Time Code

(Columbia TriStar)

With the screen split into four parts, each section showing the same story from a different point of view and each filmed simultaneously in real time and in one continuous take with a digital camera, Mike Figgis's film will challenge, if not alienate, those used to seeing one movie at a time. Alex Green (Stellan Skarsgård) is a dissipated producer faithless both to his art and to wife Emma (Saffron Burrows), whose face is one of the first we see as she relates to her therapist (Glenne Headly) a dream that will prove prophetic. Lauren (Jeanne Tripplehorn) is a limo-bound sugar mommy who suspects her lover Rose (Salma Hayek), an aspiring if talentless actress, of auditioning on Alex's casting couch. Last there's coke-dispensing security guard Randy (Danny Huston). Despite the inevitable lapses into pretentiousness and contrivance (montage may be an artifice, but Figgis's alternative is even more so), this is that rare commodity, a philosophical movie -- and an entertaining one.