The second coming et al.

Choke

Crit

Who would have thought a film based on a Chuck Palahniuk novel about sex addicts, one of whom is a mother-smothered professional manipulator who may be the half-clone of Jesus (yeah, I could explain, but then I'd have to baptize you) would turn out to be so darned sweet? You knew Sam Rockwell and Kelly Macdonald would be tough to resist, but who knew that the secondary couple, played by the Seth Roganesque Brad William Henke and the out-of-nowhere Gillian Jacobs, would tug our hearts too?

Appaloosa

Crit

Lac . . . lac . . . what's the word I'm lookin' for, Everett? Laconic. Right: laconic intellectual gunmen in love. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Sometimes that means suspending civil rights, sometimes it means reading Emerson, and sometimes it means saving your friend from his woman's unfocused libido.

Then again, woman's gotta do what she's gotta do, too.

Ed Harris cowrote, directed, and costars with Viggo Mortensen, Renée Zellweger, and Jeremy Irons, and it's a mostly lovely project, a quiet visual poem, but somebody should have talked him out of singing that tells-the-story-of-the-movie song over the end credits.

Trailers

• RocknRolla--Guy Ritchie and gangsters; need we say more?
• Pride and Glory--Wait, isn't this Infernal Affairs/The Departed again?
• Saw the Morning Light trailer for the 5th time, I believe (yes, confirmed), and also saw a different W. trailer, featuring "Once in a Lifetime" (which is never a bad thing).