Reviews by JxSxPx

A tiny bit of a mess, Bugsy wants to be both a quiet character study, a loud mafia epic, and a portrait of a doomed love affair, while winding up being mostly a damn fine entertainment. Much of that credit goes to leading man Warren Beatty, a notoriously picky star who hasn’t made as many films as his reputation of Hollywood royalty would suggest. Beatty wouldn’t have to put much effort into making us want to watch him, but his work in Bugsy is completely committed.

This goes a great deal to making Bugsy work, because as written his character is very one-dimensional. The film leans heaviest on a plot for Bugsy to turn the Nevada desert into a wonderland of casinos and a Mecca for gangland behavior. No attention is paid to his back story, so he arrives and remains a bit of a narrowly envisioned enigma. Beatty’s megawatt charisma and background as an untamable bad boy add layers that wouldn’t be there otherwise. Is it a performance because Beatty makes it so flashy, or is it a flashy performance and so great because of sheer movie star strength? It’s probably a bit of both.

Bugsy does have the unfortunate feeling of droning on for a bit too long, and while Beatty and Annette Bening could start forest fires with the way their romantically stare at each other, the story never evolves in a satisfying way. Call me crazy, but I think Bugsy would have been much better if it had focused in on any one of these various plot strands and made it the main focus of the film. As much as I enjoy watching these two romance and betray each other, it repeats itself too much and becomes dull towards the end. If anything, Bugsy could have been a gangster epic on par with any of Scorsese’s 90s great films, but it ends up feeling like an entertainment from another era. One in which its epic length is not matched by a wealth of thematic material and high quality.

Vincent & Theo was originally a miniseries for European television, and the film product suffers from being truncated. One gets the sense that many of the twists, turns, and slowly building character development and biographical details would be better served in their original format. Not that the film is bad, with Robert Altman at the helm even if the film doesn’t work as a whole, it’s still has plenty of interesting parts to keep you interested.

Vincent & Theo mostly works for me. The story of Vincent Van Gogh is rich with details and fascinating events that make most fiction about struggling artists seem cutesy in comparison. And the complicated relationship Vincent had with his brother Theo, a more repressed gallery owner. This being Altman, clichéd choices are left in the dust in favor of a more organic approach. Van Gogh’s struggling artist is at times prickly, bordering on likeable, and slowly descending into madness as his genius goes unnoticed in his lifetime.

Altman has two terrific lead actors at his disposal, Tim Roth as Vincent and Paul Rhys as Theo. Roth makes his Van Gogh an insular personality, true details like his penchant for eating paint or having seizures become organic outgrowths of an atypical personality, and his descent into madness and suicidal tendencies the logical outcome. Rhys has the trickier role of Theo, who is outwardly neurotic and capable of performing in society unlike his brother. Rhys also works with Roth to make the brothers share something like a telepathic bond, which goes a long way towards explaining how Van Gogh was able to alienate everyone else in his life but not his brother. Roth gets the obviously flashier role, but Rhys is the movie’s real MVP, providing a capable support system, and it becomes more shocking that Theo begins to crack up as time goes on.

There are many thematic instances of Altman appearing to make grand statements about art versus commerce or unappreciated genius. But these feel too easy of targets for such a singular, cynical vision as Altman’s. As I said earlier, these themes feel partially formed, and if I could view the complete miniseries in its original form, I wonder if they would be more subverted. Or possibly even fully explored and dug up to find newer talking points in these ideas. As it exists, Vincent & Theo is a solidly made portrait of a struggling artist. And I’m sure it would make for an exciting and strange double-feature with Minnelli’s equally intense, if more obvious but more satisfying, Lust for Life.

Steven Soderbergh’s work offers the biggest charge when he sits back and watches as professional commitments and messy private lives loudly crash into each other. Some of the best moments in Traffic are when Catherine Zeta-Jones’ pampered wife goes from bored housewife to cutthroat queen of the cartel or Michael Douglas’ Congressman having to rescue his drug addled daughter while confronting the messy realities of his war on drugs. And Behind the Candelabra is obsessed with the complex ways in which public persona of a talented artist causes him to be something of a controlling tyrant in his personal life.

A long-gestating passion project for Soderbergh, Behind the Candelabra is a fitting swansong for the auteur. Not only does it reunite him with Douglas, who gave a great performance in the above-mentioned Traffic and is even better here, but it practically rooted itself in his personal obsessions. It follows the five years in which a man named Scott Thorson (Matt Damon) becomes Liberace’s paid lackee, live-in boyfriend, and eventually spurned lover.

