Taymor's latest is bold, but it left me cold

• In the audacious "Across the Universe," filmmaker and "Lion King" stage creator Julie Taymor jams a bunch of Beatles tunes onto the soundtrack -- sung by its cast members -- and creates a minimally coherent story line that loosely stitches them all together.

As much as I wanted to love this raw and inventive celebration of 1960s baby-boomer nostalgia, I came away from "Across the Universe" a bit mixed.

I admired how Taymor hammered, sawed and drilled the songs and experimental/pop-arty visuals together so they fit into the narrative and it all made sense.

Yet, the movie left me a bit cold, like Harold Ramis' "Multiplicity," a comedy so focused on making four Michael Keatons look good on the screen, it forgot to engage audiences.

Likewise, Taymor's "Across the Universe" is so focused on pressing Beatles songs into service, it sacrifices its characters and the connections.

These are led by young actor Jim Sturgess as Jude (without the "Hey"), a working-class kid from Liverpool. He ditches his life at the shipyard to travel to Princeton to find his Yank dad.

He meets a new pal in Max (Joe Anderson), who doesn't have a silver hammer, but a sister named Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), a student who has just said goodbye to her boyfriend as he leaves for a tour of duty in Vietnam.

The revolutionary winds of the '60s sweep these three characters through war protests, hallucinogenic drug trips and moments of personal epiphanies as Taymor envelops us with Sgt. Peppered scenes of gaudy color and fluid movement.

Watch for appearances by "Frida" star Salma Hayek, Eddie Izzard and Bono as a hippie chieftain delivering the message "I Am the Walrus."

"Across the Universe" opens today at Chicago's Century Centre Cinema and the River East 21. Rated PG-13 (nudity, language, drug use, sexual situations). 129 minutes. ..½

• "Eastern Promises" comes from filmmaker David Cronenberg, which guarantees three things: 1) it'll be smart; 2) it'll be surprising; 3) it'll be hideously violent.

"Eastern Promises" contains one of the most visceral, robust fight sequences of the decade, a bloody and brutal confrontation between a naked Viggo Mortensen and a blade-wielding thug in a Russian steam bath.

Mortensen plays Nikolai, a driver and clean-up man for the Russian mob in London. He crosses paths with Anna, a nurse played by Naomi Watts, after she finds a diary written in Russian by a teenage girl who dies in childbirth.

Although of Russian descent, Anna doesn't speak the language, so she allows a gentlemanly Russian restaurant owner (Armin Mueller-Stahl) to translate it, never suspecting that he's the ruthless head of the local mob, and the diary contains details of criminal activities.

"Eastern Promises," written with steely flourish by Steve "Dirty Pretty Things" Knight, literally cops out near the end, but for most of its run, Cronenberg pulls the drawstrings of suspense so tight, we can barely breathe.

Still, Cronenberg's latest doesn't match the power or style of his crowning achievement, "A History of Violence," but it comes within a bullet's width.

"Eastern Promises" opens today at the River East 21 in Chicago. Rated R (violence, sexual situations, language, nudity). 100 minutes. ...½

• Paul Haggis' heavy-handed anti-Iraq war drama "In the Valley of Elah" merges an old-fashioned murder mystery with 1970s overt political symbolism.

This combination yields an often bumpy drama smoothed out at every turn by Tommy Lee Jones' leathery performance as a retired military investor forced to work on the most important case of his life.

Jones plays Hank Deerfield, a former Vietnam War soldier and current owner of a Tennessee truck business. He gets a call from nearby Fort Rudd that his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker) is missing from the base and will be deemed AWOL soon.

Deerfield kisses his wife (a woefully underutilized Susan Sarandon) and heads off to find his boy.

Instead, he finds a terrible murder mystery that tries to replicate the layers of deceit in "Chinatown" and the social sounding board of his own Oscar-winning "Crash."

Deerfield is a skilled investigator, a smart and experienced cop who finds his unlikely match in a local police detective named Emily Sanders (a brunetted Charlize Theron).

A single mother, Emily must withstand the taunts and stupidity of her peers, good-old-boy Southern cops who never hesitate to denigrate her in public.

When Deerfield meets her, the two reluctantly bond while working on the case of the missing Mike. After all, they have one thing in common: They're the smartest investigators in their worlds.

The title "In the Valley of Elah" gets explained by Deerfield's unorthodox bedtime story to Emily's young son. Not understanding anything in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe," the retired military cop tells the lad the story of David and Goliath, and how they met in the valley of Elah.

I'm not sure exactly how the David and Goliath story directly applies to "In the Valley of Elah," but it gives Haggis' movie that patina of importance he imagines it should have.

I have deliberately avoided saying too much about the investigation into Mike's whereabouts. Some things are better left to be discovered in the theater.

"In the Valley of Elah" powers up on its key performances -- Theron presents Emily as a beauty who doesn't want to be one -- a spellbinding confessional scene, and a sledge-hammered final shot that, although overstated to the max, is probably what Haggis thinks necessary to reach the part of his audience immune to political subtlety.

"In the Valley of Elah" opens today at the Webster Place Theaters in Chicago. Rated R (violence, language, sexual situations and nudity). 121 minutes. ...

• Bruce David Janu, a teacher at Arlington Heights' John Hersey High School, presents his documentary "Facing Sudan" as part of the Illinois International Film Festival, running today through Sunday at the Arcada Theater, 105 E. Main St., St. Charles.

Call (312) 733-7469 or go to the Web site www.illinoisinternationalfilmfestival.com/arcadia.htm for details.

• "Preserve Me a Seat," Jim Field's doc about saving classic movie theaters, plays today and Saturday at the Portage Theater, 4050 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago.

Call (773) 736-4050 or go to the Web site www.portragetheater.org for details.