At the Movies

THE DARK KNIGHT
RUNNING TIME 152 minutes
WRITTEN BY Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan
DIRECTED BY Christopher Nolan
STARRING Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Michael Caine, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, from a screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, based on a story by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, is, of course, ultimately from a series of comic books published by DC Comics, with the creation of the Batman character attributed to Bob Kane. In the world of comic-book superheroes, the Batman franchise has specialized in the most eccentrically colorful villains. I still remember Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne/Batman character looking out of the corner of his eye at Jack Nicholson’s clownish antics as the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, the second such cinematic transfer after Laslia Martinson’s 1966 Batman, with Adam West reprising in a campy fashion his hit television role.  read more »

I finally caught up with that much abused chick flick, Sex and the City, directed by Michael Patrick King, from his own screenplay, based on characters from the book by onetime New York Observer columnist Candace Bushnell. I happened to have been a steady patron if not a rabid fan of the half-hour television series. How did the two-hour-plus movie compare with the HBO series? As the French would say, pas mal. It started slowly and unpromisingly in a giggly fantasy fashion, and when I use the term “fashion,” I do so advisedly. But when Sarah Jessica Parker is left at the alter by Chris Noth, all the pathos of a rejected 40-year-old woman floods her face with a burst of Zolaesque realism.  read more »

Diminished Capacity
Running time 92 minutes
Written by Sherwood Kiraly
Directed by Terry Kinney
Starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Alda, Virginia Madsen, Dylan Baker, Bobby Cannavale, Louis C. K.

Terry Kinney’s Diminished Capacity, from a screenplay by Sherwood Kiraly, is based on Mr. Kiraly’s gentle and yet hilariously hectic novel spoofing the insane predilections of people entangled in the mania surrounding the hunt for an obscure baseball card of a Chicago Cubs player from the early days of our national pastime. Again, as with The Wackness, for a low-budget project, Diminished Capacity is blessed with a blue-ribbon cast. Most notably, Matthew Broderick as brain-damaged Cooper, a downward-drifting Chicago journalist, and Virginia Madsen as Charlotte, a spunky, divorced mother of one and Cooper’s former flame in their hometown, LaPorte, Mo.  read more »

The Wackness
Running time 110 minutes
Written and directed by Jonathan Levine
Starring Josh Peck, Ben Kingsley, Olivia Thirlby, Famke Janssen

Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness, from his own screenplay, takes place in New York during the summer of 1994, when the newly inaugurated mayor, Rudy Giuliani, was beginning his now notorious crackdown on all sorts of petty crimes and even mere nuisances. His name is taken in vain several times during the course of the narrative, as if he and he alone were responsible for taking all the fun out of the Lindsay/Dinkins Fun City. Still, “fun” is spelled for the most part as D-O-P-E to the musical accompaniment of the hip-hop rants of the period.  read more »

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson
Running time 118 minutes
Written and directed by Alex Gibney
Starring Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Depp

Alex Gibney’s Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, narrated by Johnny Depp, gets so far inside the tortured soul of its subject through his writings, musings and media sightings that it is amazing how much of the outside world breaks in to illuminate the political and social convulsions Hunter both reported and embodied. Indeed, Gonzo turns out to be the most absorbing film, fiction or nonfiction, I have seen this year.  read more »

The Last Mistress (Une Vieille Maitresse)
Running time 104 minutes
Written and directed by Catherine Breillat
Starring Fu’ad Ait Aattou, Asia Argento, Roxane Mesquida, Claude Sarraute

Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress (Une Vieille Maitresse), from her own screenplay, is based on Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s provocative 19th-century novel, and is her most ambitious undertaking to date in terms of a formal narrative with period costumes and a targeted mainstream audience. Hence, most of the nudity and sexuality are deferred to the film’s climax, in which a penniless and newly married aristocrat discovers that his passion for an old discarded mistress can outlast his supposedly eternally true love for a beautiful, virginal and wealthy heiress of noble lineage.  read more »

Tell No One (Ne Le Dis à Personne)
Running time 125 minutes
Written by Guillaume Canet and Philippe Lefebvre
Directed by Guillaume Canet
Starring Francois Cluzet, Marie-Josée Croze, Marina Hands, Kristin Scott Thomas

Guillaume Canet’s Tell No One (Ne Le Dis à Personne), from a screenplay (in French with English subtitles) by Mr. Canet and Philippe Lefebvre, is based on a best-selling American mystery novel—Tell No One. Whereas the book was set in New York, the film was shot in Paris with many changes from its literary source. In its present form, it is as much a love story as a murder mystery, with more than its share of Hitchcockian quirks and surprises.  read more »

Trumbo
Running time 96 minutes
Written by Christopher Trumbo
Directed by Peter Askin
Starring Joan Allen, Brian Dennehy, Michael Douglas and others

Peter Askin’s Trumbo is based on the play, Trumbo, by Christopher Trumbo, and is clearly a labor of love and ideological affinity for all the Hollywood celebrities who participated in the production. The Hollywood blacklist ensnared the playwright’s father, Dalton Trumbo, and many other talented people in the period of the cold war, the House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover and other cruel relics of a bygone era. Trumbo’s withering take on these instruments of his torture could be used as a club against the Bush-Cheney administration for its perceived assault on the Bill of Rights in the name of national security.  read more »

Brick Lane
Running time 102 minutes
Written by Abi Morgan and Laura Jones
Directed by Sarah Gavron
Starring Tannishtha Chatterjee, Satish Kaushik, Christopher Simpson, Zafreen

Sarah Gavron’s Brick Lane, from a screenplay by Abi Morgan and Laura Jones, is based on the rapturously received 500-page first novel by Monica Ali. The story begins on a sustained lyrical note as teenage Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee) and her little sister Hasina (Zafreen) chase each other across the sensuously photographed rice paddies next to their home in a village in Bangladesh. The musical accompaniment is a melodious Bangladeshi children’s song composed by Jocelyn Pook.  read more »

Get Smart
Running time 110 minutes
Written by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember
Directed by Peter Segal
Starring Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson

Peter Segal’s Get Smart, from a screenplay by Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember, is based on a satiric television series with characters created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. In fact, Mr. Brooks and Mr. Henry are listed in the film’s credits as “consultants.” This leads one to wonder if the timely jabs at an anonymous Bush-like president and a Cheney-like vice president can be attributed at least partly to the Brooks-Henry team.  read more »

Charles Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947), in a new 35mm print, will be shown at Film Forum for one week, June 13 to June 19, at 2, 4:30, 7 and 9:30. Chaplin (1889-1977) is supported by Martha Raye, Isobel Elsom, Marilyn Nash, Mady Correll, Irving Bacon, William Frawley and Charles Evans. The film was originally titled A Comedy of Murders, and the idea was reportedly suggested by Orson Welles, though it may have also been based on the real-life Parisian serial killer Landru, the subject of several French films.

