Sean Penn stars as Samuel Bicke (which is way too close to Bickle, if you ask me), a bitterly separated loser who has to find a job after getting bounced from his brother's (Michael Wincott) tire company for not being able to lie to customers about the bottom line during sales negotiations.  He creeps out his ex (Penn's 21 Grams co-star Naomi Watts), has but one friend (Don Cheadle), and has trouble fitting in with his new Always-Be-Closing boss down at the office furniture warehouse.

Bicke begins to unwind (Steven Stern's score handles this quite well) over his wife and kids, as well as a potential small business loan to start his own tire sales outfit.  He begins to see power and the people who have it as incredibly arrogant creatures who don't respect the little people (be they blacks, Sioux Indians, or Willy Lomans like himself).  With footage of Tricky Dick constantly playing in the background, it makes sense to want to take out your rage on the Head Liar.

Penn's performance is uneven, but most of the supporting cast does a great job.  Emmanuel Lubeski's photography, while not quite as dark as usual, is still sumptuous.

Millions – Danny Boyle follows zombie feast 28 Days Later with this: A light charmer with a sappy ending that would make for a much better Christmas film than Nixon.  It's about a kid named Damian (Alex Etel) who is obsessed with saints and often sees and converses with them throughout his day, as if he were some kind of Joan of Liverpool.  It's logical, then, for Damian to assume the duffel bag packed full of cash that falls from the sky was sent from god -- a gift to make up for the death of his mother.

The money, of course, isn't from heaven.  It's from a robbery, and it isn't long before the crook shows up looking for his loot.  In the meantime, Damian tries to give the money to the poor, but for some reason, this task is way more difficult than it seems (a la Brewster's Millions).  He lets older brother Anthony (Lewis McGibbon) in on the secret, and after a quick round of Money Jenga!, Anthony seems much more interested in using the cash to make himself popular than helping Damian dole it out to the unfortunate.  To make matters worse, Euro Day is quickly approaching, threatening to make Damian's Sterling Pounds worthless unless the boys can get rid of it all.

Etel is as cute as a button, and his Damian asking each saint whether or not they've seen Saint Maureen (his mom's name) is utterly heartbreaking.  The last 20 minutes or so, however, got a bit too sappy for my taste.  John Murphy's score sounded too much like a Danny Elfman knockoff, but the Burton-esque opening credits over stop-frame animation was pretty cool.

Bad Education – I'm not a big fan of Pedro Almodòvar.  It seems like the more praise his films get, the less I like them (my favorite: Live Flesh, which nobody even seems to remember).  Education is the first exception to my Almodòvar Rule.  It's a taught jigsaw puzzle that would have Hitchcock loved, though it has more in common with Double Indemnity that anything Hitch made.

The film opens in 1980 Madrid, where a filmmaker named Enrique Goded (Fele Martinez) receives a surprise visit from Ignacio Rodrìguez (Gael Garcia Bernal), his old school chum and co-pilot for his first sexual experiences.  Ignacio, a struggling actor, wants a part in one of Enrique's films, and even offers a script he's written about their childhood.  What follows is a combination of Ignacio's script, Enrique's film, and sandwiched somewhere between the two, the real story of what happened between the two men and the pedophile priest who ran their strict Catholic school.

To say more would give away too much of Education's terrifically layered and wonderfully paced story.  I'll just say it kept me on my toes.  Another strong performance from The Motorcycle Diaries' Bernal, who finally gets to show a bit more range than we're used to seeing.  The film is light on the usual melodrama but, of course, full of the rest of the typical Almodòvar fare: Drag queens, gay sex, overuse of religious iconography, subtle political undertones, and insanely colorful sets and photography.

Sideways – Alexander Payne ditches the Midwest for California's wine country in this adaptation of Rex Pickett's book about two friends on a one-week trip before one of them is to be married.  The lucky man is Jack (Thomas Haden Church), an actor on the fringes of the system who, despite the careful planning of his wine connoisseur-friend Miles (Paul Giamatti), wants to use the week to bang everything in sight.  He wants to help Miles, a recent (to him) divorcee who puts the "sad" in sad sack, get lucky, too.  But Miles, like a certain man in the mirror I know, is pudgy, balding, has bad facial hair, no self-esteem, no writing skills, is extremely uncomfortable around women, and leaves incomprehensible messages on answering machines.  So you can see where the laughs come from, especially when Jack tries to hook Miles up with a waitress (Virginia Madsen) who seems way out of his league.

Payne once again does an incredible job creating deeply flawed but extremely likable characters. portrayed in shockingly real performances.  Sideways is the least glossy and least Hollywood on Payne's four films, and this might mike it a bit inaccessible for some viewers.  Those who can tough out the rambling road trip will be rewarded with one of the year's most assured pictures.  Sideways doesn't feel like an Oscar film, but you'd better believe it'll be better than everything that is.

P.S. – Aside from an ending that really drops the ball, Dylan Kidd's bitterly hysterical p.s. is nearly flawless film with two lead performances that aren't likely to be topped by anything else I'm seeing here in Toronto.  Like 3-Iron (which was just picked up by Sony Classics), it's a very unconventional romance in which Laura Linney plays Louise Harrington, the head of Columbia University's Fine Arts department.  Louise doesn't have much of a life, or any friends, but she gets jolted out of her seriously deep rut when she receives an admissions application that bears the same name as her high school boyfriend who was killed in a car accident.

When Louise interviews F. Scott Feinstadt (Topher Grace), she discovers he looks, acts and paints just like her great love of yesteryear.  This, as you might imagine, creates a whole lot of confusion in Louise's poor little head.  And then she jumps his bones in what might be one of the more awkward sex scenes you'll see this year.  Throw in a fairly unusual relationship between Louise and her ex-husband (Gabriel Byrne), who finally owns up to banging hundreds of his student when they were married, and you get even more layers to Linney's amazing performance.  Grace, as talented as he is, tries to keep up, but there's no use.  Linney is on fire.  It's just too bad the ending crapped out.

Dead Birds – You don't see too many period horror films, but that's what Birds is.  Set in 1863 Alabama, it's about a band of bank robbers who, after swipping a whole lot of Confederate gold, decide to hole up in a creepy-looking farmhouse.  The frightening scarecrow doesn't scare 'em off.  Neither does the weird, pale creature that attacks them.  Or the crazy stuff that happens in the house, once they finally get there.  And they say people from the South are dumb.  Other than the refreshing setting, there isn't much else going on in Birds that you haven't seen a million times anywhere else.