Before the Sword Fights, Cue the Harem Girls

First, the United States invaded the Middle East, and now Hollywood has rushed to finish the job one day after "Sex and the City" ladies landed at Abu Dhabi doo-doo, sparking a dust storm of hatred critical "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" looks ready to raise the voices Huffy with swords and sandals spectacular style in ancient Iran. Based on a video game in the Gulf War era, "Prince of Persia" stars Jake Gyllenhaal as the warrior headlines, climbing walls and vaulted ceilings in the middle of the camels, grenades and dervishes, helping to lead Search for wartime, Praise Bruckheimer, weapons of mass destruction is not so.

As an example of new emerging cultural cross Prince of Persia "is both insulting and generally relatively innocuous. Set in the sixth century, the story involves dastan (Mr. Gyllenhaal), the adopted son of King Sharam (Ronald Pickup), who started the wee boy off the streets to raise the child with his real spawn, Tus (Richard Coyle) and Garsiv (Toby Kebbell). The film, directed by Mike Newell and written by Boaz Yakin, Doug Miro, Carlo Bernard and obedient if you pay cursory attention to the angle of the family. The father gives wise words, and the brothers come together and look at the lock, but the fraternal bonds are destroyed after invading a holy city and dastan is immersed in intrigue.

The cut and chiseled, muscular flashing his pecs, Mr. Gyllenhaal provides an update on the mysterious twist of old Oriental film lover. More butch god Valentino silent film (best known for playing the Sheik, an Arab instead of a heartbreaker Persian), Mr. Gyllenhaal instead follows - and run and jump - in the tradition of solidly muscular and acrobatic Douglas Fairbanks, silent film star whose exploits Middle East were aggressively masculine. Of course, the resurrection of a hero of the Middle East sexpot (played by an actor but not Persian) does not seem to be progress. But given the strained relations between the U.S. and Iran, is a representation that point, especially since dastan worth is ultimately measured by their actions more peaceful.

This hook is currently not very deep sinks, it is true, as, a lot of action films "Prince of Persia" exploits gender holders family fun. Dastan is engaged with a pouty princess (an unfortunate Gemma Arterton) and engages in a fun business with a shadow Sheikh pranksters (Alfred Molina, thankfully). Ben Kingsley appears as Basil Rathbone, or rather Nizam, the king's brother silky suspicious. Filmed in Morocco and Pinewood Studios in Britain, the film is full of swirling sand, milling crowds, cities computer generated narrative and assorted bits and pieces, some taken from the playbook of study (all speak a British accent, although, unfortunately, Mr. Gyllenhaal's), other recycled game series by Jordan Mechner, who has a story credit.

roots movie video game are more evident in the mechanical sense of many of cervical movements camera, zigzag sharply, as if created by algorithms. Given that he made the move from art house to blockbuster a few years ago with "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," Newell certainly knew what he was getting into when he signed with producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Except for Michael Bay, who broke off with Mr. Bruckheimer for some time, no director ever get to put their fingerprints on their own production Bruckheimer. As usual, the talent in "The Prince of Persia" is generally superior first class - from the director of photography John Seale to David Belle parkour expert - but the ingredients are so heavily chewed the results are mush.

For the most part, this will collapse completely without pain. The film is silly unstoppable - What did you expect? - But a couple of hours by Mr. Gyllenhaal jumping around in leather and fluttering her long eyelashes has its dumb-fun attraction, as is the view of Mr. Molina plant a kiss on an ostrich in a big-screen spectacle that is like a great debt to innovative technologies in terms of old Hollywood narrative strategies. If nothing else, it's fun to think about how this mash-up of ancient Persia and heroism on the front would sit with Iranian authorities to be. In March 2009 a spokesman for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, demanded an apology from Hollywood to "insults and accusations against the Iranian nation" in the last 30 years. Clearly they had no idea they were about to be Bruckheimer-ed.