Chaplin and Raye do a takeoff on the rowboat scene in Josef von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy (1931) that is even funnier than the one Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca performed on television. Chaplin’s stunned reaction to Raye’s signature raucous laughter in a later scene is one of his most hilarious sight gags in the talkie era. Forget the artistically and politically myopic reviews of the time (with the notable exception of James Agee’s complete rave) and its subsequent flop at the box office. It is a masterpiece. See it. 

asarris@observer.com

Quid Pro Quo
Running time 82 minutes
Written and Directed by Carlos Brooks
Starring Vera Farmiga, Nick Stahl

Carlos Brooks’s Quid Pro Quo, from his own screenplay, transports us into a strange world of guilt-ridden fetishism by which the legitimately physically handicapped incite envy in a small group of able-bodied eccentrics. The film begins with Nick Stahl’s Issac Knott, a New York City Public Radio reporter, who begins to tell his own personal story, and the mystery that surrounds it, over the airwaves. Isaac has been confined to a wheelchair since surviving an automobile accident that killed both of his parents when he was 8 years old.

The crash itself is never shown over the course of the film, but the scenic approach to the accident is repeated many times, with stunning images of symmetrically arranged plants serving as counterpoint to the shady setting in which the handicapped-wannabes choose to congregate.

Issac is not lacking in his own fetish objects for recovery, most notably a pair of magical shoes that send tremors of feelings up his legs so that he can finally stand on his own power, and with a pair of canes that liberate him from his wheelchair. Another of his fetishes is a Milwaukee brace that also aids his recovery.

For the group that Issac is investigating in his broadcast, his wheelchair is itself a magical means of transforming the non-handicapped into the handicapped. At first I thought that the whole film was becoming an extended sick joke ridiculing all the agitation about supplying access to the handicapped.

But then arrives Vera Farmiga’s Fiona, a beautiful and accomplished woman with a morbid desire to enter what she considers Isaac’s privileged realm of incapacitation. Hence, she is so disappointed when Isaac begins to regain the use of his legs that she steals his shoes for a short time to hinder his recovery. But when she does finally return them, it is with a feeling of terminal resignation, and she disappears shortly thereafter. Isaac tries in vain to find her, but we already know the “secret” of Isaac’s accident, and it plays out like a detective story, with the complete solution to the mystery locked in the detective’s psyche.

The ambitious indirection of the film’s visual style is reflected in the director’s own comment on the direction of his cast: “I told the actors in rehearsal to think of the story as unfolding entirely within that moment that transpires between deep sleep and wakefulness. So from the earliest rehearsals and creative discussions and final sound design, we approached the film within that framework—that the film itself should be experienced as a kind of dream. Even to the extent that we avoided the usual overtly ‘dreamy’ filmmaking and editing tricks—in favor of a straightforward style that would, like an actual dream, invite you to perceive it as real.”

Quid Pro Quo thereby seems to be the latest attempt to awaken us all from more than a century of dreamlike voyeurism at the temples of the cinema so that we can look more closely at the mechanics of our addiction. The effort is as cerebral as all get-out, and it is moderately interesting to think about afterward. Still, there is a limit to how far we will go to forgo the pleasures of the ancient illusionists of the medium. This is to say that Quid Pro Quo is a respectable feature-film debut for Mr. Brooks, and it remains reasonably thought-provoking without ever becoming emotionally absorbing.

asarris@observer.com

Love Comes Lately
Running time 86 minutes
Written and Directed by Jan Schütte
Starring Otto Tausig, Rhea Pearlman, Barbara Hershey, Tovah Feldshuh

Jan Schütte’s Love Come Lately, from his own screenplay, is based on three Issac Bashevis Singer short stories: “The Briefcase,” “Alone,” and “Old Love.” Mr. Schütte has gone above and beyond the call of dutiful adaptation to translate Singer’s world into vibrantly geriatric longings for older women. As Singer notes in his preface to his collection, Old Love, “The love of the old and middle-aged is a theme that is recurring more and more in my works of fiction. Literature has neglected the old and their emotions. The novelists never told us that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience.”

Austrian actor Otto Tausig, now in his mid-80s, plays prolific author Max Kohn, who finds himself on an Amtrak train on which he is outrageously grilled by the conductor on the number of times he has had sexual intercourse in a week. It seems that if Max doesn’t answer, the conductor will throw him off the train. Max wakes up with a start from this nightmare of his impending impotence, awakening his long-suffering bed partner, Reisel (Rhea Pearlman), who has become increasingly infuriated by Max’s many infidelities.

Max is fashioned in the mold of many recent screen academics and authors who are well past their prime, but continue masochistically on lecture tours to ever emptier auditoriums and lecture halls. But the emphasis here is not on the pathos of his decline, but, rather, on his unending susceptibility to sexual adventures with new female acquaintances. After a typically poorly attended campus visit at which his hosts defensively remind him that he is not a big name like Kafka, Max is consoled by an accidental reunion with a former student named Rosalie, played by a still very scrumptious Barbara Hershey. When they find themselves together in her apartment, with the inevitable about to happen, Max guiltily calls Reisel to cover his tracks, but succeeds only in making her more angrily suspicious.

In a subsequent nightmare, Max is thrown out of a hotel that has suddenly declared bankruptcy, and is forced to move into an empty run-down motel, where he is aggressively pursued by crippled Cuban housekeeper Esperanza (Elizabeth Peña). When he resists her advances, thinking in the dream that he is married, Esperanza storms out in a rage, accusing him of rejecting her because of her infirmity.

The final episode is prompted by the loss of his briefcase with his speech inside, and his substitution of a short story he has written, based on Singer’s “Old Love.” Max, like Singer himself, is a retiree who has moved to Miami Beach. One day a woman knocks on his door and introduces herself as his next-door neighbor, Ethel (Tovah Feldshuh), a recent widow who has enjoyed nothing but happiness with a kind and loving husband, and now feels that he is asking her to join him in the afterlife.

Max gallantly asks her to sit down with him for coffee while they discuss the ways they can spend the rest of their lives. They agree to meet again, but when the time comes, they are separated forever by a message she leaves behind before joining her husband in the great beyond, where they will put in a kind word for poor bereft Max, who is left alone once more on the far side of life.

There have been several other films over the years based on Singer’s works, but none with such relevance as Love Comes Lately to Singer’s own description of his subjects: “I deal with unique characters in unique circumstances …a group of people who are still a riddle in the world and often to themselves—the Jews of Eastern Europe, specifically the Yiddish-speaking Jews who perished in Poland and those who emigrated to the USA. The longer I live with them and write about them, the more I am baffled about the richness of their individuality (since I am one of them) by my own whims and passions. While I hope and pray for the redemption and resurrection, I dare to say that for me, these people are living right now, in literature, as in our dreams, death does not exist.”

