Three films open very wide this weekend, including the Courtney Love - Charlize Theron catfight, Trapped,which wasn’t screened; Fox Searchlight’s unfortunately-titled groupies-in-dotage comedy The Banger Sisters; and Franchise Picture’s videogame adapation, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.

Opening fairly wide is Four Feathers, which some early reviewers (like Variety’s Todd McCarthy) found  boring, but I think there’s a lot to admire in Shekhar Kapur’s first movie since 1998’s Elizabeth.  Heath Ledger and Wes Bentley’s acting is stiff, just as these young soldiers might have been, but Kapur's elegance comes into play as he captures the strangeness of the desert, as shot in shimmering widescreen by Robert Richardson (who has been cinematographer on most of Oliver Stone's movies). Whether lost in the raw expanses, tiny against unforgiving vistas, or shoved into the midst of a teeming hellhole of a prison with hundreds of other men, Harry is a man who must discover not only a reason to fight, but to live. It's the kind of movie that expands in your head afterwards: while elements of the story could be read as ambivalent, I think it's subtler than that. In fact, this $53-million desert epic becomes about the vastest expanse: the mind. Click here for my interview with Kapur, who also composed a provocative essay for the U.K.”s Guardian newspaper, “The Asians are Coming,” suggesting that western dominance of the cinema will be over in 10 years (which you can read here).

With Igby Goes Down, which United Artists has opened in several cities, first time writer-director Burr Steers demonstrates a savage verbal wit in his jaw-droppingly mean Salingeresque black comedy of Swiftian bad manners among uppercrust Georgetown and Manhattan. Kieran Culkin is a star. Culkin plays Igby Slocumb, a sarcastic 17-year-old who hates the old money world he was born into, especially his distant, selfish mother, played with spite by Susan Sarandon, who notes "His creation was an act of animosity, why should his life not be?" Happy to flunk out of yet another school, Igby goes on the lam, hiding out at godfather Jeff Goldblum's Manhattan loft, which he keeps for smoke-blowing mistress Amanda Peet.

Steers understands wicked dysfunction, as well as emblematic behavior, such as having Goldblum goofy-grinning, literally caught with his pants around his ankles, and Peet watched by a boy and a boy-man as, bare-chested, she shaves her underarms. Then there's Clare Danes' pissy turn as older-woman Sookie "I am not a JAP" Saperstein, who provides Igby with drugs, sex and attitude. She calls him "Pavlov's pothead." Culkin seethes with conflict and confusion and, best of all, Steers does not bother to illuminate hilariously arcane references, and he’s utterly unsentimental about any number of ticklish issues, including assisted suicide. Nor does he apologize for a character taunting Igby from hiding with the chant, "Anne Frank, Anne Frank, the soldiers are gone, come out and play." While reminiscent of "Where's Poppa" and other sad, sorrowful black comedies, "Igby" is a clear-eyed original. "You're a furious boy," Sookie tells him after taking up with "fascist" older bro Ryan Phillippe, "and someday you won't be a boy anymore and it will eat you alive." For the moment, Igby lives. There’s also a nice song score, too, collated by KCRW-Santa Monica’s Nic Harcourt.

Another arthouse release I admire is Sony Classic’s Quitting, now in New York and L.A. I reviewed it for indieWIRE at the Toronto Film Festival in 2001. It’s a heartbreaker, with Zhang Yang, director of 1999’s Shower telling the true story of an actor friend’s descent into addiction and madness, and his later recovery. What’s most impressive is that virtually everyone on screen is playing themselves, even non-actors. A Toronto Festival programmer called Quitting " a major work from an emerging master." I can’t argue with that: there is craft and hurt and redemption and the only calculation to make here is, why don't we insist on such quality, such humanity, such bold emotions, from U.S. pictures?

DVD:  Vérité, I say unto you. Bryan Kortis and Steven Mudrick's WTC Uncut, (here) an important historical document, is an unblinking video image of the World Trade Center that runs from moments after the second strike and ends soon after the second collapse. There's a composed soundtrack, busy with reaction, but it's the image that sustains, taking some of the ideas about longitude explored by artists like Andy Warhol to a shattering extreme. I've seen this in a gallery and on VHS and can't take my eyes off it, and although I considered it, I avoided seeing it on September 11, despite it being shown at several locations in New York and in Chicago.

E-me: What’s the most heartrending tragedy that you know in a fictional film?