Enduring Love opens today, in limited release.

In terms of biopics, Ray offers little that we haven’t seen in countless other films about real people.  Were it not for the electrifying turn of Jamie Foxx and a soundtrack full of songs that’ll make you want to jump up and dance, the Taylor Hackford (Proof of Life) flick is about as pedestrian and by-the-numbers as you can get.  But did I mention that Foxx was electrifying as Ray Charles?  Also, he’s electrifying.  This might be the performance of the year – I haven’t seen anything quite this mesmerizing since Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York.

But then there’s the rest of Ray, which clocks in with a massive running time of 152 minutes (for those of you keeping track at home, you can watch Primer, grab a burger, and watch Primer again in the same amount of time).  The show begins in 1949, with the then Ray Robinson (Foxx, Collateral) hopping on a bus from Tampa to Seattle, where he quickly begins performing at black clubs on the “chitlin circuit” – initially just copying the sounds of other popular artists of the day, and then, after fusing the gospel and rhythm-and-blues genres together, rocketing into the upper echelon of recording stars.

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James Wan’s debut proves that a film can be intellectually stimulating and as freaky as your cat on acid.  In Saw, Wan throws two unconscious strangers into a large, dimly-lit industrial bathroom, chains their legs to separate pipes on either side of the room, gives them hacksaws, and waits for the fun to start.  The fun, in this case, being a series of sadistic clues which boil down to this: Snooty oncologist Lawrence Gordon (Cary Elwes, The Cat’s Meow) has until a given time to kill “cellmate” Adam (co-writer Leigh Whannell).  If he fails the task, Gordon’s wife and daughter will be executed.  And the only way he can get to Adam is if he saws his own foot off.

We see, through a series of flashbacks, other bizarre and ultimately deadly situations (think of an important “immunity challenge” created by a criminally insane Jeff Probst) plotted and planned by somebody the police call the Jigsaw Killer.  Old Jigsaw hasn’t actually killed anyone, though.  He’s clever enough to get his captives to take care of that dirty little business on their own.  But is he clever enough to escape the pursuit of the boringly relentless Detective Tapp (Danny “I Can’t Get a Cab” Glover)?  Probably, but you’re going to have to find that out for yourself.

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January is Frozen Food Month and February is Black History Month.  But does anybody know what the heck October is?  Apparently, at least when it comes to cinema, it’s Woman In Her Late 30s Dealing With What Might Be The Reincarnation Of Her First And Best Lover Month.  Dylan Kidd’s p.s. first tackled the subject, and now Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) takes the reigns with Nicole Kidman (The Stepford Wives) replacing Laura Linney in Birth, a film that reminded me both of a still, quiet Kubrick chamber piece and Rosemary’s Baby.

The Baby reference is due more to Birth’s setting and casting than content.  Kidman’s Anna, like Mia Farrow’s Rosemary, is frighteningly thin, has a pixie haircut and a tiny, timid voice, as well as a fancy Central Park apartment and a place in the upper crust of Manhattan's social elite.  Anna’s husband, Sean, died ten years ago, but she’s finally moved on enough to accept a marriage proposal from Joseph (Danny Huston, Silver City).  Shortly after their lavish engagement party, Anna is confronted by a 10-year-old kid named Sean (Cameron Bright, Godsend) who claims to be her deceased husband.

Anna handles it like you’d expect: At first she’s startled, then filled with indifferent anger, and then she has a good laugh about it because it’s so damn cute.  But as Little Sean begins to cough up important details about their relationship, Anna – like Rosemary – becomes more and more frazzled.  This sets off a domino effect of insanity, poisoning just about everyone it touches.  Anna is well on her way to cuckoo, with fiancé Joseph, Sean’s mother (Cara Seymour) and the wife of Sean and Anna’s best man (Anne Heche) following quickly behind her.  Only Anna, however, is buying Little Sean’s story, and that leads to a couple of scenes that will have Birth’s less sophisticated viewers squirming in agony (it’s acting, you boobs).

Birth, despite having a couple of fairly major flaws*, is still riveting to watch, from its Six Feet Under-ish opening (we know Big Sean is going to buy it, but how will it happen?) to its slightly unsatisfying finale.  It’s definitely the kind of movie you’ll be talking about the rest of the day.  The acting is terrific across the board, and Kidman has much more chemistry with Bright than she did with Anthony Hopkins in last year’s The Human Stain.  Alexandre Desplat (Girl With a Pearl Earring) contributes an outstanding fairytale score (again, reminiscent of Baby), and Glazer, along with Gus Van Sant’s regular photographer Harris Savides, seems to have taken a huge leap from creating stylish music video-type films to intensely thought-provoking cinema.

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A rare example of obvious Oscar bait that still manages to grab you and charm you into a trance, Finding Neverland tells the “inspired by actual events” (code for “mostly made up”) story of writer J.M. Barrie cooking up the idea for Peter Pan.  The highlight in the Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) film is, of course, Johnny Depp, who fills the role of Barrie with the fragile spirit of a man-child who refuses to grow up and doesn’t look much older than when he played Tom Hanson on 21 Jump Street.

Neverland is set in 1903 London, where Barrie’s latest production goes over like Surviving Christmas.  In a gloomy, self-deprecating mood, Barrie takes his faithful Newfoundland, Porthos, to the park, where he meets and immediately falls for four children (names: Peter, Michael, John and George) and their widowed mother, Sylvia (Kate Winslet, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).  This doesn’t sit well with Barrie’s wife (Radha Mitchell, Man on Fire), or Sylvia’s mum (Julie Christie, Troy), who are both afraid of the affect the unusual relationship might have on their social standing.

