Leading Ladies: February 2006

In limited release

• Unknown White Male is a controversial documentary about 30-something New Yorker Doug Bruce, who gets on a subway one day and ends his ride with a case of full-on amnesia (which has led some reviewers to question it's authenticity). "Crammed with friendly, sympathetic talking heads and pretty images of a stunned-looking Mr. Bruce, then 35, relearning life (he remembers how to walk but forgot family and friends), the film comes up frustratingly short when it comes to the particulars," says Manohla Dargis of the New York Times.
• The Hollywood Reporter's Erin Free says Little Fish, a thriller starring Cate Blanchett as a rehabbed junkie trying to start a new life, is "confrontational, raw and always compelling... a film of rare power and conviction."
• The Onion A.V. Club's Tasha Robinson says of Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, an Oscar-nominated drama about Germany's famous anti-Nazi heroine, "While the film doesn't dig deep, or hit particularly hard, it neatly achieves its modest goals: presenting a real-life heroine in real-life terms. A film this fictionalized rarely feels this much like fact."
• Of Trudell, a documentary about Native American poet-activist John Trudell, the New York Times's Jeannette Catsoulis says, "No one in the film has a bad word to say about [Trudell], despite his 17,000-page FBI dossier; and by the time Robert Redford assures us that meeting him is not dissimilar to meeting the Dalai Lama, you may feel that all this worship does not do justice to an unusually stormy and complicated life."
• "More calculated than a Starbucks sampler CD, the picture could win the up-from-hardship award," says Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum about the South African crime drama Tsotsi.
• L.A. Weekly's Ella Taylor says of Russian horror flick Night Watch, "In the final act, the movie dons a more human face and commits to an absorbing tale of crime and punishment, albeit pushing the fatigued message that you can't always tell light from dark these days."
• Of the father/daughter dramedy Winter Passing, with a stellar cast that includes Ed Harris, Zooey Deschanel, Will Ferrell, Rachel Dratch, Amy Madigan and Anthony Rapp, the Village Voice's Jessica Winter says, "The film is so grindingly predictable that I was writing out a full plot synopsis in my notebook before it was half over. Deschanel's understated performance [adds] a little kick to the family-dysfunction paces, and Ferrell's dive-bar rendition of the Eagles' "I Can't Tell You Why" is positively riveting. Winter Passing should have been a musical."
• The New York Times's Jeannette Catsoulis says the religious drama The Second Chance is "startlingly direct if unavoidably preachy." She continues, "[It] takes aim at Christianity's racial divide and the corporatization of faith. Its message is simple: Being a Christian requires more than just dropping a check in the collection plate every Sunday morning."
• The New York Daily News's Elizabeth Weitzman says about teen horror sequel Final Destination 3, "After a fiendish start, filmmakers James Wong and Glen Morgan approach their task with all the subtlety of a hammer to the head (or a knife to the gut or an ax to the back). They do, at least, find a mordant humor in the formula."
• Says the New York Times's Manohla Dargis of Neil Young: Heart of Gold, a Jonathan Demme-directed documentary about the music legend, "At one point, during one of his occasional verbal rambles, [Young] says half-jokingly, half-defensively that he's got some love songs left in him. This film, which is at once a valentine from one artist to another and a valentine from a musician to his audience, is surely proof that he does."
• Of Cowboy del Amor, a documentary about a cowboy turned matchmaker who tries to find Mexican mates for lonely American men, the N.Y. Times's Jeannette Catsoulis says, "Directed... with a light touch and an attentive ear for the regressive attitudes beneath the humor, [the movie] follows the fortunes of Rick, an easygoing truck driver who thinks most American women are 'too hard to please.'"
• The N.Y. Times's Laura Kern calls the Jessica Biel 20-something angst drama London "a misfired attempt at provocation and the exploration of philosophical thought... little more than an immature display of male bonding on speed."
• Of Through the Fire, a documentary that follows high school basketball phenom Sebastian Telfair through his senior year, the N.Y. Times's Catsoulis says, "Behind the cheering and popping flashbulbs of Through the Fire lurks another, much darker movie, one that questions the relationship between sneaker manufacturers and financially deprived kids with exceptional talent."
• The Miami Herald's Connie Ogle says A Good Woman, a romantic comedy based on the Oscar Wilde play Lady Windermere's Fan, is "a witty and engaging bit of fluff about sex, scandal, idleness, gossip, blackmail, guilty secrets and, most surprisingly, redemption."
• Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum says of the fact-based drama The World's Fastest Indian: "The cockeyed devotion with which writer-director Roger Donaldson dramatizes the story of New Zealand motorcycle legend Burt Munro and his classic 1920 bike... is in direct proportion to the cockeyed devotion with which Munro himself pursued his lifetime goal of setting a land-speed record at Bonneville Flats, Utah."
• Of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a Cannes favorite western starring Tommy Lee Jones, the New York Times's Manohla Dargis says, "In a film filled with plaintively expressive faces, characters say as much when they don't talk as when they speak [the] dialogue, which sometimes sounds like hardscrabble poetry, sometimes sounds real as dirt and is, rather surprisingly, often darkly funny."
• "There's something about the no-exit, zero-sum logic of the film's rivalry that makes this dingy, grim little indie hard to look away from," says Slate's Dana Stevens of The Tenants, a drama about a rivalry between two writers (Snoop Dogg and Dylan McDermott) who live in an abandoned New York apartment building.
• Of The Libertine, TV Guide's Maitland McDonagh says, "Johnny Depp's coruscating, rigorously uningratiating performance as debauched, self-destructive 17th-century aristocrat John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, is the glue that doesn't quite hold together first-time director Laurence Dunmore's adaptation of Stephen Jeffreys' 1994 play."

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