Guys and Dolls, Births and Deaths

Cowriter-director George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. is the occasion for tonight's grand opening fiesta—and while that may be cause enough for the easily impressed to submit to googly-eyed celebrity worship—do try to get over the fact that you probably won't be invited to the "real party" away from the party. Instead, focus on one of the whip-smartest films of the year, an impressively pared-down and timely tale of how CBS telejournalist Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn, tempting Oscar) took an urgent on-the-air stand in the '50s against Senator McCarthy's communist witch-hunts. Sporting sumptuous black-and-white photography as crisp as a dry-cleaned suit and set to a hand-picked crop of songs sung by smoky-voiced jazz vocalist Diane Reeves, Good Night, and Good Luck. is not just some banal newsroom-fraternity biopic; rather, it's a pitch-perfect recreation of a moment in time when American civil liberties were challenged, and the give-and-take triangle between the media, commercialism and politics became frighteningly more tangible. Clooney (who also appears as producer Fred Friendly) has finally broken free of his second-rate Soderberghian style and come into his own as a solid directorial force, so hopefully his lesson of how entertainment often trumps vital news broadcasting isn't lost by audiences buying tickets to an Ashton Kutcher vehicle instead.

In related references, director Steven Soderbergh's Bubble may be burdened with the distinction of being the festival's most divisive entry (but ask me again after Lars von Trier's Manderlay plays next week). The first of six projects in an ongoing collaboration with HDNet Films, this utterly captivating High-Def experiment is so unlike the indie-to-Hollywood auteur that his fingerprints have been nearly wiped clean. Set in and around an Ohio doll factory (which need not be stylized to offer a serious creep-factor), Bubble uses only non-professional actors to austerely unsettling effect, giving delicate weight to a low-key love triangle, a murder mystery that doesn't mind having no mystery, and an examination on tender desperation. The sound of knives sharpening could be overheard at press screenings concerning Soderbergh's sincerity, as his grand widescreen framings of one of the most notorious red-states could be misconstrued (by those not paying attention) as aestheticizing poverty and classist condescension, yet Full Frontal scribe Coleman Hough's nuanced script is nothing if not genuine. Also of interest, Guided by Voices singer/songwriter Robert Pollard supplies a sensitive score of acoustic instrumentals, some of the most moving music he's written in years. If I could recommend nothing else, do seek out this gem before jaded critics can change your mind.

After receiving top honors at Cannes this year (and for the second time ever), one might expect to be simply blown away by brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes' L'Enfant (The Child), and although it's safe to say that the film is as entertaining as it is distressing, this is bog-standard Dardennes at best, and questionable as a Palme D'or winner. Taking place on the streets of an eastern Belgian steel town, 18-year-old mother Sonia (Déborah François) takes her newborn to go find the father, a pock-marked hustler named Bruno (Jérémie Renier, La Promesse) who would seem unconscionable were he not an overgrown child himself. Employing their typical up-close, loose and overly personal camerawork, the Dardennes boys work best when capturing the couple's carefree roughhousing and Bruno's quick-money scams, but after the happy-go-lucky young thug has the audacity to literally pawn their baby, the predictably redemptive narrative feels dubiously like a Westernized crowd-pleaser.

On the other end of the life cycle, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu—Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu's magnificently damning critique on healthcare—begins with a headache. Not ours, but the 62-year-old titular character (a very believable Ion Fiscuteanu), a cranky boozer who is concerned that his years-old ulcer surgery might be the source of his queasiness. Almost entirely shot in long shaky takes, this 153-minute Dantean descent into Hell, Purgatory, and a powerful payoff that is anything but Paradise follows Mr. Lazarescu as he is picked up by a paramedic (Luminita Gheorghiu, who is cleverly given the film's most complex character arc), taken to four different hospitals over the course of one night, and given wildly diverse diagnoses and treatments from an egocentric bevy of assembly-line docs. Unlike other medi-critical films like The Hospital or The Doctor, Puiu's take is more universal in its face of human function and folly, less concerned with insurance or other idiosyncratic issues as it is with illustrating the multi-headed beast that is the industry of healing itself. Oh yeah, and it's done with a devil's sense of humor that then calls you out on your laughter. Now where's that aspirin?