Film Review By Michael Phillips, Tribune Newspapers Critic

"The Twilight Saga: New Moon," also known as "Twilight: The Squeakquel," is actually pretty good - a tick better than the first "Twilight," which wasn't bad, either. These are hardly superlatives on the order of "shattering" and "beautiful," but compared with the film versions of "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels & Demons," the only two movies ever made with less sex than the first two "Twilight" installments, they're matchless.

The first "Twilight," a lower-budget and scruffier affair directed by Catherine Hardwicke, may have been lame in the visual magic department, but its stars and their smoldering separate-beds bedroom eyes did a valiantly angst-y job in launching a major franchise. The second film in the series is bigger, better in the effects and more vibrant visually, which is crucial - the heroine, Bella, is an Olympic-level mope, and if "New Moon" matched this character's mood with the visual palette of the first film, we'd all be dead.

Wisely "New Moon" brings back screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, who continues to prove she has a much better way with English than the author of the books, Stephenie Meyer. The director this time is Chris Weitz, who handles this tosh with the commitment it requires. When last we left Bella and her vampire boyfriend, Edward, they'd come through a serious test or three of their endless love. "New Moon" separates the pair fairly early on, with Edward nervous about Bella's safety around his kind. With the boy with the fwoopy hair off to sunny Italy to deal with the Volturi (Michael Sheen plays the primo eterno-vampire), Bella pines and pines again, and retreats into herself. Then she is pulled out of her funk - halfway, anyway; it's a big funk - by her pal Jacob, who is sweet and hunky but who is a werewolf, and there's the treaty with the vampires, which ... well, either you already know all this or you will never, ever care.

Torn between two hunky supernatural theoretical boyfriends and feeling like an emo fool, Bella and "New Moon" wrestle with all sorts of metaphoric issues. Vampirism and werewolfery are just two more high school cliques to navigate. Guys with anger-management trouble, hormonal urges that cannot be satisfied, a succession of pristinely objectified boys - no wonder there are a few female teenage fans.

Why does "New Moon" basically work, even with its grave self-seriousness? A few reasons. Weitz lets the material breathe, and his actors interact. The film does not try to eat you alive. Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are interesting to watch, even if Pattinson's makeup makes him look like a mime. And they're strong enough to compensate for the comparatively amateurish Taylor Lautner, portraying the perpetually shirtless wolf boy, whose subtext remains the same scene to scene: Have you seen my abs lately?

Composer Alexandre Desplat (one of the best working in movies today) supports the constant, abstinence-only yearning with an exceptionally subtle score. In Meyer's prose, thankfully toned down for the movie, every other sentence is "His golden eyes smoldered" and "He continued to kiss my hair, my forehead, my wrists ... but never my lips, and that was good." Stewart and Pattinson get all that across without having to say any of it. Weitz and Rosenberg may let the rhythm slacken in the final half-hour, but that is unlikely to matter to any of the people who, with this film's closing line, could be heard squeaking in anticipation of the third "Twilight," movie, due in 2010.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some violence and action).

Running time: 2:10.

Cast: Kristen Stewart (Bella Swan); Robert Pattinson (Edward Cullen); Taylor Lautner (Jacob); Ashley Greene (Alice); Rachelle Lefevre (Victoria); Dakota Fanning (Jane).

Credits: Directed by Chris Weitz; written by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer; produced by Wyck Godfrey and Karen Rosenfelt. A Summit Entertainment release.

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