To many, Malden may have seemed a curious candidate for stardom, with his stocky build, balding pate, and famously huge nose (which grew increasingly large when he broke it multiple times playing basketball). He certainly never stood in line to become a screen heartthrob, per contemporaries Marlon Brando or Paul Newman, but he parlayed his average looks into a decades-long string of everyman character roles, rendered on each occasion with a kind of quiet intensity that brought weight and emotional power to dozens of skilled interpretations, and won him legions of fans. Although Malden rose out of the method acting environment that wrought a new era of realism in American cinema, and took classes at the Group Theater and Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio, he blatantly rejected the idea of any formalized approach to acting and later reflected in his autobiography: “I do have a method – any method that works.”

Karl Malden began life in Gary, Indiana circa 1912, amid humble beginnings – as Mladen Sekulovich, the son of a Serbian immigrant steelworker who later drove a milk truck. Early on, Mladen followed in the steps of his father by working in a steel mill, and handled occasional milk deliveries, but he soon discovered that his passion lay in the theater. Revealing a formidable amount of self-determination, he set out for Chicago’s legendary Goodman Theater with a few hundred dollars in his pocket that he planned to use to study acting; in addition to following through on these plans, he built sets at the Goodman and used the money to support himself and pay for additional schooling. For a time, it looked as though Sekulovich would be forced to permanently return to Gary and hit the milk route, but rescue came in the form of an invaluable connection with playwright Robert Ardrey, whom Sekulovich had met in Chicago. Ardrey wrote Mladen a letter, inviting him to come to New York and audition for a forthcoming play. That never happened as planned (the play itself went unproduced), but while in Manhattan, Malden auditioned for Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman and landed his first stage role: four lines in the Group Theater’s production of The Golden Boy. He also developed a lifelong friendship with legend-in-the-making Kazan; the latter encouraged him to change his name to the more Anglicized Karl Malden. Thus began the young man’s journey through stage and film roles.

Following Malden’s World War II service, work came quickly and furiously. 1947 represented a breakthrough year for the burgeoning actor – the year that witnessed him landing stage roles in All My Sons (as the son of a profiteer played by Ed Begley, Sr.) and the seminal Tennessee Williams gothic A Streetcar Named Desire, in a role as Mitch alongside Marlon Brando’s brutish Stanley Kowalski. In both instances, he made audiences sit up and take notice, and from there, it represented merely a short leap into the 1951 film version of Streetcar (for which Malden won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar) and the 1954 Best Picture winner Waterfront.

A third collaboration between Malden, Williams, and Kazan – the 1956 Baby Doll – gave the censors fits, with its tale of a middle aged lecher (Malden) and his nymphette wife (Carroll Baker) who sleeps in a crib and sucks her thumb, and the Sicilian seductor (Eli Wallach) who turns the marriage upside down. It also drew a less-than-glowing critical response. But it kept Malden in the limelight, and received a host of Oscar nominations.

In the years to follow, Malden continued to rack up a formidable series of roles in A-list features. Some of the more prominent included Brando’s directorial debut One-Eyed Jacks (1961), The Great Impostor (1961), How the West Was Won (1962), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and Ken Russell’s Harry Palmer outing Billion Dollar Brain (1967).

The 1970s brought Malden a substantial amount of attention on the small screen. He starred for several seasons (1972-77) as Detective Lieutenant Mike Stone on the police drama The Streets of San Francisco (opposite a young Michael Douglas), and in a series of now iconic advertisements for American Express that found Malden imploring viewers: “Never leave home without it.” The actor continued to work steadily through the 1980s and into the 1990s, though his profile diminished and the quality of individual projects occasionally waned – witness Malden’s roles as a NASA director in the poorly-conceived disaster picture Meteor (1979), a wealthy gangster in the sequel The Sting II (1983) and a child molester father in the execrable Martin Ritt courtroom drama Nuts (1987). But as variable as some of these projects were, Malden’s acting levels never once flagged, and indeed, he deservedly won critical raves late in his career for his portrayal of a father-in-law hell-bent on justice in the telemovie Fatal Vision (1984). In his final decade, he lent a fine guest starring role to an episode of Aaron Sorkin’s series The West Wing.

From 1989 to 1992, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made Malden its President - a fitting tribute to one of the heavyweights of film acting. He drew on that status in 1999, when he urged the Academy to award an honorary Oscar to Elia Kazan despite the opposition of many who remembered the director’s much-maligned decision to testify on the House Unamerican Activities Committee. The effort succeeded.

