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Mike Mills on Beginners' lessons

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War zones

DON’T LOOK BACK: Cate Blanchett is one of a half-dozen Bob Dylans in I’m Not There.

That means audiences will have to face some inconvenient and — for the studios — potentially noncommercial truths. While waiting for the Bush administration and the Department of Defense to give us the lowdown on Iraq this month, Hollywood has begun its own surge of features on the subject. Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah opens this week; upcoming films taking on the War on Terror include The Kingdom, Rendition, Grace Is Gone, and Lions for Lambs.

Back home, the situation doesn’t look much rosier. Illegal immigration? Check out La misma luna|Under the Same Moon. Organized crime? There’s Ridley Scott’s American Gangster. And Ben Affleck in his directorial debut confronts the grim topic of child abuse in Gone, Baby, Gone.

Students might take advantage of this renewed seriousness on the screen. Those needing to brush up on their history can watch Elizabeth: The Golden Age. In lieu of Cliffs Notes, they’ll have adaptations of Beowulf, Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.

So what can we expect in the way of mere entertainment when even the f/x thriller Resident Evil: Extinction has an agenda of apocalypse and global doom? How about pop music? Like Control, a feel-bad bio-pic about Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division, who committed suicide at age 23? Or Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, a schizoid portrait of the young Bob Dylan, with six actors, including Cate Blanchett, playing the iconic superstar?

Maybe the Farrelly Brothers will come through with their remake of the 1972 Elaine May comedy The Heartbreak Kid. And you can’t take the movies too seriously when they close the fall slate with The Christmas Cottage, perhaps the first major feature based on a kitschy painting.