A coming-attractions trailer can give away so much. Yet even when the previews spill every narrative bean in sight, your eyes may well be deceived.

Take “Public Enemies,” now in theaters. For months we’ve been seeing trailers for director Michael Mann’s Dillinger film, and they are swank. The packaged images—Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, beautiful clothes, accurate period settings—look like a dream of a gangster film.

What’s missing from these trailers? For better or worse, a sense of how the movie actually looks, and moves. Mann and his longtime cinematographer, Dante Spinotti, shot the vast majority of the picture on high-definition digital video, favoring hand-held cameras (sometimes operated by Mann himself) and zoom lenses. Mann has long been ahead of the digital curve in Hollywood. Even when his high-def aesthetic yields mixed results, as it did in his big-screen, rough-grained version of “Miami Vice,” you know you’re in the presence of a filmmaker exploiting cutting-edge technology, not the other way around.

“Public Enemies,” which is worth seeing, often resembles a 1933 episode of “COPS,” with Mann’s camera nosing in, very close, on his actors, giving every pore in everyone’s skin its full due. Mann has little interest in panoramic cityscapes and heavy postproduction computer-generated effects. His film springs to life especially in the night sequences, such as the Little Bohemia shoot-out that arrives midway through and lifts “Public Enemies” to another level. “Digital cameras read into the shadows very differently [than 35 mm film],” Spinotti told American Cinematographer magazine, noting Mann’s desire for a “hyper-realistic look.”

One of director Michael Mann's feats of Depression-era conjuring: The arrival of lawman Stephen Lang in a scene from "Public Enemies."

It’s trickier in daylight. There are moments in “Public Enemies” when Mann catches direct sunlight and suddenly the image loses clarity and color saturation. Some believe Mann’s high-def imagery will prevent audiences from engaging fully with the Dillinger saga and its historical period. Anne Thompson of Variety put it this way: “His biggest misstep here is the same as the Wachowskis with ‘Speed Racer.’ His pursuit of what interests him formally may leave audiences behind ... when moviegoers watch a period film, no matter how authentically recreated, they aren’t expecting it to look like this. There’s something jarring about the way ‘Public Enemies’ shoves us into the past.”

 True, but it’s effectively, evocatively jarring at least half the time. Especially at night. When Spinotti is able to illuminate the Little Bohemia exteriors, shot on location in northern Wisconsin, with little more than automobile headlights and white-hot blasts of machine gunfire, the results are remarkable. There’s another reason such sequences, purely kinetic and elegantly conceived, work so well; they’re less dependent on the script’s highly variable dialogue.

 See what you think. Tell me if you like Mann’s approach to the material in “Public Enemies,” or if you don’t. And don’t forget the “why” part.  

Sequels are tough. “Here we go again!” so easily becomes “Here. We go, again.” Characters start getting a little sick of each other, as they do in “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs,” with the story falling back on a falling-out between a mammoth and a sabre-toothed tiger, or the tiger and a sloth. The dialogue begins to sound like screenwriters voicing their creative frustration. “Face it, Sid,” Denis Leary’s Diego mutters to John Leguizamo’s lateral-lisping mammal Sid in “Dawn of the Dinosaurs.” “We had a great run, but now it’s time to move on.”

Not bad, not good, “Ice Age 3” may be OK enough to do what it was engineered to do, i.e., baby-sit your kid for a while and rake in the dough, somewhere in Twentieth Century Fox’s preferred coinage realm of “Ice Age 2” ($651 million worldwide) or, more modestly, the first one ($383 million). Directors Carlos Saldanha and Michael Thurmeier and the four credited writers amp up the peril, if not the humor, of the first two. The mammoths, Manny and Ellie, are expecting a baby, and Manny’s baby-proofing everything in sight. (It’s the best gag in the picture.) Diego feels like the odd man out; he takes off on his own, while sweet, desperate Sid discovers three dinosaur eggs, which he adopts, thus drawing the attention of an enormous T. rex mom.