Barrie forms the closest bond with the initially standoff-ish Peter (Freddie Highmore), who hasn’t been quite the same since his dad died.  But before long, Barrie has the boy playing cowboys and Indians, and concocting intricate backyard productions involving pirates.  As Neverland hurtles towards its finale, their relationship is strained by both the persistent thwarting of Christie’s crusty character and Sylvia’s persistent second act cough (those just never go well).

While I enjoyed Neverland and was completely choked up at the end, I still can’t help but wonder who this film was made for.  It’s rated PG (so you don’t get to see Winslet’s self-described “floppy dog ear breasts”), but I don’t think Neverland is the kind of picture you’re going to want to drag your kids to see.  They’ll be bored because the Pan references are vague and/or fleeting.  And I think an unhealthy number of adults couldn’t care less about how an alleged pedophile came up with the idea for story about faeries and a one-armed man chasing little orphan boys around.  That leaves a rather small viewership, and is probably one of the reasons Neverland has been shelved for so long (it was shot in mid-2002, but needed to distance itself from last year’s box office dud Peter Pan).

The biggest problem with Stage Beauty is that it plays like an extremely light version of the still distributor-less but ridiculously entertaining Johnny Depp/Samantha Morton/John Malkovich film The Libertine.  Both have the same setting, at least one common character, and stories that focus on the production of important plays.  There are other problems, unfortunately.  Beauty is, at least for its first 90 minutes, a poorly-balanced train wreck.  It would have us believe that 1661 London was populated by just a dozen or so inhabitants, since that’s all we ever see regardless of where we’re taken.  And those dozen or so people are, for the most part, a bunch of swinging, switch-hitting, cross-dressing dandies, which makes Beauty a lot more like a John Waters film that you might expect from its trailer and pedigree.

After suffering under the puritanical reign of Oliver Cromwell, the free-thinking Charles II (Rupert Everett, The Importance of Being Earnest) lifts the ban on women portraying women on the stage.  This doesn’t sit so well with Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup, Big Fish), who has built a successful career playing the female lead in productions like Othello and Romeo & Juliet.  To make matters worse, Ned’s dresser, Maria (Claire Danes, T3), becomes the first big actress of the day, and he is forced to help her hone her talent.

Bleak by even Mike Leigh (All or Nothing) standards, Vera Drake portrays the life of its titular protagonist in a 1950 London that still hasn’t fully recovered from the Blitzkreig.  Vera (Imelda Staunton, Bright Young Things) works hard for her money, whether its working as a housekeeper to the city’s remaining wealthy, or performing quickie abortions in which she attacks the womb with the same fervor used to scrub a stain out of the carpet (“Just relax, dear, and it will all come away”).

Even though England is a decade-and-a-half away from legalizing abortion, Vera doesn’t think she’s doing anything wrong.  In fact, she flinches when she hears the word “abortion,” preferring to say she’s just “helping girls out.”  At the 60 minute mark, the law starts to catch up to Vera when one of her charges ends up in the hospital (and, also, because abortion films rarely end happily).  Since she’s been keeping the whole second job thing from her family, it’s only a matter of time before they’re given the shock of their lives when the police come-a-knockin’.  They look genuinely surprised, and given Leigh’s penchant for improvisation, I wouldn’t be surprised if he kept the actors in the dark about Vera’s line of work until this moment.

Staunton is magnificent, and seems destined for year-end accolades (but why is Drake being released so early in the season?).  Her performance hit particularly close to home for me because she looks, dresses and hums just like my grandmother.  And that meant I was easily able to identify with the astonishment her family experienced when they learned of Vera’s big secret.  I wondered how I’d feel if I’d been told something similar, and decided I wouldn’t have been more shocked if somebody grabbed grandma’s head and tore off her rubber mask to reveal her as David Hasselhoff.

Mean Creek, the debut from writer-director Jacob Aaron Estes, pits irritating, overgrown George (Josh Peck) against scrawny, intellectual Sam (Rory Culkin) in a brief battle in a suburban Oregon high school.  Sam comes home with bruises, prompting older brother Rocky (Trevor Morgan) and his pals to finally do something about the legendarily obnoxious bully.  Pretending it’s Sam’s birthday, Rocky and friends lure George to a rowboat party, where they plan to get into the middle of the nowhere and leave him, naked, to get home on his own.

The award-winning documentary from Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar could, at 145 minutes, be a bit more focused.  I’d only recommend it to people who agree with the film’s politics, and even they might find it rather heavy-handed.  I was lucky enough to watch The Corporation in three installments, which made it much more palatable.  That said, the reason I watched it in three installments is because I kept falling asleep.  Its intent and message are dead on, but The Corporation just doesn’t work that well as a film.

Packed with interviews from economists, CEOs and familiar faces like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, The Corporation is assembled like a cumbersome classroom film that explains the 14^th amendment, in addition to freeing the slaves, also gave birth to the notion that Big Business could give itself the rights of a regular human being.  Flash forward fifty years, and watch IBM and Coca-Cola make phat profits by cuddling up to Hitler.  Flash forward another fifty years and see the patent of living organisms and the creation of dangerous drugs that unnecessarily increase milk production in cows.

Remembering Saddam is the latest pre-election political documentary to hit screens (there’s been at least one a week for the last couple of months).  This time, though, we’re hit from the other side of the aisle, which is something made fairly clear by the caliber of folks trumpeting the film’s virtues.  Fair and balanced people like Laura Ingraham and the Heritage Foundation.

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Next week: The Incredibles, A Very Long Engagement.