This time Allen casts Larry David in the part he would have played himself — Boris Yellnikoff, a retired physicist who never misses the chance to tell people he almost won a Nobel Prize. Nowadays, though, he’s a highly educated blowhard, spouting off opinion after opinion about the decrepit state of humanity with his friends — at least that’s what he does when he isn’t insulting the children whose parents have hired him to teach chess to their offspring. One day, Melody (Evan Rachel Wood), a homeless Southern girl, approaches him outside his apartment begging for money. Against his better judgment, Boris lets her into his home and quickly learns that her parents recently split up. She discovers that Boris’ misanthropy is all bark and no bite, and as they become friends, her naïveté busts through his innate cynicism. Soon she’s staying at his place, paying rent after she secures a job as a dog walker, and she becomes a more cultured person from spending so much time with Boris. After she goes out on a bad date with a guy her age, the May-December couple realizes they’re in love, and they get married.

If that were the extent of the movie’s plot, this would be just another in a long line of Woody’s Pygmalion-inspired bittersweet romantic comedies, but it turns out their relationship is just the first act. The film takes a somewhat unexpected turn when each of Melody’s parents shows up to try and rescue her from the city. Her mother, Marietta (Patricia Clarkson), is simply aghast that Melody would marry someone who is not only decades older, but Jewish as well. After hanging out with the couple for a few days, though, Marietta goes on a date with one of Boris’ friends, a respected art critic, who tells her she’s a talented photographer. Soon Marietta has a thriving art career, and although she learns to love life in The Big Apple, she still never takes a liking to her son-in-law. Eventually Melody’s father, John (Ed Begley Jr.), arrives at Boris’ door looking for both his daughter and his wife, with whom he wants to reconcile, and his time in the city also changes him in unexpected ways.

While it’s easy to point out how often Allen returns to the theme of an older man being romantically involved with a much younger woman, this time out he avoids the inherent “ick factor” thanks to his actors. Larry David plays Boris with a pronounced lack of sexuality — he more or less says he’s not interested in sex anymore — and because of that he never comes off as a dirty old man, just a cantankerous old fart, while Evan Rachel Wood is simply, irresistibly charming, so you can understand why a man of Boris’ age would want to nurture her.

For longtime Allen fans, it’s a kick to have him filming in New York City again, to see his characters walk through the town while pontificating on every subject imaginable. But the downside is that what they say just isn’t all that funny most of the time. Sure, there are laughs, especially in Evan Rachel Wood’s dumb-girl delivery, but the film’s Bush-era red state-vs.-blue state attitude suddenly feels out of synch with Obama in the White House. The biggest problem is that Boris’ attitudes and opinions about life are never really challenged — in fact they are validated by the movie’s tidy ending. And, since it’s difficult not to assume that Boris speaks for Allen, this gives Whatever Works a disappointing air of self-satisfaction — bordering on smugness — that would be easier to forgive if only the whole thing were much funnier. Sadly, Allen the writer/director has become a lot like his most recent creation — all bark and no bite.

Best Picture:
Away We Go
The Brothers Bloom
Duplicity
Two Lovers
Up

Best Director:
Rian Johnson – The Brothers Bloom
Henry Selick – Coraline
Tony Gilroy – Duplicity
James Gray – Two Lovers
Pete Docter - Up

Best Actor:
Robert Downey Jr. – The Soloist
Jamie Foxx – The Soloist
Clive Owen – Duplicity
River Phoenix – Two Lovers
Paul Rudd – I Love You, Man

Best Actress:
Sasha Grey – The Girlfriend Experience
Gwyneth Paltrow – Two Lovers
Julia Roberts – Duplicity
Maya Rudolph – Away We Go
Tilda Swinton – Julia

Best Supporting Actor:
Jason Bateman – State of Play
Zach Galifinakis – The Hangover
Chris Messina – Away We Go
Mark Ruffalo – The Brothers Bloom
Tom Wilkinson – Duplicity

Best Supporting Actress:
Kathy Bates – Cheri
Melanie Lynskey – Away We Go
Carrie Preston – Duplicity
Isabella Rossellini – Two Lovers
Vinessa Shaw – Two Lovers

