The technique deployed in "Apocalypto" is elegant, though that shouldn't be surprising, given the superb craftsmanship of "The Passion of the Christ." Dean Semler's cinematography, Tom Sanders's production design, Roberto Bonelli's art direction, John Wright's editing, James Horner's music and Mayes C. Rubeo's costumes all illuminate the story of one man and his family trying to survive in the ghastly chaos of a pre-Columbian society that's grown rotten to the core. (If the screenplay, by Mr. [Mel Gibson] and Farhad Safinia, suggests that any other civilizations are rotting, it's as the writers intended.) In the department of razzling and dazzling, "Apocalypto" embraces an assortment of consecrated action tropes and reliable cliches dating back to the silent cinema -- brilliant chases, spectacular leaps and falls, a creepy seeress, women and children in constant jeopardy, waters rising, quicksand gurgling, lives saved by a solar eclipse, cliff-hangers on the edge of sandy cliffs. Due to the absence of ice floes off the Yucatan, there's no Mayan equivalent of Lillian Gish.
'DAYS OF GLORY" is the forgettable English title of "Indigenes," an unforgettable drama about Algerian soldiers fighting in the French army in World War II. (It's Algeria's Oscar entry for best foreign film, and would have my vote if I were an Academy member.) The French title translates to "natives," but with a strongly ironic connotation. The soldiers in question, dust-poor volunteers who had never set foot on French soil, fought valiantly to liberate the motherland from Nazi rule. Yet their fellow French soldiers called them "natives" or worse, used them as cannon fodder, and saw them as subhuman scum.
ONE BAD SIGN of many in Nancy Meyers's "The Holiday" is how much the movie's home-swapping women, played by Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz, talk to themselves. It's not that they're crazy, though both are improbably crazed by unrequited love (which, Lorenz Hart warned in a trenchant lyric, is a bore). It's that they're stuck with the movie's structure, which uses a home-exchange Web site to send Ms. Diaz's unhappy Amanda from California, where she produces movie trailers, to an empty cottage in the Cotswolds, and Ms. Winslet's unhappy Iris from England, where she writes for a newspaper, to an empty mansion in Los Angeles. Eventually both women find conversational partners, followed by happiness, but, here again, the story goes on at untoward length. In what was clearly designed to be a chick flick, the on-screen chicks work hard at being endearing, while Jude Law, as Amanda's more than conversational partner, charms everyone effortlessly and gets the best lines.
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