Philadelphia Film Festival: Week One Reviews

Fifty-eight reviews from the first week of the 17th annual PFF.

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Published: Apr 2, 2008

Following are reviews of movies premièring in the first week of the Philadelphia Film Festival, April 3-9. Up to the day of the show, tickets may be purchased in person at TLA Video locations (11 a.m.-10 p.m.), by phone at 267-765-9700, ext. 4 (10 a.m.-9 p.m.), and online at phillyfests.com (up to 24 hours in advance). Same-day tickets are available only at the screening venue. Single-ticket prices are $9-$10, $7-$8 for matinees until 4 p.m., and $7 for children 12 and under. Service fees may apply.

A Stray Girlfriend | Afghan Muscles | Alexandra | American Teen | The Art of Travel | Baghead | Blast of Silence | Blood Brothers | The Bloodlines Video Project | Brick Lane | California Dreamin' | Dead Fury | Deadline U.S.A. | The Edge of Heaven | Electile Dysfunction | Eleven Minutes | Epitaph | Eye in the Sky | First Person | For the Unknown Dog | Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts | Help Me Eros | I Just Didn't Do It | In a Dream | I.O.U.S.A. | Jesus, the Spirit of God | Join Us | Like a Shooting Star | Lovely By Surprise | Me | Medicine for Melancholy | Mongol | Mrs. Ratcliffe's Revolution | Night Train | The Other Boy | Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm | Phoebe in Wonderland | Pistoleros | Pixar Story | Puujee | The Red Elvis | Roman de Gare | The Sandman | Secrecy | The Sperm | Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story | Storm | Stuck | Summer Scars | The Sun Also Rises | That Day | To My Great Chagrin: The Unbelievable Story of Brother Theodore | The Toe Tactic | Two Ladies | The Visitor | Who Is KK Downey? | Young@Heart | Young People Fucking

A Stray Girlfriend

When Ines (Ana Katz) is abandoned by her boyfriend on what was supposed to be their vacation to Mar de las Pampas, she decides to stay at the resort anyway — and encounters new friends who try to help her work through the pain. While the film, directed by Katz, often captures post-breakup been-there-done-that actions (leaving far too many voicemails, crying incessantly), it never really grasps on to the heartache of it all. Ultimately, it feels a little too much like Ines and Miguel's breakup: drawn out and unresolved. —Aly Semigran (April 5, 2:30 p.m., RE; April 6, 9:30 p.m., RE)

"Dreams are impossible for people like us," says Hamid Shirzai, the champion bodybuilder at the center of Afghan Muscles, Andreas M. Dalsgaard's look into the most popular sport in one of the world's poorest, most devastated nations. And though Shirzai, who holds the title of Mr. Kabul, wants to excel on the international stage, the out-of-reach ambition he refers to is much humbler — he'd like to own his own gym. Dalsgaard places a respectful lens on competition that's often regarded with nothing but Arnold jokes, instead painting the art as a noble diversion. Though Shirzai and colleagues lack a leg up and out of the mud and rubble of modern Afghanistan, they can at least channel their frustration into molding the one thing they have complete control over — their bodies. —Drew Lazor (April 7, 5 p.m., IH)

Legendary soprano Galina Vishnevskaya doesn't sing a note as a Russian babushka visiting her grandson on the Chechnyan front in Alexander Sokurov's hazy tallying of the cost of war. Evoking the sights, sounds and even smells of freshly oiled metal and bombed-out buildings, Sokurov favors texture over topicality. (He denies political intent, although given the setting, that's hard to swallow.) Closer to the vague babble of Russian Ark than the sensuality of The Sun, Alexandra drifts without direction at times, although it's full of startling moments, as when Vishnevskaya shoulders an automatic rifle and pulls the trigger, or a group of old men gather into the shadow of a half-destroyed building, slabs of concrete dangling above their heads. —Sam Adams (April 8, 7:15 p.m., RE; April 10, 2:30 p.m., RE)

