Weekend Entertainment Guide

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MOVIES . . . LOST HIGHWAY: David Lynch's new film is a milder Wild at Heart, the 1990 road movie that, like this one, he wrote with novelist Barry Gifford. "If Lost Highway had preceded Wild at Heart (or Eraserhead or Blue Velvet), it might give off a sense of otherworldly menace," says TIME's Richard Corliss. "But we've visited this planet before, become familiar with its obsessions and grotesqueries until they hold as little terror as garden gnomes." The plot, which cunningly loops itself like a Mobius strip with sprocket holes, starts with a couple, Fred (Bill Pullman) and Renee (Patricia Arquette), troubled about intrusions into their home and their private lives. Renee vanishes, and the film changes lanes. It follows Pete (Balthazar Getty), a grease monkey who dumps his girlfriend (Natasha Gregson Wagner) and takes up with a gangster (Robert Loggia) and his moll. Damned if this new femme fatale doesn't look exactly like Renee, but with platinum blond hair. Several motels and murders later, and in between cameos by such veteran outragers as Richard Pryor, Henry Rollins and Mink Stole, it all starts to look very familiar. "While it's always a tonic in this timid film age to see directors try something different, Lost Highway is the same different," Corliss notes. "Someone should tell Lynch that noir is a genre, but weird isn't."

MOVIES . . . ROSEWOOD: John Singleton's fictionalized account of the destruction of the almost entirely black Florida town of Rosewood by a white mob 70 years ago plays loose with history but is powerful nonetheless, says TIME's Richard Schickel. "In shaping Rosewood, Singleton and screenwriter Gregory Poirier have commingled the relatively few known facts of this matter with a lot of very obvious, very movieish fictions. Some of this was doubtless inevitable. Like the terrible end of the story, its ludicrous beginnings -- a trampy white woman falsely accuses an anonymous black man of brutally assaulting her, thereby whipping up a mob spirit -- is known and powerfully shown. What is not available in the historical records is anything very specific about the people, victims and victimizers alike, who lived this story. Nor, apparently, does it offer a suitably heroic figure on whom to center audience attention or a suspenseful and emotionally releasing climax." The moviemakers therefore create a character named Mann (Ving Rhames), who drifts into town on horseback just as the tragedy is beginning to unfold. In essence, he's the mysterious stranger of a thousand westerns, eager to avoid conflict but miraculously adept at the killing arts when he is finally obliged to employ them. "Ordinarily such trespasses against truth would be enough to condemn such a movie, but Rhames' gravity and grace and the moving work of actors like Don Cheadle and Esther Rolle do much to redeem this film for human if not historical reality," notes Schickel. "Rosewood finds, in a shameful bygone moment, sources of pride for contemporary audiences. There are worse things to do with the past."