Newsday's Movie Reviews

'Speed Racer'

Somewhere between a Mario Bros. video game and Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Speed Racer" is one of the most visually audacious films to come along in years. With its supersaturated palette and slick surfaces, "Speed Racer" looks like a video-art installation at the Whitney, but it also wants to be an old-fashioned Hollywood family film. Against all odds it succeeds, making for a spectacular - and spectacularly strange - viewing experience.

'Battle for Haditha'

Nick Broomfield, the loose-cannon British documentarian, has never shied away from inflammatory subjects ("Biggie and Tupac," "Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer"), and for this fictionalized feature he's chosen a doozy: the U.S. Marines accused of murdering 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005.

'Turn the River'

Why has Chris Eigeman, the longtime member of Whit Stillman's acting ensemble ("Metropolitan," "The Last Days of Disco"), waited so long to get behind the camera? "Turn the River," his directing debut (he also wrote the script), is a small-scale but thoroughly engrossing drama full of strong performances and sharp dialogue. It's a noir with a female lead in Famke Janssen (the "X-Men" flicks), who hides her supermodel beauty behind the hardened, haunted face of a pool shark hoping to hustle up enough money to skip town with her young son, Gulley (Jaymie Dornan).

'Before the Rains'

Santosh Sivan's "The Terrorist" (1999) was as memorable for its lush imagery as for its nerve-racking immediacy, and he brings the same visual opulence to "Before the Rains." It's no surprise the veteran cinematographer's eighth film as a director - and his first in English - bears the Merchant-Ivory imprimatur: It takes place at the end of the Raj, among people in a colonial quandary.

'The Babysitters'

You didn't really need the Miley Cyrus photo "scandal" to be aware of the tart-ification of American girlhood. In pop culture, at least, it's endemic. As is exploitation. So we can blame writer-director David Ross for what? Being ahead of the curve? There are plenty in "The Babysitters" in which child-minding morphs into dad-tending: After the lanky, unsure Shirley (Katherine Waterston) has a romantic moment with suburban dad Michael ( John Leguizamo) - and gets a big tip - she parlays her newfound entrepreneurship into a schoolwide hooker ring.

'Tracey Fragments'

In this flawed but occasionally powerful short feature, Ellen Page ("Juno," "Smart People") doesn't exactly stretch herself playing a teenager with the snark and smarts of a 40-year-old. Here she's Tracey Berkowitz, one of those depressed, sensitive misfits destined to become a punk-rocker, a poet or both. (The script, by Maureen Medved, is based on her novel.)

'Made of Honor'

Patrick Dempsey has a lot going for him, including an interestingly distracted quality, as if he can't stop thinking about his patients even when he's not playing a doctor. Yet his success at this point remains slightly ahead of his skill set. Like a lot of medium-talented folks, he's primarily lucky. He's McDreamy on "Grey's Anatomy" and he offered solid backcourt assistance in last year's hit "Enchanted." Now Dempsey stars in a wedding-centric romantic comedy called "27 Dresses." Sorry, "My Best Friend's Wedding." Sorry, "Made of Honor."

'Redbelt'

It sounds like a great idea: David Mamet, the playwright famous for brutal dialogue ("Glengarry Glen Ross") and fiendish plot twists ("House of Games"), brings his formidable brain to the usually brainless genre of martial-arts action flicks. All the usual Mametian ingredients are here - con-men, magic tricks, the cauliflower-nosed actor Ricky Jay - but there's also the promise of the visual excitement that comes when men pummel each other on screen.

'Fugitive Pieces'

Hopscotching time on film is never an easy task, but Canadian writer-director Jeremy Podeswa handles it with skill and care in his lovely, absorbing adaptation of Anne Michaels' lauded novel about a circumspect writer haunted by his traumatic youth.

'Viva'

The sexploitation films of the 1960s and '70s are always ripe for satire, and filmmaker-actress Anna Biller takes her shot with "Viva," the story of a bored housewife who joins the sexual revolution by becoming a prostitute.

'The Favor'

It's been quite a month for middle-aged men whose stalled lives are jump-started by unexpected encounters. First came Dennis Quaid's cranky English professor in "Smart People" and Richard Jenkins' sad-sack economics prof in "The Visitor."

