Philadelphia Weekly

The leaves are turning, which means it's finally the time of year you can stand a pretty decent chance of seeing a Hollywood flick that won't leave you feeling depressed and insulted. Autumn is always my favorite movie season, as studios tend to nestle their quirkier, more unpredictable pictures in this strange dead zone between summer blockbusters and holiday Oscar-grubbers. The precious, easily pandered-to teen demographic is busy settling back into school, so September and October are Hollywood's de facto dumping ground for more offbeat adult titles.

The folks at Warner Bros. have spent the past couple years (and a reported 34 different edits) trying to figure out what exactly to do with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and short of adding a spoiler warning to the title, I can't imagine how they might make this strange, stubborn film palatable to multiplex audiences. I also can't imagine I'll have any movie experience this year even half as hypnotic as this one.

Brad Pitt gives his creepiest, saddest performance yet as the legendary outlaw, haunted by his infamy and shadowed by the revelatory Casey Affleck's fame-hungry would-be gunslinger. Writer/director Andrew Dominik--who raised eyebrows while lopping off ears a few years back in the Australian import Chopper--has steeped the film in a sumptuous, almost mythical Americana, more of a piece with those druggy, languidly fatalistic '70s anti-Westerns like McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid than any traditional horse opera. The skittish studio is rolling it out slowly all month; keep your eyes peeled.

A similar go-for-broke grandiloquence can be found in Sean Penn's startlingly personal Into the Wild. Adapted by Penn himself from Jon Krakauer's 1996 bestseller, it's the true-life tale of young Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), who spit the silver spoon out of his mouth, abandoned his identity and hoofed it all over the country before finally starving to death in the Alaskan wilderness. Penn's directorial efforts have previously been defined by what Woody Allen might call "total heavy-osity"--full of Jack Nicholson, endless cigarettes and downbeat Springsteen tracks.

Such a surprise that he's somehow made this tragic story throb with life, so affirmative, humorous and blessed with a completely unironic adolescent yearning. This is Penn's behind-the-camera breakthrough, discovering freedom and transcendence in layered American landscapes, while coaxing brilliantly naturalistic work out of Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn and a late-movie cameo by Hal Holbrook that's guaranteed to break your heart.

The big news about Ang Lee's Lust, Caution isn't just that it's his first foreign-language film since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It's also not that he's dabbling in potentially explosive material set in the 1940s about a comely young Shanghai student (Tang Wei) attempting to seduce a politician (2046's Tony Leung) who's collaborating with the Japanese ... so she can murder him. No, the excitement here is that when Lust, Caution was smacked with those scarlet NC-17 letters by the MPAA, the good folks at Focus Features didn't blink, happily announcing they'd accept the rating and release the film uncut.

Of course the movie's co-screenwriter James Schamus just so happens to run this particular studio division, so it's not like he didn't have a horse in the race. But still there's something exhilarating about an Academy Award-winning director like Ang Lee being allowed to make a movie specifically for an audience of adults only. Could this late-September release finally mean the end of filmmakers constantly recutting their pictures to satisfy the whims of a mysterious ratings board?

Speaking of adults, how 'bout that George Clooney? As annoying as it is seeing him grow more absurdly handsome with age while the rest of us atrophy, fatten and decay, it's also inspirational to watch him back risky projects that otherwise would never see the light of a projector. Michael Clayton, an extremely satisfying, stripped-down, meat-and-potatoes legal mystery, is one of the many movies for which he finagled financing in exchange for making an Ocean's Thirteen. Starring Clooney, Sydney Pollack, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton and a host of other folks north of 40, the directorial debut of Bourne screenwriter Tony Gilroy is a welcome throwback to Alan J. Pakula's paranoid, pessimistic thrillers, and the kind of smart, sophisticated crowd-pleaser we should be seeing a lot more often. This October release gives George one of his meatiest roles yet, as a silky-smooth fixer for a hotshot N.Y.C. firm who stumbles onto a case that taxes even his own epic capacity for bullshit.

Isn't it awesome we don't have to see Ben Affleck in movies anymore? The medium-talent, cap-toothed tabloid bore has taken one giant leap for mankind, settling behind the camera for October's adaptation of Dennis Lehane's Gone Baby Gone. Even better: Ben's cast his infinitely more gifted kid brother Casey as the lead, playing a sleazy private investigator in this Boston-based potboiler about a missing child. The killer cast also includes Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, '80s cop movie icon John Ashton and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang's secret weapon Michelle Monaghan. The early footage reeks of Mystic River, but as both pictures stem from Lehane's paperback Beantown despair, it feels like a fair steal for the former Bennifer.

And finally, after years of wrangling and weirdly secretive festival screenings, all evidence seems to indicate Tony Kaye's mind-blowing abortion documentary Lake of Fire might finally find a commercial release this October. Kaye hasn't been heard from since helming American History X almost 10 years ago, after an embarrassingly public war of words revealed that Edward Norton's massive ego had elbowed the director clear out of the editing room--and this was way before such behavior became business as usual on Norton's pictures.

Decades in the making, and shot in shimmery black-and-white 35 mm, the gargantuan, two-and-a-half-hour Lake of Fire is by turns alarming, inspiring, confounding and just plain terrifying, tackling the nation's most violently divisive wedge issue while stubbornly refusing to editorialize or take any easy stand. It's the kind of picture that rattles your preconceptions and haunts your dreams. Like many of the movies unspooling this fall, this is one for the grownups.