Operation Desert Togs

The aboriginal “Sex and The City” movie, which came out two years ago, qualifies as a ball both because it is somewhat funny and because, according to a added classical definition, it ends, afterwards some reversals and delays, with a wedding. The aftereffect — which should accept adopted a explanation from addition account aperture this anniversary and alleged itself “Sex and the City: The Sands of Time” — begins with a bells and never seems to end. Your watch will acquaint you that a adumbration beneath than two and a bisected hours accept elapsed, but you may be abashed at aloof how abundant earlier you feel back the accomplished affair is over.

The wedding, the characters frequently remark, with the admixture of airy apology and catholic self-congratulation that seems to accept become the authentication of this weary franchise, is a gay one. Stanford (Willie Garson) and Anthony (Mario Cantone) accept fabricated honest men of anniversary other, giving the four capital changeable characters, their macho assembly and the director, Michael Patrick King, a adventitious to wink, nod and annoyance out Liza Minnelli to accomplish “All the Single Ladies.” Her adaptation is in no way above to the one in “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel,” and it is somehow both the aerial point of “Sex and the Burghal 2” and a austere augury of what is to come. The cardinal starts out campy, affectionate and self-aware, but at some point turns desperate, annoying and a little sad.

Come to anticipate of it, the achievability of sadness, which adumbral this movie’s forerunner and the long-running HBO alternation (if not the Candace Bushnell cavalcade in The New York Observer that is the antecedent of it all), has been abandoned this time out. Happy endings, already achieved, cannot be undone. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Harry (Evan Handler) are the admiring parents of two adolescent daughters. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) has acclimatized in Brooklyn with her husband, Steve (David Eigenberg), and son, Brady. Samantha (Kim Cattrall) is, as ever, the proudly abandoned publicist, while Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Big (Chris Noth) abide in a plushly feathered flush nest. She’s still a writer, he’s still a adept of Wall Street, and the real-world knocks that their professions accept taken almost annals alfresco an casual pasted-in band of recession-conscious dialogue. (One of which is announced by Penélope Cruz.)

Not that aggregate is perfect. Samantha frets about the access of menopause, and doses herself with hormones and lotions. Miranda has a mean, sexist bang-up at the law firm, and Charlotte worries that her ample adolescent assistant (Alice Eve) may accept bent her husband’s eye. She’s additionally fatigued out by parenthood.

Carrie and Big, meanwhile, abide acid benevolence from added couples because of their accommodation to abide childless. “You beggarly it’s aloof the two of you?” a adolescent bedfellow at Stanford and Anthony’s bells asks, incredulous. Yes, it is, and afterwards two years the Prestons — as Mr. and Mrs. Big are added clearly accepted — may be in article of a conjugal rut.

All of which could be altogether interesting. Acceptable movies accept been fabricated of abate crises, and over the years all of these characters — Carrie and Big in accurate — accept becoming and repaid our interest. At its best the series, a abrupt half-hour at a time, distilled and defanged the apple it represented, giving HBO subscribers a fantasy account of New York they could both aspire and chronicle to.

The clothes were fabulous, the amusing pressures and able ambitions intense, the names aggressively dropped, but at the affection of every adventure were four accompany who, while they could be competitive, judgmental and mean, could additionally be relied aloft back it absolutely counted to be loyal and supportive. Sex was the tease, the burghal was the packaging, but the absolute affairs point was consistently the adulation amid those four admirable women.

If they assume beneath admirable now, it isn’t because of comfortable accomplishment or beneath agreeableness on the allotment of the actresses who comedy them. It is that the cine itself, and conceivably the ability it stands in for, has absent absorption and can’t amount out what to do with them as they edge adjoin average age. Samantha is the exception, but the accomplished point of her actualization is a abiding attrition to change. So Ms. Cattrall accurately reprises her brand outrageousness, come-hithering guys of all ages and allotment a corrupt girls anniversary out in Abu Dhabi.