'Son of Rambow'

In this funny, eccentric kids' film, writer-director Garth Jennings ("The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") casts two terrific newcomers (Bill Milner and Will Poulter, 11 and 13, respectively) as Will Proudfoot, a sunny-faced kid bound to a restrictive religious order called The Brethren, and Lee Carter, the rebellious son of a rich, absent mother, who embark on the delightfully odd project of remaking a Sylvester Stallone flick. Armed with a VHS camcorder and homemade props, the two misfits inadvertently create a mini-Hollywood within their school and soon find themselves schmoozing with the popular kids. (One clever scene depicts a bunch of fashionably debauched youths snorting scented erasers.) The film occasionally loses its own plot but always retains its sense of magic by staying firmly rooted in the heads of its two young heroes, who view the outside world with wonder but retreat into inner worlds when necessary. Those worlds collide, blur and finally co-exist, which, when you think about it, is pretty much what it means to grow up.

'Mr. Lonely'

The late Stu Troup, Newsday's former jazz writer, once said of Wynton Marsalis that he'd never be great until someone broke his heart. With this in mind, you have to wonder about the emotional breadth and crazy beauty of "Mister Lonely" and how it now comes from the onetime poster child of abrasive transgression, Harmony Korine.

'Baby Mama'

What may be the first real outsourcing comedy, "Baby Mama" is like a pacifier: floppy, nourishment-free and may even keep your teeth from growing in straight. It stars the likable Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, as a wannabe mother and her trailer-trash surrogate, but it's mild to the point of pabulum, taking a pretty fertile topic - surrogate motherhood - and making it inoffensive to anyone. This is not an endorsement.

Review: 'Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay'

Greasy, hazy good fun, "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" (2004) got by on a 4 a.m. mixture of explosive-emission toilet jokes, gratuitous nudity and Neil Patrick Harris as himself. Everything took place in one night, hinging on a single quest rife with detours. Crass? Yes. But there was a merry spirit to it all.

'Standard Operating Procedure'

There's a reason that Errol Morris, after 30 years of filmmaking, isn't a celebrity or "brand" like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock. He doesn't mug for his own camera or force an agenda. Instead, he tells others' stories, nailing down facts while staying as objective as he can. It's an unfashionable approach. Folks used to call it journalism.

'Then She Found Me'

Gaunt, grim and wound as tight as a ukulele's string, April Epner (Helen Hunt), the elementary schoolteacher undergoing the mother of all midlife crises in "Then She Found Me," is a stern challenge to an audience's collective sympathy. We feel her pain, nonetheless, when, in swift succession, her adoptive mother dies, her Peter Pan husband (Matthew Broderick) abandons her for another woman and, out of the blue, her real mother (Bette Midler) turns out to be narcissistic talk-show queen Bernice Graves, who claims April is the fruit of a one-night stand with Steve McQueen.

'Deal'

In an industry built on someone getting a raw deal, few deals have been rawer than the post-"Boogie Nights" career of Burt Reynolds. He was marvelous as the patriarchal porn king in that film, and while the actor lined up plenty of work in the wake of his "Boogie Nights" Oscar nomination, none of it mattered as much.

'Deception'

It takes more than a middle-period- Hitler haircut and a pair of specs to render Ewan McGregor unto dweebdom. The actor may have undertaken one too many nude scenes in his career to convincingly inhabit the soul of a mouse, even one morphing into a rutting, wolfish Lothario.

'Roman de Gare'

ROMAN DE GARE (R). This fast-moving, brain-teasing mystery, the 49th film from the 70-year-old director Claude Lelouch ("A Man and a Woman"), begins by unraveling a skein of quintessentially French themes: identity, perception and, of course, sex. Dominique Pinon ("Amelie") plays a man loitering in a highway rest-stop who's either a serial killer, a ghostwriter for a bestselling author (the regal, vulnerable Fanny Ardant) or just another shlub having a midlife crisis.

'88 Minutes'

A cheap thriller with an expensive star, "88 Minutes" is fast, sleazy and serviceable - in other words, totally watchable - and has one point in its favor: It never tries to pretend it's a class act.

