Attention, all 13-year-old female readers of this newspaper: Run, do not walk, to the nearest multiplex playing "Twilight," the screen version of Stephenie Meyer's best-selling potboiler about a principled vampire and the teenage girl who loves him. Others needn't run. Or walk.

Robert Pattinson

The bleached-faced bloodsucker, Edward Cullen, attends high school in Forks, a singularly gloomy little town in Washington state; he's played by the young English heartthrob-in-the -making Robert Pattinson. Edward first meets his inamorata, Bella (Kristen Stewart), when she moves to Forks, where her father is police chief, from her mother's house in Phoenix, where she had managed, fatefully, to avoid getting a tan. In a film that has the courage of its absurdity but not much else, Mr. Pattinson gets the best of what passes for style. He's been fitted out with an upswept rat's-nest hairdo, along with a thin coat of clown-white makeup, and photographed with special attention to his cantilevered brows and his gift for growing a gaze into a glare or, when the occasion demands it, a leer. Ms. Stewart, on the other hand, hasn't been directed so much as permitted, or maybe incited, to indicate anxiety by spitting out her lines in a rat-tat-tat that can be borderline unintelligible.

Kristen Stewart as 'Bella,' left, and Robert Pattinson as 'Edward' in 'Twilight.' Summit Entertainment

Not that "Twilight's" fate hangs on intelligibility. It hangs on fangs that aren't bared, and on a bloodlust that isn't indulged. Edward is, as he explains to Bella patiently, the vampire equivalent of a vegetarian. Like ordinary people living on tofu, he and his family restrict their diet to animal blood, though they still consider the human variety a treat to die for. Indeed, the movie pushes undead abstinence while its director, Catherine Hardwicke, indulges in klutzy extravagance that misfires as often as it fires -- a Cullen family baseball game is to howl at -- and gets little blood pounding until the climax, when Edward clashes with the slavering scion of a carnivorous vampire family in some no-tofu kung fu for the custody of Bella's soul. "Twilight" has targeted the collective soul of teenage America, and will surely have its way.


I saw "Bolt," Disney's 3-D animated feature about a movie dog who mistakenly thinks he has superpowers, only an hour after leaving my own dog, Skeezix, at a boarding kennel for a week's stay. Skeezix has no such illusions to protect him -- he's just a lovable little guy who thinks regular dog thoughts -- so my heart was heavy with regret that may have skewed my response to the movie. I did not find "Bolt" lovable. Likable, yes, and occasionally endearing -- yet the best parts involve a hamster in a plastic ball. The movie dog's confusions are entertaining, though they're familiar to anyone who has seen Buzz Lightyear in Pixar's peerless "Toy Story" films. But the spunk of the hamster, a corpulent rodent named Rhino, is stirring, and there's a timeless purity to the spectacle of him scurrying around in his private little sphere.

Taken on its own terms, "Bolt" the movie certainly makes the cut. In his role as the action hero of a popular TV show, Bolt the canine -- a white rescue dog voiced by John Travolta -- is all but omnipotent. (Miley Cyrus provides the voice of his co-star and owner, a girl named Penny.) But the mail room accidentally packs him in Styrofoam peanuts and ships him to New York, where he's thrown on his own severely limited resources. (The poor pooch doesn't even know how to beg until he gets amusing lessons from a street-smart cat named Mittens.) The plot, such as it is, has Rhino, voiced by Mark Walton, and Mittens (Susie Essman) helping Bolt to get back to Hollywood and his beloved Penny, and coming to understand that true heroism doesn't depend on special powers.

'Bolt,' voiced by John Travolta Walt Disney Studios

The 3-D process is an enhancement, even though it's used with little verve or ingenuity. But the movie's terms are severely limited too. "Bolt" is yet another entertainment fascinated by the entertainment industry, with knowing references to agents, writers, directors, ratings and the like. This won't damage our kiddies' delicate minds, but it won't fire their imaginations either. Mine was warmed, if not fired, by simpler things such as Bolt sticking his head out the window of a mobile home in transit and rediscovering the joy of the wind.

'Let the Right One In'

By happy happenstance, a remarkably fine and genuinely frightening movie about a teenage vampire is playing in a dozen or more cities around the country. "Let the Right One In," in Swedish, with English subtitles, was directed by Tomas Alfredson from John Ajvide Lindqvist's adaptation of his own novel. This time the genders are reversed -- the vampire takes the form of a dark-eyed girl. Her name is Eli, and she moves into a suburban apartment with a stone-faced man who only looks to be her father. At first Eli has evil eyes for Oskar, the boy next door; he looks like an angel, and lives in a hell created by school bullies. But she falls in love, in her fashion, and becomes the boy's protector.

Kare Hedebrant (center) in 'Let the Right One In.' Magnet Releasing

Mr. Alfredson's style is as elegant and laconic as "Twilight" is amateurish and campy. The cinematographer, Hoyte Van Hoytema, has created formal compositions, muted in tone, that I will savor as still frames when the DVD is released. The film has its share of sly humor. At one point Eli, her face smeared with a victim's blood, snuggles with Oskar in bed and tells him she's not really a girl, but he still wants to go steady. Yet the main dramatic tone is quiet horror grounded in a matter-of-factness that will have your blood running cold.


In the recent flood tide of releases, I missed another elegantly uncluttered little movie -- little only in the scale of its production budget -- called "Ballast." A debut feature by Lance Hammer, it's a deceptively leisurely account of tragedy and reconciliation in a Mississippi delta family. At the center of it all is Lawrence, a large, deliberate man played by Micheal J. Smith Sr. (Mr. Hammer has used only nonprofessionals in his cast, and used them brilliantly.) When his twin brother kills himself, Lawrence grows despondent, his nephew goes out of control and the family's already tattered fabric starts to unravel.

Micheal J. Smith Sr. in 'Ballast' Alluvial Film Co.

That makes the movie sound more eventful than it is. For the most part the story moves at the ambling pace of uncertain lives, a pace representing the filmmaker's trust that his audience will stay involved as several important events unfold. His trust is justified by his talent. This ostensibly simple film evokes whole lives in 96 minutes, and does so with sparse dialogue. It's about sorrow, addiction, the secret life of a child, an incipient fall from the slippery decks of respectability and the moral and material ballast that keeps a family afloat. It's even about twins. The brother who dies takes some of Lawrence with him.


Let's be seriously film-scholarly here. Carl Theodor Dreyer's "Vampyr" (1932) is one of the landmark horror films in film history, and it has recently been remastered and released in a Criterion version that does full justice to its visual splendor. "Vampyr" is mostly silent, and entirely hypnotic. The cinematographer was Rudolph Mat&eacute;, who went on to a long and distinguished career in Hollywood. (He shot "Gilda," starring the entirely gorgeous Rita Hayworth.)

Write to Joe Morgenstern at