Another day, another great director gone to the art house in the sky. Michelangelo Antonioni, an artist of atmospheric ambiguity, died Monday. He was 95, and it's like he just decided that since Ingmar Bergman went, he'd go, too. Incredible.

Antonioni had a smaller body of work than Ingmar Bergman, who died Sunday, but his movies, culminating with 1966's "Blow Up," got some people excited and bored some people senseless. But he was a post-WWII director making movies in rapidly industrialized eras, and his films in the the 1960s and 1970s dramatized those changes through portraits of malaise and alienation, in Italy, London, and Death Valley, California, through epic wide-angle photography that made characters out of landscape, in a way that few directors had. The settings often swallowed his characters and made them sick, namely Monica Vitti, who was the stunning star of "L'Avventura," "L'Eclisse," and "Red Desert."

If you're a certain age, like under 40, Antonioni was a director you discovered in college, which is an ideal place to examine the effects of his style and to dismantle his sensibility: cold, but knowing. People didn't interest him so much as the physical world - architecture, geography, place, and displacement. Not only did he bring poetics to filmmaking, he gave the movie an epic, rousing kind of painterliness. With him, if you had evocative locations, you almost didn't need people.

by Ty Burr
Globe staff

Ingmar Bergman, the protean master filmmaker whose work opened the cinema to profound spiritual and philosophic inquiry, died Monday morning at his home on the island of Faro in Sweden. He was 89.

Arguably the most daring and artistically uncompromising of the writer/directors who transformed world cinema in the years following World War II, Bergman introduced a new seriousness of purpose to the medium. Simply put, he was to movies what the Existentialists were to literature: A questing and questioning voice that would not be denied. He took the human interior as his landscape, a psychic Monument Valley that none before him had put on celluloid and few afterwards captured so well.

Bergman’s key films probe the absence of God and man’s search for meaning; initially despairing, they grew over the course of his career to be filled with bitter, clear-eyed hope. “Wild Strawberries” (1957) is a young man’s movie about old age. By contrast, “Saraband” (2003), Bergman’s last completed work and a film that revisits the agonized couple of “Scenes from a Marriage” (1973), extends a bleak forgiveness toward humanity that feels ageless.

Similarly, the director evolved from the young enfant terrible of Swedish stage and screen, known for ripping phones off walls when he didn’t get his creative way, to a demanding but benevolent father figure who encouraged his actors to improvise their way toward moments of truth. His artistic “family” included such regular performers as Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, and Gunnar Björnstrand.

Bergman’s other great subject was the battle between men and women, portrayed with scathing honesty in such films as “A Passion” (1969) and “Scenes from a Marriage” (1973). Key to many of those works was the actress Liv Ullmann, with whom the director had a romantic relationship and a daughter, Linn Ullmann. Bergman married five times, had numerous liaisons, and fathered nine acknowledged children. His insights into human relationships came from personal experience, and his most damning conclusions often stemmed from his own actions.

After an apprenticeship in the Swedish film industry immediately following the war, Bergman burst upon the international scene in the late 1950s, winning festival awards for “Strawberries,” the wisely comic “Smiles of a Summer Night” (1955), and the dark, allegorical “The Seventh Seal” (1957).

It is two scenes from “Seal” – a hooded Death (Bengt Ekerot) playing chess with a wandering knight (Max von Sydow) and, later, leading a representative daisy-chain of humanity across a mountain ridge – that remain the popular culture’s shorthand snapshots for “Ingmar Bergman.” Much parodied and hugely influential, those early works unleashed a wave of soul-searching creativity among European and American filmmakers. The careers of such diverse U.S. talents as Woody Allen, John Cassavetes, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola would be vastly different without his example.

In the 2005 book “Woody Allen on Woody Allen,” the director discusses what drew him to the Swedish filmmaker’s films: “Bergman developed a grammar, a vocabulary to express ... inner conflicts brilliantly. Part of this grammar was the use of the close-up in a way it hadn't been used before. Very close and very long, long, long static close-ups. The effect is so exciting because it's infused with his special genius.”

Starting with “Persona” (1966) – a mystical rumination on identity in which two women merge personalities -- Bergman embarked upon a second run of masterpieces that are more mature and somewhat less seen. “Hour of the Wolf” (1968), “Shame” (1968), and “A Passion” led to a commercial resurgence with “Cries and Whispers” (1972) and “Scenes from a Marriage."

“Cries” was nominated for five Academy Awards, unusual for a foreign-language film. “Fanny and Alexander” (1982), Bergman’s final theatrical work before retiring to concentrate on stage and TV directing, was nominated for six Oscars and won three. Over the course of his career, the director was nominated for nine Oscars and received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1971. Three of his films won the Foreign Language Oscar -- “The Virgin Spring” (1960), “Through a Glass Darkly” (1961), and “Fanny and Alexander.”

The challenging Swedish master Ingmar Bergman has died, at 89. His true subject never changed over the years: the depth of art to capture and comment on the philosophy of life, be it through portraits of death or marriage. His 50 or so films remained devoted to a high seriousness that defined a kind of European filmmaking to the rest of the world.

