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Tenderness, where is the tenderness?

In movies, shockingly enough.

I've loved a lot of movies lately, and most of them are about love, and mostly about the terror of love that has been withheld. Two are in limited release: Mike Leigh's achingly sad and beautiful, All or Nothing, and the long-beleaguered but gorgeously paced Tully. Tully was bought after its Toronto 2000 showing, and has suffered the indignity of various bankruptcies and bad deals since. Calm and witty, its story of the changes on a small Nebraska farm and the effects on the three men in the Tully clan, is small yet wondrous. More next week.

After a night and day of thinking about Mike Leigh's devastating All or Nothing, I'm eager to say: it may be perfect. It may not be your cuppa tea, however. In Leigh’s Secrets and Lies, there were several sorts of sorrow, a number of revelations, and all manner of comic distraction.  If you saw Naked, even its end-of-the-millennium howl of despair finds Johnny Boy, the HIV virus in talkative  human form, hip-hopping away from his latest befouling into a certain dark future.  But All or Nothing works mostly from the lives of one troubled family. It’s Leigh at his most tumbledown, yet his most elegant.

I like to think movies can get you to change something besides the channel. Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing packs the kind of devastating emotional wallop that reminds me why movies are made, why art is made, why I do what I do. And: what we lose by leaving love unspoken. Uncompromising, rich with a sorrowful empathy, All or Nothing eschews irony and tactical emotional distance, to ask, directly, what does it mean to live with dignity? And to effortlessly bestow that on others and not scar them with our spite, our own limitations?

Leigh’s latest may be his best, a skillfully calibrated, beautifully designed and acted film about ungenteel lives in a downtrodden part of southeast London. (The gifted actors include Leigh stalwart Timothy Spall as a worn-down cab driver, Leslie Manville as his long-suffering mate, Alison Gordon and James Corden as their pained post-adolescent kids, as well as half a dozen other unforgettable turns.) Like Lars Trier, Leigh struggles, with startling results, to find a way into art and the heart. I’d hate to think that All or Nothing would be difficult going for some viewers, based on a hideously ill-behaved preview screening on Monday night. A batch of supposed adults in late middle age moaned, groaned and chattered like children at a birthday party who discover their clown doesn’t speak their language. How could they not see that Leigh’s eighth theatrical feature, often profane, is a brilliant, melancholy masterpiece of empathy and hope? Talking, tsking, complaining, yawning: you want these balding brats to leave, not stay after school. They couldn't take it: They lacked not the education or patience to understand Leigh's diligent description of the unstable lives up screen, but the simple compassion. They wanted to be spoon-fed, and I hated them as much as I loved this movie. They wanted wanting caricature and meanness.

Leigh’s collaborators, including cinematographer Dick Pope (Naked, The Matrix, 13 Conversations About One Thing) and composer Andrew Dickson are exemplars of quiet elegance. I’ve been listening to music lately that takes its time to build to shattering emotional effect, such as  John Parish's "How Animals Move" (Thrill Jockey) or 90 day Men’s  “To Everybody,” (Southern Records) and Dickson's besorrowed score is similarly rich, of a piece with Leigh’s patient drama.

In All or Nothing, understanding is withheld, a horrible thing occurs and everything is at a precipice then a single line that ties it all together: "You used to make me laugh."  Laughter, and love, perhaps, are possible once more. Yet the sun does shine one day. If you are not moved to tears at film’s end by the wash of nurturing morning light on the sweet, round, fragile face of Lesley Manville, you have a heart of stone. Here's the moral I take from the unsentimental, fierce, essential All or Nothing: love cannot be indicated, love can only be given, must be given, or we die by each waking moment. If you care about serious drama, you should see All or Nothing this weekend.

I don't think I could ever get drunk enough, even at the risk of alcohol poisoning, to say I love I-Spy, but there are a couple of top-notch interludes between Owen Wilson and Eddie Murphy that are hilarious.   Director Betty Thomas and producer Jenno Topping are among the blunter interviewees I’ve met in a while.

Peter Mattei’s quiet, sadly comic Love in the Time of Money opens in New York this weekend, drawing from the grandfather of interlocked narratives, Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen, best known by its French title, La Ronde. I reviewed it from Sundance this year.

Peculiar and sometimes precious comic performances are the highlight of dogged director George Hickenlooper’s latest, The Man from Elysian Fields. Floating on a rave review from Roger Ebert, Hickenlooper foregoes the kind of quiet, Hal Ashby-ish rhythms of his earlier movies like Dogtown. Here, he charts the implausible, but often kicky, misadventures of down-on-his-luck “quality” novelist Andy Garcia who becomes a gigolo to man-pimp Mick Jagger (notably twerpy for someone of his advancing years), proprietor of the establishment of the title. Juliana Margulies plays Garcia’s wife in this 2000 production; James Coburn sets roaring fires with his performance as a dying Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose comely young wife (Olivia Williams) brings Garcia into their stately fold for literary and sexual services.

Campbell Scott is a marvel as a too-fluent Manhattan womanizer in Dylan Kidd’s sharp writing-directing debut, Roger Dodger. Roger’s an ad exec whose inspired and witty rants inevitably devolve into a kind of curdled misogyny, and Scott’s gift, with his silken theatrical cadences, is to make him both charming and appalling. On one of what are surely many bad days in his fortysomething life, Roger (who got his nickname for his capacity for dodging blame as a child), 16-year-old cousin Nick (charming and guileless Jesse Eisenberg) drops in unexpectedly for coaching in the art of woo. The night of drinking and chat that follows is wry and sometimes sad, and Kidd shows that he understands women far better than his protagonist ever could. The assured performances by Isabella Rossellini, Elizabeth Berkley and Jennifer Beals prove it.

The stinker of the week is the long-delayed The Weight of Water, a time-shifting narrative, based on the novel by Anita Shreve, telling of an unsolved nineteenth century murder and a modern attempt to solve it. The older story is fairly dull, even with bravura actor Sarah Polley at its center as an immigrant woman stuck in a loveless marriage to an older man. The modern segment, with Catherine McCormack as a photographer working on a magazine story about the case, is more successful, with several scenes of sexual tension expertly handled through elegant and elemental visual means by director Kathryn Bigelow, who is usually masterful in such matters. Sean Penn’s fiery confusion as a sodden poet has attractive aspects as well. With Elizabeth Hurley, at her best in a scene set on a boat, in a bikini and lapping at dripping cubes of ice, finding new uses for skin and sun and damp. The flashback portion has a decent performance from the late, great Katrin Cartlidge. (Naked, Claire Dolan.)

E-me: How many times have you seen your favorite film from beginning to end? How many times have you seen bits and pieces while  channel-surfing?