In a strained science-fiction leap, “Ice Age 3” sends the gang beneath Earth’s frozen surface, where they discover a vast “Land of the Lost”-type jungle realm, home to highly marketable scary creatures from the old days. The primary addition to the character roster, a swashbuckling one-eyed weasel named Buck, is theoretically entertaining—always getting everybody into trouble, pulling off feats of derring-do right and left. I’m puzzled as to why Buck isn’t more fun in practice, though, even with Simon Pegg providing a zesty Cockney vocal characterization.

Lack of comic distinction and defiantly forgettable computer animation have always held back the “Ice Age” projects. “Dawn of the Dinosaurs” lays out one life-and-death scenario after another, dutifully. The pileups passing for a climax find Ellie (voiced by Queen Latifah) giving birth; Manny (Ray Romano) fighting dinosaurs; Diego battling his own set of adversaries; Sid navigating a river of molten lava; Buck piloting a flying prehistoric bird, accompanied by squabbling possums (Seann William Scott and Josh “Perpetually Annoying” Peck). No wonder the comparatively simple frustrations endured by the squirrel-rat hybrid Scrat (Chris Wedge) offer some relief. Also, I realize that with most “Ice Age” fans, puke, snot and mucus represent the trifecta of sight-gag comedy. Nonetheless: This movie has a lot of all three, and only a handful of laughs to show for its damp self.

MPAA rating: PG (for some mild rude humor and peril)
Running time: 1:33.Starring the voices of: Ray Romano (Manny); John Leguizamo (Sid); Denis Leary (Diego); Simon Pegg (Buck); Queen Latifah (Ellie);
Directed by: Carlos Saldanha; co-directed by Michael Thurmeier; written by Michael Berg, Peter Ackerman, Mike Reiss and Yoni Brenner;
produced by Lori Forte and John C. Donkin. A Twentieth Century Fox release.
 

Luxembourg-born director Anne Fontaine’s first film, in 1993, was a comedy called “Love Affairs Usually End Badly.” That title applies to any number of other films before or since, including Fontaine’s newly released and stimulatingly unpredictable comedy-drama “The Girl From Monaco.”

It begins as easygoing farce before shifting into a more ominous mood. A famous Parisian attorney (Fabrice Luchini) has traveled to Monaco to defend a woman accused of murder—a crime of passion quite outside the lawyer’s own tightly contained emotional sphere. Reluctantly, the lawyer spends every waking minute shadowed by a bodyguard-for-hire (Roschdy Zem), whose ex-lover, a sunny, carnally aggressive TV weathercaster (Louise Bourgoin), latches onto the lawyer.

Almost instantly the legal eagle’s life becomes a sexual blur—he can’t quite believe his luck. Nor can he recognize a barracuda when he sees one. As the taciturn bodyguard becomes the lawyer’s confidant, in matters of work, lust and love, the screenplay by Fontaine and Benoit Graffin treads a fine line between playing for laughs and playing for keeps.

Woody Allen’s “Whatever Works” is this summer’s other bittersweet comedy dealing with a 30- to 40-year age difference between leading man and leading lady. “The Girl From Monaco” is the good one. Some have had trouble with the film’s tonal shift. I think it works; Fontaine’s relaxed direction takes the hairpin curves with ease. Luchini never forces a moment, even when the moment calls for slapstick; the deadpan Zem’s technique is precise as a diamond cutter’s; and as the scooter-riding symbol of Monaco’s fun-and-sun promise, Bourgoin makes Audrey a little ridiculous and a little frightening. This is a modest but expertly performed piece. And this summer, surrounded by lesser, louder, bigger and dumber diversions, it’s especially welcome.

