The Matador

Pierce Brosnan has been underutilized in the movies. After making his name as television's Remington Steele, big screen fame beckoned in the guise of the mother of all romantic leading roles: James Bond. With few exceptions, his characters have been variations thereof. This is not a slag; Brosnan's a great leading man, but even his best performance in The Tailor of Panama felt restricted by the specter of Bond.

So it must have been a relief for him to play the scabrous hit man Julian Noble in Richard Shepard's black comedy The Matador -- he tears into the part like a lion who hasn't tasted meat in years. Noble's a character you'd run from in real life, but who lights up the movies with amorality and social awkwardness. While trying to sustain a conversation in a Mexico City bar with Danny (Greg Kinnear), Noble tells the anxious businessman that "margaritas always taste better in Mexico." After toasting, he adds, "Margaritas and cock." He can't understand why Danny wants to leave.

Brosnan's performance -- so funny and fully-realized -- gets us through the film's weak spots, most of which are near the beginning. The friendship developed between the two disparate men never gels; the motivations -- especially Danny's -- are weak, compounded by Kinnear's inability to play sincere. He doesn't come alive until he gets to show his gift for crazy irony. Hope Davis doesn't have enough screen time as Danny's wife, but she's a great team player.

In Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, a complacent businessman discovers the excitement of the darkside. It's a kinky road movie. The Matador does the opposite -- it starts at the underbelly with its burnt-out hit man and shows him a way to achieve normality. It's a testament to Brosnan's creation that we want to applaud when Noble walks away from it. -- Dan Loughry

The New World

Terrence Malick's latest opus to nature and man is like an especially lucid dream. The reclusive writer-director tends to direct these days (The Thin Red Line) more by intuition than traditional structure, as if guided only by the windmills turning in his mind. Sure, the voiceovers are sometimes maddening (whose head are we in exactly?) and the travelogue-ish shots of fallen logs seemingly pointless, but the end result is a truly beautiful, if fractured, film -- at once lyrical and meandering. The loose narrative follows the true story of John Smith (Colin Farrell) and the formation of Jamestown during America's early days. Which means it could have been a boring biopic about guys and their guns exploring the wilds, but it is Pocahontas (lovely 14-year-old newcomer Q'Orianka Kilcher) who emerges as Malick's real muse. Her father's tribe of "natives" greets the English settlers with a tender naivete and curiosity -- touching, sniffing, and poking their pale skin and clunky armor -- before sensing these colonial interlopers might be here to stay. Still, Pocahontas begs her father to spare Smith's life and together they embark on a kind of cultural exchange -- two strangers discovering one another as they fall in love. Here, Farrell shines most brightly, expertly harnessing Smith's sense of adventure and wonder. He may come to shore as a prisoner among his shipmates for a misguided mutiny attempt, but Smith ultimately may have highest ideals for this new world. While others hope for trade and new land to conquer, Smith sees the opportunity for a fresh start -- a new age of liberty and independence in harmony with nature. But even he knows his colonial character will betray him: He tells a clearly smitten Pocahontas, "Don't trust me." But although we have given up on Pocahontas and her people, she never gave up on us. Although still heartbroken over Smith, she takes an English husband (Christian Bale), gives him a child but dies too soon on foreign soil the toast of London. -- Anderson Jones

The White Countess

The legendary Merchant-Ivory filmmaking team -- business and life partners for more than 40 years -- have made a career out of laconic Edwardian literary adaptations like Maurice (1987), a trailblazing film about a young British man who learns to embrace his inner homo. The typical Merchant-Ivory flick unfolds at a languid pace, is suffused with lavish, impeccable period details, and offers repressed, silently suffering characters who are unable to reveal their true feelings for one another.

The duo's latest effort, The White Countess, follows in this vein. Set in 1930s Shanghai, the film finds a handsomely anguished, blind former diplomat, Todd Jackson (Ralph Fiennes), falling for a gorgeously anguished, exiled Russian countess, Sofia (Natasha Richardson). Toiling as a taxi dancer in a nightclub, the widowed countess uses her wages to support her daughter Katya and a family of downtrodden royals. Meanwhile, Jackson, tormented from losing his own family to the political violence swirling about China, enlists the countess' help in his dream to open an elegant nightclub where he can insulate himself from the turmoil and tragedy of the outside world. Although he makes Sofia the centerpiece of his idealized club, he keeps her at an emotional distance and their relationship strictly business.

The disillusioned Jackson is just the kind of role that the coolly detached Fiennes is so good at playing. Yet the actor imbues his character with a surprising vulnerability as his world begins to unravel. The radiant Richardson brings warmth, weary resignation and understated grace to Sofia.

Joining Richardson in this family affair is her mother, Vanessa Redgrave (as Aunt Sara), and her aunt, Lynn Redgrave (as Sofia's spiteful mother-in-law Olga), who practically steals the film when she tells Sofia, with a cruel, matter-of-fact smile, that she'll have to stay behind while they escape to Hong Kong as a Japanese attack becomes imminent.

Despite a sometimes laborious, uneven pace and some strange holes in the story (Ivory never shows the seedy side of Sofia's profession), White Countess is another engaging, high-gloss film from the Merchant-Ivory duo. It also marks the last film they made together before Merchant's untimely death last spring. No doubt, he'd be proud of the final result. -- Christopher Wallenberg