by CHRIS BARRY, KEVIN LAFOREST,
JOANNE LATIMER and MARK SLUTSKY

Saw

Two men wake up trapped in a dark room. They're each chained to opposite walls, and there's a dead man lying in the middle, apparently killed by his own hand. So begins director James Wan's Saw, a serial killer suspense that blatantly rips off Seven, yet still manages to be scary and compelling until the end.

Leigh Whannell (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Wan) plays the first trapped man, a bitter photographer. His unlikely roommate (played by Cary Elwes), is a dispassionate surgeon and the calmer of the two. Elwes' character soon deduces that they've been captured by a mysterious criminal known as the Jigsaw Killer, a moralizing fellow who specializes in death by irony (just like a certain serial killer from a certain David Fincher movie.) Also in the mix is grizzled cop Danny Glover, driven unhinged by his encounter with Jigsaw Dude. There's nothing particularly new here, but the two-men-trapped-in-a-room idea is a lot of fun and Wan makes the most of it. The movie is less successful, however, when it leaves the fellas' underground dungeon and returns to the events happening outside. Still, it's unnerving, bloody and gritty and all that and ultimately, a pretty satisfying thriller. (MS)

I Huckabees

Gotta give director David O. Russell (Three Kings, Flirting With Disaster) credit for trying with this one: a madcap pseudo-existentialist farce involving petroleum-obsessed firefighters, autograph-collecting Sudanese refugees, French nihilists, anti-sprawl environmental activists and some sort of unified theory of how everything is unified (in theory). Jason Schwartzman is the activist in question, who, unsatisfied with his life, turns to "existential detectives" Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman. They follow him as he navigates his way through a cast that also includes Jude Law, Naomi Watts and Mark Wahlberg, all of whom are seeking meaning in their lives in some way or another.

Everything seems to be happening at once in this picture, though in the end it's hard to remember what exactly happened at all. Russell's attempt at "madcap" produces some genuine comic moments but also a lot of chaos. And while he gets points for at least attempting to understand the human condition in a star-studded Hollywood picture, the film never quite achieves the moment of ecstatic enlightenment that it seems to be going for. As a comedy it's hit-or-miss - Wahlberg is definitely at his best here as the above-mentioned despairing firefighter, striking a comic tone he hasn't really pulled off since his great performance in Boogie Nights - but most of the movie is just a lot of sound and fury. (MS)

Birth

How does a director follow a sensational debut film like Sexy Beast? Answer: a reincarnation drama starring Nicole Kidman, naturally. Birth, the new film from Jonathan Glazer, is a genre-busting oddity. Marvellously sombre and grey, Birth is note-perfect, never overplaying its bizarre premise. Let's give thanks that M. Night Shyamalan didn't get his hands on this script and fill it with paranormal hocus-pocus.

Anna (Kidman) is a 35-year-old widow on the cusp of her second marriage to Joseph (Danny Huston). One day, a 10-year-old boy (Canadian Cameron Bright) appears and claims to be Anna's dead husband. He has some insider information that gives Anna pause, and the rest of her family stick their heads in the sand.

Glazer has a way with New York WASPs. Anna lives with her mother (Lauren Bacall) on the Upper East Side, where it's hard to distinguish a funeral from an engagement party. Glazer masterfully captures the family's quiet strain, then the slow unravelling of Anna and her fiancée. Joseph is prepared to play second fiddle to the dead husband forever, but not to a pint-sized imposter.

Glazer teases out our wish to see Anna reunited with her dead husband and succeeds because we want the kid, no matter how improbable, to lift the forlorn look from Anna's face and heal her heartache. (JL)

The Take

God bless director Avi Lewis and his delightful wench, writer Naomi Klein. You know who they are, right? Lewis, the former host of the CBC's ass-kicking public affairs show counterSpin? And Klein, probably best known for the persuasive arguments she unleashed against the forces of globalization in her No Logo book a few years ago? Yup, that's them, a bona fide activist power couple. But instead of making you sick, these kids are some of the smoothest talking activists one could ever hope to be lectured by. And why? Because, unlike so many on the left - or the right for that matter - Lewis and Klein consistently present their well-considered case, blissfully free of that emotional and simplistic "we're good, those against us are evil" crap.

The Take is consistent with the approach these two have presented in other mediums: "Here's the facts as we see 'em, now come to your own conclusions." It's a story of a burgeoning workers' movement currently taking place in Argentina, a country whose proletarian folk have been totally burned by this crazy globalization thang. Said workers have organized to turn once privately owned and now largely abandoned factories into worker-owned collectives. Moving and intelligent, The Take is one of the better political docs to come out this year. And in 2004, that really means something. (CB)

Mémoires affectives

Is a man the sum of his memories? If so, what happens when he loses all of them? This is the ordeal that Alexandre Tourneur (Roy Dupuis) faces after waking up from a long coma during which he was declared clinically dead. Struck with a wicked case of amnesia, Tourneur can't remember a thing: not his failing marriage, not his unhappy daughter, not his job as a veterinarian, not his friends and not even his drinking problem.

Mémoires affectives is a gripping and compassionate drama about a man who feels like he was born yesterday, but into an aged body. There's a superficial mystery surrounding the circumstances of the hit-and-run that knocked Tourneur out, but his efforts to recover what he lost go much further, all the way into traumatic childhood events. Writer Marcel Beaulieu and director Francis Leclerc, who previously collaborated on Une jeune fille à la fenêtre, have done a great job of creating a complex central character, one who continues to intrigue long after the movie's over.

The film is also beautifully shot. Using high contrast and bluish tones to give the picture an unusual feel, cinematographer Steve Asselin complements the atmospheric score music by Pierre Duchesne. The story might be a little too deliberately paced, then too abruptly resolved, but this is undeniably a well-crafted piece. (KL)

Birth, Saw, Mémoires Affectives and The Take open Friday, Oct. 29 and I Huckabees is now playing

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