THE FADED SPOTLIGHT

Some men lie to survive. Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush) lies because it’s something he’s good at. Pendel is a gifted tailor in Panama who made his name fitting power into silk. He also listens—to whisperings, to gossip, to state secrets he has no business knowing. He’s even known for passing that information along to other clients, though usually it’s been embellished as a way to flatter them. He’s a man who can’t stop talking, can’t stop fabricating, and can’t quite grasp what happens when a bedtime story lands in the wrong ear.

Then comes Pierce Brosnan, a British agent gone to seed—still in the suit, still selling the act. He eyes Pendel the same way a cat would eye a wounded bird: amused first, hungry second. He orders a few drinks, brings up a few debts, and suddenly Harry’s harmless gossip has become the subject of international intelligence. What began as bedtime stories for bureaucrats has swollen into a full-blown crisis. Pendel’s increasingly wild fantasies find themselves ricocheting through the Pentagon like bad wiring.

Rush gives Pendel the nervous charm of a man who bluffs on instinct. You can see how pleasure and panic often share the same spark—how each lie is a little victory and each truth a defeat. Brosnan seems to relish the opportunity to slice through his own Bond image. He’s charming, still lethal, but completely rotten underneath. A spy who’d sell out his own mother for an expense account.

Jamie Lee Curtis, as Pendel’s wife, brings a clean, no-nonsense intelligence to the domestic wreckage—watching, worrying, knowing exactly how far gone her husband already is. Brendan Gleeson drops in like trouble with a grin as Pendel’s alcoholic former revolutionary—many of his stories reappropriated by Pendel as his own. Even young Daniel Radcliffe—pre-wizard—wanders through as Pendel’s son. A small reminder of how easily the ordinary buckles once the lies start billing interest.

Boorman, who’s certainly no stranger to filming cinematic humidity (Deliverance, The Emerald Forest), shoots Panama like a city that has to exhale steam just to stay alive. The script, which he wrote with John le Carré, is cynical and well-plotted but just slightly on the dirty side of slick. The movie’s witty, tense, and brave in that rare way—unwilling to let anyone, or anything, off easy. Maybe it’s more brain than heart. But it’s sharp and close to top-shelf satire. When it laughs, it also bites. A political film that knows that truth doesn’t fade. It drowns. In paperwork.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone arm a puppet brigade to take down American heroism, celebrity conscience, and global diplomacy. What follows might be the most elaborate puppet show ever filmed—juvenile, ruthless, and hysterical in every sense. Explosions. Broadway numbers about AIDS. A whole lot of swearin’. And yes, in case the point isn’t clear, it’s all carved and strung. Done completely with marionettes. No CGI shortcuts. Dr. Strangelove by way of Howdy Doody.

The premise is as blunt as it is brilliant: an elite paramilitary force of American “heroes” storms the globe to fight terrorism, leaving a trail of flaming embassies and toppled monuments in their wake. The Eiffel Tower goes down in the first five minutes. The pyramids don’t last much longer. Team America’s mission is clear: freedom isn’t free. Subtlety’s not in the budget. Their latest crisis—Kim Jong Il arming terrorist cells with weapons of mass destruction—finds Team America, complete with a psychic, a psychiatrist, a martial-arts expert, and a hotheaded jock, as the world’s last, worst hope. But that external threat is only half the problem. Back home, they’re fighting a PR war led by none other than Alec Baldwin, fronting the Film Actors Guild (F.A.G.), a coalition of smug celebrity activists demanding the team’s immediate disbandment.

The satire here isn’t what you’d call subtle, but Parker and Stone have never trafficked in nuance. They’re here to offend—offend as many people as possible—and they do it with the gusto of teenagers who’ve stumbled across a cache of explosives and plastic action figures. Yet for all its vulgarity, Team America doesn’t just flail its limbs for shock value. It’s weirdly well-made. The puppets are shockingly well-built, the sets have real scope, and the characters—though deliberately cardboard—somehow pass for human. The love-triangle subplot even plays like it belongs in an actual movie about a love triangle. In fact, it’s faintly embarrassing how much better this movie handles romantic entanglements than most films that mean it.

The movie has a pretty intense poker face. The film never cracks. It plays its insanity like high drama. And the straighter it plays the genre tropes, the funnier it all gets. (Jong Il, for instance, is played like a buffoon, but he also gets a sincerely mournful musical solo about feeling lonely.) Heroic music swells over puppets with stiff legs and eyes that can wink but not blink. The whole thing plays like Top Gun performed by department-store mannequins. And then there’s the scene everyone remembers. Whether gladly or against our will: the sex scene. It’s gymnastic, deranged, and it goes on forever. Like something choreographed by two middle-schoolers who just discovered anatomy class and got locked in a closet with a box of puppets and decided to test where everything goes. One of them then decided to escalate things with their mom’s piping bag and a batch of thick chocolate frosting. One of the film’s most unforgettable “special effects.” And it couldn’t have cost them more than $3.95.

Needless to say, it’s a childish movie—but not a movie for children. The language is filthy and the violence cartoonish. The R rating is stretched so far that I’m sure someone at the MPAA was begging to slap an NC-17 on the sucker. Except the joke’s on them, because this is all puppets. This thing is dumb on purpose but smart and stinging when it counts. And like most of Parker and Stone’s best work, it fillets every target in every direction—including itself. I’m even offended by some of it. Can you imagine? But that just means the movie’s doing its job. It’s making me laugh at myself, too.