Their twisted romance, from a brilliant script by Richard LaGravanese, is a jaundiced prism through which we view showbiz and its desperation for submission and uniformity. Liberace demands a total acquiescence to his whims and ideals. He is a man who only wants those to who throw themselves at his feet in worship near him, and any slight questioning of his dictatorship is to find yourself cut out from his life. Replaced with a newer, younger, more eager model to bend and contort to his pleasures, or for them. Yet we glimpse inside of these moments the fragile, broken man demanding acceptance from a larger society, a safe haven in which he can completely himself.

If the original plan had gone through to release this a big screen entertainment instead of an HBO movie, I have no doubt in my mind that Michael Douglas would have found himself the proud owner of Oscar number three (he won previously as producer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and actor for Wall Street). His clean sweep on the television awards circuit was well deserved. His performance is a marvel of not only capturing the cadence and mannerisms of the subject matter, but crafting a complete portrait of a real person. His narcissism is acidic to any healthy relationship, but there’s still a sympathetic individual and gaudy, entertaining persona wrapped around that damaged core. It’s one hell of a performance, and the better for not resting on easy imitation and avoiding loud, obvious choices.

Matt Damon is no slouch in the film either, having to sell us a naïve youth swept up in the tacky glamour of Las Vegas and the corrosive entrapments of fame and wealth. His Scott is eager to love and appease Liberace, but writing it off as a youth looking for a daddy figure is too simple. By the time Scott’s given himself over to the point of plastic surgery to look more like his lover/sugar daddy/benefactor, we have entered into a warped reality in which normal decisions about healthy relationships, morals, and strength of character no longer apply.

Orbiting them is a strange batch of character actors, and each of them is wonderful in their parts. Debbie Reynolds began life as a megawatt Movie Star, and has now found herself as a consummate character actress. It took me a moment to realize that was her as Liberace’s mother, she’s slathered in makeup prosthetics and a strange accent. She has one scene in which she’s playing a slot machine over and over, eventually hitting a jackpot, and proceeds to belittle and embarrass her son for not being able to pay her the full amount of her winnings. This small fragment is a tiny piece of character building for both of them, giving us a glimpse into where exactly he learned that relationships and profits can be intertwined.

Even better are Dan Aykroyd playing it straight as Liberace’s manager, Scott Bakula as a long-time friend who brings him fresh young boys to seduce and dominate, and Rob Lowe as a plastic surgeon. Lowe’s pinched face is a disturbing vision of the lengths one will go to preserve their image, and Lowe plays him as an impossibly attractive devil here to offer solace in the form of habit-forming pills and the tools to eradicate Scott’s identity to appease his lover. The trajectory of the story may become a tad familiar as drug addiction and a life-threatening illness consume the last chunk of the film, but this cast keeps it invigorating and moving along nicely.

Despite the subtitle being A Tale of Terror, this version of Snow White is no more authentic to the Grimm’s fairy tale than the Disney version. Substituting musical escapades and cutesy sidekicks for muddled psychology and vague terror, Snow White: A Tale of Terror is a showcase for Sigourney Weaver’s great talents and nothing more.

The film begins with the birth of Snow White, here named Lilli Hoffman (Monica Keena), and the death of her mother. Normal enough, but A Tale of Terror has her mother dying in a carriage accident and her father (Sam Neill) cutting her out of the womb. It’s a needlessly shocking and violent opening, and like so much of the rest of the film a more interesting as an idea than in execution. We flash forward several years and find Lilli’s father has remarried the glamorous Lady Claudia (Sigourney Weaver). After nine years of marriage, Claudia becomes pregnant, Lilli a bratty teen, and their relationship fragments into darkness and jealousy after Claudia gives birth to a stillborn son.

The rest of the film follows the basics of the fairy tale. There’s a flight into the woods, the mistaken belief of her death, getting refuge from seven outcasts, the poisoned apple and glass coffin. However, none of the diversions are of much interest or explored in great detail. This version rejects the idea of the seven lonely men being dwarves, instead casting them as damaged men returned home from the Crusades. Except the main one is Gil Bellows at the height of his attractiveness with a poorly done scar to try and distract from his attractiveness, which it doesn’t. This idea of them being wounded soldiers from the Crusades also doesn’t gain much traction, nor does the vague mentions of class warfare and Christianity versus paganism. Although it is a campy delight to watch Weaver hang Neill upside down on a cross.