He started making films in the mid-1940s and his body of work contains some of the most indelible images to appear in the movies. Frequently working the brilliant cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Bergman became a consummate visual filmmaker, using the frame to transcend merely photographing his actors. By 1967's "Persona," he was seeing deep inside them, using images to commit a kind of psychoanalysis. Beginning with that film, Bergman had begun making full-blown masterpieces.

I never cared for most of the films he'd made before this. They claimed to be about emotion and human struggle, but there was so much artifice and sleepy chic in movies like 1955's "Smiles of a Summer Night" and 1959's "The Virgin Spring," even the iconic symbolism of 1957's "The Seventh Seal" seems frivolous now. He was making movies as the French New Wave arrived in the 1960s and watching Godard, Truffaut, and the rest, it was hard to warm to Bergman, since the French were showing us what fun the movies could be. Their films were cool. Bergman's were cold.

"Persona," though, was a breakthrough. Bergman didn't just turn inward, he began examining the artistic process, which to a great extent meant he began examining himself: his work, his relationships, how art can be both all-consuming and yet never quite enough. His movies were awake with emotional action. From 1966 to 1973, it was an impressive run. The pictures - "Persona," "Hour of the Wolf," "Shame," "The Rite," "A Passion," "Cries and Whispers," "Scenes from a Marriage" - were or felt acutely autobiographical, marked by honesty, obsession, and eroticism and starring a revolving cast of great actors (Liv Ullman, Max Von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, and Gunnar Bjornstrand. He'd begun letting the world (war, dysfunction, psychology) into his movies. And his characters craved human connection even at the risk of self-destruction.

And yet these movie still have their didactic lapses. The mind tends to think in binaries (mine does, anyway) and I always saw Bergman, with his interest in dreaminess and atmosphere and erotics, as the anti-Fellini. Fellini didn't just want to take you to the carnival, he wanted to be the carnival. Bergman wanted to deconstruct the carnival until it looked like something else. Still, there were rewards in Bergman's approach. If Fellini made beautiful movies about the soul from the heart, Bergman made beautiful movies about the soul for the head. And the head is a fertile place for a Bergman film to live.

I Know Who Killed Me
Directed by: Chris Sivertson
Written by: Jeffrey Hammond
Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Brian Geraghty, Julia Ormond, Neal McDonough
At: Boston Common, suburbs
Running time: 105 minutes
Rated: R (grisly violence including torture and disturbing gory images, and for sexuality, nudity and language)

**

By Ty Burr
Globe Staff

"She knew a trick. She knew how to turn her life into a movie and watch it." So reads straight-A student Aubrey Fleming from a homework essay at the start of "I Know Who Killed Me." Since Aubrey is played by Lindsay Lohan, whose personal life is devolving as part of the latest tawdry, hand-wringing celebudrama, the line resonates right off the screen and into our laps.

Maybe Lohan does see her life as a movie -- who knows? who really cares? -- but she has to be glad this movie isn't her life. "I Know Who Killed Me" is an intensely unpleasant killer-thriller mystery that has nevertheless been directed with low-budget craft by Chris Sivertson. Sivertson's 2005 feature "The Lost" wowed moviegoers on the gore festival circuit but has yet to be released. On the basis of his new film, he's a budding Brian DePalma with even less restraint. Oh joy.

The movie overlays a supernatural mystery on top of the by-now-standard torture-porn trimmings. An unknown sicko is kidnapping the teenage girls of New Salem and lopping off their limbs in stages. Aubrey is the latest to disappear, but then she's unexpectedly found two weeks later in the woods, missing a hand and a leg.

One problem: She now claims she's not Aubrey but a hard-bitten teen stripper named Dakota Moss (it sounds like a color you'd paint a nursery). This shock Aubrey's suburban parents (Neal McDonough and Julia Ormon), although her boyfriend (Brian Geraghty) is delighted that Aubrey is now putting out. It also means we get to see Lohan pole-dance lewdly and have wild amputee sex while keeping just enough clothes on to cover her career. Do you think the girl wants to shock us?

Things get stranger and ickier from there. "I Know Who Killed Me" doesn't stint from rubbing an audience's face in severed fingers and blistered skin, and while Sivertson's hardly a subtle director (red filters for Dakota, blue for Aubrey; got it) he has a sharp eye and a knack for nasty atmosphere. Unlike such bland screamers as the recent "Captivity," this movie gets you to feel the characters' pain and dread in the pit of your stomach. Take that as recommendation or warning.

The twist is fairly obvious, as is the identity of the killer, as is the hoarse-voiced, wide-eyed performance Lohan now gives as a matter of course. She's barely convincing as one person, let alone two, and her flat line readings fall on our ears like a broken promise. There's an interesting idea buried in this movie -- that every young woman is both good girl and bad, virgin and whore -- and that paradox is one the star herself may be wrestling with on some level.