Best Original Screenplay:
Rian Johnson — The Brothers Bloom
Tony Gilroy — Duplicity
John Hamburg and Larry Levin — I Love You, Man
James Gray & Ric Menello — Two Lovers
Pete Docter & Bob Peterson and Tom McCarthy — Up

Johnny Depp stars as Dillinger, whom we first meet as he’s leading a violent nine-man escape from Indiana State Prison. He and his gang soon get down to work robbing banks, relying on a complex network of syndicate cooperation and one-step-ahead criminal smarts to stay out of jail. They fill their off-hours with swanky Chicago parties, which is how Dillinger meets a dark-haired minx named Billie (played by Marion Cotillard, whose usual high-caliber acting chops are occasionally belied by her extremely inconsistent accent), and falls immediately in love. Sadly, we know that their romance is probably of the doomed variety, as Dillinger — despite becoming a celebrity for the anti-heroic times — is the most wanted man in America, and J. Edgar Hoover (played with a rapid-fire, old-timey accent and impressive fat-face by Billy Crudup) has created an entire federal task force devoted to his capture, led by stand-up Southern gentleman Melvin Purvis (played with even greater solemnity than usual by Christian Bale).

The real-life Dillinger was a full-on rock star in the desperate 1930s, when people were ecstatic to see someone bilk the institutions that had let so many down. Depp’s performance as the swaggering folk hero offers a lot of nuance in this regard, depicting the renegade as a natural celebrity, effortlessly charismatic and smirkingly self-aware. Dillinger was, after all, known to have peppered his stick-ups with biting quips and counter-jumping acrobatics that he copied from the movies. And yet, it stays clear in Depp’s portrayal that he’s an authentic outlaw, a reasonably skilled and certainly accomplished gangster, not just some Bonnie and Clyde-type newsreel cad — all buzz with no rap sheet to back it up.

There are plenty of scenes devoted to what would generally be considered gangster movie badassery, stuff like police shoot-outs conducted largely with machine guns and bank heists featuring Depp in a fedora and overcoat, wielding two hand cannons. But while these moments are impressive, and even sometimes awesome, like everything else in Public Enemies, they’re also often joyless. Mann just isn’t interested in celebration; almost everything is deliberate and grinding — an idea of realism that never builds towards triumph, or even tragedy. If movies like Collateral and The Insider are anything to go by, it would seem pretty clear that Mann just prefers tension to excitement, and Public Enemies proves once again that he can create beautiful cinema out of this perspective. But for audiences who can’t bring themselves to share his rather sedate vision, beauty might not be enough.

As we rejoin the motley herd from the two previous Ice Age films, Manny the mammoth (Ray Romano) nervously pampers his expectant mate, Ellie (Queen Latifah), while his best friend, Diego the saber-toothed tiger (Denis Leary), bristles at the thought of Manny’s domesticated existence. Meanwhile, Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) continues to annoy everybody, and Scrat the rock rat is still trying to get that acorn. When Sid accidentally discovers an underground world populated by dinosaurs, he steals three dino eggs so that he, too, can become a “mommy.” After the little ones hatch, their real mom comes to retrieve them, and snatches Sid as well, hauling all of them back to the dinosaur kingdom, a place that looks an awful lot like The Land Before Time. This, of course, prompts the others to band together yet again in order to rescue their friend.

What sets this third installment of the animated series apart from its predecessors is the state-of-the-art 3-D effects. That’s not to say this is better than the other two movies; it’s not. For the most part, it’s the exact same — right down to the makeshift family remembering that they do, in fact, like each other and should probably help each other out. It’s a lesson the characters have already had to learn twice — you’d think they would have absorbed it by now.

The tired performances don’t help at all. Ray Romano sounds like he just ate a really big meal, and Denis Leary never makes Diego as ferocious as he has been in the past — not even when he’s supposed to be saving the day. Poor Queen Latifah suffers from such a lack of interesting material that you might not realize she’s the voice of Ellie at all. Only Simon Pegg — who joins the hit franchise as a swashbuckling, possibly psychotic weasel named Buck — sounds energetic.

What all this means is that little ones will probably have a fine time — dinosaurs are for the most part just inherently appealing to seven-year-olds — but parents may begin to pray that their little ones grow up before the release of Ice Age 4.