 
MPAA rating: R (for some sexual content and language)
Running time: 1:35
Opens: Friday at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St., and the Landmark Renaissance Place, Highland Park.
Starring: Fabrice Luchini (Bertrand); Roschdy Zem (Christophe); Louise Bourgoin (Audrey); Stephane Audran (Edith)
Directed by: Anne Fontaine; written by Fontaine and Benoit Graffin; produced by Bruno Pesery and Philippe Carcassonne. A Magnolia Pictures release.
 

You don’t go to a Michael Mann movie for realism. You go for the sleek, threatening glamour of crime and punishment. From “Thief” to “Heat” to “Collateral” to another vein of wrongdoing in “The Insider,” his films ruminate, beautifully, as they place their characters in settings of insinuating darkness, hunter versus the hunted, brothers under the skin.

Mann’s latest is “Public Enemies,” starring Johnny Depp as charismatic Depression-era outlaw John Dillinger and Christian Bale as G-man Melvin Purvis. It’s a fascinating bundle of contradictions—authentic in a million details, deeply romanticized in others. Cool, calm and collected, this is more love story than gangster picture—Marion Cotillard, Oscar winner for “La Vie En Rose,” plays Dillinger’s lover, Billie Frechette—and it’s more vivid around the edges than at its center. Yet a genuine filmmaking intelligence guides every scene, even the frustrating ones.

Director and co-writer Mann focuses on 1933-34, the final year and a half in the life of Dillinger, a time when the elusive bank robber’s appearance in newsreels provoked bigger applause than that for FDR and Charles Lindbergh, according to one magazine account. For a few attention-grabbing months, Dillinger stayed one step ahead of the feds (Billy Crudup plays crime czar J. Edgar Hoover) while Purvis, a narrowly conceived role played by a rather rigid Bale, endured more than a few missteps.

The script comes from Bryan Burrough’s fine, expansive account “Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34.” While Mann focuses the film on Dillinger’s last hurrah, he tries to suggest some of the other forces at work during those years, chiefly the mob syndicate’s nationwide web of corruption. We meet a lot of tough guys; the script’s structure seems built to support a much larger film (or a miniseries), and Dillinger and Purvis must compete for our attention against an interesting array of gangsters and federal law enforcement officials closing in on Dillinger’s gang.

The outlaw at the center was the last of the Mohicans, in Mann’s view. (Mann’s version of “The Last of the Mohicans” marked an earlier combination of exacting period detail and swoony romance.) Like all Mann heroes, who are both humanized and fabulized by the director’s meticulous touch, he is meant to evoke a kind of nostalgia for the days, if they ever existed, when men were men and codes were codes, and adversaries respected the rules of engagement.

Like a lot of things in this life, “Public Enemies” looks terrific at night and less so in broad daylight. Mann and cinematographer Dante Spinotti shot it in Midwest locations, both urban (Chicago, in case you hadn’t heard) and rural, on high-definition digital video favoring hand-held, close-quarters compositions. The visual quality is striking, notably in a 15-minute sequence—the best in the film; the one that makes it worth seeing—pitting Dillinger and his cohorts against the feds in a northern Wisconsin lodge known as Little Bohemia. The inky darkness, the staggering explosions of light every time someone lets loose with a round from a Tommy gun—none of it would look the same on celluloid. The scene is beautifully mapped out in every way, as strong as any of the violent set pieces in “Heat” or, more recently, Mann’s big-screen version of “Miami Vice.”

Mann’s direction is excellent; the script, hit and miss. “What do you want?” Cotillard’s Billie asks him. “Everything. Right now,” Depp’s laconic antihero answers. Elsewhere we get such period-accurate but cornball exchanges as:

“Don’t kid a kidder.”

“Don’t play me for a fool!”