Lohan never dramatizes it, though -- never shows she's giving much thought to her performance at all -- and "I Know Who Killed Me" slides back into the genre murk from which it emerged. Sivertson may walk away from this ritual humiliation with a future, but for his star the film's title is beginning to sound like prophecy.

The big monkey this weekend is "The Simpsons Movie," which is about eight years late and a few dollars short of inspiration. I dunno; I'm with Wesley and A.O. Scott at the Times in thinking that it's pleasant enough (and there are some solid laughs in the first half hour -- Spiderpig, Spiderpig, heh-heh) but that it's really just a decent episode of the show, and that's not quite enough. But you already know whether you're going to see this or not.

"No Reservations" (photo above), on the other hand, is lightly likeable if you go in with no expectations (especially none concerning "Mostly Martha," the 2001 German film on which it's based). Catherine Z-J and Aaron Eckhardt are purty to watch and so are the Greenwich Village locations; you'll almost forget you're eating leftovers. Pity they didn't give Abigail Breslin much to do, though.

More demanding moviegoers will enjoy "12:08 East of Bucharest," a mordant but very funny tale of Romanian entropy 16 years after the revolution, or Patrice Leconte's "My Best Friend," a polished comedy starring Daniel Auteuil. Both are at the Kendall Square. Anyone who cares about punk rock past, present, and future needs to see "Punk's Not Dead" at the Brattle: It's one of the better entries in the punkology genre.

Otherwise, you'll have to wait until next Friday, when a bazillion new movies are opening up. The most notable is "The Bourne Ultimatum," which I saw yesterday and which may be the most well-made threequel of the summer. Man, can Paul Greengrass direct.

The MFA sees the last three days of the French Film Festival, so you may be able to snap up some last-minute goodies.

At the Harvard Film Archive on Saturday, two excellent early works from leading lights of the Mexican renaissance, Guillermo del Toro's eerie "Cronos" and Alfonso Cuaron's farcical "Solo Con Tu Pareja." (Want to see the pair cross swords with Charlie Rose? Here you go.)

One other thing: The Roxbury Film Festival starts on Wednesday, August 1. Look for Leslie Brokaw's article in the Globe on Sunday for further details.

The movie version of the beloved 1980s graphic novel about superheroes in a hostile world is back on again. Zack Snyder of "300" will direct -- to which I channel Scooby-Doo to say "Ruh-roh" -- and the cast will include Patrick Wilson as the Nite-Owl, Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach (both actors worked together in "Little Children"), Matthew Goode as Ozymandias, and Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan. Shooting will begin this fall in Manhattan. An earlier incarnation, to be directed by Paul Greengrass ("United 93," "The Bourne Supremacy") folded in 2003. The Hollywood Reporter has further details.

Ulrich Muhe, the German actor and star of the Oscar-winning art-house hit "The Lives of Others," died Sunday at the age of 54. In "Lives" he played Gerd Wiesler, a pallid Stasi spook who gets emotionally involved with the theater couple whose surveillance he's overseeing. It was a memorable and touching role that introduced Muhe to international audiences after a busy decade and a half in German film and TV; after the Oscar win, his agent received numerous offers from producers in the U.S. and elsewhere. He was respected enough that German Chancellor Angela Merkel sent a public letter of condolence today to Muhe's widow, actress Susanne Lothar.

The cause of death was stomach cancer, but the Hollywood Reporter obit includes "Lives" director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's statement that the ailment stemmed from Muhe's experiences in the East German military in the 1970s, when he developed stomach problems after being ordered to shoot fugitives escaping over the Berlin Wall. (The Spiegel Online obit has further details.)

It's possible, then, that Gerd Wiesler's expression of pained sympathy was real. The character's final words in "The Lives of Others," responding to a novel dedicated to his Stasi code-name, are "Das ist for mich" -- "That is for me." Perhaps the role served a similar cathartic purpose for Ulrich Muhe. Or perhaps it was just his art.

Perhaps the most brutally frank assessment of the sad little implosion that is currently Lindsay Lohan can be read halfway through David Halbfinger's business piece in today's Times: "I believe she’s uninsurable. And when you’re uninsurable in this town, you’re done.”

That's Bernie Brillstein, legendary agent/manager/producer and a guy who once represented John Belushi and Chris Farley. So presumably he knows something about people who can't stop putting things up their nose. His statement gets to a nasty truth about Hollywood -- that no matter how people cluck their tongues in dismay or sympathy over a celebrity tailspin, it's finally all about business.

And Lohan's business is headed for Chapter 11. (If you haven't heard, the actress was arrested yesterday after apparently chasing her former personal assistant's mother in a SUV; she had a high blood-alcohol count and a small amount of cocaine in her possession. So much for Hollywood rehab.) The Times article also reports how Lohan's legal woes may pull the financing out from under the independent film "Poor Things," currently in pre-production. Sad that the presence in the cast of two Oscar-winning actresses, Shirley MacLaine and Olympia Dukakis, means less to investors than a train-wreck of a post-adolescent, but there you go. I'm not blogging about MacLaine and Dukakis either, am I?

