RECOMMENDED

Like an altogether different movie also opening this week, “Virtual JFK (Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived),” Nacho Villagondo’s “Timecrimes” (Los Cronocrímenes, 2007) toys with the notions of “what if only…” With almost as much invention as the underrated “Primer” but with slightly less force than “Groundhog Day,” the tricksy-turvy narrative definitely takes a jaundiced view toward the notion of free will. Are there choices we didn’t make? Would things have been different? Héctor (Karra Elejalde) and his wife Clara (Candela Fernández) have moved into the countryside in the north of Spain; surveying his new domain with binoculars, Héctor quickly becomes interested in the sight he catches of a woman in her twenties (Bárbara Goenaga) taking off her clothes. Once Clara’s out of sight, Héctor heads into the forest… Complications and fearsome scissors ensue. Let’s just say he gets several chances to wholeheartedly fuck things up. It’s a worthy follow-up to his 2003 Oscar-nominated short, “7:35 in the Morning,” which you can find online. From Magnolia Pictures, which also released “Let the Right One In.” 88m. (Ray Pride)

United Artists’ poster sports a mostly vertical red band with two ninety-degree turns that create a horizontal jag. It does not look like a swastika, but there’s enough to trigger the mind’s eye to add a right and a left angle or so, and fashion the Nazi icon from the abstract graphic. No such mind games are in play when reading the boldfaced schematics of “the good German” and “ten righteous men” in the screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie and Northwestern grad Nathan Alexander. After directing two “X-Men” films, Bryan Singer knows all about renegades engaging über-foes. Evil, in this telling, is signaled by an extreme close-up of a mosquito incinerated by the burning tip of a cigarette wielded by a Nazi sentry. This pulsing thriller stars Tom Cruise (”A Few Good Men”) as Claus von Stauffenberg. Seeing himself as a true patriot, he delivers a briefcase bomb to a briefing with Adolph Hitler on July 20, 1944. If the meeting had not been relocated from a stifling underground bunker to a room with open windows, the explosion would have killed Hitler. Stauffenberg spearheads a coup attempt by mobilizing Hitler’s own anti-coup mechanism, known as Operation Valkyrie. “Long live our sacred Germany!” cried Stauffenberg before his execution by firing squad. Last year his son Berthold told Der Spiegel: “It is unpleasant for me that an avowed Scientologist will be playing my father. … I fear that only terrible kitsch will come out of the project.” Yes, but is it ennobling kitsch? An end title states there were fourteen other “known” attempts to assassinate der Fuhrer, should Singer have more operations in mind for the screen. With Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Carice van Houten, Thomas Kretschmann and Terence Stamp. 120m. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

After an ill-advised strike against a terrorist attending a funeral in January 2009, an extremely strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and the Patriot Act activates a regime change. In D.C. a high F note played by an 8-year-old trumpeter from Hyde Park figures in incredible machinations that include hitting emergency brakes on El trains and assassinating an Iranian-American by high-tension power wires. This fine thriller was written by John Glenn, Travis Wright and Hillary Seitz, who delight in toying with the idea that a plot is concocted like lines of computer code, and that characters walk, run and jump at the whim of unseen forces for our entertainment. Two innocent civilians (Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan) are recruited by remote control to do their civic duty with extreme prejudice. This couple of strangers receive cryptic cell-phone calls from a woman who yanks their chains and steers their minute-to-minute fates by changing traffic lights from red to green, and posting personalized instructions on public LED signs blinking in their lines of sight at malls and airports. Law enforcers (Rosario Dawson and Billy Bob Thornton) track the duo, who look like terrorists. Director D.J. Caruso does outstanding chase scenes through Chicago nightscapes. I really liked how an action sequence is visualized as a flow chart. One chase occurs in an automated baggage-handling facility where the characters are routed this way and that, as if inside a Chutes-and-Ladders game. “Eagle Eye”—which climaxes with a cathartic poke-in-the eye—is made for panoptical paranoids. With Anthony Mackie, Michael Chiklis, Ethan Embry, Anthony Azizi and Cameron Boyce. 117m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Bill Stamets) 

On a for-profit prison located at the end of a long causeway, men in cars—customized with 30mm machine guns and napalm—race around vacant docks and decaying warehouses. Winners are promised their freedom. Seventy million subscribers watch the three-day race via a live stream on the Internet. In the year 2012 this costs subscribers $99 per day, but you can pay less to view “Death Race.” Back in the year 2000, when the 1975 film “Death Race 2000″ was set, fans watched for free. Both showcased a star racer named Frankenstein whose multiple injuries and surgeries necessitated a mask. David Carradine played the original. Back in that day, the racers were not prisoners. They crossed the country, scoring points for hitting the unwary on foot. Now Jason Statham plays a new incarnation of Frankenstein. Once a NASCAR champ, he’s laid off from a blue-collar rustbelt job. That very night a masked intruder slays his wife. The out-of-work ex-driver is framed and imprisoned so he can keep alive the franchise. Paul W. S. Anderson (”Mortal Kombat,” Resident Evil,” “AVP: Alien vs. Predator”) writes and directs this loud, blunt, macho pulp ride without a trace of the wit that executive producer Roger Corman laced the original. With Tyrese Gibson, Ian McShane, Joan Allen and Natalie Martinez. 97m. (Bill Stamets)