Otto Tausig deserves some kind of special award for incarnating the ageless defiance of the death-dealing Nazi Holocaust, which Singer never addressed directly in his writings, but sought to nullify with characters like Mr. Tausig’s indomitable Max Kohn.

asarris@observer.com

“Late Hawks” is the provocative title of a retrospective at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue) that covers the later, more neglected movies of Howard Hawks (1896-1977), plus a few earlier ringers like Red River (1948) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Hawks’ career antedated the talkies—he made the silents The Road to Glory and Fig Leaves, both in 1926—and extended all the way to Rio Lobo, in 1970. He was eventually singled out by his admirers for stylistic consistency; in an interview, he declared that he consciously shot most of his scenes at the eye level of a standing onlooker. A director of parts as well as a unified whole, Hawks stamped his distinctively gritty view of life on adventure, gangster and private-eye melodramas; Westerns; musicals; and screwball comedies—the kind of thing Americans do best and appreciate least. That one can discern the same directorial signature over an unprecedentedly wide variety of genres is proof of his artistry. That one can still enjoy the genres for their own sake is proof of the artist’s professional urge to entertain.

By a not-so-strange coincidence, I am teaching my first course in Howard Hawks this fall semester, after 43 years of being engaged in film studies. Why the long wait? Like his illustrious contemporaries, John Ford and Jean Renoir, he is as difficult to teach as the equally sublime Alfred Hitchcock and Buster Keaton are easy—that is, easier to teach to young people, and easier for young people to appreciate.

The Hawks series begins with Hatari! (1962), with John Wayne, Hardy Kruger, Elsa Martinelli, Bruce Cabot and Red Buttons. It will screen on Wednesday, June 4, at 6:30; Friday, June 6, at 8:30; and Sunday, June 8, at 3:30.

Next up will be Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), with Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, Charles Coburn, Tommy Noonan, Elliott Reid and George Winslow. Showtimes are Wednesday, June 4, at 9:30; Friday, June 6, at 6:30; Saturday, June 7, at 9:30; and Sunday, June 8, at 6:30. After that? Land of the Pharaohs (1955), with Jack Hawkins, Joan Collins, Dewey Martin, James Robertson Justice, Alexis Minotis and Sydney Chaplin. It will be shown on Thursday, June 5, at 6:30; Saturday, June 7, at 4; and Sunday, June 8, at 8:30.

Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964), with Rock Hudson, Paula Prentiss, Maria Perschy, John McGiver, Charlene Holt, Roscoe Karns, Norman Alden and Regis Toomey, will screen on Thursday, June 5, at 9:30 and Saturday, June 7, at 7.

Rio Bravo (1959), with John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan, Angie Dickinson, Ward Bond, Claude Akins, John Russell, Bob Steele and Harry Carey Jr. screens Wednesday, June 11, at 6:45; Friday, June 13, at 9:15; and Saturday, June 14, at 3:30.

Also on the bill: El Dorado (1966), with John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, James Caan, Charlene Holt, Michele Carey, Arthur Hunnicutt, R. G. Armstrong and Edward Asner. Showtimes are Wednesday, June 11, at 9:30; Saturday, June 14, at 6:30; and Sunday, June 15, at 3:30. And Rio Lobo (1970), with John Wayne, Jorge Rivero, Jennifer O’Neill, Jack Elam, Victor French, Christopher Mitchum, Susana Dosamantes, Mike Henry, David Huddleston, Bill Williams, Sherry Lansing and Jim Davis, on Thursday, June 12, at 6:45; Saturday, June 14, at 9; and Sunday, June 15, at 8:45.

Last but not least: Red River (1948), with John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Walter Brennan, Joanne Dru, John Ireland, Noah Beery Jr., Paul Fix, Coleen Gray, Harry Carey Jr. and Harry Carey Sr., will be shown Thursday, June 12, at 9:15; Friday, June 13, at 6:45; and Sunday, June 15, at 6.

asarris@observer.com

When Did You Last See Your Father?
Running time 92 minutes
Written by Daniel Nichols
Directed by Anand Tucker
Starring Colin Firth, Jim Broadbent, Juliet Stevenson, Claire Skinner

Anand Tucker’s When Did You Last See Your Father?, from a screenplay by Daniel Nichols, based on Blake Morrison’s book of the same name, fully qualifies as what film historian Raymond Durgnat once designated as a “male weepie.” This is to say that we men who smirkingly condescend to so-called “chick flicks” reach for our handkerchiefs when we are shown a memory scene of a late father teaching his teenage son how to drive.

There is such a scene in When Did You Last See Your Father?, and in the convoluted flashback structure of the narrative, we already know that Jim Broadbent’s Arthur Morrison is dying of cancer, and his 40-year-old son, Colin Firth’s Blake Morrison, a successful author, is recalling all the good and bad times they shared from Blake’s childhood (Young Blake played by Bradley Johnson) to his adolescence (Teenage Blake played by Matthew Beard) to the mournful, tearful present, during which Blake must finally come to terms with his mixed relationship with his exasperating father.

Arthur Morrison and his wife, Kim (Juliet Stevenson), were physicians in the same medical practice in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales, England. They had two children, Gillian (Claire Skinner) and her older brother, Blake. The story covers a period of 40 years in bits and pieces of Blake’s memory of his father, beginning with a summer family drive in the late 1950s. Stymied by a long line of stalled automobiles en route to a car-racing arena, Blake’s father brandishes a stethoscope as he blithely bypasses the line by speeding through the right or, rather, wrong lane, talking down the noisily outraged drivers on the line by lying about a nonexistent medical emergency, and then bluffing his way past the security guard with cheaply invalid tickets just in time to watch the first race. Kim and the children are mortified by Arthur’s nervy behavior, but all they can do is cower in their seats in shame.

On other public occasions, Blake’s father easily dominates the proceedings, even when Blake is given a literary award. Arthur is bitterly disappointed when Blake does not follow him into his medical practice, but Blake has to concede that the recognition he received for his writings did greatly please his father. There are also less savory memories, of the father’s dalliances with other women, and even possibly an illegitimate child. But Kim’s essentially passive attitude through the years of their marriage only clouds her son’s memories without completely darkening them.

This vagueness about the father’s more serious derelictions of marital duty would have counted as a serious flaw in the film if it were not completely overwhelmed by a spectacularly terrific tearjerker ending that, I must confess, even got to me. I have never really seen anything quite like it, and I must therefore wholeheartedly recommend this wondrous work for its magnificently moving father-son performances by Mr. Broadbent and Mr. Firth.

asarris@observer.com

The Promotion
Running time 85 minutes
Written and Directed by Steve Conrad
Starring Sean William Scott, John C. Reilly, Jenna Fischer, Lili Taylor

Steve Conrad’s The Promotion, from his own screenplay, immerses itself in the world of Chicago supermarket midlevel employees, two of whom are furiously competing for promotion to a better-paying managerial position. At first, longtimer Doug (Sean William Scott) is considered a shoo-in for the promotion, but with the sudden arrival of Richard (John C. Reilly), a newcomer from a Canadian branch of the Donaldson supermarket chain, the competition is thrown open again.