'Forgetting Sarah Marshall'

Is there something inherently funny about naked men? Not men whose pride has been wounded. Or whose manhood has been impugned. Whose illusions have been stomped on with golf shoes. Who have been stripped of every shred of self-respect and decency. We mean men with no pants on.

'The Life Before Her Eyes'

Whether playing a virginal nymphet in "Dangerous Liaisons" or a sword-wielding vigilante in "Kill Bill," Uma Thurman has always seemed, despite her unearthly beauty, human and woundable. As Diana, the haunted woman at the center of "The Life Before Her Eyes," Thurman has never looked more heartbreakingly fragile.

'The Forbidden Kingdom'

For true fans of martial-arts flicks, the first-ever pairing of the genre's two biggest stars, Jackie Chan and Jet Li, might have generated more sparks in a tougher, meaner film. Instead, "The Forbidden Kingdom" is a family film, aimed at those who have probably never seen earlier chop-sockies like Chan's "Drunken Master" or Li's "Shaolin Temple." That means the action is slowed down for younger eyes, mostly bloodless and often played for laughs.

'Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed'

Ben Stein, the actor, lawyer, columnist and onetime speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford, is probably smarter than you. He's definitely smarter than I am. What's galling about his new documentary, "Expelled," is that he seems to think we're both slobbering idiots.

'Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?'

Morgan Spurlock's 2004 exposé of the fast-food industry, "Super Size Me," was a smart, funny, imaginative documentary that marked a turning point in the form. Along with Michael Moore, Spurlock ushered in the age of the documentarian as personality.

'Constantine's Sword'

CONSTANTINE'S SWORD (unrated).

'Anamorph'

(3 STARS) ANAMORPH (R). There aren't many police-procedural/serial-killer thrillers that can claim painter Francis Bacon, camera obscura and Pope Innocent as plot devices, or for that matter anamorphosis - the technique of hiding one picture inside another, with it revealed only by the viewer's changed perspective.

'Dark Matter'

(2 STARS) DARK MATTER (R). A film almost impossible to review without giving everything away - especially everything that's wrong - "Dark Matter" is elegantly directed by the debuting Chen Shi-Zheng. It features several superb performances ( Meryl Streep, Liu Ye). And it concludes in a way that will have you asking whether the ending was misguided, or maybe it was just the rest of the movie.

'Smart People'

It's hard to say just how Dennis Quaid manages to make Lawrence Wetherhold, the sour, self-centered professor at the heart of "Smart People," anything close to likable. Wetherhold is not one of those stock Hollywood curmudgeons with gruff charm and a gooey center. He has no charm; he has no goo. Yet, Quaid finds what is funny and endearing and worthy in the character, and his performance holds this fine, if somewhat fragile, film together.

'Street Kings'

You can always count on James Ellroy for a night of feel-bad entertainment. In novels like "White Jazz" and "American Tabloid," his prose is blunt and brutal; the film adaptations of his books, like "L.A. Confidential" and "The Black Dahlia," mix the tough dialogue of old gangster flicks with modern, bloody action. The common threads are pervasive pessimism and cheerless violence.

'Prom Night'

There ought to be a rule, stashed in the Screen Actor's Guild bylaws, that every actor cast as a villain in a slasher film has to watch "Psycho" and write a paper on Anthony Perkins.

'Bra Boys'

BRA BOYS (R). The dashing young lords of California's Dogtown have nothing on the hard-core surf gangs of Australia, whose assaults on the world's scariest waves are matched, if not exceeded, by their full-contact battles with rivals, traitors and cops.

'Chaos Theory'

If actor Ryan Reynolds isn't careful (see: "Definitely, Maybe"), he's going to parlay his good looks and engaging presence into a full-time job as a game-show host.

'The Visitor'

THE VISITOR (PG-13). The "homeless, tempest-tossed" yearning to breathe free don't have to be emigres from oppression in Tom McCarthy's "The Visitor": They can be emotional exiles like Walter Vale, the hero of McCarthy's first film since "The Station Agent," and the boring white man extraordinaire.

'Young@Heart'

The premise of the new documentary "Young@Heart" makes it sound like some sort of bizarro-world " American Idol."

