The annals of science record several cases of twins who communicate, as children, by means of special languages incomprehensible to anyone but them. I have no idea if Mark and Michael Polish -- twin brothers whose third film, ''Northfork,'' opens today in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles -- are literal examples of this phenomenon, but their movies, which they write together and which Michael Polish ...

There has never been a movie quite like "Northfork," but if you wanted to put it on a list, you would also include "Days of Heaven" and "Wings of Desire." It has the desolate open spaces of the first, the angels of the second, and the feeling in both of deep sadness and pity. The movie is visionary and elegiac, more a fable than a story, and frame by frame, it looks like a portfolio of spaces so wide, ...

A dream of the Old West lacquered in dust and silt, Michael Polish's "Northfork" eulogizes what might be the last town on the last frontier of the last untouched comer of God's country--a place where the buffalo roam, but in the company of earthbound angels, devils and other majestic creatures on the verge of extinction. Though set in 1955, "Northfork" examines the original American pioneer spirit ...

With "Northfork," the Polish brothers create a myth out of the death of an American town just as Sergio Leone mythologized the birth of America in "Once Upon a Time in the West." While Leone's town was born with the coming of the railroad, Northfork's death is brought on by the building of a dam.

The action takes place during the town's evacuation by a group of Ford-driving "men in black," who ...

Northfork comes from brothers Mark and Michael Polish who made a striking debut with "Twin Falls, Idaho." Their new movie is equally rich and strange. The story takes place in the Great Plains region. A new hydroelectric dam is about to put an entire town underwater, which means residents must pick up stakes and move their lives, families, and futures to some other place. And some of them don't want ...

The idea that religion is man's way of coping with mortality gets a lot of weird workouts in ``Northfork.''

The latest example of down-to-earth, big sky surreality from the Polish brothers (``Jackpot,'' ``Twin Falls, Idaho''; Michael directed this one, Mark plays James Woods' son in it, and both shared writing-producing duties), it's an austerely beautiful, contemplative film that has too many ...