CHARLOTTE FILM SOCIETY Movies begin this Friday at the Manor and continue the following Friday at Movies at Birkdale. Call 704-414-2355 for details.

* THE BELIEVER The winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival (beating out, among others, Memento, In the Bedroom and Hedwig and the Angry Inch), this absorbing drama quickly found itself swept under the carpet after no studio proved brave enough to release it. Acquired by Showtime, the film finally premiered on cable before being screened in a smattering of cities here and there -- kudos, then, to the Charlotte Film Society for bringing this cinematic hot potato to town. Like Edward Norton in American History X, Ryan Gosling (Murder By Numbers) delivers a magnetic performance -- too magnetic, some might argue -- as a self-loathing Jew who becomes a persuasive speaker for the Neo-Nazi movement even as he still finds himself struggling against his upbringing. Loosely based on a true story, The Believer isn't about the banality of evil as much as the personality of evil, and how it merely takes one measured (if misguided) voice to sway mindless multitudes. 1/2

* HAPPY TIMES Even legends like Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston occasionally directed trifles such as (respectively) I Confess and Victory, so it's no surprise to see a world-class filmmaker like Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern) behind the camera for a yarn that's ultimately rather inconsequential. A middle-aged screw-up (Zhao Benshan) proposes marriage to an obnoxious woman (Dong Lihua) who insists he take over the care of her adopted -- and blind -- daughter (Dong Jie), leading to a seriocomic situation in which he develops a genuine interest in the girl's welfare. The director's penchant for irony and tragedy feels more forced than flowing in this erratic flick.

* Also: Jean Luc Godard's 1964 BAND OF OUTSIDERS, about a woman who teams up with two crooks to pull off a robbery, reemerges in a polished new print; the surreal Swedish import SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR has been described as "a Fellini film in slow motion, or a David Lynch film drained of color, or an abstract Monty Python comedy." (Unscreened)

CURRENT RELEASES

AUTO FOCUS Director Paul Schrader moves from Affliction to addiction with Auto Focus, a distant, even sterile, yet compulsively watchable look at the sordid life of Hogan's Heroes star Bob Crane. Played by Greg Kinnear with the right mixture of frat-boy exuberance and lounge lizard unctuousness, Crane, in his early days as a radio show host, emerges as an affable chap with a yen for "skin" magazines. The success of the WWII sit-com doesn't exactly change his personality ("I'm a nice guy," he repeatedly insists), but the exposure allows him to stray from his wife (Rita Wilson) and get a taste of the women lining up to bed a bonafide celebrity. Working in tandem with a video production geek named John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), Crane eventually gets hooked on the easy sex; what follows is an expected divorce, a post-Hogan career in dinner theater, endless hours of taped sexual marathons, and the actor's unsolved murder in 1978. Despite the intense focus on Crane, calling Auto Focus a character study wouldn't exactly be accurate, since the movie doesn't get inside his head as much as it watches his increasingly self-destructive actions from a detached distance. This approach mutes the film's emotional pull and makes the climactic killing seem almost like an afterthought, yet it also allows viewers to better study the signs that eventually lead Crane to his doom. The sex itself isn't the problem, Schrader seems to suggest; rather, it's any obsession that reduces a man to an unfeeling automaton merely going through the motions. Auto Focus centers on a sad sack whose life is eventually reduced to one endless bout of intercourse without intimacy, a marathon bang that lends new meaning to the term "artificial insemination."

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE God bless America. And God bless Michael Moore for caring so much about America. The scruffy guerilla filmmaker who's made a career out of sticking it to the nation's corporate guard on behalf of the little people this time sets his sights on the country's thorny firearm issue. The result is a hard-hitting treatise that offers almost as many laughs as his previous pictures Roger & Me and The Big One but also (and here's the telling detail) emerges as a much sadder, wiser piece of filmmaking than its predecessors. Detractors will claim that this film, so skewed that Marilyn Manson ends up coming across as the most logical of all the interviewees, is nothing more than a typical liberal diatribe taking pot shots at easy targets, and they'd probably be right except for one thing. Sure, it's easy for Moore to note that those countries without easy access to firearms don't have our absurdly high murder rate, yet this film muddies the waters by pointing out that Canada, a country also swimming in firearms, has an enviably low murder rate despite the prevalence of weapons, thereby leading Moore (and us) to question whether gun control isn't the issue as much as an arrogant American mindset that feels everything is for the taking for anyone with the means to do so. That's not to say that Moore lets the satanic NRA off the hook: He allows goober members to ramble on until they hang themselves, and the picture concludes with him landing an interview with rabid NRA spokesman Charlton Heston, an enjoyable actor but a somewhat reprehensible human being. Bowling for Columbine isn't a subtle film; instead, it makes its case with Magnum force. 1/2

