THE WORLD pours into San Jose Feb. 23-March 7. For 20 years now, Cinequest has made our area a destination for filmmakers and film fans, and this anniversary year sees an increase in the scope of the festival. By now, Cinequest is both a summit meeting for international and indie films and a festival that successfully foretold the way digital film would provide new possibilities for the aesthetics and distribution of films. » Read More

TAKE THE BEARD off Karl Marx, and what you see is a romantic poet, wrote historian A.J.P. Taylor. The same idea informs director Jon Amiel's take on Charles Darwin in Creation. Without the crescent-shaped beard, Darwin (Paul Bettany) is not just a romantic but also a quivering neurotic. The script by John Collee shows us Darwin in the period leading up to the publishing of On the Origin of Species. » Read More

TWO OF the children of an Oregon businessman are doomed to die of a hereditary syndrome called Pompe's Disease. Fearlessly, the father quits his job and starts a new career financing the development of an experimental drug to keep his kids alive. At this point, at least, Extraordinary Measures is a true story. Despite the title, this fairly ordinary film heads into what seems like fictionalization early on. » Read More

EVEN THE TITLES for The White Ribbon inform us of director Michael Haneke's rigor: tiny type, white on black, lingers onscreen to try to get us used to the slower tempo of life a century ago. The camera sits still and watches, as if it will get punished if it squirms. Here is stark black-and-white clarity. Here is the kind of bleak Germanic humor that makes English comedy seem fulsome and obvious. » Read More

CLAIRE DENIS' 35 Shots of Rum investigates a small world of the sidelined, the elsewhere. It takes place in an unlovely Parisian suburb of high-rises. Yet the gifted cinematographer Agnes Godard makes even this world startling. One lady, gazing out of her apartment at night, looks into abstract field of square windows across the street; some iodine-reddish, some radiant with blue TV light. » Read More

ANY FILM adaptation of a celebrated novel is a sort of X-ray; any manipulation or self-importance in the text will be laid bare. The success of the book The Lovely Bones is easy to understand. The horrific subject matter has substantial Gothic appeal, and it's an irresistible fantasy of a family mourning without cease, for you and only you » Read More

THIS ONE goes out to the lighthouse keeper in the Pitcairn Islands who never saw a dystopic downer before. We, however, saw a dozen of them last year alone, just never a version apparently produced by the Gideon Society. In the Hughes brothers' The Book of Eli, Denzel Washington plays the warrior of the wastelands, "30 years after the Big Flash." He is Eli, armed with a makeshift yet just sword and a significant book. » Read More

FOR Terry Gilliam, Don Quixote is still the ur-text. Despite the various stops and starts he endured in adapting the Cervantes classic, Gilliam repeatedly makes films about fantasy as an escape from a cruel world. This is an odd way to look at Don Quixote—it shoves aside the counterpoint: Sancho Panza's view that the world has its lovable and sensual side that only a stubborn old madman would ignore. » Read More

THE 1920s-era anti-heroine of The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond is named Fisher Willow; this is the most alluvial name since James Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle. No surprise that Fisher (Bryce Dallas Howard) is drawn to the Mississippi River to sit and take good long stares at its majesty. Like the river, she tends to go crazy and jump the banks. Furthermore, her family name has been skunked by a river-related incident. » Read More

I HAVEN'T READ Arizona writer Thomas Cobb's 1987 novel Crazy Heart, although it was praised by both Kinky Friedman and Donald Barthelme. The novel might have provided a key for the failure of guts in the Sundancian movie Crazy Heart. The film plays softball, despite the hefty acting by Jeff Bridges. Crazy Heart gives Bridges' a belly-baring role, with his slit-eyed Bad Blake as a kind of Bad Lebowski » Read More