Nanette Burstein's doc plays out like a reality-show counterpart to decades of high school comedies, following a popular girl, a nerd, a jock and a self-declared "rebel" through senior year in tiny Warsaw, Ind. Burstein constructs a highly linear story out of a wealth of disparate experiences, concocting drama that can't help but feel artificial a good bit of the time. But what she does manage to capture is the students' feeling, as high school draws to a close, that those halls and classrooms are the entire world and that everything that happens in them is near-apocalyptic in importance. —Shaun Brady (April 4, 7:15 p.m., PMT; April 6, 2:30 p.m., RE)

Boy dumps girl at altar and honeymoons solo across South America, joins a motley band of explorers cutting a path through the impassable Darien Gap, and finds himself. Thomas Whelan's film uses the worst elements of low-grade porn — static and absurd plot, cheesy music, weak characterizations and frequent incongruities — as a backdrop to crudely display pretty landscapes. Clichés are flung around like discarded clothing, and montages bookend nearly every scene. Those looking for the thrill of travel will find none of it here. —Sam Tremble (April 4, 9:30 p.m., RE; April 9, 2:30 p.m., RE)

Mumblecore meets murder mystery in Jay and Mark Duplass' follow-up to The Puffy Chair. When a foursome of struggling actors (including Hannah Takes the Stairs' Greta Gerwig) retire to a remote cabin to jump-start their careers with a quickie production, they split over what kind of movie to make. As sexual tension mounts and a shadowy figure in a paper-bag mask makes fleeting appearances among the trees, it seems they may be living both angst-ridden relationship comedy and horror movie. Baghead's goofball opening makes it unlikely that anyone's going to end up gutted, but slasher-movie suspense is replaced by the tension between genres, which is, surprisingly, just as involving. —S.A. (April 4, 7:15 p.m., RE)

"Out of the dark silence, you were born in pain," begins Allen Baron's lean and vicious 1961 noir. As hate-filled hit man Frankie Bono, Baron prowls the streets of Manhattan, shadowing his mobster target while steering clear of human contact. The lack of dialogue helps Baron, who's more expressive behind the camera than in front, and makes room for narration, written by a blacklisted Waldo Salt, whose Beat brutality suggests Mickey Spillane reading Howl. (The acid-voiced reader is Lionel Stander.) Frankie's prickly run-in with childhood pals is pure hokum, but Larry Tucker (Shock Corridor's Pagliacci) has an astonishing handful of scenes as a gun-dealing sleaze who is oilier than his pet sewer rats. Scorsese picked up a few pointers on shooting Manhattan's streets from Baron's photography of the East Village and the old Penn Station, and Coppola flat-out nicked the setup for II's Clemenza hit. —S.A. (April 5, 9:30 p.m., RE; April 7, 5 p.m., TB)

This gangster flick takes place in China's roaring pre-Mao 1930s, and chronicles the journey of three men as they leave their rural lives for busy Shanghai. They soon realize that legitimate occupations aren't nearly as profitable as doing dirty work for a powerful mafioso filmmaker. Despite a slow start, Blood Brothers gives way to some graphic, Scarface-like violence, including one unlucky guy who's lit on fire, a slew of severe beatings and a machine gun massacre. Director Alexi Tan could have used a less hackneyed approach to telling the story, but it's still an entertaining take on the classic rags-to-riches-by-way-of-mafia genre. —Ptah Gabrie (April 9, 9:45 p.m., TB; April 14, 4:45 p.m., RE)

This video diary project follows two Philadelphia middle-schoolers, Ebony from North Philadelphia and Dennis from Port Richmond, through their daily lives. Mixing their own imagery with footage from Temple professor Eugene Martin (the film was done in conjunction with Temple's Media Education Lab), the 60-minute doc is a window into the sometimes joyous, sometimes harrowing lives of our city's youth. Ebony's dedicated, single mother has seemingly willed a better life for her daughter; Dennis' troubled family life seems to portend similar troubles for him. While that's the film's major — if not earth-shattering — revelation, it's a delight to see the ebullient Ebony flourish in front of the camera and the camera-shy Dennis blossom behind it. —Brian Howard (April 5, 7 p.m., IH; April 12, 2:15 p.m., PMT)

