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I realized only after this week’s issue went to press that I’d employed near-identical phraseology in my long review of Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster, which opens today in wide release, and my capsule review of David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which is opening at the Music Box. In both reviews, I describe the movie’s lush stylization as a smoke screen for lack of meaningful ideas. I didn’t intend to repeat myself—I wrote the Saints capsule about a month ago and forgot about it by the time I watched The Grandmaster. Also, I should add that not all smoke screens are created equal. I consider The Grandmaster to be an honest failure, in which a great artist enters new creative territory and reaches a dead end. Saints, on the other hand, is one of the phoniest movies I’ve seen in a long time, a collection of cinematic mannerisms lifted shamelessly from the films of Terrence Malick.

Getting back to new releases, this week’s issue has new reviews of: American Made Movie, a documentary about the U.S. manufacturing industry; The Attack, an adaptation of the international best seller about an Arab doctor living in Israel whose wife becomes a suicide bomber; Closed Circuit, a British legal thriller starring Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall (the British actress from Vicky Cristina Barcelona and The Town, not the Northwest Chicago Film Society programmer); Off Label, a documentary about the pharmaceutical industry; and Saturday Morning Mystery, a horror-comedy that riffs on the old Scooby Doo cartoons.