At the very least, A Tale of Terror has Weaver in the lead role. And aside from the handsome sets, strong makeup, and lovely costumes, she’s the only reason to watch this mess. She’s operating and performing at a higher level than everyone else, relishing in the campy theatrics. While Neill is wasted in his role, Kennar and Bellows are eye-catching but bland, Weaver manages to create an entirely realized character. Watching her take a piece of broken glass and threaten to kill Kennar is like watching All About Eve envisioned as a penny dreadful horror story. It’s in this isolated moments that the film becomes interesting, and when the camera decides to just sit back and lovingly watch Weaver act like a psychotic diva then it’s really cooking. Much like it’s titular heroine, Snow White: A Tale of Terror is pretty to gaze upon and nothing else.

It seems unfair to compare films based on a book to a mini-series based on the same book, or vice versa. Inevitably, there is always one version that is the most beloved and deemed the definitive filmed version of the novel. Any version of Great Expectations is doomed to try to bloom in the shadow of David Lean’s 1946 classic.

This version, which aired in the US on Masterpiece Theater, from 2011 is one that deserves more respect and a fair shake. Sure it suffers from similar problems as other adaptations of Dickens’ novel – bland leads for Pip and Estella being the main cause of concern – but it does take some interesting chances in parts.

On a technical level, this version of Great Expectations lays waste to many competitors. The production and costume design from the tiniest details to the exquisite close-ups are well thought out. Much attention has been paid to make it look real. These are dirty and dusty interiors, rooms and houses that have been lived in for generations that contain secrets. And the costumes are just gorgeous to behold. Miss Havisham’s wedding dress and crony make-up have never been so subtlety progressed before. Normally she arrives as a Grand Guignol madam, and here she is a strangely sympathetic broken woman using a young child to right her personal wrongs and launch a proxy vendetta.

And for covering so much expansive ground in so brief a time, three episodes that clock in at an hour each, the plot moves along relatively smoothly. The various characters and story strands merge and tear only to be mended as best they can. I wanted to spend a longer amount of time in this world, despite as well-known as it has become, because of the impressive technical aspects and the attention paid to the letter of the text. While I have never been a great fan of Dickens’ wandering prosaic style, I do appreciate that this series tried valiantly to keep as much of the immense scope intact as possible.

Yet it’s such a shame that we’re stuck with the pretty but bland Douglas Booth as Pip. I never believed in him as the naïve love struck son of a blacksmith. He’s far too delicately beautiful, with large brown eyes and soft pillowy lips that make him look a better fit for a model than a tortured young lover who must pick the pieces of his shattered dreams back up and move on. And Vanessa Kirby didn’t make much of an impression on me as Estella, a crucial bit of casting. I never felt the tortured, complicated fiery emotions within her, but she’s never bad, just decent enough. However, other casting choices are top notch. Ray Winstone as Magwitch is terrifically rugged and brusque. Harry Lloyd is an endearing and entertaining Herbert Pocket, and I wonder what would happen is Booth and Lloyd had switched parts? But I was most impressed with Gillian Anderson’s Havisham, a controversial choice on my part. Much of the critical response is split on whether or not she was a great fit for the part, arguing that she was too old or too sedate. But I found her to age appropriate for the role given that Havisham is described as being closer to middle-age than an elderly woman. And I found her sedate, disturbingly calm way to talking to be an effective mask for the bitter hurt and madness lurking underneath, things which she slowly lets slip out over time.

While I don’t think that David Lean’s film version has any reason to worry about this one taking its top spot, this version of Great Expectations is still damn fine in its own way. A solidly constructed period piece that closely adapts a classic novel with high production values and a (mostly) solid cast, what’s not to like?

With prestige borrowed over from the combination of novelist Larry McMurtry, producer Suzanne de Passe, and star Anjelica Huston, Buffalo Girls perhaps had too much baggage to ever truly be great. But it could have turned out better than this middling effort.

Buffalo Girls tells the sprawling story of Calamity Jane, a highly fictionalized account that seems more concerned with crafting whimsy and sentimentality than being authentic to these people. It also tries to slam together as many figures from the closing era as possible without bothering to develop any of them much. You get quick appearances from Wild Bill Hickok (Sam Elliott), Buffalo Bill (Peter Coyote), Sitting Bull (Russell Means), Annie Oakley (Reba McEntire), General Custer (John Diehl) played by a series of variously distracting guest stars.

