Cinematical

Drug consumer par excellence, Hunter Thompson's legendary hallucinogenic and boozy escapades have by now been sufficiently documented, not to mention brought to pitch-perfect cinematic life by Terry Gilliam's 1998 adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Less well known, however, is his lifelong political conscientiousness, which receives the lion's share of attention in Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Alex Gibney's (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) loving yet even-handed non-fiction bio of the notorious father of Gonzo journalism. Narrated by Johnny Depp (Gilliam's Fear and Loathing star), and overflowing with archival footage and interviews with friends and enemies, the film lays out the vital details of its subject's life, from his outcast adolescence in Louisville, Kentucky to his suicide in 2005. Comprehensiveness, however, isn't necessarily the goal, and thus while most prime topics are tackled, the greatest focus is paid to Thompson's failed attempt to run for governor of Aspen, Colorado on a legalize-drugs platform, and his coverage of the 1972 presidential election, which resulted in the classic Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.

Catherine Breillat is a director fascinated with the intricacies of desire. This does not, however, mean that her work is altogether sexy. Rather, the celebrated French director's esteemed canon - highlighted by 1999's graphic Romance and 2001's stunning Fat Girl - is cerebral even when steamily carnal, her films intellectual exercises that arouse the head as much as the nether regions. Her latest, The Last Mistress, is by and large no different. Based on Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's taboo 1851 novel, it's a period piece revisitation of her interest in the ambiguous motivations of, and feelings born from, romance, here delivered not with her usual shocking transgressiveness but, instead, with the refinement, grace and sensuousness of a charged costume drama. This 19th-century setting results, on the one hand, in something of a startling change of pace for Breillat, whose cinema has long been infused with a decidedly modern strain of provocation. And yet on the other hand, her preoccupation with love's thorny complications feels right at home in the drawing rooms and boudoirs of indolent 1835 Parisian aristocrats, whose public civility masks private conduct of a much more lascivious sort.

A real-life romance to put all those rom-com fairy tales to shame, Tina Mascara and Guido Santi's Chris & Don: A Love Story details the unlikely union between British author Christopher Isherwood - chiefly famous for writing The Berlin Stories, which was the basis for Cabaret - and Don Bachardy, a man thirty years his junior. From the outset, age was the monumental difference between the two, as Isherwood had already achieved professional recognition and befriended countless literary and filmic celebrities (including classmate W.H. Auden) when, in 1952, he met 18-year-old Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach. Having first had a fling with the young man's brother, Isherwood quickly fell for the bright-faced, energetic Bachardy, an L.A. suburbanite conditioned by his mother to adore all things Hollywood who saw in the writer a handsome, sophisticated father figure and role model. As friend John Boorman opines, Bachardy was a malleable individual eager to be shaped by Isherwood into a version (if not outright carbon copy) of himself, a dynamic that became so pronounced that the teenager, raised in California, soon began unconsciously speaking with a British accent.

A documentary about famous Congolese musician Antoine "Wendo" Kolosoy, On the Rumba River is filled with warm, intimate close-ups - of Wendo and his compatriots' weathered countenances; of hands playing percussive instruments and strumming guitars; and of bodies joyously swaying in motion to the sounds of Wendo and his band's rumba music. Visual proximity to Wendo lends compassionate heart to this portrait of the now-83-year-old singer, whose sprawling story includes discrimination at the hands of Belgian colonialists, homelessness, and condemnation of his music by the church. Nonetheless, despite director Jacques Sarasin's physical nearness to Wendo, there's something of a remove to his beautifully photographed proceedings, primarily because the film provides only skimpy details on its subject's myriad experiences while almost completely avoiding any substantive discussion of the 30-year dictatorship (under Mobutu Sese Seko) and ongoing civil war that have so profoundly colored the man's life.

A non-fiction portrait of acclaimed, polarizing author Harlan Ellison, Dreams with Sharp Teeth doesn't attempt to conclusively explain how its subject came to be who he is. Avoiding a simple, chronological cause-and-effect recitation of the various noteworthy events of his life, Erik Nelson's engaging documentary instead opts to merely present the writer in all his arrogant, combative, cantankerous glory, interspersing Ellison's diatribes about writing, television and religion (among many other topics) with comments from admiring friends (including Robin Williams and Neil Gaiman) and segments in which Ellison reads passages from some of his most renowned works ("'Repent Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," "Spider Kiss") in front of cheesy computer-generated backgrounds. Less intent on investigating than simply depicting, it's neither a definitive statement on his canon nor on his fantastically interesting life but, rather, an intimate portrait of a now-73-year-old artist who, as Gaiman sums up, is "partly one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century...and partly an alternately impish and furious 11-year-old boy. Or possibly 9-year-old boy. Or possibly 5-year-old boy."

