Although it's only opening in the States this Friday, it feels like we've been hearing plenty about Atonement since it first screened, to quite a warm array of reviews, at the Venice Film Festival in August and the Toronto Film Festival in September. Since then, it' s had a somewhat bell-shaped London run, worth an estimated $25 million. As pointed out at The Numbers.com, director Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice hit a similar number and came in just under $40 million in America. The site also points out the film's had better reviews (89 percent approval at the Rotten Tomatoes site, before sliding four points as the Friday reviews piled in) and is getting a bigger Oscar play.

The latter point's undeniable; Atonement is hanging in as the front runner for Best Picture at The Envelope.com, and Wright is installed as second-likeliest for Best Director at this stage. It's a big, handsome costume drama somewhat in the audience-friendly mold of The English Patient. So what's not the kvell about?

Well, it seems some fairly influential critics (The New York Times' A.O. Scott has weighed in since this post first went up) are watching with great suspicion as the bandwagon rolls by.

The New Yorker's Anthony Lane and David Denby, in their alternating turns reviewing The Current Cinema for the magazine, keep putting me happily in mind of the glory days of Pauline Kael and Penelope Gilliatt's twin stewardship (roughly, 1967-1979). As a proudly confessed Kaelette, Denby fluently does what I always loved Kael for--he make you want to see the films he's discussing, even when it's a slighting review. (More on that below.)

The comparison of eras doesn't go much beyond that point, because in many ways Denby, who wrote a fine book on rediscovering literary classics, is also a film classicist, and Lane, for all his erudition and a mellifluous style, carries a slightly ruder energy.

In this week's New Yorker review, Lane has a couple points to make about Atonement, adding up to this after a discussion of a crucial early scene: "We cut to Cecilia at her dressing table, in front of the looking glass, with a cigarette, and, as the music bursts we are struck not just by her beauty but by the deep, guilty secret of this equally beautiful, unsatisfying film: it's done with smoke and mirrors."

Carefully paying respects to Ian McEwan's source material (the author was at pains in this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine to keep his distance from what becomes of his novels on screen), Lane in fact uses the book to indict the film. He also, in a pair of cogent asides that are a sort of lesson in what a good British university education can do for you, convincingly traces McEwan's book to Henry James' antecedent The Turn of the Screw (approvingly so) and Wright's treatment of it to David Lean's Brief Encounter (not so approvingly--it's a "colored and contorted version", says Lane).

The particulars pile up--a "refreshingly bluff" nurse is "oddly more credible than the complex major characters around her", a musical cue is from a considerably later recording than could have been heard by the characters (picky, picky--but this is the sort of precision these loving cinematic recreations always brag on), and in the bravura Dunkirk evacuation scene (see it fascinatingly detailed in this month's American Cinematographer), "[Wright] risks merely drawing attention to his own style. This ties in with a general suspicion that Atonement as a story about stories, may be too self-conscious for its own good."

By the time he's added that a leave-taking by the lovers in the book is a "sickening wrench" in the novel but "here passes off lightly", he's ready to state what might have been the film's animating force: "Nothing is more insistent, in the artist's mind, than the will to transfigure the hell-bent into the heaven-sent...'

But that urge needs to be backed up with believability. Instead, he continues, Vanessa Redgrave as the grown-up Briony character is striking but, "Just one problem: her last, beneficent lie made me look back over the expanse of the film and realize, to my dismay, that I hardly believed a word of it."

The film's found other significant detractors: Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwatzbaum wrote,
"...when the lights come up, it's too easy to say, ''That was good and sad and romantic and classy, now what's for dinner?'' And L.A. Weekly's Ella Taylor said, "Wright wouldn't recognize unobtrusive if it tapped him on the nose...McEwan's deepest and most thrilling theme -- of how fiction atones for life (and, sometimes, doesn't) -- falls by the wayside."

It may be that audiences, depending in what numbers they come to see Wright's film, will determine its Oscar fate along with its commercial one. A rather less grandiose (though only marginally less spoken of in Oscar chatter) film is Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which I went to by default when Savages was sold out. (After seeing Philip Seymour Hoffman in Savages, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, and Charlie Wilson's War I say, don't just give him a statuette, build him a statue, perhaps like Rodin's Balzac, on a median strip on Cahuenga Boulevard or some such perch.)

If you're a bit of a claustrophobe, I can pretty well promise you you'll be feeling your phobia quite forcefully in Schnabel's (and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski's) canny hands; but don't for a second think they have made a movie that's in any way static or boring. Erotic, funny, touching, ferociously unafraid, this thing rocks steady and is much more life-affirming than the last five movies this filmgoer saw with `happy' endings. But it's best to return you to Lane's partner in reviewing, Denby, who frames it eloquently:

The Schnabel movie is about an unlucky man--Jean-Dominique Bauby, the real-life editor of French Elle, who, in 1995, at the age of forty-three, suffered a massive stroke. Lying speechless and outraged in a hospital near Calais, a victim of "locked-in syndrome," Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) was restored to full mental clarity but could move nothing but his left eye. Yet Schnabel's movie, based on the calm and exquisite little book that Bauby wrote in the hospital, is a gloriously unlocked experience, with some of the freest and most creative uses of the camera and some of the most daring, cruel, and heartbreaking emotional explorations that has appeared in recent movies.

The Diving Bell, he adds, "more than fulfills the promise of the sultry early scenes in Schnabel's previous picture, Before Night Falls." (An early plank in the richly deserved ascent of Javier Bardem, and a film with its own claustrophobe challenges.)

Describing the diving bell of the title as the hero's confinement, Denby adds:

The butterfly is his mind and, of course, the cinema itself, which can go anywhere it wants.

....Imperially free and generous as Schnabel's work is, the imagery--medical, erotic, religious--hangs together with enormous power. The birth of Bauby's soul feels like nothing less than the rebirth of the cinema.

Not as declamatory as Kael's famous Last Tango in Paris review that said "Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form", it's still a bold declaration. Kael was speaking out against stiffer resistance, as Last Tango had shocked the establishment; as you'll see when you see Diving Bell, which most of the voices cited here would probably recommend as a far profounder and more entertaining experience than Wright's Atonement, Schnabel's film can take care of itself quite nicely . But I'm still glad there the New Yorker's pair is there to light the way.

(James McAvoy,Keira Knightley and Joe Wright at the Toronto Film Festival)