But the main thrust of the story involves Jane writing down her life story for the daughter she had with Hickok and gave up. Speaking to us through narration as though we were the daughter, Buffalo Girls spends most of its time developing the friendship between Jane and saloon owner Dora DuFran (Melanie Griffith). If you arched your eyebrow and wondered if there was any kind of Sapphic undertones to their relationship, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But like so much involved in this mini-series, that particular element goes woefully under-explored. Jane’s gender performance also goes under-explored – we rarely see her done-up in feminine styles of the time, preferring to express herself in as masculine a way as possible.

Also damning Buffalo Girls to being merely serviceable is that the entire thing feels inauthentic to these characters. The world feels too pristine, the characters feel like outlandish figures instead of fully-realized people, dialog can be awkward at times, and a strong streak of sentimentality permeates throughout. I wouldn’t doubt that Calamity Jane would have really had moments of wistful longing for the old days and friends who died, and a touch of sentimentality when earned has never bothered me. Buffalo Girls though gets swept away by the sentimentality and artifice, losing the characters along the way.

Yet throughout there is Anjelica Huston trying valiantly to make magic happen, and she nearly succeeds on sheer effort alone. She gives her Calamity Jane a grit and fiery edge, crafting a woman who presents herself in as masculine a way as possible in order to even be seen as their equal. Melanie Griffith’s saloon owner is a hit-and-miss affair, like practically all of Griffith’s work. Sometimes she’s effective and other times too distractingly surgically made-over to make her character look authentic and winsome in her emotions. Jack Palance, Tracey Walter, Liev Schreiber, and the various parade of guest stars are under-utilized. While the various one-or-two scene cameos from Annie Oakley and General Custer are attempts at a wider canvas, they’re more distracting than anything. Never bothering to craft real people when blown-up cartoon versions of the characters will do, at least they cast them successfully to type while their scenes sometimes swing too wide instead of hitting it home.

Extant borrows liberally from various sources -- Artificial Intelligence, Rosemary’s Baby to name just two – and tosses them together into a puree. The show is entertaining, solidly crafting, but does suffer from a sense of bloat during the middle run of episodes. At only thirteen, I would think that they would have been able to maintain the suspense and moral inquiries much easier with a smaller set of episodes.

There’s actually a lot of juggling that any episode of Extant is trying to keep in the air at any given moment. In-between the main premise of Molly (Halle Berry) returning to Earth from a 13-month solo space mission pregnant, there’s also her husband’s career in android and robotic machinery results in the creation of the world’s most advanced android child, government conspiracies and corruption, and a late in the game terrorist. That last addition wasn’t particularly well thought out or executed, appearing for only a handful of episodes before being wrapped up unsatisfactorily.

For much of the first half of the show, Molly is an unreliable narrator. Much of what she does and sees doesn’t make any logical sense, and no one else can see what she does. But her paranoia and hallucinations are eventually proven to be accurate reactions to the phenomena around her. Berry is clearly game for everything the show can throw at her, and it’s nice, refreshing even, to see her actively engaged with material. She’s never been a consistent actress, but when she’s on-point she can be quite effective, and she’s very effective in Extant.

The other major players are Goran Visnjic as Molly’s husband and Pierce Gagnon as the robotic son. Visnjic is very pretty to look at, but limited as an actor. And many of his scenes detailing how Ethan’s programming is capable of making him like a “real boy” feel borrowed over from better franchises, and any worries about an android uprising are a foreign concept to him. Apparently he’s never read or watched any sci-fi in the last 50 years. Visnjic cannot overcome the weaknesses of his character and make something better from the material. Gagnon, on the other hand, should join the creepy kid annuls based on his ability to keep his face emotionless while providing ominous inflections in his voice. It’s a pity that the darkness surrounding his character is never fully explored or allowed to shine, and he winds up feeling more like a plot device in the end than a realized portrait of artificial intelligence gaining humanity.

Yet Extant does manage to ready itself for a satisfying conclusion to the major story-lines, even if certain characters that seemed to be bigger deals are revealed to have faintly ridiculous backgrounds and disappear entirely from the series (Hiroyuki Sanada’s Yasumoto being the primary focus of this). The show wraps up the major plot points, while leaving the faintest possibility for a second season. I feel like Extant is the kind of story that cannot sustain itself over several years, and having a fairly artistically successful 13 episode run is what’s best for all involved.

When it comes to the big screen, superhero properties are displaying incredible longevity across various franchises (long-running ones like X-Men, the MCU as a whole, and perpetually revamping Batman properties come to mind), their television counterparts can’t seem to make it past one or two seasons though. This is a real goddamn shame because Green Lantern: The Animated Series is a great little show. A one season wonder from the brilliant mind of Bruce Timm, the man behind great shows like Batman: The Animated Series and Justice League, Green Lantern alternately explored every facet of the comic book history and mythos while laying the groundwork for a deeper dive into this material as well.