Julianne Moore is some kind of great in Savage Grace, but the film? Not so much. Tom Kalin's adaptation of Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson's provocative true-crime book centers on the life of Barbara Baekeland (Moore), her well-off husband Brooks (Stephen Dillane), and their son Tony (Eddie Redmayne), a dysfunctional clan if ever there was one. It's a tale of the screwed-up wealthy, spanning their ups and downs from 1946 to 1972, when their myriad hang-ups and compulsions finally culminated in perverse tragedy. Episodically constructed by screenwriter Howard A. Rodman, the narrative - full of drugs, back-stabbing, affairs, three-ways, and taboo sexual relations - revolves around the type of sordid stuff tabloids live for, though the director treats his inherently sensationalistic material with cool meticulousness, as if a serious approach might somehow counteract the overarching mood of scandalous tawdriness. It doesn't, which isn't to say that this reserved tack doesn't effectively grip one's attention. Yet the delicacy of Kalin's presentation, which is infused with more than a dash of self-conscious Sirkian artifice, never quite meshes with Barbara and Tony's descent into twisted psychosis.

With stately cinematography, period piece detail, and a true-life tale that mixes historical conflict and doomed romance, The Children of Huang Shi has all the ingredients for a stirring epic. Yet the resultant concoction of wartime heroism and loss seems to have been cooked in a cinematic Easy Bake Oven, blending its familiar elements with uninspired clunkiness. Director Roger Spottiswoode's film offers a functional retelling of the life of George Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), an English reporter who in 1937 sneaked into Japanese-controlled Nanjing, China and, with the aid of colorful communist rebel Chen Hansheng (Chow Yun-Fat) and brave nurse Lee Pearson (Radha Mitchell), cared for - and then led to safety across hundreds of mountainous miles - a school of orphaned children. A tale of sacrifice and courage embroidered with sweeping vistas of early 20th-century China and shiny shots of Mitchell's long, flowing blonde locks, it's a TV movie in disguise, a handsomely staid affair that prefers skin-deep elegance to psychological or historical substance, moving from regal panorama to gallant speechifying to dewy-eyed amour with metronomic predictability.

With Battle for Haditha, British documentarian Nick Broomfield brandishes his verité techniques for a fictional recreation of the November 2005 killing of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines. Aspiring to be a modern Battle of Algiers, the film falls far short of that lofty goal, hawking standard-issue characterizations and leaden cause-effect analysis to humdrum effect.

To be sure, Broomfield generates palpable you-are-there immediacy, especially during the final act, when his camera's close proximity to its subjects (American and Iraqi alike) amplifies the mounting mania and fury that's been simmering for the prior hour. Such intensity, however, doesn't come equipped with matching insightfulness, as the depictions of its various players - marines, everyday citizens, and insurgents - are fashioned after now-familiar, simplistic psychological molds and action-reaction dynamics.

"I don't know how to begin, because the story's been told before," croons Nora Jones on the soundtrack during the opening of My Blueberry Nights, and it seems a similar problem afflicts Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai, who makes his English language debut with this gorgeous if slight saga about aimless Elizabeth's (Jones) search for herself via a cross-country journey. It's not so much that Wong doesn't know how to commence this specific tale but, instead, that he doesn't know how to start anew, as his latest proves a minor stateside revisitation (or, perhaps more accurately, a rehash) of his favorite thematic and aesthetic preoccupations.

Despite being shot by Darius Khondji and not the director's longtime collaborator Christopher Doyle, the film offers up a handy compendium of his favorite visual signatures - the smeary slow-motion, the hyper-vibrant, sharp-and-soft color palette, framing and tracking shots that dreamily highlight the distance between individuals - while his narrative continues a career-long obsession with the intricacies of romance and the imperative role of memory (regarding both love and loss). It's as light, fluffy and attractive as the blueberry pies that Manhattan café owner Jeremy (Jude Law) serves Elizabeth late at night, but ultimately, also, far less satisfying.

With each picture since his 2000 debut George Washington, David Gordon Green has taken at least a small step backward. That gradual regression becomes a full-fledged precipitous decline with Snow Angels, a film in which the director (working from a novel by Stewart O'Nan) flails about in search of poetry, and comes up with only trivial stylistic flourishes that compound his story's overwrought faux-naturalism. Considering the lyrical grace of his heralded first feature, Green's devolution from one of American cinema's most promising talents to his current status as just another middling indie lightweight is tough to fathom. Yet with his latest, Green misses the mark in so many respects -- from a multi-strand plot devoid of insight, to performances that are generally overcooked, to a mise-en-scène that comes up largely empty in the department of inspired grace and beauty -- that it makes one wonder if his upcoming foray into director-for-hire work (with this summer's raunchy stoner comedy The Pineapple Express) isn't a shrewd attempt to escape his own increasingly faulty auteurist instincts.