5-minute movie reviews: 'Paris,' 'The Other Man'

Paris

Opens Friday at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; rated R for language and some sexual references; in French with subtitles; 130 minutes.

When Pierre (Romain Duris), an exuberant Parisian dancer, falls ill and needs a heart transplant, his frazzled big sister Élise (Juliette Binoche) moves in with her three kids to care for him. From his balcony, Pierre looks out on his neighborhood, and writer-director Cédric Klapisch follows the characters he sees: a gorgeous student (Melanie Laurent, from "Inglourious Basterds") and her smitten professor (Fabrice Luchini), the professor's architect brother (François

Cluzet), and a garbage man (Zinedine Soualem) trying to get his brother into France from Cameroon. The movie's big-hearted message is that everyone in a big city is intimately connected to everyone else, if you just follow the links -- a theme Klapisch explored before in "L'auberge Espagnole" and its sequel, "Russian Dolls." Here, he keeps too many threads going at once, with weaker subplots stealing time and energy away from the better ones.

 

The Other Man

Opens Friday at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; not rated, but probably R for sexuality and nudity, plus some language; 88 minutes.

This dramatic love

triangle has a pedigree: three strong actors -- Liam Neeson, Antonio Banderas and Laura Linney as the woman between them -- moody directing from Richard Eyre ("Iris," "Notes on a Scandal") and a short story by Bernhard Schlink ( The Reader ) as source material. But the rank ridiculousness of the story, in which Neeson's loving husband learns that Linney's character has been cheating with a smooth lothario (Banderas) in Milan, undercuts the strong acting and the film's polished look (credit cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos and editor Tariq Anwar). Eyre and co-screenwriter Charles Wood deliberately withhold key facts to gin up the tension, while setting up too-obvious symbolism (Neeson and Banderas meet, I kid you not, over a game of chess). Still, even though the effort is wasted, Neeson's rage and Linney's silent suffering are well-played.

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