The series begins not with an origin story, mercifully, but with Hal Jordan already an established hero and cosmic presence as part of the Green Lantern Corps. With the emerging presence of the threatening Red Lanterns, Hal is called away from Earth and sent out on a mission to help bring the Red Lanterns down before they reach Oa, home world of the GL Corps. But an even bigger threat emerges in the form of the Anti-Monitor and a rogue piece of artificial intelligence that goes berserk.

Each episode, which balances the neat trick of continuing a larger narrative arch and a nice introduction to the series, takes our heroes to a different planet where they must fight off the Red Lantern forces, recruit new members for the Green Lantern Corps, meet newly emerging Lantern Corps (Blue, Yellow, and Orange), or finding a way to destroy the Anti-Monitor. The odd episode works as a complete stand alone, like the one where Hal finds himself in an alternate universe with a “Steam Lantern” that’s a wonder of charming and smart character and production designs.

The scope of the show is big as it explores various parts of the cosmos, creating new worlds populated with their own races, flora and fauna. The Star Sapphires, a group of females with lantern-like powers operating like deadly sirens from Greek myth, make several welcome appearances, as does Larfleeze, the sole Orange Lantern who are associated with greed, and a small group of Thanagarians, fans of Justice League will remember them as the race that Hawkgirl belonged to. These appearances serve as expansions of the universe, small seeds being dropped for eventual stories to blossom in later seasons. Alas, that wasn’t to be, but it’s wonderful to see the creators playing such a long game with their choices.

While the Green Lantern film may have been a diet version of the material, commodified to the essentials for popular consumption, the animated series gives us some of the weirder aspects of the comics. Cameos from Lantern Corps such as the alien squirrel and living planet are included, but the strangest trip may the central emotional core of the show. That core is the love story between a reformed Red Lantern named Razer and the ship’s AI, dubbed Aya, which takes on humanoid form. The entire series tracks a progression in their characters, highs and lows, and their romance eventually becomes the central story in the climatic episodes of the series.

It must be said though, that Green Lantern is a gorgeous show to look at. The character designs are clever and smooth, a transformation of Bruce Timm’s Silver Age drawing style into three-dimensional life. It looks better than I ever would have thought, and the animators get a tremendous amount of depth and range of emotions from the character using very little. Occasionally fluidity of movement or anatomy can go a little strange, but that can be forgiven. They had to produce 26 episodes at roughly 23 minutes each, which is a ton of work to complete. The landscapes are gorgeous and the action scenes are thrilling. The action scenes are also logically edited. There are no fizzy quick cuts and murky camera angles which make it hard to discern what is going on. Every scene is a work of clarity where each character is clearly located to a building or another character. Sometimes everything does have a smooth, flat texture so that rocks and flora look less like stylized versions of these things than plastic versions, but I never found it too outwardly distracting.

It makes me sad that Green Lantern didn’t last longer. I wanted more from this show. I loved what Timm and company had managed to create and pack in with these 26 episodes, but what else were they planning on doing? Hints and clues are peppered throughout, but I’d love to see what the major plans were for season two. Timm took Superman into more Jack Kirby-esque territory as the show went on, eventually ended up with a third season that featured Superman and Darkseid and all of Apokolis throwing down. It was thrilling stuff, and Green Lantern could have gone anywhere. Shame we’ll never see it.

After a rocky first two seasons, Star Trek: The Next Generation eventually emerges as a smartly acted ensemble piece. It’s a giant science-fiction space opera which is happier to let characters talk and explore their moral quagmires than it is to have them shooting lasers at each other. I welcome this change of pace, and by the end had grown very attached to this motley crew.

The first season is an unsettled affair with many of the actors unclear on their characters and trying to find them. The various plot strands feel messier than they would in later seasons, but this does mark the first appearance of Q’s many guest roles as an antagonist and helper of the Enterprise crew. The death of Tasha Yar, a character I never warmed up to or cared much about (mostly thank to Denise Crosby’s poor performance), sets up what would become a major conflict later on in the series.

And the second season doesn’t offer much better. Gates McFadden left for the second season only to return in the third. During this interim she was replaced by Diana Muldaur, a perfectly fine actress who never seemed to find her groove with the rest of the cast. Both seasons had a bad habit of wrapping up an episode with boy genius Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) coming up with some crazy scientific solution to the conflict. Mercifully this became less prominent as the series went before jettisoning the character off to the academy towards the end of the run.