Lohan's woes have also put a damper on the release of "I Know Who Killed Me" (photo above), which opens this Friday without benefit of critics' screenings. (I'll catch it at the first showing then and post my review here later in the day; it'll run in Saturday's paper.) We reviewers are used to this treatment -- not happy about it, but used to it -- when it comes to D-grade horror movies like "Captivity," but when a studio embargoes a film with a star this big, that means it's either unwatchable or they're embarrassed to be associated with her or both.

Judging from "Georgia Rules," I'm guessing the latter.

The great cinematographer, who fled Hungary for the U.S. in 1957 and went on to shoot many of the key "New Hollywood" films of the 1970s, was 74. "Easy Rider," "Five Easy Pieces," "Paper Moon," "Shampoo," and "New York, New York" -- these are all great films and critical documents of their period, and Kovacs defined them as much as did their directors (respectively, Dennis Hopper [with Kovacs, above], Bob Rafelson, Peter Bogdanovich, Hal Ashby, and Martin Scorsese). He shot "Ghostbusters," too, instilling a fear of the Upper West Side in a generation of children.

The L.A. Times obit has a good thumbnail bio and a nice anecdote about "Easy Rider," but the most fitting tribute you could give the man is to rent "The King of Marvin Gardens," Rafelson's brooding 1972 drama of brotherhood and the death of the American dream. Never has Atlantic City looked so beautiful and so diseased. Thanks, Laszlo.

Should it be any surprise that "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" was the biggest-grossing movie of the weekend, with a $35 million that beat out "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" ($32 million its second weekend out) and "Hairspray" (28 million)? Not really. The combined Q score for Adam Sandler and Kevin James renders the movie a genuine mass-appeal prospect. More to the point, all the Harry Potter maniacs A) had already seen "Phoenix" -- twice -- and B) spent Friday camped out in front of a bookstore (probably in Harvard Square, from the mob reports I've heard) and the weekend with their noses glued to "Deathly Hallows." So they were down for the count.

And "Hairspray"? Don't cry for it, America. Largest opening ever for a musical, even accounting for ticket inflation (although, as Box Office Mojo points out, studios routinely open their films in many more theaters than in decades past). Rave reviews helped convince multiplex audiences to get past their fears of musicals, although some folks apparently have deeper issues. My Idiot Email of the Week was this one:

"Are you gay, Ty? Is there a musical you didn't LOOOOOOOOOOOVVVVVVVVVVVVE? Give a good review to an action flick and prove your manhood. Otherwise, you can pick up your fairy wings on the corner of Boylston and Tremont with the rest of the freaks."

To which I say: Grow some stones, chump, and enjoy song-and-dance like the rest of us. Gene Kelly was a bigger jock than you or I will ever be.

In limited release, Danny Boyle's sci-fi stunner "Sunshine" played in only 10 theaters but picked up a massive $23,500 per theater.

More box office numbers at Box Office Mojo and via Leonard Klady.

In my "Hairspray" review on Friday, I wrote the following: "Correct me if I'm wrong, but only 'The Producers' has followed the same movie-to-musical-to-movie path, and that one was a high-spirited embalming."

Never throw down the gauntlet to readers, at least in the internet era. I've received easily 40 e-mails since the piece ran reminding me that, yes, there's at least one other property that has traveled this route -- started as a non-musical movie, turned into a stage musical, put back on film.

That movie is, of course, "Little Shop of Horrors," which began life as a cheesy 1960 Roger Corman horror movie (starring a young Jack Nicholson), became a 1982 off-Broadway sensation as a musical, then was filmed by Frank Oz in 1986.

Thanks to all who wrote in (too many to note individually). Other correspondents staked claims for "Phantom of the Opera," "Mame," "Cabaret," "My Fair Lady," "La Cage Aux Folles," "Peter Pan," and "Hello Dolly." Good suggestions all, but I'm not buying. In most cases, the original property was a book or a play ("Phantom" was both before it was a silent film starring Lon Chaney), which was subsequently turned into a straight movie and then musicalized. The exception is "Cage," which was a 1973 film, a 1983 musical, and a 1996 American non-musical remake.

So the math holds: The only three properties to have originated as a movie, been turned into stage musicals, then seen that same musical version put onto film are "Little Shop of Horrors," "The Producers," and "Hairspray." Possibly to be joined in the near future by "Sunset Boulevard," and, who knows, "Xanadu."

One point brought up by reader Richard Sagotsky of Canton: "It's interesting how the three movies that went that way all started as films that didn't make a tremendous amount of money." Perhaps the fact that the originals aren't considered sacred cultural cows releases the creative impulses in the people writing the musical?

The Boston French Film Festival continues at the MFA. Tonight is Catherine Corsi's acerbic dissection of modern lovers and users, "Ambitious." Just a reminder, folks -- you'll never see these films anywhere else and probably never on DVD in this country. Move it or lose it.