Richard is more gregarious than Doug, and his amiability seems to give him an edge at the outset of their hilariously desperate struggle for advancement. Both men are in their 30s and married, Doug to a medical assistant, Jen (Jenna Fischer), and Richard to a Scottish woman, Laurie (Lili Taylor). Richard and Laurie already have one child, whereas Doug and Jen are still trying to determine if they can afford to buy a house and start a family.

There are none of the usual shenanigans one finds in many current movies about married couples. The stakes are too high for any errant glances in one direction or another. Doug is somewhat irritated with Jen’s employer, Dr. Mark Timms (Bobby Cannavale), a pediatric cosmetic surgeon who is always popping up to boast of a life-changing service he has performed for one afflicted child or another. But there is never the slightest suspicion of any monkey business between Jen and her pompous boss. Indeed what is most different about The Promotion in today’s movie market is its unusual lack of malignancy, to the point that one feels sympathetic to both the apparent protagonist, Doug, and the apparent antagonist, Richard. Then what accounts for the quiet horror of the situation? Dare I say it? It’s the infernal system that tortures and enslaves the great majority of ordinary people.

Mr. Conrad has touched on some sensitive issues, particularly in this wildly contentious election year, by placing Doug and Richard in an impossible quandary: on the one hand is the firm’s insistence on good community relations with even the most rambunctious elements of the minority population; and on the other, the ability of a few delinquents to make Doug and Richard lose their cool at the very moment their superiors choose to arrive on the scene. When the inevitable slips of the tongue do occur, one does not know whether to laugh sadistically or groan sympathetically.

The two wives, Jen and Laurie, are quietly and subtly supportive without indulging the eccentric explosions of their beleaguered husbands. In short, Mr. Conrad has managed to generate humor and drama out of the everyday predicaments of real people without either preaching or fantasizing about some ideal alternative to the money-grubbing world we inhabit.

The talented ensemble players fit seamlessly into the writer-director’s controlled patterns of dispensing information from a variety of viewpoints amid sudden transitions from the impersonal to the subjective. All in all, The Promotion deserves to be remembered fondly when this year’s award season comes rolling around. At last, we have a completely and profoundly American movie with all the classical skills of timing, editing and character development that we associate nostalgically with some Hollywood golden age.

asarris@observer.com

Savage Grace
Running Time 97 minutes
Written by Howard A. Rodman
Directed by Tom Kalin
Starring Julianne Moore, Stephen Dillane, Eddie Redmayne

Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace, from a screenplay by Howard A. Rodman, based on the book Savage Grace by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson, fails to explain why its characters, supposedly drawn from real life, behave in the neurotic and psychotic manner shown on the screen. Perhaps there is no adequate explanation for the psychic disasters that befall the Baekeland family. I must say, however, that I received much more insight into the family’s problems from the copious production notes than I did from the film itself. About the only impression I retained from a single viewing of the movie was that of Julianne Moore’s Barbara Baekeland in eternally red dresses, initially vivacious and flirtatious, but perpetually angry underneath, mostly at her cold, upper-crust husband, Stephen Dillane’s Brooks Baekeland, heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune. Caught in the middle of this messed-up marriage is the troubled son, Eddie Redmayne’s Anthony Baekeland, or “Tony” as he was known to his various sexual partners, male, female and, occasionally, his own mother. The time span of the film runs from 1946 to 1972, and is organized into six increasingly unpleasant acts over an oddly foreshortened 97 minutes, a rare instance of less seeming to last much longer.

When asked in an interview what initially attracted him to the project, Mr. Kalin, the director, answered: “Christine Vachon gave me a copy of the book, Savage Grace, by Natalie Robins and M. L. Aronson to read many years ago. I was riveted by the sensational truth at the core of the Baekeland story, but even more by the echoes of classical tragedy. The sad beauty of the material drew me to it. But the film’s terrible climax, Barbara’s death, is only part of her story. The originality of her uniquely American character (self-made woman of the 1940s with a born gambler’s instinct) and her glittering rise and devastating fall contained the elements of what I believed would be an amazing drama.”

Mr. Kalin has received many festival honors around the world for his many offbeat projects since he made his 1992 feature-film debut with Swoon, on the Leopold-Loeb thrill-killing ’20s sensation, with more emphasis than previous treatments on the widespread homophobia at work in the society at large. I suspect that Mr. Kalin and his equally honored screenwriter, Mr. Rodman, assumed a widespread familiarity with their subject that simply did not exist, at least within my own cultural purview.

Mr. Kalin’s own recollection of his partnership with Mr. Rodman on the project is particularly revealing: “I had an amazing collaboration with the writer of the film, Howard Rodman. We both knew the book was too sprawling in its scope for a simple adaptation (Savage Grace consists primarily of first-person accounts of witnesses and participants in the Baekeland saga, spanning nearly a century.) Howard and I began by separately identifying what we considered the five key moments of Barbara’s story. When we compared the results, most of them were the same.”

The problem the creative team never solved was the lack of dramatic construction in the narrative to indicate where the actual turning points occurred over the years. Most of the scenes are oppressively intimate, without any adequate ambience to indicate any social consequences for the erratic behavior of the three major characters. As a comparatively uninformed viewer, I found myself relatively detached from the gruesome climax of the film, and the film’s even more gruesome post-film printed accounts of further disasters in this pathologically afflicted family.

Call me old-fashioned if you wish, but I will continue to expect and even demand more dramatic coherence in my narrative entertainment. It is too easy to avoid banality by depriving the audience of enough information to understand the inner lives of the characters. As it stands, Savage Grace is a film strictly for avant-garde festivals, at which even minimal exposition is at a premium.

The Edge of Heaven
Running time 122 minutes
Written and directed by Fatih Akin
Starring Baki Davrak, Tuncel Kurtiz, Nursel Köse, Nurgul Yeşilçay, Hanna Schygulla

Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite), from his own screenplay in English, German and Turkish with English subtitles, succeeds in transcending an amazing series of coincidences with its compassionate treatment of several transplanted Turkish and German characters, both parents and children, on a not-so-merry-go-round between placid Bremen, Germany, and tumultuous Istanbul. Mr. Akin, the son of Turkish parents, was born and educated in Germany, and on the evidence of his previous film, Head-On (2004), and now The Edge of Heaven, he sees in the clash of the two cultures the dramatic sparks of fiery personal tragedies.

There are two coffins shown being transported to airplanes, one bound from Bremen to Istanbul, and the other from Istanbul to Bremen. Both contain the bodies of vibrant human beings we have come to know before they became victims of grotesque homicides that were nonetheless rooted in their own passions and the passions of the people around them.

