The Last Mistress - Opens July 4

Asia Argento looks like a cross between the sluttish, younger Madonna and Frida Kahlo. Unfortunately, she also acts like Madonna, which makes her all wrong for the role of Vellini, the title character of French provocateur Catherine Breillat’s latest film, The Last Mistress.

Vellini has a powerful hold over Ryno de Marigny (Fu-ad Aît Aattou), an aristocratic libertine who—as the film begins—is betrothed to Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida). Most of the narrative is a long night between Ryno and Hermangarde’s grandmother while he recounts his 10-year affair with Vellini in order to convince the dowager that he has moved on and is worthy of her granddaughter’s hand (and generous dowry). It’s obvious that such is not the case, yet the old woman allows the marriage.

As a character, Vellini is mysterious, petulant, passionate and uncontainable. As played here, she’s merely petulant. Argento has the bearing of a Spanish/Italian spitfire, yet everything she does feels too modern for the film’s 19th-century setting. This may be a result of Breillat’s approach to filmmaking— she’s more conceptualist than storyteller—though the other actors seem authentic to the period (even the Jagger-lipped Aattou, who seems to have walked out of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad).

It’s hard not to unfavorably compare The Last Mistress to its spiritual cousin Dangerous Liaisons. Yet where Stephen Frear’s version of de Laclos’s epistolary novel has movement and tension and real consequence, Breillat’s film is airless, suffocating and ultimately feckless. She’s interested in the ideas of cinema—the film comes with its own thesis statement at the very end—yet when characters are there to express a pre-ordained conclusion, they lose our interest as human beings. They’re just shallow marionettes manipulated by a trivial puppeteer. C-
—Dan Loughry

Tell No One - Opened June 27

There are few things more intricate than a French braid, but one of them is the French thriller. Tell No One—Guillaume Canet’s adaptation of Harlan Coben’s novel—is as full of deceptions and mysteries as the recent Oscar-winning The Departed. Though, being French, it’s more attuned to psychological and behavioral nuance.

François Cluzet plays Alex, a pediatrician who’s been in mourning for eight years since the murder of his wife, Margot (Marie-Josée Croze). Though exonerated by the local police, he’s still treated as a suspect. When two bodies are found near the same murder site, the police re-open their investigation, hell-bent on implicating Alex for the fresh murders.

Canet keeps the film jumping; you can feel the influence of Hollywood and Hong Kong in the new French cinema. Cluzet gives Alex just enough ambiguity to keep him suspicious, even after he receives an anonymous e-mail from what he believes is his long dead wife. The past and present merge ingeniously; old secrets surface; long-held grudges and misunderstandings unravel.

Though Cluzet is in nearly every frame of the film (overlong at 125 minutes), Canet surrounds him with superb supporting players. The venerated Jean Rochefort plays a corrupt local statesman (are there any other kind?), Gilles Lellouche is a sweet bit-of-rough as the street-rat Bruno, and Kristin Scott Thomas—a long way from The English Patient—is irreverent perfection as Helene, the girlfriend of Alex’s sister. When she smacks her girlfriend after a nasty revelation, you wish they’d make a tent-pole movie for angry middle-aged women the world over. (Iron Woman, perhaps?)

There’s not a lot of art in Tell No One. It’s a B-movie, the kind the French have always loved and imbued with some class (and sometimes more). Yet its pleasures are more than enough for a good night out at la cinema. B+
—D.L.

The Wackness - Opens July 3

Josh Peck is not what one would call “Hollywood hot.” At 21, the actor has a certain softness that lends itself to his boyishly handsome face, while his body still consists of the baby fat that many other actors of his generation have already excised via strict workout regimens or cosmetic surgery. If Hollywood has its way, in another few years he’ll be a chiseled, buffed-up stud weightlifting his way into romantic leads. But for now, he’s still a scrappy, slightly doughy thespian of average good looks and big talent.

Peck’s unassuming, boy-next-door demeanor lends itself nicely to the role of Luke, a pot dealer who comes of age one hazy summer in New York City in writer-director Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness. Set in 1994, during Guiliani’s reign as mayor, the film follows Luke’s experiences going to weekly sessions with the therapist (Ben Kingsley) he pays in pot and falling in love with his shrink’s daughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). Compounded with an unstable home life (his parents constantly argue about money), these experiences begin Luke’s journey to manhood.

A hit at Sundance, The Wackness is a pleasant if by-now-all-too-familiar exercise in coming-of-age filmmaking buoyed by solid performances and the thrill of seeing a respected actor like Kingsley taking hits of marijuana from a bong. As Dr. Squires, Luke’s equally immature shrink, Kingsley is a hoot, imbuing the role with a lived-in world-weariness. Juno’s Thirlby does her best in the girlfriend/

temptress role, rising above the script’s—and the film’s—limitations. But it’s Peck who really holds the movie together, and it’s his charming Everydude scrappiness that makes us forget that we’re essentially watching the New York stoner version of Good Will Hunting. B
—Ken Knox