MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT
★★★ out of four stars
Rating: R for violence, some sexual content and language. In French, subtitled. Theater: Uptown.
This film begins at the end, with a forest of guns and a close-range shooting, and then, barely giving us time to gasp, takes us back where it all began. "Killer Instinct," the first of two parts ("Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1" opens next week), is the couldn't-make-it-up true story of French gangster Jacques Mesrine.
Played by Vincent Cassel with a taut expression and a mustache that seems to grow exponentially with his crimes (then again, it was the 1970s), Mesrine emerges as a coolly efficient, enigmatic figure who seems tailor-made for the movies -- we watch him smoothly impersonate a cop when a couple catch him robbing their home. And Jean-Francois Richet's film is an engaging one, even if it often plays like a re-enacted, high-episodic documentary. The cast is first-rate, particularly Cecile de France as the Bonnie to Mesrine's Clyde, and Cassel in his eerie stillness. In prison, we see him tortured, sobbing, naked, broken, yet resolute. "I'm not dead," he says, and you wonder if anyone -- or anything -- could kill him. Not in this movie, anyway.
MOIRA MACDONALD, SEATTLE TIMES
MAO'S LAST DANCER
★★ out of four stars
Rating: PG for brief violent images, some sensuality, language and smoking. Theater: Edina.
This drama is historical ballet camp. It tells the story of Li Cunxin, plucked from his family as a boy and arduously turned into a star, courtesy of Madame Mao's Beijing Dance Academy, then placed in the Houston Ballet as an exchange student. Based on Li's memoir and directed by Bruce Beresford, it displays the bland professionalism you'd expect from a movie based on an uplifting life. The most interesting elements of Li's story -- dance, politics and the politics of dance -- have been dulled from their source material.
