Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, is the star of this film just as she was a composed and determined figure after the murder a half-century ago. (She died in 2003, as Beauchamp was completing the movie.) She seems to have understood immediately that in death her son had become a powerful emblem of racial injustice, and that his suffering might help save others. The potential biblical symbolism of Emmett's murder was not lost on her: "I know that without bloodshed there can be no redemption," she tells Beauchamp in the film.

Till-Mobley had her son buried in an open casket, and mourners (including national civil-rights members and clergy) flooded to the funeral from all parts of the country. Till's horribly disfigured face, which you see in the film, became an unforgettable testimonial to the brutality and evil of Southern white supremacy. I won't detail the scope of his injuries; suffice it to say that the sadism of the attack -- performed by two apparently unexceptional members of the local white community -- went beyond any possible notion of revenge, however misguided and cruel, into what can only be called insanity.

Stanley Nelson's "The Murder of Emmett Till" aired two years ago on PBS, but while Beauchamp's film is more crudely made, he has been working this turf longer and gotten far closer to the story than Nelson ever does. Beauchamp's interviewees -- one of whom speaks anonymously, with her face in shadows -- include Till's family members and close friends. Some were in the house when he was taken, while other locals saw and heard the beatings and point to potential collaborators, still living and never before identified.

Largely as a result of Beauchamp's film, the Justice Department reopened the Till case last year, in the hopes that some who were involved can still be brought to justice. (To no one's surprise, Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all-white jury in 1955. They later confessed their guilt to a Look magazine reporter, at a price of $4,000. Both have since died.) It's too little and far too late for Emmett Till, but Beauchamp's intimate history reminds us that even iconic events like this tragedy happen to real people, and belong not just to history textbooks but also living memory.

"The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till" opens Aug. 17 at Film Forum in New York. A national release will follow, with details to be determined.

Fast forward: A film you can't stop watching (in which nothing happens), and a wistful travelogue of post-9/11 Manhattan
Jun Ichikawa's haunting "Tony Takitani" is quite a short movie, barely 75 minutes, and the camera spends much of that time creeping around walls, edging toward Ichikawa's characters and then stopping, at some odd distance and some odd angle, as if embarrassed to draw too close. More than most contemporary Japanese directors, Ichikawa is heir to the tradition of the great Yasujiro Ozu, with its tremendous technical rigor and emotional restraint. There are some postmodern touches in "Tony Takitani" that Ozu would never have tried, but as in his movies, Ichikawa is out to capture tragedy in very few brush strokes, without wallowing in it.

Even the casting is minimal: Issei Ogata plays both the supremely lonely title character and his ne'er-do-well father, a jazz musician who thought giving his son an American name in 1946 was a good move. The reed-slender Rie Miyazawa plays both Eiko, the surpassingly lovely wife Tony loses (in large part because of her designer-clothing addiction), and Hisako, the girl he hires to impersonate Eiko after her death. Already that makes "Tony Takitani" sound as if it has more plot, or at least more action, than it does. Most of the story is told in voice-over, with the characters almost motionless in the frame; only occasionally do the actors actually speak their lines, and still less often to each other.

If that sounds insufferable, well, this is one of those movies where you either give yourself up to its rhythms or give up entirely. It took me a few minutes to get used to it, but I found "Tony Takitani" absorbing and loaded with emotional power. Ichikawa's compositions are lovely, Ryuichi Sakamoto's music is haunting and the mode of contemplative stillness is contagious. "Tony Takitani" is adapted from a story by the great Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, and as in much of his work the combination of sadness and humor is impossible to summarize. Ichikawa's film is more a tribute to Murakami than an attempt to capture him in a bottle, but for those so inclined it's 75 minutes beautifully spent. (Now playing in New York; opens Aug. 12 in San Francisco, Aug. 26 in Los Angeles and San Diego, Sept. 9 in Philadelphia and Sept. 30 in Chicago, Dallas and Sacramento, Calif., with other cities to follow.)

Finally, I want to thank New York independent filmmaker Art Jones for sending me "Lustre," his odd but often lovely spiritual odyssey through the streets of Manhattan in the year following Sept. 11, 2001. Anyone who lived through that year of grief in New York will identify strongly with the luminescent emotion of this film, and it stars Victor Argo, a classic gravel-voiced New York character actor who appeared in "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver" (among many other films), in his final role.

Jones' filmmaking is often both beautiful and daring -- he shoots a scene on a billboard walkway over Canal Street and on top of one of the Brooklyn Bridge's towers -- and his story offers brave and intriguing possibilities. Argo stars as an aging loan shark named Hugo, who rhapsodizes eloquently about the edgy, brawling city he sees disappearing beneath yuppie condo developments and chain stores (I feel his pain) and then begins to have murky spiritual revelations -- angels' voices, apparitions, magical powers, the Virgin in a coffee stain, that kind of thing.

Does this all hang together? Not really. "Lustre" lurches uneasily from satire to sentimentality and back again, and after the bewildering eschatological ending I wasn't sure whether we had reached the Second Coming or just a guy having a breakdown. But if the storytelling is murky, the filmmaking is stunning and, more important, the passion for this city -- its people and landscape -- is pure. (Opens Aug. 17 at the Pioneer Theater in New York.)

Recent Stories