The narrative starts and stops arbitrarily between at first seemingly disconnected pieces of time and space, first in Turkey, and then in Germany. Eventually, we are introduced to the major characters, beginning and ending with Nejat Aksu (Baki Davrak), a Turkish-German philosophy professor living and teaching in Bremen. Of course, it is very possible that the seemingly sexless Nejat serves as the writer-director’s alter ago.

Nejat lives in Bremen with his retired pensioner father, Ali Aksu (Tuncel Kurtiz), a lusty, drunken old widower, who persuades a Turkish-speaking prostitute he accidentally encounters to move in with him. The prostitute, Yeter Öztürk (Nursel Köse), is reluctant at first, but when two of her outraged co-religionists threaten her with bodily harm if she doesn’t discontinue her shameful activities, she quickly decides to move in with Ali. Nejat is at first scandalized by his father’s new “living arrangement,” but when he discovers that Yeter is supporting with her earnings a college-age daughter back in Turkey, he becomes more sympathetic to her plight. After suffering a heart attack from which he slowly recovers, Ali angrily and mistakenly suspects that Nejak’s shift in attitude indicates that his son is sleeping with Yeter. One day, when Yeter resists his drunken advances and tries to leave, Ali pushes her to the floor so hard that he accidentally kills her.

While Ali is imprisoned for the murder and later deported back to Turkey, Nejat resolves to abandon his profession and go to Istanbul to find the late Yeter’s daughter, Ayten Öztürk (Nurgul Yeşilçay). Nejat was much too late, however, inasmuch as Ayten, a student revolutionary, had long since fled Turkey after sleeping through a failed street demonstration, and ended up—where else?—in Bremen sleeping through Nejat’s lecture on Goethe.

The distinctive shot of her sleeping through the lecture is shown twice, both before and after we know the identity of the sleeping student. This repetition of images is typical of the film’s narrative strategy. By this constant circling back, the characters become more inevitably driven by their fateful feelings. It is as if an added layer of characterization has been added to the narrative, formally enhancing its impact, and enriching its content.

When Ayten is impulsively befriended by a German student, Lotte Staub (Patrycia Ziolkowska), we already know this relationship will end badly for this newcomer to the story, because this section of the film is titled by the writer-director “Lotte’s Death.” In any event, Ayten and Lotte become impassioned lovers, much to the dismay of Lotte’s at first helplessly bourgeois mother, Susanne Staub, played by Hanna Schygulla, the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s muse in nearly half of his 50 films, from the late ’60s to the early ’80s. One of the foremost sensual icons of her time, Ms. Schygulla at 64 still retains her overpowering intensity in her projection of a mother’s grief over the loss of a daughter. Yet, as an integral part of a magnificently talented ensemble, she never diminishes the assorted charisma of the other major characters she encounters. Still, the bereaved mother’s intervention is decisive in consoling and embracing Ayten over the death of their mutually beloved Lotte, and persuading Nejak to rejoin his errant father.

The last image of Nejak sitting on the shore of the Black Sea patiently waiting for this father to return from a fishing trip is held for several minutes all the way to the conclusion of the end credits. It is a haunting expression of the forgiveness and reconciliation that make up the noblest transaction imaginable for children estranged from their parents.

Mr. Akin has created an epical masterpiece centered on otherwise ordinary lives disrupted by the restless movements of whole populations from one domain to another. The Edge of Heaven is Mr. Akin’s eloquent demonstration of the viability of bridging the abyss between two supposedly irreconcilable visions of the earth’s inhabitants at the edge of one heaven or another. Mr. Akin’s own mixed heritage has enabled him to focus on a shared humanity without glossing over the hatreds and bigotries that conspire to keep us all apart. Now, more than ever, The Edge of Heaven is a film to be seen, savored and thoughtfully appreciated.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center, in collaboration with the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., has added an extremely rare archival find to their felicitously conjoined tributes to Jennifer Jones and Charles Boyer. The series has been imaginatively programmed by Joanna Ney, staff programmer for the society. On May 21, a screening of King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946) at 3:30 will be preceded by a nine-minute series of screen tests of Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones ordered by David Selznick, and conducted by Josef von Sternberg. The illustrious Sternberg was solemnly instructed by Selznick to produce the same intense passion with Peck and Jones that Sternberg had previously achieved with Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich in Morocco in 1930. Daniel Selznick will be on hand to tell the full story of the nine-minute screen test. The screening will be held at the Walter Reade Theatre on Amsterdam Avenue and 65th Street.

SANGRE DE MI SANGRE
Running time 100 minutes
Written and directed by Christopher Zalla
Starring Jorge Adrian Espandola, Jesús Ochoa, Armando Hernández

Christopher Zalla’s Sangre de Mi Sangre (Blood of My Blood), from his own screenplay (in Spanish with English subtitles), has been honored as the first Spanish-language film to win the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and one can see why. Though its Mexican immigrant characters express themselves almost entirely in Spanish, the film was actually shot in a lower-class Brooklyn neighborhood with a longingly ironic view of the Manhattan skyline. Most of the footage was rendered with a mobile hand-held camera, and its noirish narrative is antithetical to the feel-good sentimentality of the recent Mexican mother-son reunion in Under the Same Moon.

According to the production notes, “Filmmaker Christopher Zalla began writing Sangre de Mi Sangre in the week following September 11th because he felt compelled to make a movie about his city. However, the actual story for the movie started in a Brooklyn restaurant kitchen, where Zalla came to know several young Mexican immigrants who worked there. ‘These guys are coming here when they are very young and working for twenty, sometimes thirty years before returning home. They are so hardworking, some don’t even take a day off. I imagined a character who, for some reason, didn’t have a family at home—and so was forced to stash it. It was really that pile of money—that pile of paper really—being the only thing someone has to show for the last twenty years of their lives—that gave birth to the movie.’”

The movie begins with a container carrying Mexican immigrants to New York City. Two of the younger immigrants strike up an acquaintance. Pedro (Jorge Adrian Espandola) confides to Juan (Armando Hernández) that he is carrying a letter from his late mother to be delivered to his father, Diego (Jesús Ochoa), supposedly a wealthy restaurant owner in New York City. When the truck finally arrives in New York, Pedro is awakened from a long sleep to discover to his horror that Juan has stolen his pack with all his credentials, money and the letter to his father from his mother.

Pedro, alone and penniless, struggles to survive in a strange city. In the course of his desperate search for food, he is befriended by a Mexican female street urchin, Magda (Paola Mendoza), with whom he reluctantly turns tricks for voyeuristic paying clients. His path nearly crosses that of Juan and Diego a few times, but Pedro never makes the right connection.

For his part, Juan, having stolen Pedro’s identity, slowly wins over the suspicious Diego, who turns out to be a lowly dishwasher and cook in a short-order joint. Still, he does have a stash, acquired in the years he felt betrayed by his promiscuous wife in Mexico. As the suspense develops, Juan and Pedro display similar resources of ingenuity and persistence in order to eke out a living in a strange land without having command of its language.