When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 1996, a nation that had already been battered by years of war was suddenly moved back in time, as the new leadership banned television and music, declaring both were sacrilegious under Islamic law. There was resistance to these new laws, but it was quiet, and even with the Taliban out of power — a development applauded by everyone who speaks in this film — Afghanistan remains very much an Islamic state, with conservative voices dominating politics and public discourse. With greater freedom has come people willing to push boundaries, however gently, and now that television is once again legal in Afghanistan, a handful of independent television outlets have sprung up. One such outfit, Tolo TV, has scored one the nation’s biggest hits with a series called Afghan Star. Daoud Sediqi, the show’s director and host, ran an underground television repair shop during the days of the Taliban, and now he’s bringing Afghan-style pop music to the airwaves, as well as a taste of democracy — like American Idol, Afghan Star allows viewers at home to vote for their favorite performers via text messaging.

In this film, director Marking follows four contestants who make it from open auditions (which appear to include at least one Afghan answer to William Hung) into the ranks for the contest’s ten finalists. Nineteen-year-old Rafi Naabzada from Mazar-e-Sharif is handsome, charming, and well-mannered, explaining that he wants to represent a hopeful future where music has replaced war in Afghan culture. Hailing from the Hazara regions, Hameed Sakhizada, 20, has a slightly more ambitious agenda — he’s a classically trained musician who also performs popular music and wants to go into politics some day (he declares “if the people want pop, I have to give them pop,” suggesting he already has a campaigner’s instincts). Lema Sahar is one of the few women in the competition; 25 years old, she still lives with her mother in Kandahar, where Islamic extremists remain in power and she must take lessons with her vocal coach in secret. And Setara Hussainzada, a 22-year-old from Herat, represents how far Afghanistan has come since the Taliban fell, and how far it has yet to go. Setara’s music and personal style are clearly informed by the West, she obviously enjoys a visit to the beauty salon and posing for the camera, she has the closest thing to a diva moment in the film (after a poorly received performance, she’s briefly and vocally cross with a cameraman who insists on filming her as she cries), and when she’s asked if she’s ever kissed a man on the lips, she coyly answers that she doesn’t have a husband to kiss her, then speaks with a bit more candor about how women are motivated by love, but some men are more interested in a woman’s body — a common statement elsewhere, but bold in this context.

Two constants in Afghan Star are poverty and the scars of war; except for mosques, it’s rare to see a public building that doesn’t show some sign of bombing or bullets, and even as the contestants dress up for the camera, it’s clear that most have one good suit that they have to wear over and over (the contest’s grand prize is five thousand dollars — not so much here, a fortune in Kabul) while many fans are dressed in little better than rags. In a land where so much seems grim, it’s not hard to understand why so many get caught up in the excitement of the competition, as families set up makeshift antennas to pull in Tolo TV for the Friday-night broadcast, contestants are mobbed by fans in the street (one woman dressed in a head-to-toe burka pulls out her cell phone to snap a picture of Rafi as he stops at a mosque), superfans print and paste up posters promoting their favorite contestants, and some folks even buy thousands of airtime cards so they can hand them out as an inducement to vote often for their favored singers. (One man even tries to sell his car so he can buy more text minutes to support Hameed.) It’s said a third of Afghanistan’s population watched Afghan Star’s grand finale, but even though it’s clear everyone loves a good song in Afghanistan just as anywhere else, the very different stakes of the game are revealed when Setara dares to remove her head scarf and dance a bit during a performance. Some observers are literally open-mouthed in shock, and it isn’t long before an angry man on the street calls for her death. Muslim clerics bitterly denounce Setara and Afghan Star, and a producer for the show compares her to Shakira and Jennifer Lopez (she’s nothing short of demure compared to either of those performers). And while Lema strives to be the image of propriety on camera, she soon requires police protection just for the simple act of singing on television. On the other hand, Hameed is able to sing a number about falling in love with a Hindu girl with no apparent reprisals.

During the movie, director Marking periodically visits an Afghan family who declare they are Afghan Star’s “biggest fans,” and at once point the mother and father talk about meeting in college. They show snapshots of themselves in the 1980s, decked out in funky, hilariously outdated threads, and though the scene is funny, it also carries a wistful sadness; once upon a time, Afghanistan was a land where people had the freedom to dress, act and learn as they pleased, and it’s obvious that’s no longer the case in 2007, where Setara becomes a public scandal even in Kabul, the nation’s most liberal city. The film Afghan Star is one of the most entertaining documentaries of recent memory; Phil Stebbing’s camerawork perfectly captures the rough-hewn beauty of Afghanistan, Marking and editor Ash Jenkins have given the material a breezy pace and work up an impressive degree of suspense in the final reel, and the film’s principal characters are engaging and often fascinating personalities. But Afghan Star is about much more than a televised talent show; it’s a crash course in just how much separates American and Afghan culture despite our common enthusiasms, and it’s a though-provoking meditation on just what freedom means, both in theory and practice.