'The Ruins'

It would have been too easy for the old-time grindhouse hucksters to hype "The Ruins" with such in-your-face admonitions as: "You'll Never Trust Your Houseplants Again After You See ... THE RUINS!" Even though that's probably true, this particular serving of Saturday night gore is garnished with more measured-than-usual doses of creative tension and metaphorical possibility. Make no mistake, though. You're going to cringe plenty before it's over.

'Nim's Island'

Over the past five years, Walden Media has become a reliable purveyor of big, bright family fantasies from "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" to "Charlotte's Web." But there have been missteps along the way. (Remember "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium?")

'Leatherheads'

Silver-haired, square-jawed and twinkly eyed, George Clooney doesn't just look like a product of the Hollywood studio system circa 1930. He can direct like one, too.

'Shine a Light'

As "Shine a Light" opens, it looks as if it will be an epic battle of wills - the chaos of a Rolling Stones concert against the precision of director Martin Scorsese, the irresistible force of rock and roll against the unmovable object of filmmaking.

'Flight of the Red Balloon'

Inspired by Albert Lamorisse's enchanted "Red Balloon" of 1956, Hou Hsiao-hsien's first French-language film shows why the Taiwanese master is considered one of the world's great filmmakers.

'Sex and Death 101'

When Roderick (Simon Baker) gets an e-mail list of all the women he's ever slept with, he thinks it's a prank. When he realizes it includes all the women he will ever sleep with, "Sex and Death 101" becomes a not-quite-successful something else, including a burlesque of male libido and a treatise on love.

'Stop-Loss'

Despite Jon Stewart's Oscar-night jokes about all the Iraq war movies that no one goes to see, the five-year-old war is still relatively underrepresented in commercial films. And yet, on the rare occasion one surfaces, we view it through a thick mist of déj ... vu. Is it that all wars are fundamentally the same or just all war movies?

'21'

"The best thing about Vegas," says a character in the new suspense lark "21," "is you can become anything you want."

'Run Fat Boy Run'

Sometimes, Simon Pegg betrays too much suppleness, physically and otherwise, to convince you that he's packing a paunch as Dennis the lovelorn, chain-smoking slacker in "Run Fat Boy Run." But he's such a good actor that he makes you believe anything - anything, that is, except the notion that any sentient male Earthling, no matter how stupid or scared, could leave a pregnant woman looking like Thandie Newton standing at the altar.

'Priceless'

Gad Elmaleh, the disarming French-Moroccan star of "The Valet," is the chief reason to see this slick comic truffle set along the Cote d'Azur. Elmaleh elevates the nettlesome role of Jean, a retiring hotel bartender mistakenly thought to be a wealthy guest by Irene (Audrey Tautou), a serial gold-digger bored with her sugar daddy of the moment.

'My brother is an only child'

This saga of Italian siblings taking divergent political paths during the turbulent 1960s and '70s is, itself, a smart-alecky little brother to the similarly themed, but far longer and richer 2003 epic, "The Best of Youth." Elio Germano is Accio, a disenchanted seminary student who finds an outlet for his volatile, contrarian passions with Fascists in his hometown.

'Alexandra'

A fascination with the physical has marked many of the films of the great Alexander Sokurov, whether it's youth and vigor ("Father and Son"), age and infirmity ("Mother and Son") or the stamina of his cameraman (the famously single-take "Russian Ark").

'The Cool School'

With current-day Manhattan the amusement park of trust-fund babies, and artists being driven to the beaches of Coney Island, "The Cool School" should offer a note of encouragement:

'Flawless'

Caper films are supposed to be fun, and Demi Moore has seldom been described as that.

'Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns'

It can't be easy being Brenda, the woebegone Chicago mom played by Angela Bassett in "Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns." She supports three kids from three different (but equally absent) daddies, has run out of stall tactics for her many creditors and, when things couldn't get any worse, loses her job.

'Shutter'

Have you ever seen a horror film in which a character, against her better judgment, approaches a motionless body sitting in a chair facing the wall, then slowly turns it toward the camera? How about a horror film in which this happens more than once? How about three times?

