Canadian Bounty

The conventions of historical biopics get blown to smithereens in Pandaemonium, a hell-or-high-water swoon (from the Ken Russell school of mad romanticism) that treats a pair of famous 19th-century English poets like the outrageous rock stars of their time they so surely were. (Director Julien Temple kept his finger on the Sex Pistols in The Filth and the Fury.) John Hannah plays William Wordsworth; Linus Roache embodies opium-addicted Samuel Taylor Coleridge. As Mike Leigh did with Topsy-Turvy, but with an utterly different, near-delirious visual vocabulary, Temple captures the feeling of creative electricity, throwing his own into a film as trippy as Coleridge's Xanadu.

Cubist narration is no novelty in filmmaking, but Christopher Nolan shuffles time like a pro croupier in Memento, a clever noir caper that's not only a whodunit but also a whattimeisit. Guy Pearce's Bakelite-hard features make him the perfect anti-hero, Leonard, whose determination to track down the man who raped and murdered his wife is confounded by his loss of all short-term memory: To keep track of the very recent past, he needs index cards, Polaroids, and even tattoos. As with The Usual Suspects, Memento is all about structural loops, not emotional arcs, but Nolan builds a cool house of cards.

For that matter, Dogma-style restrictions and technical specs are no novelties either, not anymore. But the Danish artistic movement has liberated two very different filmmakers. For Joel Schumacher — yes, that Liberace-like keeper of the Batcave — Tigerland may be his best, most affecting work since Falling Down. In a loose, prowling, low-budget Vietnam-era ensemble piece about the effect one uncrushable free spirit has on his platoon (the young actors are unknowns, but charismatic Irish actor Colin Farrell's anonymous days will be behind him after this), Schumacher charges into his story with a galvanizing passion. Jonathan Nossiter, who made the mournful and adult 1997 festival favorite Sunday, uses the lightness of digital video to probe new adult relationships from vertiginous new angles in Signs and Wonders, an erudite and rewarding drama starring Charlotte Rampling and Stellan Skarsgard.

A nonfiction film about Tobias Schneebaum, a gay, Jewish, septuagenarian New Yorker who was once, by the way, a cannibal in Peru, is guaranteed to lead viewers off the beaten path. In Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale, siblings David Shapiro and Laurie Gwen Shapiro frame Schneebaum (on whose 1969 memoir the story is pegged) as a lively and sensitive man in full, not just a cocktail-circuit oddity. The Young Unknowns, meanwhile, a small, quietly shocking fiction by feature first-timer Catherine Jelski, takes one of the droopiest of indie clichés — the miseries of spoiled rich kids adrift in Los Angeles — and makes real art, at once sorrowful and indicting. (Devon Gummersall from My So-Called Life stars in an astonishing performance.)

I loved the austere beauty and compassion of The Widow of St. Pierre, Patrice Leconte's historical drama starring Juliette Binoche and the nonstop-magnificent Daniel Auteuil — with Yugoslavian director Emir Kusturica playing a murderer, no less. But love — or, for that matter, visual beauty — has nothing to do with the furious power of Baise-moi. This graphic, hard-core, blood-soaked jag (X-rated even in France) about a couple of screwed-over women who turn tables, screwing and killing men, may be the most direct, ungussied expression of female sexual rage ever thrown up on screen. And I mean thrown up. A lot of people hated it.

Fortunately, Nine West was just down the street, offering those people some much safer merchandise.
— LS