Directed by Mathieu Kassovitz. The director of “La Haine” has expressed his disappointment in the final cut of this Prague-shot post-apocalyptic thriller set in Eastern Europe and “the teeming megalopolis of New York City,” where Vin Diesel must deliver a “package”—”a mysterious young woman with a secret.” With Michelle Yeoh, Melanie Thierry, Lambert Wilson, Mark Strong, Gerard Depardieu and Charlotte Rampling as the “Neolite Priestess.” Shot by the talented Thierry Arbogast, a frequent collaborator of Luc Besson. 99m. NR. Not previewed.

RECOMMENDED

(La sconosciuta, 2006) Opening the same week as “Frozen River,” an American movie about trafficking in human souls, “The Unknown Woman,” the first feature from Giuseppe Tornatore since 2000’s “Malèna,” is a heady, overproduced revenge tale about sex trafficking, and it’s a heady eyeful. Dervishes whirl; Tornatore’s camera spins to the dance of an emphatic, Hermannesque Ennio Morricone score. While some passages in Tornatore’s movies tend to the slobbery, such as “Cinema Paradiso,” the best moments in his work are deliciously hard-nosed about emotion, and even at its most twisty or solemn or vulgar to the point of obscenity, “Unknown Woman” is captivating post-noir delirium. With Kseniya Rappoport. 118m. (Ray Pride)

“The Unknown Woman” opens Friday at Siskel. 

Americans meet strangers on a train. In this Russo-phobic thriller, Roy (Woody Harrelson) and Jessie (Emily Mortimer) are two do-gooders from a church group who head home to Iowa. Their itinerary will include unwelcome overtures to sample local color. Heroin and torture, not to mention a boiled potato and a snowy orthodox monastery, are part of their Beijing-to-Moscow ride. First Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and Abby (Kate Mara) invite themselves into the couple’s train compartment. These seasoned travelers claim they were teaching English in Japan. Then corrupt narc Ilya (Ben Kingsley) befriends the Iowans, now of questionable innocence. Director Brad Anderson (”Next Stop Wonderland” and “The Machinist”) and his co-writer Will Conroy are far from innocent of charges of bait and tease. After their bogus threats go poof, the plot kicks in real ones. “We have no shoes; they have guns,” Jessie notes sensibly when stranded on a subarctic steppe. Fortunately, Roy the hardware store proprietor knows all about cheaply made Chinese locks, and this choo-choo buff can engineer a locomotive if the occasion comes along, and it does. What’s more obnoxious: the Trans-Siberian train’s non-stop late-sixties Muzak, or the script’s endless variants of “In Russia, we have an expression for this”? With Thomas Kretschmann, Etienne Chicot, Mac McDonald and Colin Stinton. 111m. (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

On Tuesday, the L.A. Times started the tom-toms going, gauging if “The Dark Knight” is on the mark to become the highest-grossing movie in the U.S. of all time, rising beneath “Titanic”’s substantial and seemingly unstoppable total that surpasses $600 million. Then again, Christopher Nolan’s dark, conflicted tale has gone above $314 million in a mere ten days, and most of the devoted moviegoers I know who have been dying to see it have faced nothing but sell-outs. (They’re still adamant, and most of them about the IMAX version.)

There are critiques as riotously conflicted as the movie’s politics—which presents, but does not necessarily endorse, the “dark knight”’s apparent turn to the “dark side” in the choices he makes throughout the movie. This is a good thing, I think: ambivalence and ambiguity just shy of notional incoherence make for the kind of movies that make it possible just to watch the zeitgeist burn. (See under: Robert Zemeckis in mid-career movies like “Back to the Future” and “Forrest Gump.”) If the world’s all hopped-up over the relative virtues or failings of “The Dark Knight,” they cannot help but engage with its suggestive political text, can they?

I’m most surprised by the fistful of reviews I’ve read where the portrayal of the city—the City—Gotham—Chicago—never enters into the appreciation. Even without knowing the corners being turned, the buildings just-glimpsed then cut away from, “The Dark Knight” is a city symphony of the hardly planned architectural heap that encircles Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plan for this patch of prairie, this City Beautiful.

The best movie you can readily see this week traffics in the same approach to drama, in a calmer, steadier fashion, and the likenesses were even more apparent last week when I watched Christian Petzold’s glassy dream-thriller “Yella” for the third time. Petzold’s earlier pictures, like “The State I’m In” (2000) and “Something to Remind Me” (2001), have had little play here, confined to a couple of screenings at Siskel. Yet this 47-year-old German director shares the amplitude of ideas about image and sound being as important as text with the Englishman who turned 38 on Wednesday. (Happy Birthday! Here’s $10 million!)

“Yella,” like most movies, unfolds like truth, like a moment, but it is also a dream, or perhaps less a dream than a portrait of a dreamer who cannot wake. Like his earlier movies, the ninth feature from Petzold haunts for what is shown but also for what is merely implied. Petzold works in apparent realism, concrete in his depiction of space and color, yet things remain disquietingly abstract—haunted. (”Ghosts,” the name of his 2005 feature, could title any of his work.)

