Newsday from New York, New York • 95

lnovirre views B15 Find thn latest niovin fivicwi it ntwidiyxom iwovin NOW PLAYING Eastwood offspring drowns 'Rails' in tears making the man interesting A member of the federal witness protection program since his parole in the onetime heroin king of 70s Harlem-filmed in concealing shadows amid bullets and piles of white comes out of hiding sort of to prove himself a stupid windbag That Barnes thinks of hiniseifas a kind of Robin Hood Nelson Mandela rather than an ex-iunkieand murderer isn't really helped by Levin's conceit of punctuating nis movie with quotations from Macchiavelli which only serve to elevate a subject with little real insight into himself or any of the events that Levin recreates through a variety of 70s cliches (people in pimp-wear Curtis Mayfield records David Berkowitz) Levin may in fact be resisting the urge to hoist Barnes by his own egomaniacal petard: he's too smart not to nave considered it Barnes may have inspired the seminal Jack Cuba Gooding Jr plays him in the upcoming "American and he may also have been the inspiration for Jim Croce's "Bad Bad Leroy But the attention has gone to his head: Near the condusion when he starts reciting in verse Barnes sounds less luce a young Muhammad All (probably his intention) than an aging gassy Jake LaMot-ta So maybe Levin does get him in the end 132 (adult content vulgarity drug content) At the AMC Empire 25 Cinema Village AMC Loews Harlem Manhattan JOHN ANDERSON MfAMNIM WtUb 'K UWl a PHUlU Marcia Gay Harden Kevin Bacon and Miles Heizer are a sorrowful trio in Alison Eastwood's Well she can devote her remaining days to the dead bereft young son Davey (Miles Heizer) who has fled from a callous foster home Never mind that the boy would have to face the back-to-back loss of two caring mothers Answered prayers do not come any needier not to say cuter than Davey Nor do scripts come any sudsier than Micky Levy's awesomely bathetic "Rails which would arguably never have seen the dark of a screening room were it not for Alison Eastwood daughter of Dirty Harry making her Ya RAU ATKS(PG-13) Dying woman acckient-rid- den husband suicidal mother orphaned son Alison Eastwood in her directing debut turns on the waterworks Marcia Gay Harden Kevin Bacon and little Miles Heizer oblige her 1:40 (mature thematic elements an accident scene brief nudity and momentary strong km-guageX At the Angelika Film Center and Lincoln Square Manhattan BY JAN STUART janstuartnewsdaycom Is there any working actress who has wept as fulsomely and inexhaustibly as Marcia Gay Harden? In her latest bout with the pitiless gods of Hollywood fate the ever-suffering Ms Harden plays Megan Stark a nurse who has entered stage four of cancer Megan can find no surcease from sorrow in her train engineer husband Tom (Kevin Bacon) a stone-faced stoic who retreats from his wife's illness and rams a passenger train into a suicidal woman who has planted her car on the tracks What is a childless prematurely dying woman with a husband in denial and threatened with losing his fob supposed to do? In touch MUSK WITHIN (R) Ron Livingston stars as a hearing-impaired war veteran who champions rights for the disabled Well-intended but flavorless biopic that drowns in a stew of voiceover narration and rock-and-soul warhorses 134 (language including sexual refer-ences and some drug content) At the Empire 25 and Loews Village 7 Manhattan BY JAN STUART janstuartnewsdaycom The ceaselessly babbling protagonist of "Music Within" is Richard Pimentel (Ron Livingston) a would-be debating star who lost his hearing while serving in Vietnam and went on to help pass the Americans With Disabilities Act While Richard is able to fake his way as a hearing person into good jobs he becomes aware of the intense social prejudice against the physically challenged through his friendship with Art Homieyman (Michael Sheen) a cerebral Director David Lynch is th subject of a documentary LYNCH (unrated) According to this very intimate predictably eccentric and off-kii-ter portrait of filmmaker David Lynch (captured during the making of last master-pieceTlnland the director can be defined by abbreviations: TM (for transcendental meditation his passion) DV (for digital video as in Tm finished with and com (as in "Hello davidlyndvcom This is facetious of course but so is Lynch and appropriately so is the film Although fractured by the various film processes and a mix of DV and 8-mm used by the bio's director it's actually a tightly edited formalist movie which in itself explains a lot about Lynch as the non-narrative filmmaker extraordinaire Story is always less important than construct Revealing are the close-ups we get of Lynch directing whether it's his star Laura Dem or the homeless people he casts for his films out of the doorways along Hollywood Boulevard (The fHm is directed by someone using the nom de cinema blackANDwhite which has been presumed in some quarters to be Lynch but which we're assured is not) £25 (adult content) At the IFC Center Manhattan Coming soon to Huntington's Cinema Arts Centre ANDERSON RH1A(PG-13)A whisper of mystery and sprinkling of magic loft this parable of broken souls somewhere above the New York streets where so comfortably teds its tale Starring former Mexican telenovela star Eduardo Verastegui as Jose an ex-soccer-star-tumed-cook with a tragedy in his past and the wonderful Tammy Blanchard as Nina a waitress with a bun in the ovea is best when dealing with the relationship between the two When Nina is fired by Jose's cafe-owner brother Manny (Manny Perez) Joe walks out too and a bad day starts to sparkle as they get to know each other The filnx co-written by debuting director Alejandro Monteverde (with Patrick Million and Leo Severi-no) grows more pedestrian when the two visit Jose's family and values start marching through the movie If better when the earthy Nina and the dreamy Christlike Jose are more or less floating through the dty With Jaime TireHl Alt Landry £37 (adult content) In English and Spanish with English subtitles At Farmingdale Stadium TO and in Manhattan at Empire 25 ami Union Square Stadium 14 JOHN ANDERSON (unrated) Genre-jumping filmmaker Marc Levin whose last documentary of Zion" was a gutsy examination of post-911 anti-Semitism has an even tougher job on his hands with Leroy Barnes: with his inner ears directing debut Like Bacon's rule-obsessed character Levy operates so determinedly by the book that the audience actively resists being sucked in which is really a shame since we could all do with a good honest cry East-wood keeps the script's creaky gears oiled abetted by the editor cinematographer production designer and composer of pater's "Letters from Iwo Any resemblances between that picture and this had they existed would have made for a strange but interesting experience free-spirit girlfriend (Melissa George) the good times the bad jobs the ugly encounters with petty people There may be an interesting movie in all of this but too much is filtered through the hero's voice-over narration always a recipe for squashing the life out of a film We are supposed to be disarmed by Pimentel's acerbity and talent for telling off ill-mannered people Livingston's charms remain elusive he comes off as surly and self-righteous Bill Murray cm a perpetual bad hair day Scenes intended to illustrate the pre-Pimentel plight of the disabled are cheaply overstated it's tee kind of movie that announces that things in the pancake house are about to get really nasty by punting the camera at a big sign that says "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" Director Steven Salowich ladles the button-pressing rock hits onto the soundtrack assuring that any authentic glimmers of music within its protagonist are deadened by the music I (RX Say this much for Anthony Hopkins' project If he's going to indulge himself as a wnter-director-star if probably better that he goes completely off foe wall than serve up ms own version of Hollywood's Anthony Hopkins shtick of serpentine elegance or avuncular menace But who in the name of David Lynch could have ever imagined this phantas-magorical discharge of shape-shifting narrative compound jump cuts and spin-drying hyperbole? Hopkins (who's even credited with the music) plays a screenwriter named wait for tt Felix Bonhoffer whose mind is veering so for out of control that his characters won't behave But which characters? The two hit men (Christian Slater Jeffrey Tambor) terrorizing a roadside diner or the actors playing them in the movie-within-e-movie- within-a-movie? The script girl (Camryn Manheim) who scolds Bonhoffer for "losing continuity" after he accidentally runs over her with his car? (If that1 what he (fid) And how did Kevin McCarthy get here? Just because somebody in the diner brought up the original version of of the Body (The diner confab also makes reference to Yogi and Boo-Boo Bear both of whom are smart enough to keep their distance) If the movie would settle down to let some of these riffs unwind a little Hopkins' movie might be somewhat more than the over-amplified goof that tt is With Sheila Array ae Lisa Pepper John Turturro (as a manic bullying movie producer) Christopher Lawford Epatha Merkerson and Michael Clarke Duncan 136 (vulgarities violent imagery At tee AMC 25 Manhattan -GENE SEYMOUR See a Fast Chat WMi Hopkins in FanFan Sunday HHUlUfev PtUIRMiAJNbAI Ron Livingston is hearing-hnpaired in Within" palsy sufferer whose sharp intelligence often gets lost in his tortured speech and mannerisms In the process of researching Pimentel's story the three writers behind "Music became so enamored of their subject they made the fatal decision to chronicle every burp and trauma from before birth onward We get the disturbed mother (Rebecca de Momay) the neglected childhood the arrogant academic who rejects his scholarship audition (Hector Elizondo) the war years the angry vet he befriends (Yu Vazquez) the KEWSDAY FRIDAY OCTOBER 26 2007.