Ray Sawhill

Seattle-set thriller -- starring Jason Statham, Ryan Phillipe and Wesley Snipes, and written and directed by Tony Giglio -- that opens like an action-heist picture, then turns into a dark, hand-held mystery.

The film does its best to mimic the conviction and "real"-ness of '70s cop pictures; Giglio tries to freshen things up conceptually by working a little chaos theory into his film's plot and structure; and Wesley Snipes delivers an enjoyably suave, stylish, and flamboyant turn as the film's mysterious bad guy. It's well done. Even so, "Chaos" basically struck me as a little too in love with its own twistiness, and a semi-snoozer. It's my least-favorite of the Jason Statham pics I've watched so far.

Fast-Forwarding Score: OK, I admit it, I did watch the whole thing. So maybe I shouldn't be such a high-minded dick when it comes to judging it.

This noble-hunter-gatherers-vs-invaders-and-civilization spectacle from Roland Emmerich didn't provide nearly as much silly fun as I was hoping for.

Emmerich's a clunky romantic primitive whose imagination seems to come right out of adventure novels like "Tarzan" and "She," and his earlier "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow" combined earnest fantasizing circa 1925 with up-to-date effects and production values in ways I found distinctive and amusing. In terms of sensibility, they weren't your typical present-day corporate entertainments, that's for sure.

To be fair, "10,000 B.C." does deliver some likable flamboyance and inadvertent giggles. For instance, the good, peaceful hunter-gatherers seem to have been dreamed up by Benetton executives. They favor dreadlocks, and they're of different types and complexions -- they're a tribe, but they're a hip, multicultural tribe! They probably recycle too. I kept thinking of them as a bunch of vegan theater majors just back from their first visit to Burning Man.

It's a lot of fun too when some black warrior tribes show up. Emmerich, who's German, doesn't seem to have the same apprehensions current white Americans do of playing up the picturesque qualities of black people, and the tribal blacks in this movie are frankly intended to be big, glossy, powerful, and fierce -- scary but magnificent physical specimens. You can choose your own reaction to the fact that they're eager to follow the white hippie-hero into battle in order to help him rescue his blue-eyed honey -- oh, and free the slaves.

Some woolly-mammoth scenes and a few wheeling overhead shots of the bad-bad-bad civilized city -- full of pyramids under construction and long-nailed, probably-gay priests -- also thrilled the idiot child in me.

Otherwise, though, I found the film emotionally monochromatic, and I kept dozing off. It's long, it's not very energized, and some of the scene-to-scene storytelling is baffling. And -- my biggest complaint -- Emmerich declines nearly every opportunity his idea offers for un-P.C. erotic fantasy. No animal-skin bikinis or satisfyingly-degrading caveman rapes here, darn it.

Fast-Forwarding Score: About a third of the movie.

Emmanuelle Devos plays a loving working-class wife and mother in a small city in 1930s France who begins to suspect that something's not quite right in her marriage.

Directed by Frederic Fonteyne, "Gilles' Wife" initially seems about as undramatic as can be. It's a very slow, very deliberate, very beautiful accumulation of sensory details and psychological moments.

(Filmgeeks may find that "Gilles' Wife" suggests a cross between the austere experimentalism of "Jeanne Dielman" and the impressionism of "Elvira Madigan.")

But this study of domesticity and infidelity sucked me in and fascinated me. If it works for you as it did for me, you'll find that despite its quiet and oblique ways it accumulates terrific power. The details convince on what feels like a pre-verbal level, and Fonteyne and Devos are quite amazing in the ways they find to convey this inarticulate woman's intuitions and discoveries, and their effects on her.

I recommend Fonteyne's 1999 "An Affair of Love" too. It stars Nathalie Baye as a lonely middle-aged woman -- I suppose that her character qualifies as a cougar, though I don't think the term was around in the late '90s -- treating herself to an affair with a studly, if similarly lonely, younger guy. Don't be afraid -- the film isn't "empowering" or "political" in that rousing and inane American way. It's a melancholy-yet-erotic entry in the small, stylishly "objective," psychological-study French mode -- a beautiful example of the kind of film that Woody Allen wishes he could make.

Fast-Forwarding Score: Not a painstaking, crystalline moment