“Yella” keeps the viewer off-kilter with strange happenings, beginning as Yella (Nina Hoss), a woman in East Germany, is stalked by a man who turns out to be her ex-husband. An accident happens. No one could survive. They both do. (Petzold admits reworking Herk Harvey’s “Carnival of Souls” for this story.) She improbably boards a train, drying her blood-colored blouse—Little Red Yuppie Hood?—and heads to the urban west, proves to be proficient in business, the equal of the venture capitalist who employs her. While her ex continues to stalk her, the dance of attraction between Yella and her boss resembles her earlier romance, as if her boss were a hale, hearty version of the earlier man, as if memory could only become moored by repetition. Hoss has the intense features of an older Mena Suvari, with a dash of Greta Scacchi’s coolness, along with an unnervingly steady gaze. Yella is central to nearly every scene, in almost every shot. She wears a blooded-red blouse that suggests vigor within, a burst of liveliness in the VC realm. Petzold’s images are hushed, interiors and compositions in painterly geometry that holds beauty that gratifies the eyes but becomes disturbingly clinical in accumulation. The real becomes spectral before these backdrops and in these spaces.

Working with his usual cinematographer, Hans Fromm, Petzold places his characters in patterns of urban isolation; the effect is studied, but never becomes forbiddingly icy. It’s tempting to explore comparisons to other filmmakers, such as Antonioni, or to the use of space in theatrical work, in which Petzold spent much of the 1980s. Like the late Italian master or Godard in their moment, European directors continue the struggle to capture the modern world as it enfolds us. His cool complexity suggests a familiar world with ease as simple as breath. Like Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck (”The Lives of Others”) or Joachim Trier (”Reprise”), Petzold is an anatomist of the unsettling, the unbearable, the heartbeat that remains beneath the money-counting tick-tock of contemporary commerce.

But I’d still belabor the comparison of Nolan and Petzold: among other things, they’re landscape artists, photographers of precision. (The surfaces submerged by the plotting that only seem to be the primary cinematic element.) Big doings are conveyed in simple gestures and images (with elusive yet evocative potential means that surpass mere framings and focal lengths). In “Yella,” sound matters, too: alarms drill, clocks tick, birds call, bells ring. A sonic boom? Seismic. A crow’s caw, the wind in the trees, the thrumming of a small river: a woman always living, mentally, at water’s edge. 

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Born in 1944 on an island off the coast of Scotland, Hellboy is the red-skinned offspring of a paranormal male Nazi and a supernatural entity of unspecified gender. His birth occurred in the opening scene of writer-director Guillermo del Toro’s 2004 adaptation of Mike Mignola’s 1994 Dark House Comic. Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is a medley of tough lug types from pulp Americana. This cranky, hunky fixer is property of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, an agency based in Trenton, New Jersey that recalls similar operations in “Men in Black” and “X-Men.” Del Toro (”Cronos,” “Mimic,” “Pan’s Labyrinth”) is manic at over-populating his mise-en-scene with supernatural critters and specters. The seven Gods of Chaos in the first film are metastasized to “seventy times seventy” combat robots. This sequel looks cheaper, plays louder and often numbs with its monotone CGI set pieces. An ancient treaty between humans and a confederation of other-things and nether-folks is broken by humanity despoiling the planet due to “infinite greed,” so all hell breaks loose. One trace of our eco-incorrectness: Hellboy’s psycho-firestarter g.f. Liz (Selma Blair), who used to burn with an efficient blue flame, now ignites in fiery red flames. It’s a carbon credit thing. With Doug Jones, Jeffrey Tambor, John Hurt, Doug Jones, Luke Goss and Anna Walton. 110m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

(Ne Le Dis À Personne, 2006) The world of grown-ups, those not beleaguered by the pressures of fate-versus-choice in life-challenging, life-affirming journeys of superheroic stature, has almost vanished in U.S. movies. Lives that have been lived a little are relegated to cable, it seems, with David Simon’s “The Wire” being the most notable example of adult stuff that once would have been part of the challenging fare on movie screens. Guillaume Canet’s haunting chiller “Tell No One,” based on a novel by American writer Harlan Coben, is a whip-smart, neck-snapping thriller where the faces of actors like Francois Cluzet (with expressive features strikingly like Dustin Hoffman’s), as Alex, a pediatrician whose wife (Marie-Josee Croze) was murdered eight years earlier, and Kristin Scott-Thomas (in fluent French), as his closest confidant, look like real people: or at least like fine, fine-featured actors who bear age with grace and whose characters are plausibly challenged by the heightening obstacles of the canny plotting. He’s almost put his life together when hints come, from the police and via successive emails, that all is not resolved. A remarkable thriller the virtues of which include terrific foot-chase, “Tell No One” is jam-packed with surprise and satisfying frissons, and its look into dark nights of the soul are easily the equal of those in the newest Batman saga, and it moves with the verve of a 1970s thriller like “Marathon Man.” More, please. 125m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Ray Pride)