Sayles also uses the same actors over and over again -- this is at least the fifth of his films for Cooper -- and assembles impressive casts, even if he sometimes seems to squander them. Tim Roth wanders through the background here (with an unconvincing American accent), playing Danny's former editor, now running a disreputable conspiracy-theory Web site. Kristofferson steals both of his scenes as Wes Benteen, the super-scary moneybags developer who tells candidate Pilager, as they ride horseback through a breathtaking stretch of Rocky Mountain wilderness: "Aspen and Vail? They ain't shit compared to what I can build here." Miguel Ferrer gets an entertaining two minutes as a Gordon Liddy-style right-wing radio host, and Daryl Hannah provides some cheesecake relief as the Pilager family's sexy hippie-chick outcast sister.

As you might expect, Benteen, the Pilager family and a slavedriver who imports undocumented Mexican workers are all tied together in a sinister scheme to defraud the public, poison the groundwater, privatize the Rockies and get dim-bulb Dickie elected. Danny's problem is that, like a lot of private eyes in noir movies, he starts out on the wrong side, working for a detective (Mary Kay Place) who digs dirt for the sleazy political operative (Richard Dreyfuss) running the Pilager campaign. But once Danny starts to trace the trail of a dead body that pops up at an embarrassing moment for Pilager, he of course can't help himself from pursuing truth, justice and the American way.

Throw in the fact that Danny's girlfriend has dumped him and his No. 1 lost love (Maria Bello) is engaged to a hunkadelic sleazeball lobbyist for the Benteen forces (an enjoyable turn from Billy Zane), and you've got two hours that clank along pretty well. "Silver City" isn't Sayles' best movie or his worst, but it's one of his darkest. What redeems him for me, at least part of the way, is his awareness that, idealism aside, the Danny O'Briens of the world may be able to set their private lives aright, but they're not likely to defeat the Wes Benteens in the long run. Whether or not this reflects Sayles' feelings about what awaits us in November, he signs off this time with a near-apocalyptic finish you won't soon forget.

"Reconstruction": Sex and high style in Copenhagen
Just to go veering wildly off in the opposite direction, to an arty obscurity you probably won't get a chance to see (and might not want to if you did), my favorite European movie of the year so far is "Reconstruction," the daring and stylish romance from 30-year-old Danish wunderkind Christoffer Boe. (It just opened in New York and Los Angeles.) A handsome, tough-yet-sensitive type (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) meets a beautiful, just slightly weathered blonde (Maria Bonnevie) in a bar. They flirt; he asks her to go to Rome with him; she doesn't exactly say no. But wait: Are they actually strangers? Don't they remember each other from some other time or place? And what about the intrusive voice-over narration, telling us that, as we already know, this is only a film, only a fictional construction.

His name is Alex and her name is Aimee, and they keep ending up in that bar, several times over, during the course of "Reconstruction." Each time, the encounter doesn't quite go right, and at least one of them isn't sure what's going on. Boe presents the night streets of Copenhagen as a haunted landscape, a color-saturated descendant of the cityscapes of film noir and the French New Wave. Against this beautiful but none too warm city, these beautiful but careworn lovers are caught in some kind of fugue state that keeps bringing them back to the same turning point, the same two cups of coffee, the same bar.

There are other people involved here, too, and their roles grow murkier as the film moves along. Aimee has an older husband, August (Krister Henriksson), a prominent novelist whose book-in-progress seems to be telling the story of Alex and Aimee's affair. Then there's Simone, Alex's slightly too clingy girlfriend. He thinks he still loves her, in classic noncommittal-guy fashion, but after he sleeps with Aimee, Simone doesn't seem to know who he is. Oh, and neither does his best friend. And when Alex tries to go home his apartment simply isn't there anymore.

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