BROWN SUGAR As far as I'm concerned, Brown Sugar is nothing if not aptly titled, seeing as how my review for director Rick Famuyiwa's previous film, 1999's The Wood, dismissed it as "a movie so light and sugary that it could easily be mistaken for an artificial sweetener." His follow-up feature is equally as saccharine, a predictable romantic comedy about two lifelong best friends, music business executive Dre (Taye Diggs) and music magazine editor Sidney (Sanaa Lathan), who spend the entire movie fighting the fact that they're meant for each other. Or at least that's what Famuyiwa would have us believe, but Lathan (so terrific in Love & Basketball) and Diggs (so bland in just about everything) are never able to convince us that their characters are truly meant to be together. What's more, the movie's whole point is that these two are forever linked through their love of hip-hop, but despite the obligatory music biz cameos and lots of lip service from the leading characters, hip-hop rarely comes alive as its own fire-breathing entity in this picture, meaning that Dre and Sidney might as well be joined together by a mutual love of pro wrestling, Alan Rudolph flicks or Pokemon trading cards. Rapper Mos Def, memorable in a small role in Monster's Ball, effortlessly steals this film in the key supporting role of a wisecracking hip-hop musician whose integrity won't allow him to sell out as an artist.

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE After the grandiosity of both Boogie Nights and Magnolia, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson works on a decidedly smaller scale with Punch-Drunk Love. Yet while his canvas (and running time) may be significantly lessened, his imagination runs unfettered (indeed, he earned the Best Director prize at Cannes this year), resulting in a romantic comedy that operates by the rules of its own self-contained universe. Adam Sandler, stretching about as far here as Jim Carrey did in The Truman Show (in other words, both comedians didn't reinvent their screen personas as much as they simply toned down the expected schtick), delivers an interestingly off-center performance as Barry Egan, a toilet-plunger business owner whose lifelong mental abuse at the hands of his six sisters would seem to go a long way toward explaining his delicate emotional state and his social ineptitude. Driven by his loneliness, Barry finally elects to call a phone sex service, a decision he regrets once he starts getting harassed by members of this shady outfit. And things get even more complicated once he finds himself attracted to one of his sisters' co-workers (Emily Watson), though the love of this good woman might be just what he needs to pull him out of his disturbed state. Anderson, who packed the Boogie Nights soundtrack with 70s hits and the Magnolia one with haunting Aimee Mann tunes, uses Shelley Duvall's rendition of Harry Nilsson's "He Needs Me" (from the Popeye score) as the centerpiece song here, just one tip-off to this film's radical, off-the-wall approach. Sandler's character, an insecure introvert prone to destructive outbursts, isn't exactly cut from the Cary Grant mold, and if the film fails to use its exemplary supporting players (Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzman) to their fullest potential, it still scores points for displaying how the redemptive power of love could transform even a seeming lost cause like Barry Egan.

THE RING An American remake of a 1998 Japanese smash that spawned a pair of sequels, a TV series and a cult following, The Ring centers around the existence of a videocassette that causes death to anyone who dares watch it. So what exactly is on this terrible tape? Outtakes from The Anna Nicole Show? Footage of the Liza Minnelli-David Gest wedding? The torturous Vanilla Ice bomb Cool As Ice? Actually, none of the above; instead, it turns out to be a series of grainy, bizarre images that would be right at home in a music video by, say, Nine Inch Nails or Metallica. After her teenage niece and her friends mysteriously die exactly seven days after viewing the video, a reporter (Naomi Watts) suspects this may be more than an urban legend, so she tracks down the tape and watches it. Quickly realizing she's now doomed, she sets about studying the footage for hidden clues that might end up saving her life. In his short movie career, director Gore Verbinski has certainly been someone to watch, having helmed Mouse Hunt and The Mexican. Yet the quirky light touch that served him well on those projects has hampered him here: For a movie built around a piece of film containing unsettling images, The Ring is itself a rather tame undertaking, never building the finger-curling sense of dread that's demanded by the material. At the same time, Verbinski clearly takes the genre seriously (overall, the movie's on a par with the '98 original), and he scored a casting coup by landing Watts in her first appearance since her amazing breakthrough performance in last year's Mulholland Drive. 1/2