Diego is revealed as a strong-willed stoic who has lived a long and lonely life with no need for other people, and the prospect of a belated fatherhood does not enchant him at first. But as Juan exercises all his charms and wiles, Diego becomes vulnerable to the call of long-lost love. The ending is even more shocking than that of Yella. I guess this is my week for surprises from the truly independent cinema in both German and Spanish.

Mr. Zalla, the writer-director, and Benjamin Odell, his invaluable producer, are both graduates of Columbia’s School of the Arts. They recruited their major male characters from established personalities in the Mexican media, most notably Jesús Ochoa, the winner of two Ariels (the Mexican Academy Award) for Best Supporting Actor. Ochoa also played the corrupt cop in the Denzel Washington vehicle Man of Fire, and he gives the role of Diego both depth and substance. For the role of Magda, Mr. Zalla and Mr. Odell went to New York’s Mexican-American community to find Paola Mendoza, a much-honored performer in the film On the Outs, a story of a 17-year-old mother addicted to crack cocaine.

All in all, Sangre de Mi Sangre stacks up as an original achievement in its own chosen genre, that of the troubled immigrant in a land of advertised promise, who too often is inflicted with pain and exploitation.

YELLA
Running Time 89 minutes
Written and directed by Christian Petzold
Starring Nina Hoss, David Striesow, Hinnerk Schöenmann

Christian Petzold’s Yella, from his own screenplay (in German with English subtitles), tells the haunting story of a mood-driven woman named Yella (Nina Hoss) who decides one day to leave her loser husband, Ben (Hinnerk Schöenmann), and their home in a small town in the former East Germany for a new career and life in the West. Her specialty is reading balance sheets with an uncanny perceptiveness, a talent that proves invaluable in business negotiations.

She attracts the attention of a handsome business executive named Philipp (David Striesow), and after several business confabs at which she demonstrates her corporate skills and killer instincts, Yella and Philipp become lovers. Yet, all the while there is an ominous foreboding of doom in Yella’s otherwise triumphant adaptation to the capitalist ethos. I can’t tell you much more about this strange film without giving away its trick plot. Suffice it to say that Ms. Hoss provides a performance that is as phenomenal as any I have ever encountered. Yet, she has been appearing and reportedly excelling in German movies, stage plays and television productions since at least 1996, and I have never, ever seen her perform in any medium. This suggests the still uncertain vagaries of foreign film distribution in America.

As it happens, Yella premiered at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival, where its star received the Silver Bear Prize for Best Actress. It was also selected as Best Picture by the German Film Critics Association in 2008, and is the recipient of four 2008 Lola Award nominations (Germany’s Academy Awards) in the categories of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Cinematography.

Right now, the long neglected German cinema seems to be experiencing something of a golden age, with such startling works as The Lives of Others, The Counterfeiters, Four Minutes and, now, Yella. One can only hope that we will have the opportunity to see a larger proportion of German productions in the future.

Seldom before have I ever been so absorbed in a female character on the screen as I was with Ms. Hoss’s Yella, as she kept trying to escape a past that was drawing her back inexorably. It was only after the shock ending that I could fully appreciate the subtleties and nuances of her portrayal. It is possible, of course, that Yella won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. As with any independent film these days, there is a certain vagueness and indistinctness in the often slightly menacing mise-en-scène. But the satiric focus of the negotiations is always sharp and clear. Suddenly, Yella’s character, which often seems to be merely drifting, comes to life with a vengeance. Eventually, Yella displays a flair for intrigue that suggests that she has mastered the cruel disciplines of the most ruthless forms of capitalism. Yet the fear is also always present even in the midst of success.

In his comments on the film and its heroine, the director confirms the intentionality of his effects: “I like characters who want to bring something together, who have a plan. I like their work on the plan, the scheme, but also their failures. Yella is both a very modern and very old-fashioned young woman. She wants to go out into the flexible and shifting world, but she also wants to stay home. While we were making the film, we often thought about those American ballads that often convey this idea, being in movement, being on the road, but yet always singing and telling stories about home. This is why the David Ackles song ‘The Road to Cairo’ is heard in the film. This inner conflict, Yella has it too. A state of suspension: enduring this is what Yella has to deal with.”

Ultimately, Yella is to be commended for not preaching sermons on the inadequacy and even malignancy of our social and political institutions. Instead, it suggests that we are all walking on a tightrope to reach an illusory other side, but with oblivion lurking at every step. Our plight is almost comical, but not quite. In any event, Yella is a film to be seen and savored, and Ms. Hoss serves up a delicious feast to a discriminating palate.

OSS 117: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES
Running time 99 minutes
Written by Jean-François Halin
Directed by Michel Hazanavicius
Starring Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo

Michel Hazanavicius’s OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, from a screenplay by Jean-François Halin, inspired by the “OSS 117” novels by Jean Bruce, was the Audience Award winner at the Seattle International Film Festival and the Grand Prix winner at the Tokyo International Film Festival. The press release for the film describes it as “the hilariously deadpan French hit comedy and spy satire starring comic celebrity Jean Dujardin. … A cross between James Bond and Austin Powers, Jean Dujardin (star of the hit French comedy Brice de Nice) is OSS 117 (real name: Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath), a French secret agent who first saw print in 1949 as author Jean Bruce’s character, and eventually appeared in 265 novels and seven movies between 1956 and 1970.”

After recounting all this publicity fanfare, I am embarrassed to confess that I have never heard of OSS 117, Jean Dujardin or Jean Bruce. Also, I have never been a particular admirer of either James Bond or Austin Powers, and could hardly be expected to be overjoyed by a “cross between them.” Hence, I was hardly surprised when I didn’t crack a smile over the antics of Mr. Jean Dujardin as OSS 117. At least I must concede that Mr. Dujardin’s broad changes of expression always alerted me to where and when I was supposed to laugh. After a while I began to wonder why people in Paris, Seattle and Tokyo laughed at plot developments I found merely silly. One target of the satire that I thought has been long overdue in American movies was the sentimentality of male buddy-buddy bonding. First, we have two men in bathing suits playing a form of beach ball, falling and tumbling over each other and playfully wrestling. OSS-117 is beside himself with unalloyed pleasure, but his “best friend” sports a slightly more ambiguous expression, which leads to a later betrayal. It doesn’t matter since OSS 117 is indestructible and impervious to subtlety and nuance.

Another thought I had was that the series did not take France very seriously as a would-be world power, and that the babes in the film, especially an Egyptian secretary, luscious Larmina El Akmar Betouche (Bérénice Bejo), never sheds all her clothes even when she is strip-wrestling with an evil babe. Even at this late date in our collective depravity, certain taboos remain in force for certain genres. And OSS 117 is nothing if not commercially calculating.

THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS
Running time 77 minutes
Written by Maureen Medved
Directed by Bruce McDonald
Starring Ellen Page, Ari Cohen, Zie Souwand

Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments, from Maureen Medved’s screenplay, based on her novel, is much too fragmented for any emotions to emerge unscathed by the film’s excessive experimentation with time and space. But again, a virtuoso performance by Ellen Page as Tracey Berkowitz, a terminally troubled 15-year-old, gives the film a semblance of recognizable humanity in a sea of split-screen, rectangular abstractions in all sizes.

From what I could piece together, Tracey was beset with a father (Ari Cohen) who is always hectoring her, along with his brow-beaten wife (Erin McMurtry) and his apparently autistic son, Sonny (Zie Souwand), who keeps barking like a dog as his only form of communication. Mr. Berkowitz wants someone, anyone, in the family to tell him why Sonny is barking like a dog.

Meanwhile, Tracey is being hazed by other girls in the school for not having “tits.” And I am not sure that I understood these episodes correctly, since the different rectangles in the frame are not always chronologically consistent, supposedly because Tracey’s memory mechanism darts back and forth all the time.

Besides, there is little community ambiance in the film to speak of, and there is a dire shortage of authority figures aside from Mr. Berkowitz. Tracey ruminates about having a crush on a fellow student, Billy Zero (Slim Twig), who rides a motorcycle to school and keeps to himself, at least at first. Later, after he has had sex with Tracey in a car, he throws her out with her panties around her legs, and later taunts her in concert with the other guys. And this is after she has delivered soliloquies on their great love for each other.

Tracey responds to this and other setbacks by retreating into a fantasy world of her own while she looks frantically to find her little brother, Sonny, who has disappeared into the snowy wilderness that is Tracey’s slice of Canada. After she fights off a rape and ends up alone on an empty bus, wrapped only in a shower curtain, the film ends with a prolonged full frame shot of Tracey in her shower curtain, walking fiercely to who knows where.

The film’s production notes confirm the strong feeling I had that much more time was spent on the editing and reframing than on the actual shooting. The effect for me was that this 77-minute film seemed much longer than it is; it displays a graphic complexity by simply multiplying the number of discrete compositions, often of the various parts of the same body.

You have probably seen modified versions of The Tracey Fragments before in recent movies; television shows like 24; and innumerable MTV videos. As Mr. McDonald recalls his research for the film: “I called [cinematographer] Steve Cosens, who I’d met on an American TV series. We’d had a great time working together, so great in fact that it got me fired for our visual audacity, which had freaked out the network. Steve, [editor] Jeremy Munce, [producer] Sarah Timmons and I along with our designer Ingrid Jurek watched all the split screen movies we could, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Boston Strangler, the new Beastie Boys concert movie, and a video about crumping that Stevie brought in. We poured over photographs, and paintings and listened to Horses—the Patti Smith album. We used our great casting directors to secure some of the best acting talent in the land. The team was ready!”

Besides Mr. McDonald and Ms. Medved, the other indispensable members of the production included producer Ms. Timmins; executive producer Paul Barkin; editors Mr. Munce and Gareth C. Scales; casting directors Sara Kay and Jenny Lewis; production designer Ms. Jurek; and a musical score provided by Broken Social Scene, a Toronto indie rock band.

Unfortunately, the net result of all this punkish avant-garde audacity, including Julian Richings as Tracey’s transvestite psychiatrist, is to demonstrate yet again that with experimental shattering of conventions, more is less. Still, Ellen Page remains one of the few stellar newcomers who deserves to be seen in anything she chooses to do.

A PREVIOUS ENGAGEMENT
Running Time 118 minutes
Written and directed by Joan Carr-Wiggin
Starring Juliet Stevenson, Daniel Stern, Tchéky Karyo

Joan Carr-Wiggin’s A Previous Engagement, from her own screenplay, takes place entirely on the picturesque Mediterranean island of Malta as the writer-director slyly spins a romantically feminist fable with farcical flourishes that sometimes fails to deliver the desired laughs. Fortunately, the very gifted stage and screen actress Juliet Stevenson plays the central role of a middle-aged married woman and Seattle libertarian who persuades her set-in-his-ways insurance salesman husband, Jack, to take Julia and their two grown daughters to Malta for their summer vacation. What Jack and their girls don’t know is that Julia has a secret plan to keep a 25-year-old prearranged reunion with her first love, a feisty Frenchman named Alex (Tchéky Karyo).

Since the whole film was shot in Malta, the backstory has to be parceled out in bits and pieces via Ms. Stevenson’s inner monologue and increasingly frenzied facial expressions as her character is suspended in a state of panic over fear of discovery by her husband, and uncertainty about what and who she will find at the end of her long-cherished personal rainbow. Hence, the movie is slow going in its early stages while the goal posts are being laboriously constructed.

Against all odds, Alex shows up for the long delayed rendezvous more passionate than ever for Julia. For Julia, long-felt doubts about Alex’s sincerity rise to the surface, especially when he confesses to having been married and divorced four times in the interim—not to mention all his former mistresses, like Julia. Indeed, at one point, Julia is so reflexively jealous that she mistakenly suspects that Alex’s teenage daughter is his current girlfriend. The humor is thus repeatedly propelled by Julia’s tendency to jump to conclusions.

The big surprise of the film is the bizarre reaction of Julia’s husband when he learns of Julia’s deviousness. Instead of behaving like the stick-in-the-mud husband we have seen previously, he purchases a blindingly all-white touristy wardrobe topped by a jaunty white fedora and hits the town’s hot spot for female consolation. He winds up on the dance floor with ex-chorus girl Grace (Valerie Mahaffey) and performs a creditable rumba and salsa, much to Julia’s horrified amazement at this hitherto unexplored side of her hitherto humdrum husband. This is usually the standard formula for marital reconciliation. I won’t reveal what finally happens because the viewers might enjoy finding out for themselves, while savoring the middle-aged magic of Ms. Stevenson’s hyper-expressiveness. A great actress even in a not-so-great comedy is fully worth the price of admission in these far from halcyon days, both movie-wise and world-wise.

The Godard series at Film Forum continues on May 5 with Le Petit Soldat (1960), starring Anna Karina and Michel Subor, at 7:30 and 9:40; the presentation will include the short Charlotte et son Jules (1958). On May 6 and 7, Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966), with Marina Vlady, plays at 1:30, 3:30, 5:30, 7:30 and 9:30.

Pierrot Le Fou (1965), with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina, plays on May 8, 9 and 10, at 1, 3:10, 5:20, 7:30 and 9:40.

