Movie Reviews

I hate to see a film snatch defeat from the jaws of victory (and hate having to say it), but John Madden's "The Debt" is a lamentable case in point: It is three-fourths of a brilliant spy thriller, cruelly sabotaged -- like its heroes' mission -- by a botched endgame.

This isn't Helen Mirren's fault, nor that of Tom Wilkinson or Ciaran Hinds. They play Rachel, Stephan and David, three retired Mossad agents who were sent to East Berlin in 1966 to find and kidnap Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel -- the notorious "Surgeon of Birkenau" -- and bring him back to Israel for trial.

By 1997, when "The Debt" opens, the trio has long been revered by their countrymen for the mission's heroic success. Rachel and Stephan were married and divorced in the interim, but their adoring daughter has just written a best-selling book celebrating her parents' exploits.

So why does Rachel look so sour, and Stephan so dour, about the new shower of adulation?

If Italian is the preeminent language of passion and music, the city of most passionate musical plenty is Naples. Singing is a required not acquired taste there, and in John Turturro's razzle-dazzling, feature-length, MTV-like documentary on the subject.

"Passione: A Musical Adventure" is a loving ode to Neapolitan music by a man better known as actor than director. Mr. Turturro -- a longtime Coen Brothers favorite from "Miller's Crossing" and "The Big Lebowski" to "Barton Fink" -- has played countless equally quirky characters for the likes of Martin Scorsese ("Color of Money"), Spike Lee ("Do the Right Thing") and Robert Redford ("Quiz Show").

The Chinese were the Asian equivalent to Japan of European Jews to the Nazis: an inferior race to be freely and justifiably exterminated at will. If any doubt remains that the Japanese were every bit as monstrous as the Germans in World War II, the film at hand should lay it permanently to rest.

"City of Life and Death" is a devastating quasi-documentary epic about the events of December 1937, when Japan's Imperial Army conquered the short-lived Chinese capital of Nanking -- slaughtering 300,000 soldiers and civilians in the process.

The search for celestial bodies and human ones are companionate pursuits in "Nostalgia for the Light," the latest of Patricio Guzman's relentless Chilean documentaries -- and by far the eeriest.

Mr. Guzman takes his search, and his audience, to the highest and driest place on Earth: Chile's immense Atacama Desert, 10,000 feet above sea level. It is a kind of alien planet in itself and the perfect vantage point for telescopes to scan the cosmos for others.

But it was also the perfect place to hide monstrous crimes -- and the evidence thereof. Thousands of those who disappeared after 1973 under the brutal Pinochet military regime were murdered there, their bones long since merged with the arid dirt.