Short Takes: Agora

Agora is one of the most artful and intelligent films of the year. Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar unfolds a historical drama set in Alexandria, in the 4th century AD.

It's based on a real woman Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), who lived with her father in what was left of the great Library of Alexandria. The old pagan religions were failing, the power of Rome was waning, and an angry, militant Christian sect, the Parabolani, was seizing power by violence. They physically attacked the Jews and the pagans.

They allowed no women to hold status or rank in the church. Hypatia was a noblewoman, a well-educated mathematician, and also an astronomer, one of the first scholars to believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and not the other way round.

This synopsis may sound very dry and academic, but the film is exciting, passionate and visually stunning. It is sumptuously designed in the most accurate and opulent period style. The story is about the battle for ideas and enlightenment rather than for dogma or power.

It's a bold, feminist biography, a detailed and fascinating drama about a woman who saw a planetary truth, centuries before Galileo did. It's unique, fascinating and a splendid change from the films we usually see.

Just Wright

Here's the problem with this amiable but unoriginal comedy. Director Sanaa Hamri casts Queen Latifah in a role in which she is supposed to be to bossy and plain, lacking the charisma she needs to find the right man. Casting Latifah in that role is not even slightly credible. She is gorgeous, even when she is wearing a hospital uniform, as she plays a successful physical therapist dealing in sports injuries.

Latifah is one of the warmest, funniest and most expressively sexy women in film right now, but here she is, typecast as the "plain Jane". In contrast, we have Paula Patton, who assumes that, because she is pretty and can put together a hot outfit, she outranks the Queen. I did not believe this casting, not even for a second.

There are some smart wisecracks, some funny situations and cameo roles from two great actresses - Pam Grier and Phylicia Rashad. Nonetheless, Just Wright, while not exactly all wrong, is too full of tired female stereotypes, and too concerned with looks rather than emotional substance.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Jerry Bruckheimer really knows how to stage a special- effects bonanza. If you love visual tricks, like cars that change shape, paper dragons that come alive and outrageous physical stunts, sit back and enjoy what the best special-effects maestro in Hollywood has to offer. But as Inception has so conclusively proved, a display of movie magic that has nothing to reveal can be tedious, and that's what happens to this gaudy, lively, empty film. Nicolas Cage plays a sorcerer, Balthazar Blake, who has lived though many centuries. He is searching for a young apprentice who has the unique power to help Blake stop the wicked schemes of other wicked sorcerers.

The ancient magician, Merlin, placed binding spells on the bad wizards, but now they are back, greedy for power. The "sorcerer's apprentice" of the title turns out to be a shy, klutzy techno-geek, Dave (Jay Baruchel). It is Blake's task to teach him how to use his powers. As a story, it makes the Harry Potter novels look like Nobel prize-winning literary classics.

Of course, Bruckheimer and director Jon Turteltaub understand how to make a film look good, but the creaky, rickety frame over which all this visual excitement is draped makes it trivial and insubstantial. It's nonsense - lively nonsense, perhaps - but nonsense nonetheless. Cage cannot afford many more such duds in what is left of his once Oscar-winning career.