For Saturday, hie thyself to the Harvard Film Archive for a double bill of "Diva" and "Subway," two French films from the high 80s. Seriously, if you've never seen "Diva," it's mix of punk, opera, thrills, laughs, unbeatable cool, and precision cinematography holds up remarkably well.

Speaking of puckish oldies, Alberto Lattuada's "Mafioso" comes to the Brattle in a new print this weekend -- an Italian forerunner of "The Sopranos" in observation and spirit. But funnier.

A Prince singalong at the Coolidge all weekend. Get your raspberry beret and head down to Harvard Street. You'll probably be in line right behind me.

Or, if you're craving new retro musicals, go for "Hairspray," playing more or less everywhere. What Travolta is doing in it is just wrong from a pop culture and closet-trannie point of view, but this is the most fun that both Christopher Walken and you will have probably had in many a moon.

Wesley loves Danny Boyle's new sci-fi space opera "Sunshine" so much that he's convinced me. Like I need an excuse to see any movie co-starring with Michelle Yeoh (in photo above).

There's a new Adam Sandler comedy for those of you looking for 90 straight minutes of fear-of-gay-men jokes, and an interesting two-character dab of venom called "Interview" from director Steve Buscemi (remaking a film by the late Dutch director Theo van Gogh). And for connoisseurs of Dreadful Cinema, there is simply... "Goya's Ghosts."

Have a nice weekend.

"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" ruled the box office starting Wednesday and carrying all the way through Sunday. No surprise there, especially when the movie's playing on OVER 9,000 SCREENS. That's the third-widest opening of all time after the most recent "Spider-Man" and "Pirates." Fueling the mania was the buzz around the imminent drop of J.K. Rowling's final novel in the series.

Here are the "Potter" numbers: $44.2 million its opening day, a new record for a Wednesday. $140 million in tickets sold from Wednesday through Sunday, the sixth best five-day start. The weekend grosses were "small" -- $77 million -- but only because the hardcore mouthbreathers had already gone on Wednesday and Thursday. Factor in another $190 million overseas, and "Phoenix" has already hauled in a third of a billion dollars. Wouldn't it be nice if Warner Bros. put some of that to, I dunno, building some new schools or funding alternate energy programs? Oops, I forgot, under Hollywood accounting practices, the movie will never get out of the red.)

The only other new release, crummy horror movie "Captivity," barely showed its face, opening in a scant 1,000 theaters and raking in $1.5 million, doubtless from audiences who were shut out of "Harry Potter" screenings. "Transformers" and "Ratatouille" held their own passably. The excellent Don Cheadle movie "Talk to Me" did nicely in a limited 33-theater rollout, picking up an $11K per-theater-average.

More charts and analysis from Box Office Mojo and Leonard Klady.

The excitement over David and Victoria Beckham's arrival in Los Angeles from the U.K. is mysterious for sure. (As Victoria put it with a certain understatement, "We're not Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.") It is also a quaint throwback to pure glamor. (Never mind that we're now outsourcing that, too.) They don't appear to have any causes or crippling complications. So far there's no scandal, just work and that W magazine layout. He will play soccer for the Galaxy. She will play at being a Spice Girl again.

That these two are instant Hollywood royalty is like something from the 1950s or the 1960s. But it also suggests that our own stars might be too complex and calculating for this kind of straightforward adulation. Celebrity worship has now become a moral issue: Paris Hilton is only slight less hateable after prison. The Jolie-Pitts seem to be using their fame to shame us into gazing at international atrocity instead. They're jaded about us. We're jaded back.

Posh and Becks have endured their share of scandal at home. Here they're just two kids trying to make a go of it. They indulge our old-fashioned shallowness. We'll wear his jersey. Or a co-worker's kid's classmate will. But you get it: Despite their tenuous Hollywood bona fides (Beckham was conspicuously absent from "Bend it Like Beckham" and the less said about "Spice World" the better), America is rooting for them both to stay beautiful and keep us distracted.

Captivity

Directed by: Roland Joffe
Written by: Larry Cohen and Joseph Tura
Starring: Elisha Cuthbert, Daniel Gillies, Pruitt Taylor Vince
At: suburban theaters
Running time: 85 minutes
Rated: R (strong violence, torture, pervasive terror, grisly images, language, and some sexual material)
One star

By Ty Burr
Globe Staff

Scarier than anything in "Captivity" was the drive to Danvers I had to go through to see it. The new horror film, a wan, derivative entry in the torture-porn cycle, didn’t screen for critics and is playing only in a few suburban multiplexes before scampering to DVD. This is what’s known as sneaking into town.

It’s a "Saw" rip-off with less smarts. (Take a moment, please, to allow that sentence to sink in.) Jennifer (Elisha Cuthbert of "24" and several not-so-hot movies) is a supermodel taken captive by a mysterious hooded man (Pruitt Taylor Vince); she awakens in a dungeon outfitted with surveillance cams and file drawers that pop out of the wall bearing unpleasant things.

Every so often she’s taken to a dank operating room, strapped to a table, and made to watch snuff films of previous victims. At one point, the villain forces her to drink a blender concoction made from eyeballs, ears, and less obvious body parts. You’ll probably want to skip the slushie on the way in.