'Drillbit Taylor'

That "Drillbit Taylor" is co-produced by Judd Apatow and co-written by Seth Rogen is temptation enough to consider this comedy about high school freshmen terrorized by bullies as "Superbad" on training wheels. There's even a chubby, woolly-headed little sourpuss (Troy Gentile) very much in the Rogen physical prototype. This was previously enacted by Jonah Hill as a horny high school senior in "Superbad" - which was regarded for good or nil as a junior-circuit version of "Knocked Up."

'The Hammer'

At times, it's hard to tell whether "The Hammer" is goofing on the formulaic uplift-through-sports movie or wants very much to be considered a classic of the genre. But then, any movie whose hero starts his day by having to use his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend's maxi pad as a coffee filter probably doesn't care where it fits in global cinematic terms.

'The Grand'

Why don't mockumentaries ever go after targets worth the mocking? In lieu of pointed send-ups of our feckless political leaders, we get easy caricatures of such don't-make-waves subjects as dog shows, regional theater, folk music, and now - don't everyone cheer at once - poker game championships.

'Boarding Gate'

It's hard to feel indifferent about an actor who pronounces the silent b in numb like a popping bubble. Lazy enunciation is perhaps the least exasperating distinction of Asia Argento, who seems like a glove-fit for Olivier Assayas' mixed bag of a thriller.

'Poisoned by Polonium'

Although a first-rate investigative documentary on its own, Andrei Nekrasov's "Poisoned by Polonium" also serves as a sequel to 2004's "Disbelief," in which the director made a rather indisputable case that the notorious 1999 Moscow apartment bombings were the work of Vladimir Putin and Russia's FSB (the heir to the KGB).

'Irina Palm'

Marianne Faithfull is so composed and convincing at playing a frumpy grandmother that you have to keep reminding yourself that she was, long ago, the bad-girl muse of the Rolling Stones and other blues-rock outlaws.

'Under the Same Moon'

On the chance that you have any surviving boxes of tissues from flu season, you should haul them by the handtruck to "Under the Same Moon," a drama of mother-son love that lunges for the heart from its pulsating curtain raiser to its leap-for-joy fade out.

'Love Songs'

French movie musicals are an oxymoron, notwithstanding the luxuriantly camp collaborations of "Umbrellas of Cherbourg" director Jacques Demy and composer Michel Legrand back in the '60s. Christophe Honoré's flat-footed "Love Songs" does little to change that Yankee-centric impression.

'Wetlands Preserved'

Earthy, crunchy and proudly activist in a city that was increasingly wealthy and self-concerned, the TriBeCa nightclub Wetlands Preserve fought the good fight for more than a decade, opening in 1989 - just in time to completely ignore the grunge movement - and finally closing in 2001, crushed by Rudy Giuliani's relentless clean-up efforts, NIMBY neighbors and the collapse of the Twin Towers.

'Horton Hears a Who'

Not that the bar is all that high to begin with, considering 2000's frantically overcooked "Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and 2003's appallingly unfunny "Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat." But whether by default or not, "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!" is the first feature-length Seuss movie adaptation to adequately evoke the warmhearted eccentricity of Theodore Geisel's classic children's books.

'Funny Games'

Unless you harbor universal contempt for anyone with the good fortune to own a waterfront vacation home, you should bear no ill will toward Ann and George, the besieged couple of Michael Haneke's punishing thriller "Funny Games." They are good-humored, warmly affectionate toward each other and their amiable son Georgie, and, as played by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, seem like folks you'd be pleased to welcome into your home for dinner.

"Doomsday"

Much as one might admire the British health care system as presented in the documentary "Sicko," even Michael Moore would have to admit they have a hard time over there coping with apocalyptic viruses.

'Never Back Down'

What is a teen football star to do when he's ended his final game in a brawl, and mom is moving the family from Iowa to the bimbo belt of Florida? If his name is Jake Tyler, he packs his glory days into a box marked "useless junk," loads it into a van and take his fighting fists on the road.

