‘Anna and the King’ likely award-winner

In theaters

ANNA AND THE KING

Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Original Score, Best Art Direction — those are the Academy Award nominations Andy Tennant’s film “Anna and the King” will likely receive next year.

The film is a grand retelling of Anna Leonowens’ diaries, those vivid accounts of a prim Victorian schoolteacher dispatched to Siam in 1862 to tutor King Mongkut’s 58 children and introduce them to Western culture.

Her story is hardly new. In 1946, Rex Harrison and Irene Dunn starred in “Anna and the King of Siam.” In 1956 Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner sang and danced to Rodgers and Hammerstein in “The King and I” (Kerr actually lipsynched to Marni Nixon’s voice). Earlier this year, Warner Brothers offered an animated debacle hardly worth mentioning, and Broadway recently explored a stage version in a Tony Award-winning musical.

Now, Leonowens’ story is given its most lavish treatment to date in a film that decidedly pairs down its strong personalities in favor of whistling a post-feminist tune.

As visually sumptuous as Scorsese’s “Kundun” and Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” “Anna and the King” is filmmaking on an epic scale. It’s no musical, but it wisely takes its cues from nearly all of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s songs, especially “Getting to Know You,” “Shall We Dance?” and “A Puzzlement,” which screenwriters Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes seamlessly wed to their literate script.

As Anna, Jodie Foster is more willful and daring than her predecessors, but her humorless, tight-lipped performance comes at a price: She doesn’t inhabit Anna the person so much as she inhabits Anna the icon. As good as Foster is — and sometimes she’s very good — the white-knuckled force driving her performance is more cerebral than soul, which translates on screen during her initial flirtations with Mongkut.

Luckily, director Tennant has Hong Kong action star Chow Yun-Fat to lift those moments. His Mongkut is no barking, foot-stomping caricature; instead, he is a charming, humane king who perfectly complements Foster’s chilly Anna, who eventually thaws as this relationship gathers emotional steam. Grade: A-

On video RUN LOLA RUN

If the infectious energy of Tom Tykwer’s “Run Lola Run” doesn’t make audiences break into a cold sweat, they may need to have their pulses checked.

This film is great fun, one of the year’s runaway best, a smashing, kinetic rush of style ignited with an electrified plot that recalls “Sliding Doors” and “Go,” but which nevertheless is fiercely original.

When Lola (Franka Potente) receives a frantic telephone call from her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), her life changes … and changes … and changes in ways that are so surprising, they won’t be revealed here.

Manni’s problem? It seems that while leaving the subway, he left behind a bag filled with 100,000 deutsche marks, which a delighted homeless man came upon — and quickly ran off with.

It gets worse. The money didn’t belong to Manni but to a vicious drug dealer, who will kill Manni if he doesn’t come up with the stolen loot in 20 minutes.

That’s right — 20 minutes. Manni’s solution? Rob a grocery store. Lola’s solution? Demand that Manni wait where he is while she runs across the busy streets of Berlin to her father, a banker, whom she will beg for help.

At only 81 minutes, “Run Lola Run” is a triumph of storytelling that’s tweaked so tightly — and feels so urgent — its pace never lags. There is real imagination at work here, real thought, a clear effort to try something new, to push and alter the boundaries of film as we race toward the millennium.

Rent it. Grade: A

SUMMER OF SAM

On the surface, Spike Lee’s “Summer of Sam” is about serial killer David Berkowitz, nicknamed “Son of Sam” by the tabloids, a vicious man whose murderous rampage took New York City by storm in the summer of 1977.

But Lee’s movie is just as much about its pre-AIDS culture. Its electrifying rush of disco anthems, punk rock, rampant sex, grisly violence and unforgettable machismo collide in a film that’s a boiling pot of a city gone mad with fear and dread.

Across the board, the performances are strong, particularly those by John Leguizamo and Mira Sorvino. But what is even more impressive is how Lee uses his smart, visually arresting film to capture the late 1970s; he sees Berkowitz as just one red flag in a society reeling out of control.

Grade: A

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews are published each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, and appear each Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “NEWS CENTER 5:30 Today” and “NEWS CENTER Tonight,” and each Saturday and Sunday on NEWS CENTER’s statewide “Morning Report.”