Depp is fully capable of exploring the subject’s roguish charm as well as his dangerous side, but the screenplay by Ronan Bennett, Mann and Ann Biderman puts forth a rather dreamy conception of Public Enemy No. 1. For all its talk of living fast and dying young and time running out, the story’s urgency feels muted. Yet you respond to the filmmaking, the pleasures of the Depression-era re-creations, even if you don’t fully buy this easygoing depiction of Dillinger. Several key supporting characters are sharply realized. When Peter Gerety shows up as a bantam rooster of a syndicate lawyer, pouring on the blather in the courtroom like a wizard, you’re thrilled to see a good actor get some juicy lines. In a different key, Stephen Lang (as a Texas lawman aiding Purvis) registers with unusual force. He has perhaps a dozen speaking lines, yet the coda belongs to him, and he makes the most of it. Cotillard embodies the film’s inner tensions and Mann’s aesthetic: The role of Billie begins in the key of “cliche gun moll,” but the actress has a way of toughening her up and keeping her honest.

In an end-title we learn of Purvis’ post-Dillinger fate (his run-ins with Hoover remain unmentioned), and it’s not sufficiently set up. Even though Mann positions Purvis as an upright lawman with no stomach for the brutal tactics employed by some of his colleagues, he remains a recessive figure. There is, however, a tantalizingly effective scene when Purvis comes to see Dillinger in jail—a more compact version of the coffee shop meeting in “Heat” between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Here, as in the Little Bohemia sequence, Mann nails it. Roughly half this film works like gangbusters, while the other half hits its marks, dutifully, and not even Elliot Goldenthal’s turgid musical score can smother the half that clicks.

MPAA rating: R (for gangster violence and some language)
Running time: 2:20. Opening: Wednesday.
Starring: Johnny Depp (John Dillinger); Christian Bale (Melvin Purvis); Marion Cotillard (Billie Frechette); Billy Crudup (J. Edgar Hoover); Stephen Dorff (Homer Van Meter); Stephen Lang (Charles Winstead); Peter Gerety (Louis Piquett)
Directed by: Michael Mann; written by Ronan Bennett, Mann and Ann Biderman, based on the book by Bryan Burrough; produced by Kevin Misher and Michael Mann. A Universal Pictures release.
 

So much happens in a year. We have a new president, who happens to be the unseen adversary in the new "Transformers" film. Barack Obama's referred to by name, and when he is, he's a punching bag, a coward hiding in an undisclosed location while the robot war rages. His fictional onscreen security adviser, meantime, snivels about diplomatic options. Appeasing peacenik! Bring back Bush!

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is going to make a fine fat pile of money, no matter its quality (opening day take alone is reported at $60.6 million). Quantity and volume are the commodities here. The sequel to the 2007 Michael Bay schlocktacular didn't need to be good; it simply needed to be.

The film opened in London a day before Tuesday night's U.S. release. "A giant, lumbering idiot of a movie," said the Daily Mirror. "Everything that is most tedious, crass and despicable about modern Hollywood," gasped the Daily Mail. Often, a sensibility gap the size of the Atlantic Ocean separates a picture's reviews in London from the American critics. Not this time.

Take Chicago. From the fifth floor of the Tribune Tower: "Can editing rhythms designed to approximate a seizure actually induce a seizure?" Roger Ebert, across the way: "A horrible experience of unbearable length." Ben Kenigsberg of Time Out Chicago, on the other hand: mixed, with high marks for Bay's "pure level of color and design."

"Transformers 2" got me feeling nostalgic for the summer of 2008. Remember last summer? "Iron Man" and "The Dark Knight" weren't just major mainstream hits. They were good major mainstream hits. In very different ways, they transcended expectations. Both films appealed to a wide moviegoing and political spectrum. And they showcased performances to remember -- thank you, Robert Downey Jr.; thank you, Heath Ledger.

This summer so far? Even with "Star Trek" in the mix, even with moviegoers ready, willing and economically eager to drop $11 plus snacks on an affordable night out, it has been tough sledding. The new Woody Allen, "Whatever Works," can't hold a candle to last summer's Woody Allen, " Vicky Cristina Barcelona." "Land of the Lost"? About one-seventh as diverting as last summer's " Journey to the Center of the Earth." "X-Men Origins: Wolverine"? Roughly on par with last summer's "Mummy" sequel.