'Heartbeat Detector'

In this striking and demanding corporate-world thriller, Mathieu Almaric ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly") plays a human resources psychologist with a dual talent for shrinking heads and labor costs. Having succeeded in dramatically skimming the fat from the personnel of a petrochemical company, Almaric's Simon Kessler is asked to investigate the troubling behavior of the firm's chief executive in Germany, Matthias Jüst (the incomparable Michael Lonsdale). As Kessler insinuates himself into Just's confidence, he begins to draw some disturbing connections between the cultivated CEO, the steely managing director who has launched the probe (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), and the company's distant history.

'Blind Mountain'

In the early 1990s, an enthusiastic young college grad named Bai Xuemei (Huang Lu) journeys to a remote mountain village with her new boss and co-worker to begin her first job. She thinks she is going to be selling herbal medicine, but instead is abducted and pressed into service as the slave wife of a farmer, who has bought her for 7,000 yuen. Bai's attempts to escape and send out letters to her family are foiled at every turn. Everyone in the community, from the farmer's doggedly alert mother, to the village chief, to the other kidnapped brides (who are resigned to their fate), conspires to subdue and constrain the new captive. When government officials come to the village to do their regular inspection, Bai is sequestered in the forest with fellow illegal brides and village reprobates until the delegation leaves.

'Flash Point'

The Hong Kong carrot dangled before us during the inane but occasionally elegant "Flashpoint" is in the action sequences, which blossom like the rare, many-fisted rose bud; the stick is the rest of the movie, with which director Wilson Yip beats us insensible. Set, for no particular reason, on the eve of the 1997 handoff of Hong Kong to China, this politics-free police procedural/sedative features Donnie Yen as Sergeant Ma and Louis Koo as undercover officer Wilson, two cops out to capture a band of Vietnamese triad members who are up to no good, even if we don't know precisely what.

'College Road Trip'

"College Road Trip" is the kind of movie that its audiences will use once for blowing off steam and then toss aside as if it were shrink-wrap. This conscientiously juvenile farce, in which an overprotective oaf of a father (Martin Lawrence) reluctantly shepherds his daughter (Raven-Symoné) to a college interview far from home, closes off genuine emotional investment by overinflating, even excusing its characters' boorish behavior.

'The Bank Job'

It's a confident British crime thriller that casts Jason Statham in a leading role, but doesn't let him hit anybody for more than 50 minutes. But there's much else about "The Bank Job" that keeps you so preoccupied and wound up that the minutes fly by.

'10,000 B.C.'

There was a time, long before the Eisenhower administration, when men were really men, women and children needed to be shielded against conspirators from faraway lands, and any animal that mattered had big tusks.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

In the ramshackle romantic something-or-other, "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day," Frances McDormand plays an English secretary with a talent for unemployment.

'Married Life'

There's little in "Married Life," Ira Sachs' burnished blend of psychological suspense thriller and comedy of manners, that those devoted to the storytelling of John Updike, Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock haven't encountered before. Subdued passions, domestic guilt, thwarted yearnings and devious behavior are, to varying degrees, hallmarks of these otherwise divergent artists.

'Snow Angels'

Wear your thermal underwear to "Snow Angels," a wintry drama in which the small-town clime is so frigid and gray, you could easily catch your death.

'CJ7'

It is safe to say that no one makes movies quite like Hong Kong's clown impresario Stephen Chow. What goes on in a mind that churns out "Kung Fu Hustle," a freewheeling action comedy that goosed the anti-gravity conventions of the martial arts genre to a raucous, Road-Runner-cartoon fare-thee-well?

'Charlie Bartlett'

In last year's "Fierce People," Anton Yelchin played a teen of modest means who is welcomed into the lap of American aristocracy. In "Charlie Bartlett," the dimpled young actor plays a scion of enormous wealth who charms his way into the hearts of the have-less.

'Vantage Point'

The picturesque Spanish town of Salamanca is the unheralded star of "Vantage Point," an assassination thriller that boasts the glossy tourist vistas of an airline magazine combined with a serious case of instant-replay-itis.

'Be Kind Rewind'

In the first place, well, I mean, come on ... a video store? In 2008? The very concept of "Be Kind Rewind" threatens to leave us scratching our heads and wondering at the outset whether writer-director Michel Gondry is indulging yet again in the kind of time-and-space warping that worked great with his "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," but not so well with "The Science of Sleep."

'The Signal'