The French filmmaker Olivier Assayas is probably best known for Irma Vep, a 1996 update of Day for Night, about the efforts of a movie director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his squad of technicians and assistants who were all trying to make a modern version of the silent movie serial Les Vampires, with Maggie Cheung, as herself, slinking about the set in a black cat suit. (My favorite detail may have been the lackey whose job was to hang around Maggie with a little squirt bottle to make sure her outfit stayed shiny.) Since then, Assayas has certainly established himself as a man of wide-ranging ambitions. His movies have ranged from the aging-friends ensemble drama Lat August, Early September and Les destinées sentimentales, a three-hour family drama set in the nineteenth century, to Demonlover, which ended with its anti-heroine, Connie Nielson, ensnared in a Videodrome-like S & M website, where she was last seen trussed up in fetish gear and waiting for her fate to be determined by some kid a million miles away who'd logged on using his dad's credit card, and the trash-fest Boarding Gate. Whatever their subject matter, Assayas's films are always intelligent, handsomely mounted, and intriguing; the one thing they generally lack is a pulse. They're not overly predetermined, like the work of some smart guys who make dull movies, but they do seem more thought-out than felt, and this can make the experience of being bored by them more frustrating than it is at sloppier movies. This is especially so in the case of his provocations, like Boarding Gate, which is like a self-conscious attempt to create the ultimate nightmare fantasy of rough sex and paranoid thrills; fighting to keep from falling asleep while Asia Argento is running around in her underwear executing people and being pursued by the agents of Kim Gordon can make you feel awfully jaded. Assayas's new one, Summer Hours, is as boring as anything he's ever done, but the nice thing about it is, it sounds as if it ought to be boring, thus restoring some of your faith in a logical universe.

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DREW BARRYMORE (1975 - )



As inspiring figures go, Barrymore pulls double duty by proving that it's possible to be both a Barrymore and a former child star and still not go tragically off the rails, even though the attractions of the grape are not unknown to her. (Lindsay!  We know you read this feature religiously!  Put down that bottle and pull over to the side of the road and take some notes!)  She made her film debut at five in the aptly titled Altered States; two years later, E.T. the Extra-terrestrial made her a household name and led to her becoming the youngest-ever host of Saturday Night Live, a record that I hope is still in her name:  I'm too afraid to check to see who might have broken it since. After an early spell (she was barely in her teens) as a tabloid star with stints in and out of rehab, Barrymore's mature career began with her attention-getting bad girl performance in the 1992 Poison Ivy, in which she played the jailbait from hell. Her work in that film was highly creditable, but it soon became clear that she wasn't really cut out to be playing mean girls: she was just too damned lovable. Since then, she's contributed her glow to such offbeat projects as Guncrazy, Home Fries, and Donnie Darko, which was partly financed by Flower Films, the company she co-founded in 1999, and which has produced such vehicles as Never Been Kissed and the Charlie's Angels films. Her charitable endeavors extend to many of her romantic comedies: she has convincingly simulated a yearning interest in such male co-stars as Adam Sandler (twice!), Jimmy Fallon, and Tom Green. (Let's not go there.) Barrymore has the potential to be a major dramatic actress, as has been most clearly demonstrated by her remarkable turn as a girl whose life is twisted out of shape by a pregnancy born of a mercy fuck (with Steve Zahn), but in the meantime, in fluffy comedies and talk show appearances, she continues to do the great work that it sometimes seems that she, alone of all the actresses in Hollywood, is fully capable of doing: she gives cuteness a good name.

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A few years ago, a glitteringly restored version of Wong Kar-wai's second feature, Days of Being Wild (1991) was released in the U.S. to general ecstasy from American Wong fans who had only been able to catch the movie on videotape or Chinatown showings of well-worn prints. Now, inspired by the discovery that many prints of his Ashes of Time had been deteriorating, Wong has gone to great pains to buff that movie up and re-release it as Ashes of Time Redux. An odd, distinctively dreamy martial arts/swordplay film set in the desert, Ashes was Wong's third production but his fourth film released to theaters; he spent some two years working on it, taking time to dash off his masterpiece, Chungking Express, in quick order and having it ready for release while Ashes was still in post-production. Ashes never got much play in this country, either, though it's been seen just enough to be widely regarded as beautiful but bewildering.

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With My Blueberry Nights getting a limited-release opening in major cities across the country this weekend, Hong Kong legend Wong Kar-Wai will finally make his English-language feature film debut, and, after twenty years of building his reputation as a filmmaker, get a shot at the cherished American audience that can make or break a director. The only question is, will My Blueberry Nights be his Fritz Lang moment or his John Woo moment? Early reviews indicate that it might be the latter; the movie wasn't especially well-received when it opened Cannes last year, and producer Harvey Weinstein's drastic cut is said not to have helped matters any. The jury, likewise, is still out on whether or not Norah Jones can act, but the testimony onscreen is said to be pretty damning. If it turns out that it's a stiff, it might be all to the good and he can return to the environment in which he did his greatest work; and regardless of its quality, we're all geeked about his upcoming remake of Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai. We'll have to wait and see, but even if it turns out that My Blueberry Nights is Wong Kar-Wai's first major dud, he's still one of the most innovative, fascinating and consistently talented directors in contemporary film. Here's five movies that prove it.

CHUNG KING EXPRESS (1994)

Although he'd shown flickers of brilliance before (and already begun his tradition of naming his films after pop songs with his 1988 directorial debut, As Tears Go By), Chung King Express is the movie that established Wong Kar-Wai as a director capable of legitimate greatness. The highly stylized film, about a heartbroken Hong Kong cop on the prowl who falls in with a gorgeous and mysterious young woman in a drug gang, so impressed Quentin Tarantino that he invested a chunk of his own money to get this and Wong Kar-Wai's other films released in the United States. Even now, after he's stretched substantially, this is still a stunning film, chock full of quirky moments, philosophical speculation on the mediated life, and his ability to coax stellar performances out of his actors. A Godardian triumph.

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