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(PG) After puzzling and angering fans with his English-language debut, the direct-to-video Heather Graham erotic thriller "Killing Me Softly" (and yes, the mind reels at the thought of a Heather Graham direct-to-video film when even "The Guru" earned a theatrical release), acclaimed Chinese director Chen Kaige returned to his homeland for the new melodrama "Together" but he seems to have lost something along the way. Instead of devising a film with the emotional delicacy of "Farewell My Concubine", the epic vision of "The Emperor and the Assassin" or the oddball everything-but-the-kitchen-sink attitude of "Temptress Moon", he has instead come up with an utterly ordinary tearjerker, loosely based on a true story, about a young violin prodigy (Yun Tang) whose devoted father (Peiqi Liu) makes sacrifice after sacrifice to help his relatively ungrateful son perfect his craft. This is a familiar enough setup (which was fairly musty even when "Stella Dallas" did it decades ago) but Chen (who also appears as the violin teacher who only sees the boy as a potential dollar sign) lays things on so thick-at one point, it appears that the father has signed up for every single job in Beijing and still his son rejects him-that the shameless manipulation winds up working against the film by the ludicrous finale. "Together" is the kind of foreign film that will doubtlessly receive acclaim from people who generally dislike foreign films-everything is spelled out in big letters so that no one will walk away confused about what happened and why (even the hairdos are symbolic)-but for anyone who valued Chen’s earlier films and hoped that his American sojourn was simply a temporary aberration, this film will come as a profound disappointment.

CREDITS: Written by Chen Kaige & Xiao Lu Xue. Directed by Chen Kaige. Starring Yun Tang, Peiqi Liu and Chen Hong. 116 Minutes Rated PG A United Artists release.

VERSUS

(unrated) After a strange, samurai-tinged prologue, "Versus" kick off like a standard-issue Japanese gangster thriller; two escaped convicts rendezvous in the woods with a carload of Yakuza and their female hostage and, before long, one of the gangsters gets a bullet in the head. At that point, however, the dead thug immediately comes back to life and things quickly get weird. It seems that the woods now have the power to bring the dead back as nearly indestructible zombies-a drawback since the Yakuza have been killing and burying people there on a regular basis-and the still-living people are forced to defend themselves against never-ending onslaughts of the living dead while trying to discover the reason why they are coming back in the first place. Extremely gory and nonsensical, the film (which owes a considerable debt to both the "Evil Dead" films and to Peter Jackson’s early gore epics "Bad Taste" and "Dead-Alive") nevertheless has a demented headlong energy that is relatively infectious (unless you have zero tolerance for splatstick) and even though it eventually grows exhausting (at nearly two hours, the film proves by default that sometimes less really is more), there is always a amusing bit of business or a striking piece of bloodshed to catch the eye-literally, at one point.

CREDITS: Written by Riyuhei Kitamura & Yudai Yamaguchi. Directed by Ryuhei Kitamura. Starring Tak Sakaguchi, Hideo Sakaki and Chieko Misaka. 119 minutes. Unrated (for adults only) A Media Blasters release.

MAY

(R) There have been so many cheap and ineffective horror movies on display in recent years that it almost comes as a shock to see a truly effective one-there are not only the expected feelings of unease and dread but also a strange sort of elation at the sight of a film that is willing to set the audience on edge without resorting to easy gore, cheap shocks or tension-draining bits of self-referential "humor". Such a film is the brilliant and genuinely creepy "May," the best American-made example of the genre in recent memory. In this low-budget stunner, Angela Bettis stars as May, a lonely, lazy-eyed young woman who works in an animal hospital and whose only real friend since childhood has been a porcelain doll locked in an elaborate case (a gift from her perfection-obsessed mother). She tries to reach out and form relationships-first with a hunky mechanic/aspiring gore filmmaker (Jeremy Sisto) and later with a flirty co-worker (Anna Faris)-but her inadvertently oddball behavior drives the mechanic away and the co-worker treats her cruelly as well. When tragedy befalls May’s beloved doll, it finally sends her over the edge and she is determined to make some new friends...by any means necessary.

While the film does wear its influences on its sleeve-the narrative is obviously indebted to "Carrie" (both the Stephen King book and the Brian DePalma film) but the sheer visceral impact of the gore is reminiscent of the works of Dario Argento-, writer-director Lucky McKee (making a stellar debut) shows that he knows more about making an effective horror film than merely referencing the classics. He knows that the amount of blood spilled during a film is less important than how it is spilled (the scene in which the doll is destroyed is shocking enough to make even the most hardened gorehounds wince) He also knows that the most effective way to get under the audience’s skin during a psycho-killer film is to force them to identify with the character making the inevitable conclusion tragic and heartbreaking as well as horrifying. To that end, he is assisted by a mesmerizing performance by Angela Bettis (who recently played "Carrie" on television) in the lead role, the best performance by an actress in a horror film since Asia Argento’s appearance in "The Stendhal Syndrome". Her performance is a marvel of tone and nuance-there is always something off about her but enough charm and sweetness come through (check out the scene in which she watches the bloody student film made by the boyfriend) so that you keep hoping that she will finally pull herself together even as she inexorably slips into madness-and in a just world, it is the kind of work that would win awards and acclaim the world over. Although it is being buried among the big summer titles, those lucky enough to catch "May" will never forget it.

CREDITS: Written and directed by Lucky McKee. Starring Angela Bettis, Anna Faris and Jeremy Sisto. Rated R. 95 minutes. A Lions Gate Films release.

CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS

(unrated) "Capturing the Friedmans" is a documentary that is so effective at depicting the disintegration of a family that it is almost impossible to sit through. Director Andrew Jarecki (the man who created Moviefone, making his directorial debut) follows the trials of the Friedmans, a Long Island family that is shattered when father Arnold is arrested in 1988, along with youngest son Jesse, and charged with hundreds of counts of alleged sexual abuse involving the students of a computer class Arnold taught from his home. As the outside world bears down on the family (even as the prosecution fail to turn up a shred of actual physical evidence), they begin to come apart in a series of harrowing scenes captured by eldest son David on a home camcorder. Jarecki’s film is spot-on at showing both how peer pressure and a queer form of one-upsmanship can send a molestation investigation out of control and how a family can just as easily turn on each other in a time of crisis as they can come together. However, the film (which has more twists than you might expect) is so unrelentingly grim and depressing that even as I was caught up in the drama, I couldn’t wait for it to end.

CREDITS: Directed by Andrew Jarecki. Unrated, 107 minutes. A Magnolia Pictures release.

Copyright © 2003 Peter Sobczynski
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While the views expressed by Peter Sobczynski do not necessarily reflect the views of Criticdoctor.com, the Critic Doctor will occasionally examine Mr. Sobczynski's film reviews to bring forth an honest examination of those views expressed.