Although it proclaims emancipation, Sarah Gavron's burnished melodrama rarely breaks out of its well-worn rut. Tannishtha Chatterjee plays a Benagali woman uprooted and married off to a portly, self-satisfied countryman (Satish Kaushik) living in London. Sixteen years later, she is dewy and wistful, dreaming of the motherland as he humps away on top of her, until a handsome young Muslim (Christopher Simpson) with activism on his mind knocks on her door. The movie offers plenty of Orientalist eye candy but not much in the way of characters or texture, nor any feel for the neighborhood that gives the movie (and Monica Ali's source novel) its name. A series of last-minute reversals finally adds a few shades of gray, particularly to Kaushik's hitherto derisive caricature, but it's too little, too late. —S.A. (April 8, 7:15 p.m., RE; April 11, 5 p.m., TB)

A bitter wartime farce, California Dreamin' is the debut and swan song of Romanian Cristian Nemescu, who died six weeks after filming wrapped (and, unfortunately for his overlong movie's sake, well before editing was completed). Inspired by a real incident from the conflict in Kosovo, Nemescu's re-set story takes place near the Serbia border, where a train full of NATO troops and American troops is sidelined by an embittered small-town official. The marines, led by a surprisingly credible Armand Assante, mingle with the locals, stirring up hopes and resentments. The final turn toward violence is heavy-handed and unconvincing, but the image of the Americans leaving town, oblivious to the destruction in their wake, lingers powerfully. —S.A. (April 4, 4 p.m., RE; April 8, 6 p.m., PMT)

An opening title refers to Dead Fury as an "animated horror parody," but the excruciating 82 minutes that follow fail on all three counts. One-man crew FSudol creates a feature film out of materials that would barely pass muster on YouTube, a fan-fic retread of Evil Dead and other borrowed ideas seemingly made in an afternoon in between Xbox games. Even the most ardent gorehound will surely lose interest in the bludgeoning repetition of circular saws to the head, leaving only juvenile taunting and toilet humor penned at a sixth-grade reading level. —S.B. (April 9, 9:45 p.m., RE)

A favorite of ink-stained wretches and late-shift scribblers, Richard Brooks' 1952 newsprint noir takes place at The Day, a crusading daily imperiled by its late owner's money-grubbing heirs. Rather than take a piece of the sale price, top dog Humphrey Bogart pulls out the stops for a last-ditch attack on the city's most powerful crime boss, endangering life and livelihood at once. Unlike former copy boy Sam Fuller's Park Row, Deadline U.S.A. doesn't have much interest in the nuts and bolts of newspapering, but the movie's glistening deep-focus camerawork rivals Citizen Kane's, and Bogey's a better boss to boot. —S.A. (April 6, 4:45 p.m., R5; April 7, 2:30 p.m., TB)

Dropping the last of his hipster pretensions, Fatih Akin (Head On) makes a great leap forward with The Edge of Heaven, whose German title translates as From the Other Side. Once again he explores the complicated relationship between Germany and Turkey, here through the lens of three parent-child pairings whose lives take them across the border in both directions. Pulled by nationality, family and fate, the characters' lives intertwine tenderly and tragically, in surprising but never contrived ways. Fassbinder stalwart Hanna Schygulla gives a rich, subtle performance as a German hausfrau whose intolerance costs her dearly. —S.A. (April 5, 7 p.m., RE; April 6, 7 p.m., TB)

The mere fact that political consultants who make their living manipulating voters are willing to analyze their tactics onscreen without fear of repercussion sums up the problem with the modern electoral process. CP columnist Mary Patel and co-director Joe Barber bring the art of image-building into timely focus, using the 2006 Santorum/Casey campaign as a loose framework. The filmmakers cram in a wealth of didactic information, resulting in something that seems more read than watched. The film is mostly composed of a succession of talking heads illustrated with stock images, often too literally — though local viewers may appreciate Larry Kane bemoaning TV's "superficial coverage" accompanied by a well-labeled shot of Monica Malpass. —S.B. (April 9, 7 p.m., PMT)