The film benefits enormously from the low-key, contemplative scenes that wisely depict the confused and messy emotional states of Pietro following the precipitous event that sets his life on a different course. We witness his emotional isolation, a benumbing calm that suddenly (amid a private moment) explodes into a torrent of grief, and an overwhelming disorientation about how to proceed with his life or whether to proceed with his life. Pietro’s simple decision to spend his days in the park across from Claudia’s classroom speaks volumes about an inner terror tied to the need for security, to hang on to the one treasure in his life that he has left and to provide a warm center of reassurance to the young girl about his own permanence at a critical stage of her life. As an actor, Moretti projects and explores these emotional states with the effortlessness of a master.

All of this, of course, is prime Moretti (even though Grimaldi takes the directorial reins, Moretti co-authored the script and his influence can be felt throughout). And anyone who reveled in the star’s Golden Palm winner The Son’s Room (2001) will find more of the same gentle human poetry about familial loss in this outing.

Unfortunately, the scenes that deal with the grieving only represent half of the equation in Chaos. The other half — the portion of the drama tied to Pietro’s work life — feels ineptly conceived. Though Pietro’s job, in the broadest sense, involves some sort of corporate-based television production, we’re never entirely clear on the specific tasks that it demands of him or his role vis-à-vis those of his colleagues. Also, when his co-workers turn up in the park to discuss goings-on with him, the conflicts that arise surrounding the corporation’s merger strike one as badly muddled and hopelessly confusing — particularly a recurring Catholic metaphor about Pietro as one-third of the “holy trinity” within the corporation.

The film’s tone feels inconsistent, as well. At times, Moretti and his co-scribes attempt to work in off-color humor, such as a subplot about a colleague’s mentally ill wife stricken by vulgar outbursts that she cannot remember afterward. The purpose of these moments is anyone’s guess; the scriptwriters may have been attempting to provide a tonal counterpoint to the bittersweet melancholy of the father-daughter scenes, but instead of functioning in that manner, the scenes violate the mood of the surrounding sequences and feel offensive.

That points to another issue inherent in the film. It grows shockingly raw and profane at times with obscene (though not quite pervasive) language that feels extremely ill-advised and out of place given the subject matter, and a third-act sex scene between Pietro and a rich female acquaintance is so graphic, it almost brings the film into the land of softcore. The explicit sex wouldn’t be an issue if it blended in fluidly with the remainder of the drama or even if it represented the culmination of a lengthy character arc in Pietro that we have witnessed throughout the motion picture. But such is not the case. The roughness of the intercourse (which includes an act of sexual abuse) suggests the need for Pietro to extinguish rage and hostility, but this is the first sign of such emotion that we have witnessed, so it feels pulled from way out of left field — an assaultive sequence, it succeeds only in shocking the audience in the worst sense.

As a film that takes on far more than it can handle, Quiet Chaos would feel far more effective if stripped down to the sequences between Pietro and Claudia, and those that explore Pietro’s emotions. In its current state, it strikes one as incongruous, disjointed, and only partially successful.

Perhaps My Sister’s Keeper should be shown in theaters that offer seats with tissue dispensers built right into the arm rests; it’s a true weepy in the most literal sense of the term, and it never misses an opportunity to tug at our tear ducts in telling the tale of a young girl conceived to keep her leukemia-stricken sister alive. The concept of the movie alone may be enough to choke up any loving parent, but recruit the kind of talent that can make the entire thing believable and even the most cynical of viewers are likely to get a little misty-eyed. Occasionally overbearing, yet consistently well played, it’s the kind of film that audiences turn to when they need a good cry.

A mere glance into Anna Fitzgerald’s (Abigail Breslin) eyes reveals a profound sadness in her being. Anna was conceived for one reason and one reason alone — to keep her sister, Kate (Sofia Vassilieva), alive. Kate was just a young girl when she was diagnosed with leukemia, and when the prospect of finding a compatible bone marrow donor proved more difficult than either her mother, Sara (Cameron Diaz), or her father, Brian (Jason Patric), had anticipated, they made the controversial decision to let doctors engineer a genetic match for Kate for the explicit purpose of keeping her alive. Now that Anna is old enough to think for herself, however, she hires slick TV lawyer Campbell Alexander (Alec Baldwin) to sue her parents for the right to her own body. But Anna obviously loves her older sister and realizes the repercussions her actions will bring about, so why go to such extremes when the result will be the death of her sister, and the likely destruction of her entire family?