Is Manhattan absolutely that over? Maybe it is for Carrie and her friends. Time does not angle still on that island, area the affair girls of yesteryear are tomorrow’s Ladies Who Lunch. But rather than aggravating to acquisition a abode for Carrie and aggregation on their built-in arena — which has confused a little in the recessionary, politicized breach amid the series’s heyday and now — “Sex and the Burghal 2” flees into a never-never acreage that manages to be both an escape from abreast absoluteness and an off-key, out-of-touch mirror of it.

The Emirate to which the four accompany adjustment is an haven of gilded affluence in a apple that has developed a little clashing about dizzying article fetishism. The longest articulation of “Sex and the Burghal 2” consists of a drooling, gawking choice bout that would not be out of abode in a high-end biking annual or a hip-hop video. Four white Maybachs accost the ladies at the airport. (The assembly could not access four white Maybachs in time for the shoot, so atramentous versions had to be captivated in white vinyl and delivered to Marrakesh, which stood in for Abu Dhabi.) They are led through anytime added abundant rooms, oohing and ahhing at their amazing acceptable fortune, and bold you will do the same.

Maybe. But the animal aroma of unexamined advantage hangs over this blur like the smoke from bargain incense. Over creation in their clandestine bar, Charlotte and Miranda ache about the hardships of motherhood and again accession their glasses to moms who “don’t accept help,” by which they beggarly paid servants. Later the acute crisis raises the bogeyman either of Samantha activity to bastille or the accompany accepting to fly home in coach, and it’s not altogether bright which anticipation they attention as added dreadful.

That ability depend on the in-flight movie. This one is grueling, abnormally back the activity moves to the Average East. There are some gestures adjoin a artifice — a baseborn kiss, a absent passport, the actualization of a above lover (Aidan, played by John Corbett) — but appreciably little happens, alike back Samantha runs into agitation with the bounded mores.

The attack to be both accurately admiring of a adopted ability and to angle up for animal liberation adjoin backbreaking attitude may be admirable in principle, but in convenance it’s asinine and strained. And the brand quips, never as amusing as they ability accept been, would be absurd to accomplish you cackle alike if your best acquaintance said them. “Inter-friend-tion”? “Bedouin ablution and beyond”? “Lawrence of my labia”?

Yes, it’s declared to be fun. And over the years audiences accept had the affectionate of fun that comes from accessible captivation in addition else’s career, addition else’s sex life, addition else’s clothes. But “Sex and the Burghal 2” is about addition else’s boredom, addition else’s vacation and ultimately addition else’s admiration to accomplishment that commissioned amusement for profit. Which isn’t abundant fun at all.

“Sex and the City” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying ancestor or developed guardian). It has the expected, and not awfully fresh, animal references and situations.

SEX AND THE CITY 2

Opens on Thursday nationwide.

Written and directed by Michael Patrick King, based on the television alternation created by Darren Star and characters from the book by Candace Bushnell; administrator of photography, John Thomas; edited by Michael Berenbaum; music by Aaron Zigman; assembly designer, Jeremy Conway; apparel by Patricia Field; produced by Mr. King, Sarah Jessica Parker, Mr. Star and John Melfi; appear by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 27 minutes.

WITH: Sarah Jessica Parker (Carrie Bradshaw), Kim Cattrall (Samantha Jones), Kristin Davis (Charlotte York-Goldenblatt), Cynthia Nixon (Miranda Hobbes), John Corbett (Aidan Shaw), Chris Noth (Mr. Big), David Eigenberg (Steve Brady), Evan Handler (Harry Goldenblatt), Jason Lewis (Smith Jerrod), Willie Garson (Stanford Blatch), Mario Cantone (Anthony Marantino), Alice Eve (nanny), and Liza Minnelli and Penélope Cruz.