The one asterisk worth mentioning regarding "Transformers 2" is one of its executive producer credits, which belongs to Steven Spielberg. That name has meant a great deal to the global film audience for four decades now. According to Bay, after seeing the film in a private screening Spielberg told the maestro: "It's awesome."

Spielberg has a financial stake in its perceived awesomeness, of course. But according to Webster's New World dictionary, here's the definition of awe: "a mixed feeling of reverence, fear, and wonder"; and [archaic] "the power of inspiring intense fear or fearful reverence." Perhaps Spielberg was being more honest than Bay realized. Spielberg's reverence, we have to assume, is business-related. The fear, one suspects, has something to do with the chaos on the screen, and how it'll affect the future of the franchise action picture.

Just as there’s no business like show business, there’s no suspense like carnal suspense. “Jerichow,” writer-director Christian Petzold’s imaginative, free-handed variation on “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” relocates the 1934 James M. Cain tale of lust and murder to a small town in northeastern Germany. It could be any number of generic spots on the U.S. map. Thomas, an ex-soldier dishonorably discharged after his Army hitch in Afghanistan, lands in the employ of Ali, a Turkish immigrant with a very profitable string of takeout joints. Thomas lands also in the bed of the Turk’s wife, Laura, abused by and beholden to her husband in provocatively equal measure.

“Everyone here cheats on me,” seethes Ali, who suspects Laura of infidelity (though not with whom she’s actually sleeping with). “Jerichow” is a triangle that keeps shifting, and our sympathies never settle down for long.

Petzold’s previous feature, “Yella,” starred Nina Hoss, who plays Laura here. While the femme fatale of “Jerichow” is an archetype, the actress doesn’t settle for caricature or push the obvious buttons. When Thomas (Benno Furmann, Germany’s answer to Jason Statham) enters her orbit, she becomes a faintly quivering arrow, drawn tight, ready to fly in his direction. But there’s a desperation and a sadness behind her big eyes.

Each key character in this lean 89-minute tale is lost, a stranger in a strange land. It’s a measure of “Jerichow’s” cleverness that Ali (Hilmi Sozer), however violent and obsessive, becomes more complicated and dramatically formidable than the disposable slob of a husband in some other “Postman” or “Postman”-like versions of this story. Petzold and cinematographer Hans Fromm often frame their actors tightly, with natural light obscuring their features. In a story dependent on mistrust and in which Ali is constantly trying to read everyone’s true face, the visual approach is the right one, subtly executed.

Italy got to the Cain novel first, in Luchino Visconti’s gritty, dusty, neorealistic “Ossessione” (1942). Then came Lana Turner and John Garfield in the cleaned-up 1946 Hollywood version, still a pip, followed by the 1981 “Postman” with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson. That’s the one that didn’t really work: It was sexually blunt but cold as ice, and director Bob Rafelson never got a fix on the material (scripted by David Mamet). “Jerichow” is a different matter: The setting works, the backgrounds of the characters work, and while there’s actually less on-screen sensuality than you might expect, well ... Cain’s narrative never concerned itself with giving anyone everything they wanted.

No MPAA rating (some violence, language and sexual situations)

Running time: 1:29.

Now playing: Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.
Starring: Benno Furmann (Thomas); Nina Hoss (Laura); Hilmi Sozer (Ali); Andre M. Hennicke (Leon)
Directed by: Christian Petzold; written by Petzold, based loosely on the novel “The Postman Always Rings Twice” by James M. Cain; produced by Florian Koerner von Gustorf and Michael Weber. A Cinema Guild release. In German with English subtitles.
 

Movies are like that too: They can choose to work us over honorably, or dishonorably. This brings us to a well-acted phony such as “My Sister’s Keeper.” I’m sure its emotional intentions were honorable. But the harder this assault weapon went at my tear ducts, the more duct tape I wrapped around them as a defensive measure.