Eventually the heroine discovers another captive, a hunk named Gary (Daniel Gillies), and the two trapped rats plot their revenge. Yes, it’s one of those movies that deplores sadistic acts visited upon nubile, trussed-up women while indulging the audience’s pleasure in same.

"Captivity" is stylish in a low-budget way, but it’s wholly pointless. There’s a twist fans of the genre will see coming a mile away, not to mention plot holes the characters could escape through. More bothersome is that Cuthbert’s character’s so bland (and the actress such a road show Kirsten Dunst) that it’s tough to care what happens to her.

I found myself caring more for poor Roland Joffe, who has sunk from directing "The Mission" and "The Killing Fields" to this. The script’s credited to Larry Cohen and Joseph Tura; Cohen, of course, is the B-movie veteran who has given us "It’s Alive," "Maniac Cop," and "Phone Booth," but his gift for inspired sleaze deserts him here (aside from the amusingly gruesome fate of Jennifer’s Bichon Frise).

Finicky film freaks will recognize "Joseph Tura" as the name of Jack Benny’s character in the classic ‘‘To Be or Not To Be,’’ which means someone’s hiding under a pseudonym and it’s probably Joffe. Anyway, the oddest thing about "Captivity" is that the movie’s a Russian-American co-production shot in a Moscow studio. How nice that the two former enemy superpowers can at last agree on something: that the world needs more crappy horror movies.

The French Film Festival begins at the MFA, providing your chance to see some excellent Gallic flicks that will otherwise not be released in this country. Thank you, Bo. The Globe's Ethan Gilsdorf has the details.

Three can't-miss propositions this weekend, providing you can get past the mobs trying to see "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" (which isn't so bad itself):

"Rescue Dawn" -- It looks like "just" another POW survival story until you look at it through the lens of Werner Herzog movies, at which point it becomes eerily overwhelming. I don't know how Christian Bale does it, but he's a completely different guy in each movie. You can also get your classic Herzog fix at the Brattle, and if you haven't seen "Aguirre" yet, now's the time. A more apt metaphor for our current misadventures abroad I can't imagine.

"Talk to Me" -- Is there a greater joy these days than watching Don Cheadle act? He finally gets a live one in the role of Petey Greene, DC disc jockey of the 1960s. See this for him and for Kasi Lemmons' infectious filmmaking -- and for Taraji P. Henson (with Cheadle, above) -- rather than for the extended, problematic mope that sinks the last third.

"Lady Chatterley" -- Achingly slow, quiet, gentle, hot adaptation of an early version of the D.H. Lawrence novel. In French. Bring a sense of patience and your significant other.

Tonight kicks off the annual "Summer Double Features" series at the Harvard Film Archive, easily the finest conglomeration of hard-to-find oldies, cool surprises, and inspired pairings in town. (My God! Elaine May's "A New Leaf" next Thursday!) Check their calendar and mark yours accordingly -- the series is an education in itself.

If you know your graphic novels -- go ahead, call them comics for snobs -- you know Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" is one of the best reads of the last decade. Even the sequel was well done. Both are personal histories, telling of Satrapi's life under the mullahs of the Iranian revolution and her experiences in Europe after escaping. They're smart, feeling, witty, and drawn with appealingly dry black-and-white bluntness. If you haven't read them, go do so now.

Anyway, the news that the animated film version of "Persepolis" has actually turned out to be pretty good is heartening. They loved it in Cannes, in part because Catherine Deneuve, her daughter Chiara Mastroianni, and French film legend Danielle Darrieux provided the voices. Also because Satrapi herself co-wrote and co-directed the film, along with fellow comics artist Vincent Paronnaud. The film won the Jury Prize, pretty rare for an animated feature.

Great to hear, but when can we see it in the States? According to the Hollywood Reporter, by the end of this year -- but not with the original cast. Before you work yourself into a purist lather, remember that all the voices in any animated movie are dubbed, so it could work. Besides, Denueve will reprise her role as young Marjane's grandmother, this time in English, and Sean Penn and Iggy Pop have been signed on to play, respectively, the girl's father and uncle. Not your average Disney voice-over talent.

So it's a wait-and-see thing. Cross fingers they get someone good to play the lead (if you have suggestions, email me and I'll post them), and hope they include the original French version on the DVD.

Here's a link to the film's MySpace page. It's in French but impressively loopy, and it has some nice teaser clips.

Perhaps you missed this bit of amazement. But last week toward the end of Wimbledon, several alarming things happened, a few of them during the same match. The second ladies semi-final featured Justine Henin, the number one player in the world, against Marion Bartoli, a 22-year-old Frenchwoman who was seeded 18th and had never advanced to the second week of a grand slam event.

Henin had been coasting through the tournament and was widely expected to reach the final, having overcome, in the quarterfinals, a hampered Serena Williams (bum wrist = weak slice backhand). And coast she did. Henin won the first set easily, and she was also ahead in the second, playing confidently and intimidating her opponent with the variety of her shot-making and the size of her reputation.