A Fresh Look Back at Right Now

A TIME-HONORED tradition: Stand alfresco a cine amphitheater with a camera and microphone and poll the admirers associates for their reactions. What did you anticipate of the film? A grandmotherly woman makes a face and after-effects her duke in disgust: Revolting! Idiotic! A middle-aged gentleman, stout and respectable, takes a added advanced view: This is a cine about how adolescent bodies alive today, he says, a cine fabricated by adolescent people, and he is about in favor of adolescent people. But a sober-looking, well-dressed adolescent adolescent demurs. “I don’t anticipate it’s actual serious,” he says dismissively.

This little arena of ad-lib abecedarian blur criticism — or bazaar research, if you adopt — occurs in Emmanuel Laurent’s new documentary, “Two in the Wave,” about the filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, whose accord was a active force and a axial actuality (as able-bodied as, eventually, a casualty) of the French New Wave. Those bodies alfresco that Parisian cinema in 1960 accept aloof apparent “Breathless,” Mr. Godard’s admission feature, starring Jean Seberg as an American barter apprentice who teases, loves, protects and betrays a French blackmailer played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, who smokes and runs his deride pensively over his lips. Some of the assemblage are baffled, some enthusiastic, some noncommittal, a alloyed bag of responses that seems a bit deflating. Aren’t they acquainted of the actual acceptation of what they accept aloof witnessed?

Is it attainable now, 50 years later, alike to brainstorm seeing “Breathless” for the aboriginal time? Mr. Godard’s blur bound took its abode amid those touchstones of avant-garde art that adumbrated a absolute breach with what came afore — paintings and books and pieces of music that accept captivated assimilate their acceptability for radicalism continued afterwards actuality accustomed as masterpieces, admired in museums and accomplished in schools.

Somehow, the galvanic, agnostic force of their accession is preserved as they age into institutional respectability. So alike if you were not about to hear, let’s say, the catcalls greeting Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” or to bare a archetype of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” banned over from Paris in affront of the postmaster general, or to appraise Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” or Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans back they were aboriginal exhibited, the works themselves acquiesce you to abode yourself amid the adventurous beat who did. And alike if you did not see “Breathless” during its aboriginal run at the aurora of the ’60s, absolutely every anatomy carries an afterimage of that exciting time, aloof as every applesauce agenda and bang of ambient artery babble on the soundtrack brings echoes of an about allegorical moment.

At the aforementioned time, though, such allegorical cachet can additionally be a burden, belief bottomward what was already beginning and abominable with a abundant bales of apprehension and accustomed opinion. There is conceivably no adventure in all of blur history absolutely as encrusted with adverse acceptation as the cresting, in 1959 and 1960, of the Nouvelle Vague. It was a access of youthful, aweless activity that was additionally a absolute assurance in the continuing action to authorize cinema as a austere art form. The partisans of the new — Truffaut and Mr. Godard, forth with assembly like Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer — were steeped in blur history. Afore demography up their cameras they had been critics, polemicists and self-taught scholars, and yet, like added artful insurgents afore them, they attacked a ascendant appearance they believed was characterized by blundering and arthritic traditionalism. And their drive to acknowledge the celebrity of French cinema was ashore in an about biased adulation of American movies.

Mr. Godard, who had fabricated a scattering of shorts afore axis to a true-crime book that Mr. Truffaut had been alive on, was conceivably the best acute and abstruse amount in this movement, and would go on to become a abounding and polarizing filmmaker. He would canyon through a aeon of intense, if not consistently intelligible, political aggression in the backward ’60s and aboriginal ’70s afore clearing into his accepted cachet about amid admirable old man and crazy uncle of apple cinema. His best contempo feature, “Film Socialism,” showed up at the Cannes Blur Festival aftermost week, admitting the administrator himself did not, alms as account for his absence a cryptic advertence to the Greek banking crisis. He has, for as continued as some of us can remember, absolved the accomplished band amid astrologer and crank, axis out films that are essayistic, abstract, enraging and intermittently admirable and arising abnormally affected and adage statements about his own work, the accompaniment of the apple and the approaching of cinema.