Director and co-writer Nick Cassavetes changes a good deal of the particulars of Jodi Picoult’s 2004 novel, especially near the end, but the basics remain the same, right down to the voice-over chores shared by all the major characters. (This film’s practically its own book-on-tape edition.) Cancer never looked more noble, nor so morally improving. The daughter of an ex-lawyer (Cameron Diaz) and a firefighter (Jason Patric), Anna (Abigail Breslin, serenely on top of every situation) was a test-tube baby conceived to provide bone marrow and umbilical blood to her older sister Kate (Sofia Vassilieva), who has acute promyelocytic leukemia.

 The years have been hard, emotionally and medically, on both girls. Anna hires a lawyer (Alec Baldwin) to sue her parents for “medical emancipation,” and while you’d think a little thing like inter-family legal action would put a stop to all the gorgeous, lovey-dovey montages of everybody cherishing every minute together, well, think again.

Everything is a little too too fabulously fabulous in “My Sister’s Keeper.” When the backyard bubble-blowing montage comes, it comes with enough bubbles for 10 seasons of “The Lawrence Welk Show.” When Kate assembles a scrapbook of all the things she holds dear, it’s such a professional-grade, ostentatiously amazing scrapbook, it actually makes her less sympathetic. And this is a cancer patient we’re talking about.

Precious little about “My Sister’s Keeper” feels like life on planet Earth, even life being lived in an extreme dramatic situation. Cassavetes directed “The Notebook,” which accommodated his gauzy Hallmark romanticism better. (He also made the tougher, underrated “Alpha Dog.”) But the mood swings are insane here, and the look is bogus: Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel makes sure that even the hospital waiting rooms are mouthwatering.

As written by Cassavetes and co-screenwriter Jeremy Leven, the mother is a monomaniacal Mother Bear, willing to do anything to save her cub. Diaz struggles to humanize her. Others transcend the suds: Vassilieva is often quite moving. So is Joan Cusack, as the judge presiding over the court case. (The character was male in the novel.) Baldwin’s masterly underplaying is most welcome. You may cry at the film’s designated crying times, approximately every 10 minutes, like the traffic and weather. Or you may not, and wonder instead why some high-gloss weepies treat their source material quite so shamelessly. 
 

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for mature thematic content, some disturbing images, sensuality, language, and brief teen smoking)
Running time: 1:48
Starring: Cameron Diaz (Sara); Abigail Breslin (Anna); Alec Baldwin (Campbell); Jason Patric (Brian); Sofia Vassilieva (Kate); Evan Ellingson (Jesse); Joan Cusack (Judge De Salvo).
Directed by: Nick Cassavetes; written by Jeremy Leven and Cassavetes, based on the novel by Jodi Picoult; produced by Mark Johnson, Chuck Pacheco and Scott L. Goldman. A New Line Cinema release.
 

How big a bastard can Woody Allen build a screenplay around and still generate a modicum of audience goodwill? The answer: not this big. Coming off last year’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” the freshest Allen film in more than a decade, “Whatever Works” (his 40th feature as director) plays like a hoary old Broadway stage comedy yanked, reluctantly, into the present.

It comes by its retro hoariness honestly. Around the time he co-starred in director Martin Ritt’s “The Front” (1976) with Zero Mostel, Allen cooked up “Whatever Works” with Mostel in mind for the lead role, that of a titanically misanthropic quantum physicist. His worldview is tempered by a relationship with a much, much younger Southern runaway, lost in New York City, land of mopes and dreams.

Mostel might’ve made this ranting foghorn of a character memorable, but “Whatever Works” has made it to the screen with the more modestly talented Larry David, best known for “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” He plays, or rather yells, the role of Boris Yellnikoff, a freelance chess tutor and full-time kvetch who calls everyone “moron” and “idiot” (you’d think Allen could come up with more distinctive insults). Boris takes in the sarcasm-averse ditzoid Melody, played by Evan Rachel Wood. The movie, like Boris, condescends like mad toward this Mississippi bombshell-belle, as Boris does a Pygmalion number on her, teaching her the joys of the knish and other delicacies. The “Pygmalion” parallel is plenty clear even without the following line, in one of Boris’ lengthy direct-address monologues to the camera: “I only wish I could do a Pygmalion on her.”