But by the time the series had entered its third season everything was beginning to come together properly. The ratio of good, some even great, episodes to mediocre or bad ones tips largely on the positive side by this time, and the cast finally found their specific voices. Patrick Stewart’s academic and pacifistic Picard is a complicated man, and a two-part episode where he is kidnapped and tortured for information is a highlight. It’s the kind of work and material that would win an actor an Emmy in a straight drama, but this being a space opera, he went woefully ignored. Jonathan Frakes as the randy, roguish Riker plays like an infinitely more mature and complex variation on Captain Kirk. But no two actors shined brighter throughout the series than Michael Dorn as Worf and Brent Spiner as Data.

Data’s a fascinating character, occupying the Spock-like role as a more human-than-human other in the series. And his season two episode “Measure of a Man” is a highlight. It presents every issue and reaction to the android that the series had brought up to that point, and a few interesting debates and moments which the series would then go on to explore in greater detail. And Dorn’s Worf transitions from more ferocious warrior to softer father figure and lover by the end, forming a strange familial unit with his son and Deanna Troi.

Deanna Troi, however, was always a problematic aspect of the show for me. She’s an interesting enough character, but the show constantly made her the object of sexual harassment, mind-control, and the repeated victim of kidnapping. This problematic aspect stood out very brightly whenever an episode would feature her in a leading role. Not all of her episode dripped with such casual misogyny, but more than enough of them did to wonder why the writer kept forcing Marina Sirtis to act this stuff out.

But by the seventh, and final, season everything on the Enterprise was running smoothly. The chemistry between the characters was what kept the series engaging and fresh. Various guest stars kept things interesting, and some like Whoopi Goldberg and Jennifer Jones were incredibly successful characters adding interesting dynamics in their episodes. But The Next Generation is beloved for that core group, and the creators knew this. They managed to craft the perfect finale which looked to the past, a possible future, and the present at the same time.

It’s another dynamite showcase for Stewart’s great talents as an actor. I swear, he can take any material thrown at him and give it a gravitas and meaning well beyond the worth of the words. But The Next Generation frequently gave him chances to give intelligent, hopeful monologues about numerous topics disguised as a fun action/adventure science-fiction series. And everything that was great about the series is located in the two hour finale. It’s a large time investment, at 45 minutes each and 176 episodes to get through I think that may qualify as an understatement, but if you can manage to ride out the flabby first two seasons then you’ll be in the perfect spot to enjoy what may just be one of the finest shows of its kind, ever.

Call me crazy, but I didn’t find the sex scenes in Lust, Caution all that graphic. I take it as a case of the MPAA blushing at the first sighting of pubic hair, clutching their pearls, and clucking their tongues. What struck me about these scenes wasn’t what one could or couldn’t see, but the emotional context and complicated feelings going on underneath. Lust, Caution knows, like Last Tango in Paris, that a sex scene is only truly successful if it somehow connects to an emotion in the story.

Lust, Caution tells the story of a young college student who joins in with a group of political radicals who band together to plan an assassination, and how the closer she gets to the target, the more complicated her emotional stakes become. The film spends far more time with scheming and subtle maneuvering than it does with pelvic gymnastics, and it’s all the better for it.

The film is alive with detailed and ornate costumes, production design, and warmly textured cinematography. Director Ang Lee manages to make a game of mahjong feel loaded with political subtext, as if the slightest twist of the tiles could doom a character. All of this populates the world with believability, and then there’s the tragic doomed heroine at the center, Mak Tai Tai (Tang Wei).

Her story is a two-pronged one of tragedy and doomed love affairs. She begins to work with the revolutionaries for the love of one man, who happily uses her as a prostitute to gather intelligence with the enemy, and she spends so much time with the enemy that she begins to view him with something close to love and fondness. Lust, Caution explores the consequences of sleeping with the enemy, both literally and figuratively.

As the central figure, Tang Wei is absolute dynamite. Her character’s transition from naïve innocent to convoluted seductress to doomed lover is a seamless transition. The scenes of emotional confusion in which she must act without words the complicated feelings of revulsion and pleasure for the sexual acts is a master class in subtlety. Wei makes Mak Tai Tai’s final acts feel like the logical conclusion of a woman thrust into her position. I apologize for the pun, but the film’s intense sex scenes only become clearer as the central relationship spirals out to its inevitable end. Here is a doomed romantic film put together with the artistry afforded a more blissful and romantic one.