ASHES OF TIME REDUX All of Wong Kar-wai's films are movies out of time, but his big-budget wuxia epic Ashes of Time seemed particularly doomed to walk alone. Made in 1994, it arrived too late to capitalize on the mid-'90s crest of the Hong Kong action craze, too early to ride the whirlwind of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon's blockbuster success—and truth be told, it's too woozy, dreamy and elusive ever to connect with a mass audience. But at least Wong won enough of a following (through movies such as In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express, shot with some of this film's cast) that he could finally get distribution for this recut edition. Calling it more accessible than the first version is like saying a spell-checked Finnegans Wake is easier to read: It's still a smeared watercolor of a movie, with the way station of a heartsick hired sword (Leslie Cheung) serving as the fixed point for rhyming stories of lovelorn assassins, brotherly betrayals and pining femmes fatales. But it remains as easy on the eyes as it is hard to follow—a portfolio of the most gorgeous stars in the Hong Kong firmament (including Maggie Cheung, Brigitte Lin, Carina Lau and both Tony Leungs) at the height of their youthful bloom, shot by master cinematographer Christopher Doyle in a fever of longing and beauty-stricken awe. It's as if Wong threw out the mythic story, kept its action-figure characters, and encased them in a chamber of romantic suffering where they would never age. It sounds pretentious, and maybe it is—but to get lost in it you need little more than eyes, patience and the lingering pang of loving someone who didn't love you back. In subtitled Mandarin and Cantonese. —Jim Ridley (Opens Wednesday at Green Hills)
AUSTRALIA The corn is as high as an elephant's eye is this curio from Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann—essentially a musical version of Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor with the production numbers deleted, but the rampaging artifice and lust for capital-S Significance left quizzically intact. Using toy-like sets, gushers of CGI and animated maps, the extravagantly gifted Luhrmann invokes everything from spaghetti Westerns to Gone With the Wind and Giant to inflate the romance of prissy Brit Lady Ashley (Nicole Kidman) and the rough-hewn Drover (Hugh Jackman) into instant myth. All it's missing is Paul Hogan singing "Down Under" with a chorus of emu-riding koalas, and for about an hour it's rousing fun to watch the strutting cavalcade of Aussie favorites (Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson, Walkabout's David Gulpilil) as the director shoots the moon for melodramatic excess: Fistfights! Stampedes! Drownings! Racist villains! If you think Luhrmann's above threats of ranch foreclosure from a mustachioed baddie—David Wenham, meet Snidely Whiplash—you don't know Baz. But the damn thing goes on for nearly three hours, and the more messianic its intentions become—especially in a central plot involving a lovable urchin (Brandon Walters) and the appalling forced servitude of half-caste and aboriginal children—the campier it gets. The title begs for an exclamation point; the movie tries but doesn't earn it. —Jim Ridley (Opens Wednesday)
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN Attention, everyone who saw Twilight last weekend: This movie will rock your world. I kinda like Catherine Hardwicke's teen-vampire reverie, with its unabashedly feminine sensibility, its blood-drained look and its emphasis on feeling over effects—but this Swedish vampire thriller, an overseas sensation lighting up the Internet (it's already #215 on the IMDB's Top 250 films of all time), has the scares, the shivers and the giddy streak of perversity Twilight is missing. Based also on a best-selling book—screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist adapted his own novel—Tomas Alfredson's character study follows Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), a lonely boy menaced by bullies in his snowy, featureless apartment complex. He finds a companion in a pale, reticent girl, Eli (Lina Leandersson), who lives with an older man (her father?) behind carefully covered windows. Soon ravaged bodies begin to turn up, and Oskar must decide whether his loyalties lie with his fellow bloodsucker bait or with his captivating, ravenous new friend. While the present resurgence of vampire movies over zombie shockers hints at a horror-cinema shift from ravishment to seduction—a degree of acquiescence that's a lot more interesting morally—squeamishness and confusion about teen sexuality are as pervasive here as they are in Twilight, without the idealized romanticism. But if anything, the bond between the preteen protagonists seems even stronger here, made especially unsettling by its degrees of innocence. Director Alfredson and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema (who's going to be getting a lot of work) frame their creepiest images with a surreal matter-of-fact tidiness that gets under your skin, and the gore effects, though sparing, are deployed for seat-clearing uproar. Spread the word—this one's a keeper. In subtitled Swedish. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at The Belcourt)
FOUR CHRISTMASES To brand, then dismiss, this seasonal allergen as a disappointment would be giving it too much credit. Never, for a second, did this New Line Cinema cast-off scream or even whisper decent in the run-up to its opening. The story of couple Kate (Reese Witherspoon) and Brad (Vince Vaughn)—not married, might as well be—who, fogged in on Dec. 25, put their planned Fiji frolic on hold to visit their four divorced parents in the course of a single day, the movie doesn't offer a single surprise within its scant 82 minutes, which feel like at least twice that. There's happiness and cheer and more than the occasional tear dropped between shouting matches and withering stares, all pre-assembled and gift-wrapped by the ho-ho hos at The Studio. There was every reason to hope for more: Four Christmases was directed by Seth Gordon, who made the bittersweet, hilarious documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, and Vaughn and Witherspoon would seem as sure a pairing as pancakes and bacon on Christmas morning. But even there, the magic's off: He's too much, she's too little. The movie's pace is lethargic; it desperately needs a laugh track, only the joke's terrible to begin with. Still, it's not as bad as Vaughn's last movie: Fred Claus, last year's holiday lump of coal. —Robert Wilonsky (Opens Wednesday)
TRANSPORTER 3 Once again, good taste and common sense cower in the backseat as Jason Statham—super-ripped, bullet-headed and expression-adjusted to Perma-Scowl—reprises his role as the world's studliest deliveryman. The package, this time, is a Ukrainian diplomat's kidnapped daughter (Natalya Rudakova), a bargaining chip played by thuggish corporateers to thwart environmental reforms; the gimmick is a liquid-bomb bracelet set to go boom if Statham strays more than 75 feet from his car. Fat chance of that: Statham's single-minded gearhead only has eyes for his Audi A8, allowing himself to be seduced only so he can get back his keys. Directed by Olivier Megaton (no shit) and scripted by longtime collaborators Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, the movie has more lags in action than either of the previous episodes, and somehow the dialogue is even more daft. (When easygoing detective buddy François Berléand isn't sidetracking the action with musings on Dostoyevsky, the leads pass the time between martial-arts throwdowns, 200-mph chases and extinction-level explosions with not one but four separate discussions of cooking technique.) But here's all fans need to know: Yes, Statham strips to the waist multiple times; yes, two dozen hopelessly outnumbered kung fu goons take on our lone hero one by one; and yes, he manages to outpace his Audi by bicycling through a congested sweatshop, freestyling over tables and down hallways, and Evel Knieveling through an upstairs window. In the Besson universe, God bless it, this is called "realism." —Jim Ridley (Opens Wednesday)