She’s acting in an entirely different comic universe, but stage-trained Patricia Clarkson does what she can as Melody’s mother, come to fetch her daughter and, as it turns out, to meet the object of her daughter’s wholly implausible affections. Lower Manhattan and environs have an instantaneous effect on this fundamentalist right-winger, a symbol of all the “family values morons” and “gun morons” derided by Boris. (Michael McKean and Conleth Hill have precious little to say, or do, as his pals.) In an eye-blink, Clarkson’s character turns into sexually voracious bohemian—a changed woman, much as Ed Begley Jr. (as Melody’s tightly buttoned father) arrives later and undergoes a similar change.

“Whatever Works” begins with Groucho Marx’s rendition of “Hello, I Must Be Going” from “Animal Crackers,” heard underneath the opening credits with the iconic Woody Allen typeface. Even if you’re a huge fan of Groucho and that song, even if you’re a huge fan of Woody Allen’s best stuff (however you define it), the second Groucho begins the tune you cannot help feeling a weariness settle over the enterprise, because Allen has been here before. And the movie hasn’t even started yet.

It wasn’t simply a change of scenery that brought something different to “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and to the best of Allen’s London-set films, “Match Point.” Those scripts worked familiar themes of chance and fate and luck, but Allen seemed more engaged and on his game. “Whatever Works” is more like “Oh, Whatever.” The detail work is practically non-existent As usual, Allen acknowledges no cultural middle ground between the soulless noise symbolized by a rock band called Anal Sphincter and the grace and class captured by the soundtrack’s signature theme, “If I Could Be With You (One Hour Tonight).” I agree, it is a lovely standard. But in this picture, it’s Boris who’s the sphincter.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for sexual situations including dialogue, brief nude images and thematic material)
Running time: 1:32
Starring: Larry David (Boris); Evan Rachel Wood (Melody); Patricia Clarkson (Marietta); Ed Begley Jr. (John); Michael McKean (Joe); Conleth Hill (Leo)
Written and directed by: Woody Allen; produced by Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenenbaum. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
 

Today's news that the 2010 Academy Awards will nominate 10 films, rather than five, for best picture of 2009 brings up a few talking points.

As reported by the L.A. Times: "Between 1932 and 1943, that Oscars category usually spanned 10 films, but then switched to just five for the year covering movies released in 1944. The most famous top 10 back then was the impressive list for 1939 when 'Gone With the Wind' claimed the prize. The other nine notable nominees: 'Dark Victory,' 'Goodbye, Mr. Chips,' 'Love Affair,' 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,' 'Ninotchka,' 'Of Mice and Men,' 'Stagecoach,' 'The Wizard of Oz' and 'Wuthering Heights.' In 1931-32, there were eight nominees and in 1934 and 1935 there were 12 contenders."

Here's academy president Sid Ganis: "After more than six decades, the Academy is returning to some of its earlier roots, when a wider field competed for the top award of the year. The final outcome, of course, will be the same – one Best Picture winner – but the race to the finish line will feature 10, not just five, great movies from 2009."

Tell me what you think this change. To get you started...

1. This is about "The Dark Knight" getting aced out of the last year's five-pack of best picture nominees. 

2. Not every year is 1939.

3. If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences confines "Up" to the animated-feature nomination slot, there'll be holy hell to pay.

Can anyone tell me what the hell is going on in this scene?

