Onetime film critic Rod Lurie wrote his political thriller The Contender specifically for Joan Allen (Nixon, Face/Off) because he thinks she’s "the best actress in the world." You’d be hard pressed to argue with the same guy who directed The Contender because of Allen’s pitch perfect characterization of — neither shaken nor stirred — Democratic Vice President nominee Laine Hanson. The movie directly addresses gender-aimed political hypocrisy that obstructs our political system with impeccable humor, fury, and finesse.

The Contender is a clarion call that challenges what is and isn’t appropriate in the political process. If that sounds dry and boring, The Contender is exactly the opposite. There are more bitterly biting and cleverly funny scenes in this movie than in The Parallax View and The Manchurian Candidate put together. From its unexpected opening scene in which a small town Governor attempts an underwater rescue in a Virginia river, to the last unforeseen revelation about Laine’s sexual indiscretions in college, The Contender is a completely enticing and fun movie that audiences will be talking about for the rest of the year. For all of the undeserved acclaim poured on Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog a few years ago, this is a political movie that shows how far the genre can go in fleshing out ethics and principles while spinning suspense every step of the way.

After the death of his Vice President, U.S. President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges - Fearless, Arlington Road) chooses Senator Laine Hanson to fill the Vice chair as a ‘swan song’ gesture of his tenure in the oval office toward gender equality. But word of Hanson’s nomination, doesn’t sit well with nasty old-school Congressman Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman - Romeo Is Bleeding), who immediately connives with running-dog freshman Congressman Reginald Webster (Christian Slater - True Romance) to publicly smear Hanson’s reputation with photos of her engaging in a gang bang during her wild college sorority days. One depraved cohort describes Hanson’s imminent downfall as similar to stabbing someone right in the navel — ‘even the healing hand of Jesus Christ himself couldn’t stop the bleeding.’ The Congressional questioning sessions that follow push Hanson to prove her political principles in a way that rings like an uncracked Liberty Bell.

Hanson absolutely refuses to dignify the board’s sordid assertions with any response as the media proceed to eat her for lunch. When the shameful photos show up on the world wide web, the feeding frenzy speeds out of control. Hanson simplifies her stance to the inexperienced Webster (Slater) by making an analogy to the McCarthy H.U.A.C. hearings. ‘If the first person the H.U.A.C. committee interrogated had refused to answer any of the council’s trumped up charges, it would have sent a strong message of propriety, and perhaps prevented the ruin that followed in McCarthy’s witch hunt.

Gary Oldman is practically unrecognizable as Runyon, a slimy old right-winger from the Midwest, complete with bad balding hair, thick black glasses, and some of the ugliest clothes imaginable. Oldman, who executive produced the 10 million dollar movie, takes special glee in savoring his character’s seething sexual frustration and ego-fueled command over his private chess game of Washington politics.

But the man to beat — as America considers between Nader, Bush, and Gore — is Jeff Bridges as President Jackson Evans. With a Gordon Gecko haircut (ala Michael Douglas in Wall Street) Bridges exudes more command over the Presidential office than Clinton on his best day. When he offers Congressman Webster a bite of his ‘shark sandwich’ before shifting gears into a brief lecture on the subjective insignificance of ‘following your heart,’ it’s more than a bust-up-laughing bit of actorly genius; it’s a consummate example Bridges’ lion-taming ability that America lacks in the oval office. His closing speech shows Bridges inhabiting the highest political office with ironclad authority. With Jeff Bridges for President and Joan Allen as his running mate, it might not be too late to turn this country around.

Danish writer/director Lars von Trier completes his Gold Heart trilogy (behind Breaking the Waves and The Idiots) with a tragic melodrama thinly disguised as a musical. Forget that Dancer in the Dark garnered the coveted Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for Best Film, and provided Icelandic rock singer/cum actress Bjork the prize for Best Actress. It’s a movie that audiences find at turns to be terminally boring and exasperating, while at the same time, paradoxically original and emotionally wrenching. By setting the story in a 1962 Washington state that never existed, von Trier casts a multi-national shadow of social satire over a thought provoking film that pushes cinema off the edge again and again.

The story traces the decline of Selma (Bjork) a Czech immigrant factory worker and single mother who is going blind from a genetic disease. Selma works around the clock at a wash basin factory, and puts bobby pins on cards as a side job, in order to save enough money to pay for her 10-year-old son’s operation to prevent him from going blind. Selma’s hopes and dreams come crashing down when her police sheriff neighbor/landlord Bill (David Morse) tries to steal her money, and forces her to execute him. What follows is a treatise on everything from introverted behavior and alienation to capitalist greed and our flawed judicial system.

That von Trier accomplishes all this with shaky hand-held video cameras in a context that deconstructs the musical genre, while at the same time reversing conventions of the empathetic protagonist, is gravy on the soup. Selma’s song and dance reveries come later in the story than you’d expect. And when the musical set-pieces finally do arrive, they only signal disaster in scenes that immediately follow. Far from the custom of American musicals in which characters break into song when their romantic emotions overflow, Selma escapes into music and song as her only defense against the harsh reality that closes in around her. This musical dependency soon infects the audience, as von Trier balances the dissonance between silence and music. The harmony that Selma hears in the clamor of machines around her at the factory, or in a passing train on the bridge where she walks, is not only a calming distraction, but a necessary tool of survival.

Selma is a kind of idiot savant, not far removed from the fiercely committed Bess character in von Trier’s tremendously effective film Breaking the Waves. Selma is committed to avenging the guilt she feels over bringing her son Gene (Vladica Kostic) into the world with the knowledge that he would go blind. She has only one clear objective — to pay for the operation that will save his eyesight. Selma isn’t equipped to engage in a romantic relationship with her ardent suitor Jeff (Peter Stormare); a relationship that could help her cope with raising her son and with her pending blindness. She doesn’t reach out to her best friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve) for anything more than companionship the two women share at work or while watching musicals in the local cinema.

Selma represents a kind of holy martyr who can only find peace by performing a set of actions that will fuel an irrevocable dramatic catharsis for herself. She seeks to define herself by sacrifice. Her conscious mistakes and subsequent punishments send a sullen shock of emotion into an audience by von Trier’s unflinching view of artifice as a spontaneous existential experience.