Michael Selditch's Eleven Minutes chronicles Project Runway alum Jay McCarroll's frantic scramble to produce Transit, a collection of transportation-inspired clothing for New York's spring 2007 Fashion Week. Despite working with almost no money and in the unpleasant company of a flock of PR and industry bitches, McCarroll maintains his cool and sense of humor. Even when breaking down, he's charmingly self-conscious and aware of how little a patterned trench coat matters at the end of the day. He compares 11 minutes — the short time his runway show will actually take — to "a long shit" and confesses that all he wants to do in life is run a bed-and-breakfast with his boyfriend and dog. Ultimately, the film is a sweet look at the larger-than-life McCarroll, a terrifying intro to the fashion industry and 100 minutes of really beautiful clothes. —Monica Weymouth (April 5, 9:30 p.m., PMT; April 7, 5 p.m., PMT)

Suffering the twin fate of being both confusing and soporific, this droll South Korean hit will likely struggle to connect with American horror fans who like their spirits as creepy, crawly and murderously prolific as possible. Set in a Kyung Sung hospital at the height of Japanese imperialism, Epitaph's "ghosts" are really just spooked vessels for directors Jeong Beom-sik and Jeong Sik's examination of obsessive love — an intern becomes morbidly drawn to a corpse; an adolescent morbidly longs for her stepfather (then her shrink becomes morbidly obsessed with her); a husband becomes morbidly mortified because his beautiful wife has no shadow. The costumes, locations and set pieces are gorgeous throughout, but it's like flipping through a beautiful photo album from a boring vacation. —D.L. (April 9, 7:15 p.m., RE; April 10, 9:45 p.m., RE)

Funny to think that this Hong Kong actioner centered around technology is actually wireless — that is, no Uzis-blazing barrel rolls or back flips over exploding oil tankers. Drawing politely from Infernal Affairs and its anglo brother The Departed, Yau Nai-Hoi's directorial debut tracks the cat-and-mouse game between a bold jewel-thieving crew (led by a quietly sadistic Tony Leung Ka-Fai) and an undercover surveillance unit that's just welcomed a rookie code-named "Piggy" (Kate Tsui) into its ranks. Though the formulaic father-daughter bond between the sharp heroine and commanding officer "Dog Head" (Simon Yam) is government-issue cheese, Eye manages to keep you looking without an over-reliance on violence (OK, there is some) or even dialogue — the unit, which communicates mostly on micro radios, says "Roger!" so much you'll think you're at a Clemens family barbecue. —D.L. (April 9, 7:15 p.m., R5; April 13, 9:30 p.m., TB)

Going to college is more than filling out applications. For the six Philadelphia high school students profiled in First Person, a debut production from Temple educator Benjamin Herold, becoming a university freshman means beating a dysfunctional school system and avoiding the lure of the streets. The camerawork is a bit jumpy, but that's fine: Viewers instead should focus on what these kids are actually saying. In one scene, Kurtis confesses to his video diary that he's "trying to stay out of stuff, trying to keep my nose clean, but that doesn't seem like it's going to happen." While, downstairs, his mother hopes he "won't go down" that road. It's stunning to see who succeeds in the end. —Tom Namako (April 6, 9:15 p.m., IH; April 12, 4:30 p.m., IH)

The second feature from German brothers Benjamin and Dominik Reding is a road movie that never seems to go anywhere. A young ex-con joins a group embarking on the traditional journey made by craftsmen, complete with anachronistic outfits and deprivation of modern conveniences. What follows is a standard-issue redemption tale, achieved through a series of tangents. The irrelevance of many of the sub-picaresque stops are motivated by visual ideas far more than narrative ones. While several isolated images are striking, when assembled empty spectacle becomes the tail wagging an increasingly purposeless dog. —S.B. (April 5, 10 p.m., TB; April 6, 9:30 p.m., R5)

Scott Hicks' decision to concentrate on the home life of minimalist composer Philip Glass is obviously meant to break down the icy facade of Glass' famously sterile music, but occasionally lapses into trite parallels, cutting between rehearsals of a new opera and its composer taking out the garbage. Still, Hicks finds context for the artistic process in watching Glass at work, studying with spiritual mentors or interacting with family and friends. Robert Wilson's glaring absence prevents this profile from being definitive, though longtime friend and portraitist Chuck Close gets to tell the notorious Glass knock-knock joke. —S.B. (April 6, 4:30 p.m., PMT; April 8, 2:15 p.m., RE)

