Cinema: Three You Should See

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MONSTER'S BALL

A pattern is forming for the new fashion in Amer-indies. Start with a teasingly obscure title; gaze fascinatedly at people in more trouble than they know; give lots of screen space and time to yearning stares; and, about 40 min. into the anomie, kill off a soulful son with a surprise gun blast. That's the recipe for In the Bedroom, which won a slew of critics' awards, and for Monster's Ball, a pained drama that is better than it sounds.

The Grotowskis--three generations of Georgia penal officers named Buck (Peter Boyle), Hank (Billy Bob Thornton) and Sonny (Heath Ledger)--make for the most ornery family of Southern men since the Leatherface clan in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Most of them anti-black, all of them bitter, they need the face slap of redemption. It arrives in a comely package: Leticia (Halle Berry), a hapless mom who looks nifty in widow's weeds. She brings out the courtly gent in Hank and forces his ardor to do battle with his prejudices.

The eccentricities of Milo Addica and Will Rokos' plot make the film seem like a bizarre sitcom pilot (racist guy with a black lady friend saddles his racist dad with a black roommate). But the cast is uniformly superb, and Marc Forster's attentive direction gives proper weight to each perplexing emotion. Strip away the strident melodrama, and you have this season's moodiest, most adult love story.

--By Richard Corliss

LANTANA

Detective Leon Zat, wonderfully played by a gruff Anthony LaPaglia, suffers intermittent chest pains and more or less permanent heartache. He's rather grimly cheating on his wife, mostly because men of a certain age tend to do that. He can't quite control his anger and has become abusive with suspects. He's particularly hard on John Sommers (Geoffrey Rush), whose psychiatrist wife (Barbara Hershey) mysteriously disappeared on an Australian back road one night. He's convinced that this arrogant man must be a murderer.

Don't be too certain of that--or anything else in director Ray Lawrence's wonderfully intricate Lantana. Before it is over, four unhappy couples will be linked in consistently surprising yet persuasive ways by Andrew Bovell's screen adaptation of his play Speaking in Tongues, which hides the cleverness of its development under a tough-talking, tough-minded manner.

Lawrence's style, naturally lit and roughly realistic, matches the writing. Lantana sometimes has the air of a routine police procedural, sometimes the quality of a dour film noir. But this movie, so alert to mischance and dreams that don't quite work out as they should, has a good soul, a heart yearning for decency. What's terrific about it is the way it lets us discover those qualities subtly, inferentially.

--By Richard Schickel

DARK BLUE WORLD

It's cynicism's major proposition: bad things happen to good people. But in Dark Blue World, a Czech pilot named Franta Slama (Ondrej Vetchy), flying with the R.A.F. in World War II, reaches a level of misery rarely touched in the movies.