But that is now. Back again it was absolutely different. An bright and aglow new book of “Breathless” will be shown, starting Friday, at Blur Forum in Manhattan, and while no apology can abrade abroad the accumulated layers of history, its ceremony can be taken as an allurement to booty a beginning look. What if, instead of gluttonous out an antiquity of the past, you could acquaintance the blur in its own present tense? Not, in added words, as a anamnesis to 1960, adorable as that may be, but as 90 account of appropriate now.

That affectionate of time biking is allotment of the appropriate attraction of movies, and “Breathless,” absolutely because it so effortlessly, so breathlessly, captures the rhythms of its time and place, erases the ambit amid the now and then. And yet alike as Mr. Godard and his cinematographer, Raoul Coutard, almanac the architect and sounds of Paris with documentary immediacy, the images are alloyed with an apparent nostalgia. This is not article a latter-day eyewitness — conceivably addled by secondhand memories of best cars ambit the Abode de la Concorde or appealing adolescent women affairs The New York Herald Tribune in advanced of cafes — brings to “Breathless.” Rather, the film’s axiomatic and affected admiration to tap into a backlog of absolute references and associations is a assurance of its director’s attraction with added movies.

You don’t accept to admit this film’s apparent accurate allusions to be acquainted of its indebtedness. Back Michel (Mr. Belmondo) pauses in advanced of a cine amphitheater to adore an angel of Humphrey Bogart, he is acknowledging what we already apperceive about him, which is that he is a accurate construct, a man who has conceivably apparent too abounding movies invented by addition man who has spent his developed activity accomplishing about annihilation else. As a accessory orbiting the accompanying suns of the Paris Cinémathèque and the account Cahiers du Cinéma, Mr. Godard was an agog best of the Hollywood admiral whose acceptability as artists is one of France’s abundant ability to America and the world. Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Fritz Lang — and conceivably aloft all Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchock: these were not aloof influences on “Breathless,” but axioms in its cosmos of meaning.

The abnormality of movie-mad moviemakers is a accustomed one by now. The adolescent American admiral of the 1970s — including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Peter Bogdanovich and George Lucas — acclimated to be articular as associates of “the blur generation” because they had developed up compulsively watching movies, assimilating brand conventions and attempt selections that would become the raw actual of their own work. Twenty years later, Quentin Tarantino, whose assembly aggregation is called afterwards Mr. Godard’s 1964 blur “Bande à Part,” would brace and extend this attitude of film-geek filmmaking. Mr. Tarantino’s career consists of a alternation of brand pastiches and homages that administer to feel startlingly novel, abstruse academic contest that are nonetheless attainable pieces of accepted entertainment.

A Gamer’s World, but a Dramatist’s Sensibility

THE ambassador Jerry Bruckheimer brand to say that he can accomplish a cine from about anything. In his continued and box-office-friendly career, he has conjured movies from books (“Black Hawk Down”), from annual accessories (“Coyote Ugly” and “Top Gun”), from the real-life adventure of a woman who was both a welder and a stripper (“Flashdance”), from a angle tossed about the appointment (“Hey, let’s accomplish a cine about submarines!” which led to “Crimson Tide”). Best famously, and best lucratively, he has fabricated not aloof a cine but a franchise, “Pirates of the Caribbean,” from a theme-park ride.

By that standard, Mr. Bruckheimer’s newest picture, “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,” which is directed by Mike Newell and stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Ben Kingsley, doesn’t assume abundant of a stretch. “Prince of Persia,” which opens Friday, is based on a accepted video game. You could alike altercate that video amateur are what best Bruckheimer movies ache to be: ceaseless action, after the distractions of too abundant artifice or complicated characters. But except for the two “Lara Croft” movies, which may owe their success added to Angelina Jolie than to their Tomb Raider provenance, the clue almanac of movies based on video amateur is not uplifting. “Street Fighter” was awfully unwatchable. The official Nintendo annual said of the blur based on Super Mario Brothers: “Yes, it happened. Let us allege no added of it.”

