Interview with the Assassin; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Directed by Neil Burger

Lots of low-budget movies have promising plot hooks; few do anything with the hook besides sucker the audience into the same genre film cliches.

Interview with the Assassin is a startling exception to this rule. It has a great hook?young freelance cameraman finds out the 60ish retiree living across the street might have helped murder John F. Kennedy?but the hook leads to more than melodrama. The movie's writer-director, Neil Burger, has given the movie a shape, a tone and a style that suits his story, something few Hollywood filmmakers with fat budgets can be bothered to do. The result is a complete vision?an eerie psychological thriller that plays simultaneously on our fears of what might have happened in Dallas 39 years ago, and our grim knowledge of what our government has always been capable of doing, second gunman or no second gunman.

(For the second week in a row, here comes a warning: plot spoilers ahead.) The hero is Ron Kobeleski (Dylan Haggerty), an out-of-work tv news cameraman who is summoned to the home of neighbor Walter Ohlinger (Raymond J. Barry). Walter has a secret: he was the second gunman in the Kennedy assassination, opening fire on the grassy knoll while designated patsy Lee Harvey Oswald blazed away from the book depository window. Barry is the right age to have been in Dallas in November 1963, and his trim physique and upright carriage suggest a military mindset. Good soldiers don't tell secrets, but Walter hasn't been a soldier for some time, and he's been diagnosed with terminal cancer; in six months he'll be history, and his story will be history, too. So he wants to commit the tale to tape, with help from his young buddy Ron. When the skeptical cameraman asks for proof, Walter takes him to a bank, digs into a safety deposit box and produces a shell that a forensics expert confirms must have been fired more than 35 years ago.

This is a great starting point for a low-budget movie. It plays on a real-life horror story that everyone knows, and it requires little equipment beyond a video camera, a proper sound recording kit and a few bright practical bulbs to light up real locales (suburban homes, cars, a hospital, a hotel ballroom). But the tale wouldn't sustain one's interest if it were told straight; it'd seem too much like a shoestring ripoff of an X-Files episode, or a dramatization of a supermarket tabloid standby ("San Bernardino Retiree Says: 'I Killed JFK!'"). So Burger ransacks the visual language of documentaries, to brilliant effect. From Richard Rutkowski's handheld camerawork to Brad Fuller's hard, clipped, verite-style editing to the way Burger lets whole scenes play out through surveillance camera monitors (making these scenes feel more mundane and horrifying), form and content merge. Because you're watching a subjective tale told by characters with no money or influence?people who could be stamped out like bugs by The Man?paranoia and uncertainty blossom early, and deepen as the film unreels.

Assassin's guerrilla inventiveness and pitch-perfect sense of proportion (it never pretends to be bigger than it is) will likely condemn it to faint words of praise, like "clever" or "promising." It's more than that: I think it's the first great paranoid thriller of the new century, and in some ways the most perfect realization of the genre's potential since The Parallax View. Its format does more than reinforce the script's story and themes. It somehow captures the emotional texture of modern life?the sense that every American has been reduced to a file, an ID number or an assortment of pixels that can be tracked and deleted when they start to gum up Big Brother's program.

It will be interesting to see what sort of critical reception Assassin gets. I suspect it'll get the brushoff, especially from cranky boomer critics with an anti-DV bias. (Beware such writers; they present themselves as brave defenders of cinematic purity, but they're actually pampered esthetic reactionaries?an updated version of critics who, in the early 60s, shortchanged Cassavetes and the French New Wave for being too "jumpy" and "grainy.")

Whatever the film's reviews, I hope Barry will get his due. A playwright, theater director and first-rank character actor, he's given rich, honest performances in dozens of movies and tv programs, including Year of the Dragon, Dead Man Walking, An Unmarried Woman and Born on the Fourth of July (as Ron Kovic's dad). This is a rare star turn for him, and he never strikes a false note. His relative anonymity works for the role. (Barry's one of those actors you recognize instantly, but aren't sure from where.) His workingman's intensity and lean physique make him credible as a killing machine that never lost his predatory confidence. (He and the soft-spoken Haggerty make a good team?a supermarket tabloid version of the master and the acolyte.) In every scene Barry plays, you sense Walter's volatile mix of emotions?pride, fear, anger, dread, guilt, disgust?yet Barry never italicizes any of them, and a few flicker across his face so quickly that you might have to see the movie a second time to catch them. In a just world, he'd get an Oscar nomination as Best Actor. This is not a just world.

Harry Potter And the Chamber of Secrets

Directed by Chris Columbus

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets will be a hit no matter what, and reviews like this are mere formalities. But in the name of going through the motions, I'll say that the latest installment in the franchise is a big improvement over the first. This time, director Chris Columbus, normally a static, cloying filmmaker, puts more motion into his moves and more dynamism into his compositions. He and director of photography Roger Pratt seem to have built on their experiences making the first movie, finally nailing a distinctive tone?sprightly yet dark?and giving their young actors room to do more than just be cute. (Columbus appears to have broken himself of the habit of heralding each new bit of magic with a glowing closeup of a child's face lit from beneath, scored to John Williams' choir music.) It's not a work of near-evangelical fervor, like Peter Jackson's towering yet fleet-footed Fellowship of the Ring, but it's craftsmanlike and fun.

Kenneth Branagh has a dandy supporting turn as a narcissistic wizard who's written a line of bestsellers trumpeting his own greatness, and the late Richard Harris?looking frail indeed?invests the obligatory dressing-down-the-kids scenes with a gravity one would not have thought possible. At two hours and 40 minutes, the movie is probably too long (Harry's journey to Hogwarts in a flying car seems to take four days) but fans won't mind?except kids under seven, who may be mildly traumatized by the film's icky roster of magical beasts. Their ranks include a swarm of Volvo-sized tarantulas and a titanic, razor-toothed snake that's nearly as scary as one of Spielberg's T-rex's (though not as inventively shot).