MISTER LONELY
Directed by Harmony Korine
Written by Avi Korine and Harmony Korine
Starring Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Werner Herzog, James Fox

Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, from a screenplay by Mr. Korine and his brother, Avi, is a more benign if comparatively overlong avant-garde enterprise than we have recently been accustomed to getting from Mr. Korine. That is to say, no blow jobs, no cat-killing, no pissing, no asphyxia-induced orgasms, no teenage violence. When he was 22, Mr. Korine wrote the screenplay for Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), with its malignantly depressing 24-hour tour of New York City’s AIDS-infected, sex-crazed, booze-belting teens. He went on to write and direct Gummo (1997) and Julien Donkey Boy (1999), the former described by some mainline critics as the worst movie ever made, and the latter becoming the first American movie to officially adopt the Danish Dogma 95. Nonetheless, Mr. Korine can be credited with launching the careers of two new screen personalities, Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson.

By now you may have gathered that I am not about to write a rave review for Mister Lonely, Mr. Korine’s first film since his self-imposed, near-decade-long exile in Paris. Nor am I going to dismiss it out of hand simply because, as Hermann Göring might have said, whenever I hear the term “avant-garde” applied to the cinema, I want to reach for my revolver. Yet, as the recent Abel Gance revival on Turner Classics demonstrates, there is nothing new under the sun on either side of the movie camera.

In his Director’s Notes, Mr. Korine traces the genesis of Mister Lonely to his “Thinking Images”: “I basically started thinking in terms of images that really have nothing to do with anything. Just single images. I started dreaming about nuns flying out of airplanes and praying all the way down and surviving. Then I started to fixate upon specific images and characters. One of them was the idea of a Michael Jackson impersonator walking the streets of Paris. I had these different images although they didn’t have anything to do with one another. But I knew there was something I was trying to get out, a unified idea, but I wasn’t sure how to say it.”

Mr. Korine and his brother finally found a way to translate the director’s random images into a semi-coherent narrative about a colony of impersonators forming a commune in a castle in the Scottish highlands, and somehow performing their specialties in a poorly attended concert in an empty theater near the commune. But hope springs eternal for even the most habitually impoverished entertainers.

The picture is flooded with semi-celebrities impersonating more famous celebrities. The Mexican actor Diego Luna impersonates Michael Jackson, and is actually seen strutting his stuff on a Paris street where he runs into a Marilyn Monroe impersonator played by Samantha Morton. Her husband turns out to be Charlie Chaplin impersonated by Denis Lavant. “Marilyn” persuades “Michael” to fly to Scotland with her to join the other members of the commune.

The other impersonators in the commune, with their celebrity models, are James Fox (the Pope); Melita Morgan (Madonna); Anita Pallenberg (the Queen); Rachel Korine (Little Red Riding Hood); Richard Strange (Abe Lincoln); Michael Joel Stuart (Buckwheat); Esme Creed-Miles (Shirley Temple); Mal Whiteley, Daniel Rovai, and Nigel Cooper as the Three Stooges (Larry, Moe, Curly); Joseph Morgan (James Dean); Jason Pennycooke (Sammy Davis Jr.); and, finally, Werner Herzog as Father Umbrillo, who flies the nuns (Camille De Pazzis and Britta Gartner) to their sky-diving destinations. David Blaine plays Father Umbrillo’s priestly subordinate. Lalid Afkir plays someone called Habid in the credits, and I am not sure if either is a celebrity.

The high point of the film, I suppose, is the spectacle of all the impersonators dancing sequentially to the strains of Irving Berlin’s Astaire-Rogers classic “Dancing Cheek to Cheek.” Needless to say, I much preferred Astaire-Rogers, but that is just the hopeless classicist in me. Anyway, I didn’t mind Mr. Korine’s conceits, but I thought that at 112 minutes the movie dragged somewhat, whereas Mr. Korine’s earlier projects never ran longer than 90-plus minutes. The only memorable line for me was Marilyn Monroe’s suggestion that her husband, the foul-mouthed Chaplin figure, was closer to Hitler than to Chaplin.

I will admit that Mr. Korine knows more than his share of interesting people, notably Werner Herzog and Leos Carax, a firebrand film director, who plays the psychiatrist of “Michael Jackson.”

And, oops, I almost overlooked Mr. Korine’s screenwriting gig for Larry Clark’s Ken Park in 2002. The story is that Mr. Korine wrote the screenplay back around the time of Kids, but then Mr. Clark and Mr. Korine had a falling-out, leading to Mr. Korine’s seizing the directorial reins for Gummo. Anyway, from what I’ve read, Mr. Korine’s life is more engrossing than any of his films.

I will end with the faint praise of Mister Lonely as the least offensive of the works in the Korine canon.

XXY
Directed by Lucía Puenzo
Written by Sergio Bizzio and Lucía Puenzo
Starring Ricardo Darín, Valeria Bertuccelli, Germán Palacios, Carolina Pelleritti, Martín Piroyansky, Inés Efron

Lucía Puenzo’s XXY, from her own screenplay (in Spanish with English subtitles), is based on a short story by her husband, Sergio Bizzio. As Ms. Puenzo describes the genesis of her film, “From the moment I read the story—the sexual awakening of a young girl who has what doctors call genital ambiguity—I couldn’t take it out of my head. I began to write with that image in my head: the body of a young woman with both sexes in one same body. I was especially interested in the dilemma of inevitable choice: not only having to choose between being a man or a woman, but also having to choose that binary decision, or intersex, as an identity and not as a place of mere passage.”

XXY may be the first fictional film to deal with the “intersex”—apart from its misleading analogies with transsexuality, homosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality—by the absence of medical intervention or “mutilation” at birth. This is eventually one of the dramatic issues Ms. Puenzo brings up in the film, without even pretending to know all the answers to the perplexing questions raised by chromosomal confusion in the newborn.

Alex (Inés Efron) is a 15-year-old girl who was born and remains an intersex child, with both male and female genitalia. She lives with her parents, Kraken (Ricardo Darín) and Suli (Valeria Bertuccelli). As Alex begins to explore her strange sexuality, her mother invites guests from Buenos Aires to come for a visit to their remote home on the scenic Uruguayan shore. The visitors are not particularly welcomed by Kraken, inasmuch as he originally fled from Buenos Aires to escape idle curiosity about his daughter’s sexuality. As it happens, the visiting husband, Ramiro (Germán Palacios), is a cosmetic surgeon. His wife, Erika (Carolina Pelleritti), and their awkward adolescent son, Alvaro (Martín Piroyansky), seem agreeable enough. Still, Kraken—who has never wanted his daughter to be ashamed of her body—suspects that his own wife has a secret agenda to “normalize” their daughter’s sexual identity.

Indeed, the emotional power of the film is encapsulated in the scenes between Alex and Kraken, and between Alvaro and his own much less supportive father. XXY is thus primarily an emotional confrontation between parents and children. The interaction of the two generations is occasionally rambunctious and tumultuous, but singularly without malice. What is emphasized throughout is the unending vulnerability of the characters to the inescapable consequences of a bizarre accident of nature.

In Ms. Puenzo’s own words, her film is concerned with “the freedom of choice, id