If “Prince of Persia” does blade the allowance again allotment of the acclaim should go to Jordan Mechner, who created the video bold on which the cine is based and wrote the aboriginal abstract of the screenplay. Mr. Mechner is additionally a blogger, with his own Web armpit (http://jordanmechner.com/), and a bright novelist, with two books advancing out at about the aforementioned time as the movie: “Solomon’s Thieves,” illustrated by LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland, the aboriginal aggregate in a projected leash about the Knights Templar; and “Prince of Persia: Before the Sandstorm,” illustrated by several altered artists, which is a prequel to both the blur and the bold that aggressive it.

He is a array of a nerd’s nerd, in added words — a Renaissance man in the overlapping worlds of amateur and comics and now movies. He is the aboriginal video bold architect to be complex in a consecutive cine version, and he pitched the activity to Mr. Bruckheimer by assuming him a “trailer” he had put calm of clips from PlayStation 2 bold footage: lots of wall-jumping and ledge-walking interspersed with shots of a about clad princess. Keith Boesky, a video bold abettor and bookish acreage advocate who helped agent the accord with Mr. Bruckheimer, said recently, “Everybody these canicule is talking about transmedia, but Jordan is the aboriginal guy to absolutely do it.”

If Mr. Mechner is a pioneer, however, he is also, by video bold standards, a bit of a relic. His capital affirmation to acclaim is two amateur — Karateka and the aboriginal Prince of Persia — that he created by himself aback in the 1980s application an Apple II computer, which is about Stone Age technology. Sitting afresh in the basement of Jim Hanley’s Universe — a banana book abundance in Midtown Manhattan — he explained that he developed Karateka, a aggressive arts game, while still an undergraduate at Yale. His archetypal was his mother’s karate teacher, whom he filmed in Super 8; application an old address alleged rotoscoping, he again traced stills from the cine assimilate his computer.

“I capital to actualize belief that the amateur would acquaintance by arena instead of watching; it became a bit of an obsession,” he said in a way suggesting that, obsessionwise, he apparently hasn’t afflicted that much. Mr. Mechner, who is 45 and divorced, with two children, is small, intense, a little awkward; his sentences sometimes abide of hesitations followed by bursts of information.

The aboriginal Prince of Persia, which came out in 1989, now seems about affecting in its primitiveness, afterpiece to Pong than to Gungrave or Steel Battalion. It’s in alone two dimensions, and the action is hasty and sketched in. (Mr. Mechner’s archetypal this time was his brother, whom he filmed jumping off walls abreast their home in Chappaqua, N.Y.) But, abnormal at the time, the bold had a artifice of sorts, above the accepted advantageous of obstacles that gets the amateur to the abutting screen, and in the prince it had a appearance Mr. Mechner hoped the amateur would absolutely affliction about. “I capital a bold area if you absent and fell too far, it would absolutely hurt,” he said, abacus that area characters like the Super Mario Brothers were dainty and stylized, he capital his to be beef and blood.

Mr. Mechner, who aback he wasn’t programming took some courses in blur history at Yale, compares the aboriginal canicule of video amateur to the canicule of bashful blur and says that he had to apprentice some of the aforementioned storytelling acquaint as, say, Georges Méliès, the French appropriate furnishings pioneer.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, on which the cine is based, came out in 2003 and was a reimagining of the accomplished franchise, which in the age of Halo and Grand Theft Auto had appear to assume antique. Instead of aloof Mr. Mechner at his computer there was now a accomplished aggregation of animators, actors, programmers. The bold has a able do-over feature, an important aspect in the cine plot, in which the amateur gets to stop time and rewind it, and what Mr. Mechner calls a “Double Indemnity”-like narration, which doesn’t become absolutely bright until the actual end.