My Sister’s Keeper takes a while to find its footing, but still stands on shaky ground once it finally does. In the early scenes, it feels as if screenwriting partners Nick Cassavetes and Jeremy Leven were struggling to translate the story for the screen. Frequent fades to black stifle the narrative by feeling like chapter breaks rather than naturally flowing scenes, time jumping leads to the occasional instance of momentary disorientation, and constant voice-over narration by a variety of characters prevents the story from developing organically. Once these issues are resolved fairly early in the film, however, My Sister’s Keeper evolves into not only a highly efficient tearjerker, but also a genuinely absorbing meditation on the unforeseen philosophical quandaries brought about by such a difficult — and unconventional — method of treatment.

Alas, the resolution of those initial issues doesn’t prevent the latter half of the film from being marred by some other, perhaps even greater, creative missteps. The decision to dictate emotions to the viewer via an achingly maudlin soundtrack is dubious at best, and hopelessly hacky at worst (do we really need that pensive cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” to ensure that we realize the dying adolescent just wants to live a normal life?); the character of Anna and Kate’s floundering brother feels woefully underdeveloped; and a pivotal romance that forms the foundation of the second act is hastily jettisoned in a way that makes logical sense but robs us of any emotional resolution. Thankfully the director and his actors were on the same wavelength, and solid performances by a particularly strong cast prevent the film from veering toward unintentional camp. In the end it’s Diaz, Breslin, Vassilieva, and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel who elevate My Sister’s Keeper above your typical Lifetime Movie of the Week. Any film about a dying child is bound to tug at the heartstrings; perhaps the drama here would have been more effective had the filmmakers put less emphasis on trying to play our pulmonary arteries like weeping violins, and instead allowed the sound of our breaking hearts to make their own triste melodies.

Set in the waning years of the Belle Époque, the movie stars Pfeiffer as the wealthy Lea de Lonval, a celebrated courtesan who is approaching, we are informed, “a certain age.” She has a lifelong frenemy in Charlette Peloux (Kathy Bates), who also made her fortune selling herself to royalty. As the story begins, Lea enters into an affair with Chéri (Rupert Friend), Charlotte’s libidinous 19-year-old son. Much to their mutual surprise and joy, they spend six carefree years together. However, Charlotte breaks up the happy couple by arranging a marriage between her son and the daughter of another courtesan. Although Chéri and Lea convinced themselves that their time together was nothing serious, the truth is that they fell madly in love, and that fact leads each of the lovebirds to years of misery while they are apart.

While this description gives the impression that Chéri might be a typically staid Masterpiece Theatre/Merchant-Ivory movie, Christopher Hampton’s reliably sly script actually contains a healthy amount of razor-sharp dialogue. Pfeiffer and Bates are superb together as gossipy biddies who both long for acceptance into high society, but know it’s an impossibility considering their chosen profession. Thanks to their catty banter, the early part of the movie has some real bite. Pfeiffer also generates genuine chemistry with Friend, who uses his male-model looks to great effect throughout the movie — rarely has a top hat looked so sexy. Chéri exudes a bored entitlement that befits his playful immaturity, and meshes harmoniously with Lea’s cynical self-possession — a mindset she maintains precisely because genuine love is the enemy of the courtesan.

Sadly, the long middle section of the movie, when the lovers are separated, is a slog. Hampton adapted the script from a pair of novels by the famous French author Colette, but it feels more like the movie came from a short story that’s been padded to reach movie length. Sure, the art direction, photography, and costumes are always a pleasure to look at, but our main characters take so long to do something about their unhappiness that they lose our interest. As good as the actors are, they can’t get the momentum back when Chéri and Lea finally see each other again. At the film’s conclusion, when Chéri comes to an understanding of how his life turned out, it should have the emotional kick of either tragedy or jet-black comedy, but because the movie never regains the passion it had early on, we’re left not feeling much of anything.

As fans mourn the 50 year-old performer’s unexpected death, AMG’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine memorializes Jackson’s life, career, and impact on the entertainment industry.