Taiwanese film star Lee Kang-sheng's second stint in the director's chair is a visually stunning critique of present-day Taiwan. From the opening scene in which listless bankrupt stoner Ah Jie (Lee) watches a cooking show demonstrate how to prepare fish that's still gasping as it's scaled, sliced open and plated, Help Me Eros is a bleak, neon-lit indictment of a vapid consumer culture. Full of superficial sex acts and escape-minded drug use, Lee's film is the embodiment of a downward spiral. That there's little revelation at the end isn't necessarily an indictment, but it's certainly not an endorsement. —B.H. (April 6, 9:30 p.m., TB; April 11, 5:30 p.m., RE)

The scope of Masayuki Suo's courtroom drama may seem excessive, but then so are its circumstances. Charged with groping a female high school student on a sardine-packed subway car, Ryo Kase rejects the chance to plead guilty and pay a fine, and so is thrown into a labyrinthine legal nightmare. Suo, making his first film since 1996's Shall We Dance, has been brought back by a seething sense of injustice at the Japanese court system, in which only one of a thousand defendants goes free. (More are released during the lengthy indictment process, but that would dilute Suo's polemic.) Combining the de facto presumption of guilt with the emotions inflamed by Japan's groping epidemic, the trial matches high drama with the mechanics of arm placement, until it verges on a grabass Warren Commission. Suo shoots in a calm, even style, saving a few highly effective flourishes for the movie's climax. —S.A. (April 5, 4:30 p.m., R5; April 8, 2:15 p.m., TB)

Isaiah Zagar's folksy-fractured mosaics are ubiquitous around Philly, and as his son Jeremiah captures, he dwells in a sort of world apart represented by those mirrored and tiled walls. But just as Jeremiah picks up the camera to portrait his eccentric father and his tales of a turbulent past, that world threatens to crumble at the revelation of an affair and subsequent splintering of their family. The film is an almost too-personal peek inside that process, depicted with a tender intimacy perhaps only possible with someone on the inside holding the camera. (See p. 26 for interview with Jeremiah Zagar. ) —S.B. (April 4, 7 p.m., IH; April 5, 3 p.m., RE)

The new documentary by Patrick Creadon (Wordplay) could hardly be more timely, but its scared-straight approach to debt management runs roughshod over the issues. Creadon ably lays out the facts: A skyrocketing national debt and off-kilter trade balance that his subjects predict could hollow out the U.S. within a generation. But the movie's don't-spend-what-you-ain't-got solution just replaces one dogma with another, leaving viewers shocked but unenlightened. —S.A. (April 7, 7:15 p.m., RE; April 9, 5 p.m., IH)

This controversy-courting Iranian film presents the Jesus story per the Koran, a rudimentary but fascinating document. The narrative itself is terse and anecdotal, offering glimpses of miracles and tidbits of Biblical teaching, familiar enough save for the inevitable predictions of the Prophet to come. Director Nader Talebzadeh offers two endings, one the Christian crucifixion, the other based on the Islamic version, wherein Judas is transformed and takes Christ's place on the cross. But the film depicts Jesus' Jewish persecutors with a vehemence that might give Mel Gibson pause, hatching murderous plots with the dogged persistence and glowering greed of Wile E. Coyote. —S.B. (April 4, 4:45 p.m., R5; April 5, noon, TB; April 7, 5 p.m., R5)

Joaquin Sullivan escaped from a cult. As he recalls for Ondi Timoner's sobering, sometimes sentimental documentary, he left South Carolina's Mountain Rock Church. The film begins after his reunion with his wife and child at Ohio's Wellspring Retreat, where counselors help families confront their participation in cults, in this case including physical abuse of their children by Pastor Raimund Melz. Footage of these sessions is cut into home-movie images of their time at Mountain Rock, dancing, praying and seeking "purity." Expert witnesses frame cults within the desire to separate church and state, but Melz and his wife provide the most chilling interviews — denying, apologizing and asserting their righteousness. —Cindy Fuchs (April 5, 7:15 p.m., RE; April 6, 12:15 p.m., RE)