Mr. Mechner’s greatest asset as a moviemaker, in fact, may be that his affection is as abundant a dramatist’s as a gamer’s. Mr. Boesky, who was additionally complex in the “Tomb Raider” deal, said the aboriginal cine angle included aloof a distinct branch of aback story, while Mr. Mechner had a 20-minute angle of new, nongame-related narrative. It could accept been a adventure from “1001 Nights,” with an crumbling king; a Shakespearean accord amid three princes, one of them adopted; an angry vizier; a beautiful, tart-tongued princess; and a abracadabra dagger. “We’ve had added bold bodies appear to us, but Jordan had a nice, worked-out adventure and absorbing characters,” Mr. Bruckheimer said from London, area he was announcement the film.

Science vs. Zealots, 1,500 Years Ago

THE aftermost time we saw Rachel Weisz in an Egyptian setting, she was casting as the ardent librarian-turned-archaeologist Evelyn Carnahan in “The Mummy” and “The Mummy Returns.” In “Agora,” her latest film, she allotment to the Nile to comedy addition woman of a bookish angled — but that is area any affinity to the archly comic-horror “Mummy” alternation ends.

“Agora,” which opens in New York on Friday, is a big-budget two-hour Roman ballsy that appearance Ms. Weisz as Hypatia, the Neo-Platonist philosopher and astronomer-mathematician sometimes acclimatized with inventing the hydrometer and the alike astrolabe. Instead of actuality set in the 20th aeon amid the pharaohs’ tombs and temples, like “The Mummy,” abundant of the adventure takes abode in fifth-century Alexandria, aback the ascent acceptance of Christianity is aggressively arduous acceptable Greco-Roman acquirements and values.

“The hot affair these canicule is Islamic fundamentalism,” Ms. Weisz said afresh over tea at an East Village restaurant abreast her home. “But in ‘Agora,’ it’s the Christians who are the fundamentalists” whose abandonment leads them to abort one of the libraries of Alexandria, conceivably the greatest centermost of acquirements in the age-old world.

Some of those scenes arm-twist the Taliban’s annihilation of statues of Buddha in Afghanistan in 2001, and Ms. Weisz, British built-in and accomplished at Cambridge, said such parallels were deliberate. In addition scene, Hypatia has a blind put over her head, “and it said in the calligraphy that this should be evocative of the burqa,” she recalled.

“The actual aboriginal affair I anticipation aback I apprehend the calligraphy was that this is a adventure about today, a actual contemporary, 21st-century story,” she said. She mentioned action to axis corpuscle analysis and to the teaching of change as examples of “a bank amid science and religion” that still stands, and again assured her thought: “That we’re still killing bodies in the name of God is archaic but true.”

“Agora,” whose appellation refers to the accessible aboveboard and exchange area account were debated in the age-old Greek world, is directed by the Spanish-Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar, who wrote the cine with Mateo Gíl. He originally envisioned a cine about the history of astrochemistry from Aristotle to Einstein but afflicted administration aback his analysis brought him to Hypatia and the aeon aloof afore the alpha of the Dark Ages.

“She was an aberrant woman, a chaste bookish who managed to appoint herself as an important figure, a advertence point in the abstract and political activity of Alexandria during a acute epoch” Mr. Amenábar said. “We are acclimatized to seeing lions blaze Christians in films, but not the transformation of Christians from a afflicted accumulation to one that is able and armed.”

For Mr. Amenábar, “Agora” additionally represents a notable change in style. The two films for which he is best known, “The Other” and the Academy Award-winning “Sea Inside,” were both affectionate pieces set in baby spaces. “Agora,” on the added hand, appropriate the architecture of around an absolute burghal in Malta for filming aboriginal in 2008 and additionally appearance a large, catholic and polyglot cast, including actors from Britain, France, Latin America, Israel and the Arab apple who are Christian, Muslim and Jewish.

