Freedomland **1/2 out of ****

She's Kerazy!

It’s been 14 years, more than 30 movies and four Academy Award nominations since Julianne Moore was the sexiest thing in “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle” and she’s never hacked like she does in “Freedomland” as a single mom named Brenda, who wanders into a hospital with stigmata wounds on her hands, the apparent victim of a carjacking. The movie’s a mess anyhow but Moore’s histrionic, nearly autistic performance gnaws at the high points of Richard Price’s screenplay, and the strong supporting work from Samuel L Jackson and Edie Falco.

Based on Price’s novel, Jackson stars as Lorenzo “Big Daddy” Council, lead homicide detective in Price’s fictional Dempsy, N.J., a burned-out mini-ghetto next door to the whiter, middle-class Gannon. Lorenzo falls into an asthmatic fit when Brenda describes a black man who must have come from a local project house to rob her car and drive off with her son. Complicating matters: Her brother Danny (Ron Eldard) is a Gannon cop who threatens to “lock down” the project “ like East (expletive) Berlin.” Lorenzo’s boss has similar ideas when he tosses renters out of their apartments for a full-building search. Outside the crowd remains, boiling to a riotous froth.

Using as a template the Susan Smith murders - the South Carolina woman concocted a carjacking tale before she admitted, after relentless questioning, that she drowned her children - “Freedomland” chugs on a dual-engine: The investigation into Cody’s dubious kidnapping; and the rising racial tension between the cops and the housing project. The plots have several blights - What happened to the car? What’s Danny’s role? How likely is Brenda’s revelatory connection to one of the tenants? - but Price has a talent for street dialogue, and his script pays close attention to the vocal rhythms of the working class - black and white - its use of profanity, its razor-thin trust in anyone, and the need to self-fulfill fears of the other.

Underneath all of “Freedomland” runs a doomsday current of a world too broken to ever reconcile all the festering guilt and pain; whatever Brenda’s done, she’s seems to have been ritually punished for it already. Maybe that’s why Price has Lorenzo talking plainly about his faith in two scenes. It’s the last ladder out of the sewer. But he is caught in between his people and Brenda, who is certainly lying, but is not necessarily a killer. Jackson, paunchy and aging, dials down his usual barking cadence to create a thoughtful, tired man. He leans on Brenda, he presses her gently, he assigns her a personal comforter, and he eventually relies on Karen Colluci (Falco, in the Frances McDormand role), leader of Friends of Kent, a group of moms who find lost children.

It’s Karen who eventually reaches through Brenda’s hysterical sludge in one of the few scenes Joe Roth directs with the austerity it deserves. But he generally lets Moore put pickles on the goulash, the result of which are several different personas: This one speaks with a vaguely southern accent with broken diction, while another one says “ I over-abstained, you see,” while a third rocks and twirls about like some neurological case. Moore depicts dawning madness as a method buffet that reminds of me of Brittany Murphy’s babble in “Don’t Say A Word,” and Anthony Hopkins’ last scene in “Titus,” when he thought he was going to retire, and chose to announce it by miming several of his favorite actors. He concluded by flipping off the camera.

Capote *** 1/2 out of ****

The Fall of Man...in the fall of a man

"Capote" is an excellent, disturbing analysis of darkness touring, at first unwittingly, then compulsively and destructively, the most pitiful district of its large precinct, running its hand over the contours of a neighborhood polar opposite to the martini Saturday nights in uptown Manhattan and finding it equally rife with desolation and ruthlessness. The uplift of it? There is no uplift. It is a straight, fierce double shot of grain liquor. Some artists grope around in the abyss, are pulled in, and do not fully return. Franz Kafka. Sam Peckinpah. Vincent Van Gogh. John Kennedy Toole. Jackson Pollock. And Truman Capote, who wrote harmless society novels and larks for The New Yorker before he stumbled upon an item in the New York Times about a murdered family in a west Kansas farmhouse.

He would go there for a magazine piece. Six years later he would produce "In Cold Blood," still a titan of non-fiction and the treadmill for the true-crime section genre, Court TV, the Amber Alert, all of it. Director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman don't rehash the book - Richard Brooks' 1967 film does that fine. Instead, they follow Capote as he researches, writes, gloats, abuses his subjects - convicted murderers Perry Smith and Richard Hickok - drinks, smokes, and generally dissolves from the pressure of his talent and conflicted guilt over the impending deaths of the killers. Philip Seymour Hoffman, as Capote, covers the journey as if he was born to it, effortlessly channeling the man's charm, malice and tunnel ambition, not to mention his speech and mannerisms. By movie's end you loathe and pity Capote precisely because he has the capacity for scruples, and he pitches them.

In his New York fishbowl Capote holds court. In Holcomb, Kan., where Smith and Hickok murdered the Clutter family, he uses his novelist friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) as a frontwoman into the homes of reluctant witnesses and police investigator Alvin Dewey (Chris Cooper). It works. In these scenes Capote is his usual storytelling self on a four or five, and he is very good at working over regular folks with stories of Bogart and Marilyn. He changes the day Smith and Hickok are captured and he meets Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.) in the kitchen of the sheriff's apartment, in the women's holding cell.

"He's a goldmine," Capote tells his friend Lee of Smith, a shy, tortured soul taken to Capote as a dog to a benevolent master.

And because of it, Capote fights to save both killers from the death penalty until he can convince Smith to talk about the night of the murders. Until their hanging would better serve the ending of his book. By the hour of their execution in a warehouse behind Leavenworth prison, Capote has slipped into a basket of acute alcoholism, self-aggrandizement and persecution complex. Most authors stretch recollected truth; Capote's predicament is worse that he is an integral part of the truth. The fact of his book and the lives of those in it reverse priorities.

The movie has an elegant, unhurried construction toward the moment Capote sees his subjects for the last time just before midnight. Miller inserts scenes of the winter Kansas prairie for emotional effect and structural progress - a shot of a distant passenger train sliding along the plains echoes Terrence Malick - while his interiors are cloaked in shadows and dimly-lit, stripped of their vibrancy; save a short interlude at Capote's home in Spain, the director works in blacks, grays, hunter greens, washed-out prison blues.

Hoffman's dandy aside, the performances suit the tone. Keener's Harper Lee is steady, sage and close to saintly; she emerges as a bit of a cipher for Miller and Futterman's analysis of the lead character; in most scenes it's hard to tell whether she's Capote's friend or his philosophical foil Likewise Bruce Greenwood as author Jack Dunphy, Capote's lover. Cooper, as Alvin Dewey, maintains that talent of holding contempt and affection in the same moment while Collins plays Smith as a man who seems like a perfectly unfortunate soul before and after the hour he shot four people in the head.