Then according to Bartoli, the magic happened: She looked up into the grandstands on Centre Court and saw him. "I was focusing on Pierce Brosnan because he is so beautiful. I was just watching him. He was the only one - I said to myself, it's not possible I play so badly in front of him." From there, she turned the match around. The action on her groundstrokes didn't simply bewilder Henin, they shocked her off the court. The score of the final set was 6-1, and Bartoli, who's fitter than she looks (her father's wacko training regiment includes having her walk around with tennis balls taped to her heels), became a hero. Brosnan became something new for sports: an optical energy drink.

A wedding kept Brosnan from the final the following day, which is too bad since Bartoli was outplayed by Venus Williams. He sent Bartoli flowers as a sort of apology and congratulations. But as a gentleman he should consider planting himself at all her future matches.

Factoring in late-night screenings last Monday, "Transformers" had amassed $153 million by Sunday night, one of the best starts for a non-sequel property in recent memory. You know what that means, don't you? No, not sequels, although there'll assuredly be a "Transformers 2: Mission to Darfur" (if only). It means every toy you ever entertained squishy feelings of nostalgia for has now been green-lighted for production as of Monday morning. "Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots"? It's doubtless on its way, with The Rock and Tony Jaa getting first look at the script. "Operation"? It'll be a torture-porn horror movie a la "Hostel". "Bratz"? Oh, wait, that one's opening in August.

This also means that Michael Bay has newfound respect in Hollywood, and I say that with the heaviest of hearts.

"Transformers" played on 7,600 screens in 4,011 theaters, and the doubling-up accounted for the film's high $16K per-theater-average. "Ratatouille" was in almost as many theaters but not on as many screens, so it's PTA was a comparatively lower $7,000. The rat-tale held up fairly well its second weekend out, with $29 million bringing the total gross over the $100 million mark, but it's looking to be less of a box-office monster than other Pixar movies. (Who cares? It's still great.)

"License to Wed"? $10 mill, about average for a bad Robin Williams comedy these days. "RV" made $16 million when it opened last year, but in a lot more theaters.

Two smaller entries to keep an eye on: "Rescue Dawn" (Werner Herzog directing Christian Bale) made a very strong $17K per theater at six houses, and creepy-kid chiller "Joshua," a Sundance hit, had an $8,000 PTA in the same number of venues. Both open in the Boston area this week ("Rescue" is terrific, and a lot of people like "Joshua," too, even if I'm not one of them.)

Here's the Box Office Mojo chart, and Leonard Klady's column.

The "Independents Week" series continues at the Harvard Film Archive: Tonight, the deadpan teachers'-lounge satire "Chalk", tomorrow Joe Swanberg's "Hannah Takes the Stairs," to my mind the best film yet to come out of the so-called MumbleCore scene.

"License to Wed" has the worst reviews of 2007 so far (Wesley hated it, and the Times' A.O. Scott held it out on tongs), so entertain yourself by reading them instead of paying good money to see a bad movie. "Transformers" and "Ratatouille" will likely dominate the weekend box office, attracting (respectively) 8-year-old boys of all ages and foodies of all sizes.

Mostly there's a new bunch of arthouse movies hitting town and most of them are at the Kendall Square: the sprightly zombie comedy "Fido" (in photo above, and, yes, that's comedian Billy Connolly in the middle); the pretty okay hitman comedy-romance "You Kill Me," which you should see for Ben Kingsley and Tea Leoni but probably on DVD; and "Gypsy Caravan," a soul-lifting music documentary that's not just for world-music followers or Gipsy Kings freaks. (I.e., if you liked "Buena Vista Social Club," you'll like this.)

The omnibus film "Paris Je T'aime" returns to the Coolidge and the Kendall today after a brief appearance in May: here's Wesley's review. 18 short stories, one per arrondissement, with a roster of directors that includes Alexander Payne, Olivier Assayas, Wes Craven (!), and the Coen brothers, and a cast that includes Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, Marianne Faithfull, and Elijah Wood. Admit it, you're curious.

The Brattle has "Broken English," which is a feast for Parker Posey fans, but save your Brattle-bucks until next weekend, when the Werner Herzog double-bill kicks in. You really need to see "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" on a big screen.

Something I didn't have the opportunity to explore in writing about Michael Bay's "Transformers" was just how much better the Dino De Laurentiis-produced animated epic was. Not only was "Transformers: The Movie" about the Transformers themselves, at the time (the year was '86) it was dramatic and, for a young fan of the toys and the cartoon, moving (more dead pivotal characters than the last four episodes of the "Sopranos")

Anyway, over at Slate the excellent John Swansburg has crystallized my feelings in a fine essay praising the glories of the 1986 movie, starting with the reality that it was, indeed, the final film of Orson Welles. Swansburg was as blown away by it as I was when it was originally released, and he understands that Bay's movie doesn't risk nearly as much as this beautifully animated spectacle. It's less than meets the eye.

