SAW II (R) As with the original Saw, an appreciation of Saw II largely depends on one's appetite for seeing people getting sliced, diced, skewered and charred. The premise here once again involves characters trapped in a controlled environment and picked off by a deranged but brilliant sicko in ways that the filmmakers hope we'll find ingenious. Stars Donnie Walhberg, Tobin Bell and Lyriq Bent. 2 stars
SEPARATE LIES (R) A hit-and-run incident shakes up life and exposes tensions in a quiet, upper-class neighborhood in the English countryside in this study of murder and adultery among people who aren't supposed to go in for that sort of thing. Tom Wilkinson and Emily Watson deliver typically fine performances as the couple at the center of it all, and Rupert Everett steals the show as the pampered and vaguely unpleasant neighbor who becomes one more monkey wrench among many. 3 1/2 stars
SHOPGIRL (R) Shopgirl is Martin's much ballyhooed "serious" project, based on his novella, and full of unrequited longing and flawed, disappointed characters. The movie is beautifully crafted but basically another one of those mopey, middle-aged male fantasies in which an older man hooks up with a younger woman and the heart proceeds to want what the heart wants. Martin plays the older man who pursues and lands the titular shopgirl (Claire Danes), an aspiring artist who pays the rent by working behind the counter at Saks. There's a scruffy young slacker in the romantic mix as well, amusingly played by Jason Schwartzman. 2 1/2 stars
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE (R) The year's most meticulously detailed, deeply personal and magnificently neurotic account of a family splitting apart at the seams. Director Noah Baumbach (who, just on the strength of this and his earlier Mr. Jealousy, has got to be considered one of the most promising filmmakers in America) uses his own family as source material for the Berkmans, a Brooklyn-based clan bound for glorious things, if disaster doesn't get them first. The family members are a bright, talented bunch headed up by a mother and father (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney) who are both writers, one whose star is rising, one with a star seriously falling, and whose marriage is well on the way to its messy end. That doesn't translate well for the two Berkman boys — 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline) and older brother Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) — as they struggle with the gravitational pull of screwed-up, hyper-intellectual parents and adjust to the unpleasant, absurd realities of divorce. The Squid and the Whale is a delicate film about people who are often brutally honest, with Baumbach managing to find something appealing and even endearing in characters who are frequently selfish, arrogant and flat-out pretentious. Also stars William Baldwin and Anna Paquin. Currently at Burns Court Cinemas in Sarasota. Call to confirm. 4 1/2 stars
SYRIANA (R) A film that attempts to be the last word on that scariest of unholy trinities — oil, money and blood — Syriana sometimes seems less like a political art-film and more like a thinking man's horror movie (think Land of the Dead with less cannibalism and where the zombies are rewritten as CIA agents). Writer-director Stephen Gaghan, screenwriter of Steven Soderbergh's similarly timely Traffic, throws together an almost unmanageable ensemble of some two dozen characters, from American politicians and oilmen to Arab sheiks and suicide bombers, in an ambitious attempt to offer up a mosaic of the enormously complicated forces (economic, religious, cultural, etc.) fueling immoral acts on both sides of the ongoing War on Terror. Syriana links political intrigue with human drama, telling its global story almost exclusively through short, intimate, mostly enigmatic scenes that almost never take place in the same place twice, and that reveal their full meaning only in a larger context. There's much that's thought-provoking and even important about Syriana, but the effect of the film is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle that disorients us so much in the beginning we begin to lose patience with seeing it through to completion. When the film finally does begin giving up its secrets, its worldview turns out to be not nearly as complex and subtle as first imagined, and an over-obvious strain of political correctness compromises the movie's later sections. Stars George Clooney (nearly unrecognizable as a paunchy graybeard), Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper, William Hurt, Mazhar Munir, Tim Blake Nelson, Amanda Peet and Christopher Plummer. 3 1/2 stars