Toshio Masuda's 1967 obscurity (also known as Velvet Hustler) is a bizarre and baffling creation, a candy-colored underworld thriller whose hit man hero literally whistles while he works. Following the story, which brings a fugitive Tokyo gangster to the gritty port town of Kobe, is a fool's errand, but the eye-popping visuals and left-field musical numbers are too dizzying to be dismissed. —S.A. (April 5, 7:30 p.m., TB)

Writer-director Kirt Gunn's debut ladles on the grad-school quirk, skipping among three parallel stories that weave between equally insufferable reality and fiction. An author's decision to kill off one of her characters, half of a pair of underwear-clad brothers who fish for cereal from a landlocked ship, forces him into the real world where he meets up with a depressed car salesman (Reg Rogers, in the film's only performance that manages to dig humanity from eccentricity). As if the scenario weren't precious enough, Gunn coats it with indie-rock ditties, making a batch of Stephin Merritt tunes feel like sugar on Frosted Flakes. —S.B. (April 6, 2:30 p.m., R5; April 7, 7:15 p.m., R5)

From the opening shot circling star Àlex Brendemühl, confusedly exploring a deserted Majorcan square, director Rafa Cortés sets a pattern of disorientation and claustrophobia that he takes no steps to relieve. Hans is a handyman just arrived in this tiny, underpopulated town, where his mysteriously absent predecessor and namesake is on everyone's mind, to a variety of effects. This withdrawn replacement's attempts to fill those multipurpose shoes leads to an unsettling meditation on identity. Cortés is adept at building and sustaining this disquieting mood, even if it does overpower the slim narrative. —S.B. (April 4, 6:45 p.m., RE; April 6, 4:30 p.m., TB)

Barry Jenkins' film begins the morning after a drunken one-night stand, as two San Francisco hipsters wander the streets and examine each other's quirky personalities. For 90 minutes of mostly real time, the camera captures every awkward moment these strangers endure. On the surface, it's a love story, but Medicine also touches on racial and gender roles, albeit without much success. The subtle undertones are mostly lost in the massive amount of snooze-inducing chit-chat, and race becomes a brief topic of conversation only after the pair are trashed and ordering tacos from a sidewalk cart. —P.G. (April 6, 7 p.m., RE; April 7, 5 p.m., RE)

Russian director Sergei Bodrov's Young Genghis Khan Chronicles is a Mongolian Braveheart, a worshipful account that finds childhood traumas at the root of the Mongol Empire. Temudgin, the future Khan, is depicted from the age of 9 to about 30, shown to be a benevolent leader, loyal family man and ardent romantic who may not have come to such greatness if his rivals had just stopped messing with his chick. Bodrov shoots with appropriately epic sweep and chest-thumping rallies, but no surprises. —S.B. (April 4, 9:15 p.m., RE; April 6, noon, R5)

Bille Eltringham's zany trip back to the 1960s follows a British family that relocates to East Berlin in hopes of experiencing the joys of communism. Once there, the somber conditions and constant threat of arrest encourage the mousy Mrs. Ratcliffe (Catherine Tate) to stand up to the German police for her family's freedoms and help several youths escape over the Berlin Wall. The branding "comedy" is generous for this film, which mostly relies on minor stunts and slapstick humor to get laughs. It has its moments (like Mrs. Ratcliffe's 17-year-old daughter liberating her conservative art class with hippie music), but they're few and far between, and the ending is disappointingly abrupt and unbelievable. —Nadia Stadnycki (April 5, 9:45 p.m., R5; April 7, 4:45 p.m., RE; April 8, 7 p.m., BMFI)

A disappointing follow-up to Uniform, Diao Yinan's second feature goes past minimalism into obscurity. Widowed executioner Liu Dan lives in a lonely world, surrounded by traces of sex and romance but unable to find some for herself. The criminals she cares for and then kills are mainly wronged women who took revenge on their abusers. The portrayal of China's justice system offers flashes of interest, but the movie is so intent on implying plot rather than showing it that just following along saps most of your effort. —S.A. (April 4, 9:30 p.m., TB; April 8, 5 p.m., RE)

