got Tilda Swinton.) Is Woody Allen really back with Melinda and Melinda? What else is looming that I don't know about, or that I'm forgetting? There's always more magic on the way than you realize.