The Prestige - 4.5 / The Illusionist - 6.5

The comparisons are inevitable: Both newcomer Neil Burger’s The Illusionist and Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige feature Victorian-era magicians, testerone-driven rivalries, hapless heroines, and twisty-turny outcomes.  They also happen to star two of today’s best actors, Edward Norton and Christian Bale, who share the rare ability to transform any career choice into something worth seeing.  With the larger budget, glitzier cast, and Nolan’s past successes with Memento (2000) and Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige would seem to have the upper hand here.  Unfortunately, Nolan appears to have forgotten what it was that made Memento such a remarkable success: Not the thrill alone of its climactic revelation, so much as what the twist meant for that film’s hero.  When Memento reveals its hand, its hero, Leonard (played so wonderfully by Guy Pearce), has already earned our sympathy, which makes the final scene - in which we see him slip back into his doomed forgetfulness - truly heartbreaking.  The Prestige aspires to a similar level of tragedy, but like a comedian too impatient to work up to his punchline, it barely skims the surface of its narrative backstory before rushing into the machinations of its climax.  Memento’s depth of emotion was a rare feat for a film so clever, and one that The Prestige resoundingly fails to reproduce.

Nolan barely wastes time establishing the rivalry between Bale’s Alfred Borden and Hugh Jackman’s Roger Angier (Borden indirectly kills Angier’s wife during a performance, but come on, the bitch basically brings it on herself) before the two magicians are waging an increasingly ridiculous battle of magic tricks, loading prop guns with real bullets, stealing each other’s secrets, and reviving real-life historical figures - in this case, Nikola Tesla, played by a frighteningly well-preserved David Bowie - to account for some highly dubious science fiction.  Throughout, Jackman doesn’t act so much as wish really, really hard that he could, so the task of carrying the film falls squarely on Bale, who bravely subverts his physical gorgeousness with a raw, slightly unpleasant intensity, like a hunter coaxing his prey.  Still, even he can’t save the film from its paper-thin character development, sagging middle chapters, and over-long finale.  To quote the film itself, it’s a prime example of a work whose reach exceeds its grasp.

The Illusionist, on the other hand, enjoys an “Honorable Mention”-level of success by setting its sights relatively low: It features a dirt-simple love story, a bloodless rivalry, and a painless “twist” that should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the basic science of potions circa Romeo & Juliet.  Norton plays the fictitious Viennese magician Eisenheim, who finds himself the rival of the Crown Prince Leopold (perennial sourpuss Rufus Sewell) for the affections of his childhood friend, Sophie (played for no good reason at all by Jessica Biel).  The magic here is much more of the polite, garden-party variety than The Prestige’s violent mad-science, but it’s perfectly at home in the film’s dollhouse scale.  Norton’s deceptive delicateness is also an ideal fit for Eisenheim’s quick-handed magic and sly charm, and the film has a pretty, turn-of-the-century patina to it that leaves a dreamy, pleasant impression.  Both films are easily passable, but The Illusionist remains a welcome alternative to the thudding soullessness of its rival this movie season, even if its pleasures are light and forgettable as air.

The Departed - 7.0

Fun, but not to be mistaken for Great.  As with Woody Allen’s Match Point, critics have hailed The Departed as a return-to-form for Scorsese, when in fact it is little more than a stretching of the muscles after a decade on the couch.  Scorsese hasn’t made anything close to Great since Cape Fear, and his most recent attempts, Gangs of New York and The Aviator, were particular failures, despite the herculean efforts of Daniel Day-Lewis and Cate Blanchett.  At least half of Scorsese’s problems can be attributed to his infuriatingly misplaced devotion to Leonardo DiCaprio, upon whose alien-man shoulders no film should ever rest.  Fortunately, DiCaprio manages to get out of the way here, perhaps because so many other, better actors are vying for the spotlight.  He plays Billy Costigan, a cop assigned to infiltrate the inner circle of Boston’s criminal kingpin, Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson).  At the same time, Costello has an inside man in the police force, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), who knows there’s a mole in Costello’s gang but not his identity.  Good-cop and bad-cop attempt to uncover and take out the other, and what ensues is an entertaining, rather good-natured game of cat-and-mouse, all foiled secret meetings and furiously typed text messages, until the surprisingly anarchic finale when nearly everyone is taken out in rapid-fire fashion.

Many fine actors fill the bill here, including Martin Sheen as Billy’s straight-shooting mentor, and Alec Baldwin, whose paunchy slickness wins some deserving laughs as Ellarby, the head of the police department.  Mark Wahlberg, in particular, is a minor revelation as Dignam, a senior detective in the police force.  Like that rare playground bully with actual smarts, he levels both DiCaprio and Damon with the film’s best, funniest lines, and steals every scene he’s in.  Unfortunately, these performances can’t cover for Jack Nicholson, who is woefully miscast as Costello.  As the film’s villain, he ought to strike chords of genuine fear, occasionally tempered with dark humor; instead, his bloated-clown schtick garners little more than a few chuckles.  It’s the sort of mistake that isn’t immediately obvious because Jack is Jack, but it’s what his performance should have been that highlights the film’s central problem.  Scorsese manages a cleaner, tighter direction to the whole affair, but he fails to express any of the psychological depth that he used to summon so beautifully; there’s no terror or emotion to trouble us long after we’ve walked out of the theater.  Had he cast former stand-bys like De Niro or Harvey Keitel as Costello, we might be discussing a different film altogether.  It’s an entertaining ride, no doubt, but ultimately just another footnote in a career once marked in chapters.

