AUGUST 1999: In his book "The Films Of My Life", the great French director Francois Truffaut writes: “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.”

Sitting at the end of the record-breaking movie summer of 1999, I am inclined to agree. I have seen a great many films, and most of them were pretty good, and as a result they all blend together, as far as I’m concerned. But this weekend I saw a wonderful new German film called "Run Lola Run", and Jesus Christ, does it ever pulse.

The set-up is simple (but deceptively so)—-Lola (Franka Potente) gets a phone call from her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreau). He has screwed-up big time—he left a bag with 100,000 deutsche marks on the subway, and it was stolen by a derelict, and now he has to deliver the money to a gangster in twenty minutes. In desperation, he tells Lola that in twenty minutes he’s going to walk across the street from his phone booth and rob a grocery store. Lola begs him to stay there, tells him she will get the money and be there in twenty minutes—and she’s off.

Lola runs. And runs and runs. And as she does, something incredible happens, and I don’t know what it was, but the sheer energy of her running, her fire engine-red hair jostling seemingly in time to the film’s relentless, pounding techno score, is as thrilling as anything I’ve seen in a movie all summer. And as she ran, and writer/director Tom Tykwer reached into his bag of tricks, I wanted to stand up and cheer.

Sometimes, he wants more energy, so he goes to an animated Lola, and lets her run through a cartoon for a while. Sometimes he switches over to video, and switches back before we can figure out why. Sometimes he has Lola bump into another character, and takes a (very quick) moment to show us a serious of photos that sum up the rest of that person’s life in about ten seconds. And then, when Lola reaches the end of her journey, she decides she doesn’t like how that turned out, so Tykwer politely turns back the clock and lets her have another go at it—and then, twenty minutes later, a third crack.

If this sounds relentlessly gimmicky—well, it is. But there’s other things happening here too, things beyond the relentless fast pace, the heartbeat-like music, the crazy angles and constantly moving camerawork. Before her run begins, and between each trip, we stop and ask a couple of questions, but before we can get too heavy—boom! Off we go again.

I watched most of "Run Lola Run" with a goofy, embarrassing grin on my face, and about halfway through, when I was trying to figure out why I responded to it so strongly, I thought about Truffaut’s quote. And I realized that this movie, and some of this year’s best movies, and all of my favorite movies, are the movies he’s talking about. Here, Tykwer goes for the gusto, and his joy for making this movie makes it a joy to watch.

That same joy is what makes "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction" sizzle (Quentin Tarantino seems, as so few directors do, in love with the sheer act of making a movie), and what makes the collage and barrage of media in Natural Born Killers so addictive, and what makes Out Of Sight such a pleasure, and what gets my heart pounding whenever I watch the opening of Boogie Nights. Earlier this year I saw two movies that gave me the same thrill—Doug Liman’s "Go" and Guy Ritchie’s "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" (both out on video this month). "Go", with its fast pace, loop-back structure and wicked ear for dialogue, was dismissed in many quarters as "Pulp Fiction" Lite, which misses the point entirely—Liman’s excellent film has an energy all its own. "Lock, Stock shares" "Lola"’s sharp eye for visuals (it also comes from outside the States, but like Godard’s "Breathless", these two films show an unmistakable American pop culture influence), and plays out an enormously complicated plot without ever seeming to be trying to fool us.

I hope Lola breaks out and gets seen, though I doubt it. Movies this smart and this original aren’t intended for mass consumption—the lemmings would rather plunk down cash for their blockbusters, even if Lola’s plight is years more exciting than your CG sharks of "Deep Blue Sea" or your mindless corpses of "The Mummy".

The great Howard Hawks was once asked, what makes a good movie? His simple, eloquent response: “Three great scenes. No bad scenes.” Probably the most impressive thing about Tykwer’s little masterpiece of pop cinema is that he somehow found a way to make a movie that is entirely composed of three great scenes and no bad scenes. I can’t wait to see it again. Run, Lola, run.