SPIRITED AWAY If there's a film genre that qualifies as an open invitation for moviemakers to let it all artistically hang out, it would be the animated field, where writers and directors don't have to worry about special effects proving too costly or stars turning too temperamental. In the animated kingdom, the imagination is truly king, and it's depressing to note just how small-minded most of its product has turned out over the years. A wonderful exception, however, is Spirited Away, Japan's all-time top moneymaker and the best animated feature since Beauty and the Beast 11 years ago. Creative beyond all reason or expectation, this latest effort from the revered Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki is a phenomenal achievement, a gorgeous-looking piece of cinema that stirs memories of everything from Alice In Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz to Where the Wild Things Are and Yellow Submarine. Featuring visions more suited to a hallucinatory dream than a movie screen, this picture, about a young girl who's forced to work in a bathhouse that caters to spirits, takes particular delight in confounding our expectations every step of the way -- not since Being John Malkovich has a movie proven to be so gloriously unpredictable. And perhaps only the Cantina in Star Wars can match this film's bathhouse as a sight for soaring eyes unable to believe the sheer number of unusual creatures sauntering through the place. Yet while Spirited Away would be worthwhile simply as an ocular treat, the story's also solid, concerning itself with timeless issues like honor, sacrifice, responsibility and respect.

THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE It's easy to appreciate what Jonathan Demme was trying to do with this remake of Charade without actually enjoying any part of it. Stanley Donen's effervescent effort from 1963 isn't exactly a classic, but with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn breezing through an engaging mystery-romance set in Paris, it's awfully enjoyable stuff. Demme probably figured a straight retelling simply couldn't compete, so he used the occasion as an opportunity to simultaneously pay homage to the French New Wave of the 60s, get back to the hipster style of filmmaking he employed in Something Wild and Married to the Mob, and hand his Beloved star Thandie Newton a potential star-making role. His ambition should be applauded but his creation should be avoided, as the truth about Charlie is that it's a brazenly misguided project. Full of schizophrenic edits that could leave a viewer with a permanent case of the shakes, shot in a frequently warped style that makes most characters appear about as misshapen as a balloon figure in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and full of maddening asides and non sequiturs, this yarn about a widow pursued by various shady characters who were all involved with her late husband never locates an appropriate wavelength. (It's a bad sign when preview audiences sit stone-faced through the lighter passages and giggle during the supposedly serious moments.) Newton acquits herself well enough, but Mark Wahlberg, in Grant's old role of the mysterious suitor, seems more a schoolboy than a sophisticate. 1/2

TUCK EVERLASTING A movie that the less charitable might describe as a castrated cross between Highlander and Lolita, this is actually based on the beloved 1975 children's book by Natalie Babbitt. In the hands of the Disney studio and director Jay Russell (who helmed the sweet family flick My Dog Skip), this sounds like it couldn't miss -- and yet it does, thanks largely to an overly reverential tone that ends up sucking the life out of a movie that's about living forever. Set in 1914, the story centers on the encounter between 15-year-old Winnie Foster (Alexis Bledel), daughter of the richest man in town, and the Tucks, a poor family living deep in the woods on her father's property. Winnie eventually discovers that all the members of the clan -- dad Angus (William Hurt, whose peculiar accent sounds more Swedish than Scottish), mom Mae (Sissy Spacek) and sons Jesse (Jonathan Jackson) and Miles (Scott Bairstow) -- once drank from a mountain spring whose water has given them immortality. Winnie falls for Jesse, a 104-year-old man stuck in a 17-year-old body, but their May-December romance gets interrupted by the aptly credited Man in the Yellow Suit (Ben Kingsley), whose banana of an outfit makes him seem less a malevolent figure and more like an adornment on one of Carmen Miranda's old outfits. A movie as tightly drawn as the corset that Winnie must endure, Tuck Everlasting is simply too plodding and ponderous to evoke the sense of magic and wonder that this story demands.

WHITE OLEANDER If the screen version of Janet Fitch's best-selling novel was an Olympic event, it's hard to tell which of the movie's four actresses would end up winning the gold. A powerfully performed drama that steadily works its way toward a satisfying wrap-up, this manages to offer complex roles to its quartet of leading ladies. And nobody's part is more complicated than that of Michelle Pfeiffer, who rewards the role with one of the finest performances of her career. She's cast as Ingrid, a talented artist and mother to 15-year-old Astrid (Alison Lohman). Ingrid clearly loves her daughter, but before long it becomes clear that she loves herself more -- hurt to the core by a philandering boyfriend, she kills him in a carefully plotted manner and soon finds herself behind bars, irresponsibly leaving Astrid at the mercy of a foster care system that places her in the home of a slutty born-again Christian (Robin Wright-Penn) and, later, in the care of a loving but overly sensitive actress (Renee Zellweger). Pfeiffer's physical beauty somehow seems to adapt to every role she plays, and here we see the frightening side of that allure: Ingrid is a woman who doesn't suffer fools lightly, and Pfeiffer's face, seemingly more angular and hard than in any past picture, reflects that steely detachment. It's a great performance in service of a towering character of great contradictions, yet she's nearly matched by the turns from Wright-Penn, Zellweger and especially Lohman, who handles the picture's largest role with the discipline it requires.