I've never met Bill Cody in person, but the filmmaker and I have been corresponding on and off for about two decades now, ever since I saw "Athens, GA: Inside/Out," the slaphappy 1987 documentary he produced about the music scene that gave us REM and The B-52s.

His most recent work is "Thank You For My Eyes," a documentary made with Simone Allmen about the Kurds of northern Iraq. I haven't seen the film yet; it didn't make it into Sundance, to Bill's frustration. Recently he headed back to Kurdistan (a real place, if not yet a genuine country) to teach a filmmaking workshop to young people there.

It's the MySpace blog he's keeping while in Iraq that I want to turn you onto, because it makes astonishing reading -- a testament to lives that go on and minds that keep growing even as disaster looms. The shadow of the war to the south is never not present, and yet the kids and grown-ups Bill meets constantly articulate their hopes, eager to express them in words or on film.

These are people and stories we don't get in the mainstream media, and the occasional political insights are similarly ground-level. (Love that July 2nd blog entry detailing drinks and a realpolitik conversation with two State Department wonks.)

Just a taste of what Cody is seeing and hearing:

"Yesterday a young filmmaker had to get up in the middle of our story conference to stand up. He apologized to us and then explained that he had to stand up sometimes because he has a bullet in his leg from when 'terrorists' attacked a film shoot he was on with an Arabic director from the Netherlands.

"After he got shot, the terrorists rounded up the crew and beat them for over an hour. Then they were lined up against a wall, the men aimed rifles at them and ordered them to turn around. The crew stood there scared out of their minds and waiting to die. After waiting for what seemed like an eternity they turned around and the men were gone. He said the director lied and said he was from Iraq otherwise they probably would have killed him.

"BUT he said he likes the bullet in his leg because it reminds him of his first job in 'cinema'. Only in Iraq."

Cody's blog is slowly getting around; Bob Saget recently emailed the filmmaker to tell him it reads like a combination of "Borat" and "Dr. Strangelove." I think it reads like nothing the movies have shown us. Yet. Again, here's the link to the "Thank You for My Eyes" blog, and the film's MySpace page.

The "Good Morning America" movie critic, Joel Siegel, died over the weekend. He'd been battling cancer and finally succumbed.

The uncommonly sensitive Taiwanese director Edward Yang also has died. His was not a household name in this country, even though he held U.S. citizenship (he was born in Shanghai, raised in Taiwan, and expired at home in Beverly Hills). His films were focused almost exclusively on the Taipei middle-class. The last and best known of them, 2000's "Yi Yi" (it was called "A One and a Two" over here) is his masterpiece, an hours-long, simply told film about the vicissitudes of familial love.

It is one of the finest movies ever made, and certainly one of the truest about the ties that bind relatives. Sometimes they're strong. Sometimes blood is no thicker than water. "What can you do? It's family," the movie seems to say with understated but democratic style: the long takes and wide angles allow your eye to consider everything and anything happening within his framing. As with all seven of Yang's movies, "Yi Yi" is full of complex, life-size feeling. This very much could be dinner at your house. Only more beautifully filmed.

He was a great director (1991's "A Brighter Summer Day" is also marvelous), and the movies are worse off without him.

Even if it didn't match the $60 million opening gross of "Cars" last year, "Ratatouille"'s $47 million led the weekend and represents a decisive victory for any movie about rats in a French restaurant. (I'd say that was the polar opposite of "Cars"' NASCAR demo appeal). Next weekend should prove what makes the movie special in the crowded marketplace: legs (and lot of 'em). I caught "Ratatouille" with the family on Friday night, and the packed house burst into applause at the end -- not bad for a CGI movie. Judging from the ecstatic reviews, this one has found the inner child in everyone's Antoine Ego.

"Live Free or Die Hard" didn't die, either -- the Bruce Willis grunt-a-thon made a perfectly respectable $33 million, on par with earlier installments in this delicate saga. Total take since the Wednesday opening is $48 million. Smart move, Fox, opening "LFODH" early and counterprogramming against the family crowd.

Dreamworks is trying a similar strategy with "Transformers," opening the pod bay doors tomorrow to jump start the July 4th "weekend". Wesley's review and Manohla Dargis at the NY Times aren't positive, but the core audience for this one doubtless thinks the more the movie offends the pinkie-lifters, the better it is.

Michael Moore's "Sicko" had its first week of fairly wide release (441 theaters), pulled in $4.5 million, with a solid $10k per theater. That puts it well shy of "Fahrenheit 9/11" territory but well within reach of "Bowling for Columbine" numbers. "Evening," an Oscar-season movie lost in the summer doldrums, turned out to be a counterprogramming move that fizzled: $3.5 million.

"Evan Almighty"? Toast in its second week out, with $15 million. As noted before, only "Knocked Up" seems to have any resiliency of the summer big-movie crowd -- and, look, ma, no special effects. (Unless you count that wizened mutant baby in the waiting room scene.)

More box office shenanigans at Box Office Mojo and Leonard Klady.