At 149 minutes, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is six minutes longer than the 2007 noise machine from which this sequel sprang, but those six minutes are like dog minutes. Shia LaBeouf, the nominal human protagonist of this franchise, once described the first “Transformers,” admiringly, as “aneurysm-inducing.” Medically, where does that leave us for “Transformers 2”? Can editing rhythms designed to approximate a seizure actually induce a seizure? Does the appearance of the words “enough, already” on your forehead, “Exorcist”-style, constitute getting your money’s worth?

Director Michael Bay’s film—which has two settings, “puree” and “liquify”—is like that scene in “Raging Bull,” when Joe Pesci slams the car door against the guy’s head, over and over. Bay’s sequel is that door. The audience is the guy.

In this one, LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky goes away to college, which looks to be Sodom University, judging from the glossy-lipped strippers-in-training littering the campus. Sam’s manic, caffeine-addled roommate (Ramon Rodriguez) runs a Web site devoted to conspiracy theories—he knows, for example, that the government is hiding something about a robot war. Sam’s sworn to silence on that score, until the bad metal men come calling and destroying. Much of the film has LaBeouf, Rodriguez and Megan “World’s Finest Actress” Fox running for their lives, while the U.S. military and their metallic allies deal with the threat level, which goes straight past red to the ruddy maroon and Aztec schmutz favored by cinematographer Ben Seresin.

The first, comparatively lucid “Transformers” was a headache, but I sort of enjoyed it. It was a Slurpee brain-freeze of a blockbuster. “Revenge of the Fallen” is more like listening to rocks in a clothes dryer for 2½ hours. Nobody’s looking for anything other than relentless, brainless action from this sort of movie, but Bay, whose best junk came early with “Bad Boys” and “The Rock,” offers nothing but visual and aural chaos. No one moves a camera more restlessly, to less interesting effect, than this man, although his sense of space is his own, I’ll grant him that: Each time the battle between the Autobahns and the Technocrats (I think I have that right—sorry, make that Autobots and Decepticons) comes down to one ’bot against another, you cannot really tell what’s happening, and who’s vivisecting whom. Your eye instinctively flees to the far corners of the screen for some relief from the computer-generated mayhem.

Fox’s cleavage is the only camera object that catches Bay’s attention for more than a millisecond. My favorite moment in “Transformers 2” comes when Fox’s character listens intently to someone gas on about the revenge of the Fallen, and the plans to wipe out the humans, and she tries like the devil to look serious and concerned, and then when it’s her turn to speak—not a lot of those moments here; more often, she’s running away from fireballs in slow motion, and Bay clearly is beyond the point of self-parody on that score—Fox says, sort of snottily, “OK, so we have to stop him.” They do, but along the way Paris gets leveled, the pyramids of Egypt turn out to be some sort of storage locker for a weapon able to obliterate the sun and the climactic melee in the Jordanian dunes goes the way of so many real-life desert conflicts, which is to say: It never ends.

In this shot, at least, we know where we're supposed to be looking.

There’s a lazy cynicism to “Transformers 2,” from the dubious comic-relief “ghetto” ’bots known as the Twins, to the rump-in-the-air introduction of Fox’s character, to the general air of militaristic fetishism. The chief human antagonist is an Obama administration security adviser who keeps pushing diplomatic solutions while the Decepticons kill, kill, kill. Near the end an aged Autobot, waling away at his enemies atop a pyramid, mutters the line “I’m too old for this crap.” No matter, pal. You’re not in the target demographic.

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MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of sci-fi action violence, language, some crude and sexual material, and brief drug material)
Running time: 2:29.
Starring: Shia LaBeouf (Sam Witwicky); Megan Fox (Mikaela Banes); Josh D  uhamel (Capt. Lennox); Tyrese Gibson (Sgt. Epps); John Turturro (Agent Simmons); Ramon Rodriguez (Leo); Kevin Dunn (Ron Witwicky); Julie White (Judy Witwicky); Rainn Wilson (professor).
Directed by: Michael Bay; written by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, based on the Hasbro action figures; produced by Don Murphy, Tom DeSanto, Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Ian Bryce. A Paramount Pictures release.