The Million Dollar Hotel

Lord knows there are reasons enough to dismiss Wim Wenders's extravagant, shaggy-dog whodunit: It's too long, the willful eccentricity is grating and the hackneyed moral — real life is better than TV — is so silly it's best taken ironically. But the film, much of it shot digitally, is also astonishingly beautiful. The action takes place in and around L.A.'s Million Dollar Hotel (actually the Frontier, where U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" video was shot), a crumbling SRO from whose roof a junkie named Izzy has fallen — or been pushed — to his death. But Izzy was no ordinary deadbeat: His father is powerful me...