Statham finds a window of opportunity.

Snow Angels SAM ROCK WELL, KATE BECKINSALE WARNER INDEPENDENT, R Underworld babe as Pennsylvania working stiff? Of course! David Gordon Green, a director who made his name creating detailed portraits of the small-town South (like George Washington and All the Real Girls), heads up to Pennsylvania and makes it look like the most middle-American place in middle America. People say grace in the food court, college professors have their midlife crises right on schedule, and the television is always on. Glenn (Rockwell), a born-again Christian, wants to move back in with his ex- wife (Beckinsale) and their daughter. Floundering in the attempt, he becomes a once-again drunk, to horrific effect. That tragedy is juxtaposed, clumsily, with stories from the so-called life of a high-school student, as if the plot had sprained something in the course of its transition from Stewart O’Nan’s novel to the screen. This is only slightly less awkward than Beckinsale, a glamourpuss to the marrow, cast as a working-class gal whose boyfriend wears leopard-print briefs.

Argento remembers what Sharon Stone told her.

a rail-yard security guard with his board and knocking him in front of a train. Glum yet gorgeous, Paranoid Park ties together Alex’s bleak confusion with his more mundane existential teen traumas: his distance from a girlfriend he doesn’t like and from parents whom the camera never quite gets a good look at.

Thick as Thieves Giddy, glossy heist flick trades sense for suspense

The Bank Job ½ JASON STATHAM, SAFFRON BURROWS LIONSGATE, R

The makers of this extra-crunchy popcorn movie—an Inside Man–ish heist flick, but also a spy tale, and ultimately a tribute to an exuberant game of chicken—claim it’s based on a true story. If they’re serious, then it’s also a masterpiece of investigative journalism, one that shows British intelligence agents concocting a scheme too baroque to believe. Follow this exhilarating loop: In 1971 an ex-model named Martine (Burrows, as glossy as everything else on display) gets busted smuggling dope into Heathrow, and her part-time bedmate, a man on the rise at MI5, helps her out of the jam in exchange for a little favor.

A high-profile Black Power leader named Michael X—the kind of guy who pals around, radical-chicly, with John and Yoko—is himself a drug runner, and has escaped conviction by blackmailing the government: He possesses photos of the queen’s sister getting royally screwed by two men. Martine is supposed to recruit some small-time villains from the old neighborhood to plunder the London bank containing Michael X’s safe deposit box. But the crooks, led by Statham’s Terry, aren’t clued in about the royal portraits,

and they sure don’t know that other customers with MacGuffins in the vault include a high-end madam and a moderately vicious smut king.

This does seem like an awfully roundabout way to steal some dirty pictures. Did anyone consider rigging a court order? Calling Q? Asking nicely? When The Bank Job starts snapping suspense sequences around, though, it doesn’t allow you

This extra-crunchy popcorn
movie is ultimately a tribute to an
exuberant game of chicken.

time to glare at whatever holes might pock the plot. (In more relaxed moments, however, you might start wondering at how an obtuse love triangle gums things up, or else thinking that the ending is so happy that it must be real, as no screenwriter over the age of ten would try to make it up.) Some great heist films concentrate on the quiet craftsmanship of the big score; and some very good ones, like The Bank Job—wild and willfully shaggy—prefer to revel in the sport of thievery.

Paranoid Park
GABE NEVINS, DANIEL LIU
IFC, R
Skater ennui gets the gloomy
Gus Van Sant treatment
The action—if action isn’t too
strong in the context of Gus Van
Sant’s latest downbeat medita-
tion—partly unfolds at a skate
park in Portland, Oregon. In the
dreamiest scenes, skaters simply
ollie and slide in slow motion,
exotic fish in a concrete aquar-
ium. Meanwhile, the film’s night-
terror side develops slowly, as if
Alex, the adolescent nonhero at
the center, is too shy or scared to
stammer out the truth. He killed
a guy, accidentally, swinging at

Boarding Gate
ASIA ARGENTO, MICHAEL MADSEN
MAGNET, R
Pimps, heroin, Asia Argento.
Sure this isn’t Cinemax?
Combining elements of a
D-grade erotic thriller and a
deconstructed international
thriller, Boarding Gate proves
duly snazzy and sleazy—kinda
skanky in a highfalutin way.
Argento’s Sandra, formerly a
hooker, gets back in touch with
Madsen’s Miles, her onetime
lover and pimp, in the hopes he’ll
stake her the money to open a
nightclub. That doesn’t pan out,
with sadomasochistic flirting
leading to murder, but Sandra
is also sleeping with her boss
and running heroin through his
import-export company, so she’s
already got her hands full. As
Sandra jets from Paris to Hong
Kong, it becomes increasingly un-
clear what the story is about. The
movie, however, is all about Asia:
Asia panting, Asia howling, Asia’s
pale and snarling face against
cold grays and cruel blacks. As a
tribute to her vampishness, this
at least beats Vin Diesel’s xXx.

Rule’s blonde ambition

SPO TLIGHT ON THE MUSIC OF Rock & Rule

With original songs by Lou Reed, Cheap Trick, and Iggy Pop, the 1983 curio Rock & Rule, now on DVD from Unearthed Films, earns distinction as the greatest oddball sci-fi musical ever committed to animation cels. Its villain—a kind of hybrid of Jagger, Bowie, and Emperor Palpatine—abducts a female singer because her voice can summon a malignant force from another dimension. Debbie Harry does the honors as the chanteuse, a post-punk babe in a postapocalyptic world where many people have mutated into snouted beasts and club owners still resemble rats.

Angels’ Rockwell and Beckinsale