Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (110 mins, 15) Directed byAlex Gibney
Overcoming (105 mins, 15) Directed by Tomas Gislason Metal: A Headbanger's Journey (96 mins, 15) Directed by Sam Dunn, Scot McFadyen, Jessica Joy Wise
16 Blocks (102 mins, 12A) Directed by Richard Donner; starring Bruce Willis, Mos Def, David Morse
Freedomland (113 mins, 15) Directed by Joe Roth; starring Julianne Moore, Samuel L. Jackson, Edie Falco
Don't Come Knocking (111 mins, 15) Directed by Wim Wenders; starring Sam Shepard, Jessica Lange, Tim Roth
The Moguls (96 mins, 15) Directed by Michael Traeger; starring Jeff Bridges, Ted Danson, William Fichtner
Slither (135 mins, 15) Directed by James Gunn; starring Michael Rooker, Elizabeth Banks, Nathan Fillion
Lost Embrace (100 mins, 15) Directed by Daniel Burman; starring Daniel Hendler, Adriana Aizemberg, Jorge D'Elia
A Year Without Love (90 mins, 18) Directed by Anahi Berneri; starring Juan Minujin, Mimi Ardu, Javier van de Couter
The title of Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is ironic. The perpetrators of the events leading up to the scandalous collapse of the house of cards that was America's seventh largest corporation thought themselves masters of the universe. This excellent documentary is a fascinating story of greed, criminality and self-deception that spreads out from Enron's flashy HQ in Houston to the White House and the whole financial world that was complicit in the company's activities. The principal figures are as contemptible as the Russian politicians and bureaucrats who were responsible for the Chernobyl disaster and show the same contempt for the well-being of decent, hard-working people.
With considerable wit, the film makes a complex affair lucid (at least for the time you're watching it) and it is interesting to learn that the favourite book of the chief operation officer, Jeff Skilling, is Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. The most bizarre figure on view is a Chinese-American in charge of energy resources whose chief interests were strippers and money. He left Enron with enough of the latter to become the biggest landowner in Colorado. There's also a mysterious 'M Yass', to whom large sums were paid; the movie suggests it stands for 'My Ass'.
The week's other two documentaries are less interesting. Tómas Gislason's Overcoming is an impressionistic account of a former Danish Tour de France winner training his international team for the 2004 event and then of the race seen from his perspective. It has more to do with pain, motivation and esprit de corps than with racing, the grace of sport and the tour as spectacle.
Metal: A Headbanger's Journey is a history of heavy metal music by a lifelong Canadian fan, Sam Dunn, who grew up to become an anthropologist. The musical is thunderous, the audiences frenetic and most of the musicians, the notorious Alice Cooper among them, appear to be pussycats posing as ferocious tigers. The scariest section looks at the truly dangerous Norwegian school, whose members are genuinely Satanic and have burnt down some beautiful country churches as a protest against Christianity.
A frequent plot of Hollywood thrillers and westerns is that of a law officer escorting a prisoner or key witness across dangerous terrain, The Narrow Margin and 3.10 to Yuma are classic examples. But the one that Richard Donner's 16 Blocks most resembles is The Gauntlet, in which mob-connected policemen attempt to kill the gangster's moll that a jaded Clint Eastwood is taking to testify at a crucial trial. In Donner's brisk movie, Bruce Willis is a taciturn, hard-drinking cop who finds redemption while escorting a motor-mouthed, black petty criminal (hip hop star Mos Def ) along the eponymous 16 blocks of downtown Manhattan from jail to courthouse.
He's going to appear before a grand jury as a witness to police corruption and Willis's colleagues are out to kill him. It takes place in what is almost real-time on a weekday morning in summer and the action is cleverly sustained. Willis has been playing slight variations on this role for years now, and though the films don't get better, his performances do. David Morse is very good as a cynical old friend attempting to talk Willis out of his newfound chivalry.
Taking place a few miles across the Hudson River from 16 Blocks, Freedomland is also a police thriller, but less straightforward, more pretentious and much inferior. Samuel L Jackson plays a plainclothes cop with the colourful name of Lorenzo Council. He's trying to keep the peace at a point where white and black neighbourhoods abut each other in a decaying New Jersey town. A white woman (Julianne Moore) claims that a black thief has stolen her car with her four-year-old child in the back seat. Jackson is dubious about this ex-junkie's story, racial tensions mount (exacerbated by Moore's racist brother-inlaw, also a cop), and riots loom. Moore, no stranger to neurotic roles, gets away with a five-minute monologue delivered under interrogation.
The deeply disappointing Don't Come Knocking reunites playwright Sam Shepard and director Wim Wenders for the first time since their triumphant collaboration on Paris, Texas, Palme d'Or winner at Cannes in 1984. This time, in addition to writing the script, Shepard plays a washed-up Hollywood actor, a womanising, drug-taking alcoholic who's fallen from star to supporting actor. One morning, in a spirit of selfdisgust, he rides off the set of an unlikely western being made in Utah, takes the bus to see (for the first time in 30 years) his elderly mother in Nevada and proceeds to look up a former lover (Jessica Lange) in Montana and the grown-up son he's never met.
It's a flat, rambling affair, revisiting themes that recur in Shepard's work (loneliness, the drifting life, broken families, fathers who've deserted their children). What it most resembles is Sydney Pollack's characteristically efficient and pointed The Electric Horseman and suffers dreadfully in the comparison. It even has an unsmiling pursuer in rimless, Gestapo-style glasses (a bounty hunter played by Tim Roth), who's a dead ringer for the corporation boss who masterminds the pursuit of the fugitive Robert Redford in Pollack's film. The saving grace of Don't Come Knocking is the western landscape and the use of Butte, Montana, a rundown mining town that retains a sad, faded grandeur. This place of notorious conflict was the model for Poisonville in Hammett's Red Harvest.
The Moguls is an embarrassing addition to the cycle of comedies about nice people doing transgressive things in a good cause. After unemployed steelworkers becoming strippers in The Full Monty and members of the Women's Institute posing nude in Calendar Girls, we now have some well-meaning dimwits in a dull American town making an amateur porn movie to raise money and brighten up their drab lives. Naïve and shy-making rather than tasteless or shocking, it wastes an ill-directed cast led by Jeff Bridges and Ted Danson.
James Gunn's Slither is a comic salute to the horror movies of the Fifties and Sixties, beginning, like The Blob, with a meteorite bringing a voracious creature from outer space. It then turns into something like Night of the Living Dead as the beast transforms the inhabitants of a South Carolina township into flesh-eating zombies. Gunn learnt his art working for the gorefest B-movie company Troma on pictures like The Toxic Avenger and the cult horror flick, Tromeo and Juliet. The film brought me little pleasure, but it revived happy memories of a laidback caper movie also called Slither, starring Peter Boyle and James Caan, made in 1973.
Finally, two Argentinian movies. Lost Embrace is an engaging tale of a Jewish divorcée running a small lingerie store in a Buenos Aires arcade, assisted by her younger son who wants to go to Europe and discover his Polish roots. It celebrates eccentricity and friendship across ethnic barriers. Daniel Burman, director of Lost Embrace, is the producer of the grim A Year Without Love, in which a gay Argentinian poet keeps a diary about living with Aids and trying to stick to safe sex while going hell for leather with some unsavoury sado-masochists. Not surprisingly, his father and aunt don't like the diary when it's published as a novel.
Copyright 2006  guardian.co.uk