Little Miss Sunshine - 7.9

Abigail Breslin snags the Best Amazingly-Not-Annoying Child Performance Award of 2006 as Olive, a sweet, potbellied 10-year-old whose dream of winning the Little Miss Sunshine beauty pageant sends her family on a roadtrip from New Mexico to California.  The film charters the well-worn territory of quirky family pics, but the filmmakers treat each character, however farfetched or flawed, with a surprising, unassuming tenderness.  There’s a host of wonderful performances here, including the ever-dependable Toni Collette as the mother, and Steve Carell as the suicidal uncle, who boasts that he was once the “world’s foremost Proust scholar” (which may become the new “I wrote a hit play”).  Even the film’s inevitable talent-competition climax is winning: The scene of Olive and her family dancing on-stage in front of a horror-stricken audience of redneck pageant regulars gets one of the most deserving laughs of the year.  Little Miss Sunshine may have more ambitious older siblings (The Squid and the Whale, Junebug, and The Royal Tenenbaums, to name a few), and it unfairly bears the burden of overpraise during a miserable movie season, but appreciated on its own terms, it’s a joyful, terrific little film.

Miami Vice (2006) - 8.0

Summer action fare by Michael Mann - which is to say, a useless, reckless, supremely entertaining joyride.  With fuck-all abandon, Mann blows a sky-high budget on boats, cars, guns, and Gong Li, all the while handicapped by a dreadful plot and Colin Farrell inexplicably done-up as a greasy-haired hillbilly.  Still, Miami Vice succeeds on the merits of Mann’s trademark charms: the palpable masculinity, the violence, and above all, the abstract beauty.  The film features several gratuitously gorgeous scenes: A brief shot of blood streaked across a highway after a man steps in front of a truck; a fast boat hurtling across the ocean towards the sunset; Li’s translucent beauty in the morning light.  And as with Collateral, Mann displays a seemingly effortless ability to transform the grainy texture and washed-out colors of digital film into art.  Miami Vice ranks far below Mann’s best work (The Insider and Heat, in that order), but it’s still textbook Mann, and we’ll take what we can get.  Also features an excellent performance by Luis Tosar as the bearded head-honcho druglord, and Barry Shabaka Henley as Lt. Castillo.

Where the Truth Lies (2005) - 2.0

What the hell happened to Atom Egoyan.  The once-masterful director of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter crashes and burns with his latest, a murder-mystery featuring Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth as a pair of pill-popping womanizers who were a modestly famous comedy duo in the 1950s, but whose careers were ruined when a girl wound up dead in their hotel suite.  The film alternates between the ’50s and ’70s, when a young journalist, Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman), tracks the now estranged pair down, determined to find out the truth for a tell-all biography.  With the film’s themes of blond obsession and the seedy Hollywood underworld, Egoyan clearly struggles in the wake of Mulholland Drive; he vainly attempts to one-up Lynch using a plethora of soft-focus camerawork and laughably “explicit” sex scenes, but never stands a chance.  I might have taken some pity on Egoyan if not for his shockingly erroneous casting of Lohman in the central role.  As much as Naomi Watts made Mulholland Drive, Lohman single-handedly ruins this film, looking for all the world like a 10-year-old dressed up as a sexpot, and delivering every line with a halting, dumb-blond awkwardness.  Only Bacon escapes the wreckage relatively unscathed, but who cares.  The film is an appalling failure on Egoyan’s part, and a true lowpoint in what was once such a promising career.

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) - 7.1

Airplane-worthy fare made fabulous by Meryl Streep’s extraordinary performance.  Streep, looking beautiful for the first time in decades, plays Miranda Priestly, the deliciously sangfroid editor of a Vogue-like fashion mag who whispers orders instead of barking them, and terrorizes the skinny-girl minions who flitter around her in fear.  The googly-eyed Anne Hathaway plays the heroine, Andy Sachs, the “smart, fat girl” who quickly learns the value of a straight perm and some wardrobe-raiding, even as her boyfriend - played by the terrible, monkey-faced Adrian Grenier - looks on disapprovingly (”I don’t care if you were pole-dancing, as long as you did it with some integrity!”).  Unfortunately, Hathaway fails to develop any nuance at all in Andy, and her wholesome naivete quickly becomes a grating bore compared with Streep’s effortless charms.  The final scene sums it up nicely: Andy spots Miranda across a busy street and sends her a toothy grin, which Miranda returns with a pricelessly dismissive glare.  Also features an excellent performance by Emily Blunt as Andy’s rival, and Stanley Tucci as Andy’s fairy godfather.