“That set was a admirable gift, because all of us anon acquainted like we were in a altered apple and time the minute we accustomed for assignment anniversary day,” said Max Minghella, who plays Davus, Hypatia’s adolescent slave. “Most actors these canicule accept to comedy to a blooming screen” instead of a absolute set, “but we didn’t accept to assignment as adamantine to accept all the things we were doing. And I’d be lying if I said there was not a fair bulk of religious agitation on the set, which was absolutely stimulating.”

Since “Agora” is a bartering enterprise, it additionally includes a adventurous subplot. Admitting Hypatia never affiliated and already about displayed a bolt clotted with menstrual claret to altercate adjoin the attractions of animal love, an adventure reproduced in “Agora,” the blur places her at the centermost of an barren adulation triangle: both Davus and an admiring apprentice who becomes administrative prefect of Alexandria ache fruitlessly for her.

Ms. Weisz, who in 2006 won an Academy Award as best acknowledging extra for her role in “The Constant Gardener,” describes herself as “extremely amorous about what I do” and initially begin Hypatia’s air-conditioned adherence adamantine to fathom. Aboriginal on, she said, she “half-jokingly” appropriate a masturbation arena for Hypatia to Mr. Amenábar, who demurred.

“My abhorrence was that she would be a academician on legs, and that is not absorbing to watch,” Ms. Weisz explained. “My achievement was that she would be amorous and affecting and abounding of feeling, alike admitting it was not actuality channeled into the sexual, personal, animal realm. She is in adulation with science, with learning. It angry her on; that was the alone way I could anticipate of it.”

Gaps in the actual almanac accustomed the filmmakers to booty added liberties for affecting effect. Mr. Amenábar brought a British actual consultant, Justin Pollard, columnist of “The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind,” and a Spanish astronomer assimilate the set, but additionally simplified or diverged from the facts aback it ill-fitted his purposes.

The actual Hypatia, for example, may accept been abundant earlier at her afterlife than the age appropriate for her in “Agora.” The blur additionally shows her assumption that our all-embracing arrangement is heliocentric added than a millennium afore Copernicus and Galileo argued that the apple is not the centermost of the universe, but the actual record, while abounding of references to her brilliance, is coarse on that point.

“Because there are so abounding holes in the story, you accept a lot of ambit for putting in your own drama,” Mr. Pollard said. “No works of Hypatia survive, and her adventure is one told in bits accounting by assorted authors in abate pieces in added books that are now lost, translated into Arabic and which again came aback to the West. So you accept to booty it all with a compression of salt.”

The blur additionally glosses over some of the distinctions amid the library and building of Alexandria, founded in the third aeon B.C., and what befell them afterward. Roman-era chronicles, as able-bodied as after works, beforehand that at atomic allotment of the library was destroyed aback Julius Caesar invaded Egypt in 48 B.C., and that Christians were amenable alone for the accident done in Hypatia’s time to a accessory “daughter library,” which may additionally accept been attacked by Muslim conquerors in the seventh aeon A.D.

“There is consistently license,” Mr. Amenábar said aback asked about his focus on Christian depredations. “But in allegory to cinema today, we accustomed to be actual accurate and affectionate to reality.”

In Europe, area “Agora” was appear aftermost year and became the box appointment best of 2009 in Spain, that assuming of Christian abandonment has affronted controversy. Hoping to arch off agitation with the Vatican, the film’s Italian distributor, for example, arrive Roman Catholic clergy associates to an beforehand screening but declared their acknowledgment as “all on edge.” And fearing attacks on its Coptic Christian minority, Egypt has belted showings of “Agora” there, according to account reports.

“Fundamentally, this is a actual Christian blur about the activity of a martyr,” Mr. Amenábar said. “It denounces bent and pays admiration to those choir that favor calmness and dialogue. Jesus would not accept accustomed of what happened to Hypatia, which is why I say no acceptable Christian should feel affronted by this film.”