Volker Einruach's chilling film focuses on the parents of two suburban families, the Morells and Wagners, whose friendship is characterized by competition, liquor binges and an inability to share their true feelings. When the extroverted, tyrannical son of the Wagners persuades the passive, desperate son of the Morells (Willi Gerk, in a commanding yet nearly silent performance) into committing a serious crime, the latter's parents rush to cover up his mess, and a new question must be asked: Do parents destroy their children, or do children destroy their parents? —Alexis Apfelbaum (April 4, 9:30 p.m., R5; April 9, 5 p.m., R5)

Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori's doc chronicles the history of the female orgasm and the journey of one of women's best friends, the vibrator, from its origins as a late-19th-century medical device (used to treat hysteria) to its present-day taboo status. Interpersed with fun facts, a mix of entertaining, liberated ladies (including sexologist Betty Dodson) talk about everything from their favorite toys to stupid sex laws to the civil rights movement. Although the effect-heavy editing is excessive and distracting, the film eases sex discussion wide open in a comfortable and honest way. —N.S. (April 5, 9:30 p.m., IH)

When a young girl (Elle Fanning) starts exhibiting strange behavior, mom Felicity Huffman struggles to decide whether tough love or empathy is the best solution. Wacky drama teacher Patricia Clarkson encourages the child's eccentric tendencies, but the consequences grow more severe as her condition develops. Daniel Barnz's debut is meat-and-potatoes melodrama, but of a highly effective kind, inducing thoughts as well as sobs. —S.A. (April 6, 7 p.m., PMT; April 9, 7 p.m., BMFI)

Billed as Denmark's answer to Robert Rodriguez, director Shaky Gonzalez's got promise, but Pistoleros isn't polished enough to be considered anything more than a fan letter to the chicks, quips and clips genre. Framed as a tale relayed secondhand by a street thug to an eager director and producer, the action concerns a fortune hidden away by Copenhagen thug Frank Lowies (Erik Holmey) and the cryptic set of tattooed clues that the whole gang, from Lowies' roughneck sons (Daniell Edwards and Dennis Haladyn) to his high-on-gunsmoke partner Ramirez (Hector Vega Mauricio), tries to follow to payday. There are legit chunks of jumbo-lump humor floating around in this stew, but the amateur nature of Gonzalez's many, many shootout scenes is simply incongruous with reverent fanboy elements like a Morricone-inspired score. —D.L. (April 4,5 p.m., PMT; April 5, 2:45 p.m., PMT; April 10, 9:30 p.m., RE)

Leslie Iwerks' history starts off like a subservient featurette, but grows teeth when it gets into Pixar's love-hate relationship with the Walt Disney Corporation (which, not incidentally, took decades to acknowledge Iwerks' father, Ub's, pivotal role in creating Mickey Mouse). Most intriguing are the tales of Toy Story and its sequel. The former was almost destroyed by Jeffrey Katzenberg's order to make it "edgy" (an idea that has subsequently given us the likes of Madagascar and Over the Hedge), and the second was whipped up in an astonishing nine months after early attempts fizzled. The movie stops short of Ratatouille, but the idyllic portrait of Pixar's corporate culture will turn office drones the color of Shrek. —S.A. (April 5, 5 p.m., PMT; April 6, 2:30 p.m., TB)

Kazuya Yamada's documentary about a young Mongolian girl whom Japanese explorer Yoshiharu Sekino discovered on a bike trek across the world can be excruciatingly slow and its production values frustratingly rudimentary (the plateau winds wreak havoc on the cameras). But Puujee's story of a 6-year-old who tends the family's herd while her father is in Ulaanbaatar working in the new free-market economy and her mother is off chasing down horse thieves is as inspiring as it is heartbreaking. Though the film can be ploddingly chronological, the landscapes are breathtaking, and the window on a vanishing way of life spellbinding. —B.H. (April 5, 7 p.m., PMT; April 8, 5 p.m., IH)

Leopold Grün's doc is the second attempt to tell the story of Colorado crooner turned Marxist folkie-in-exile Dean Reed onscreen. The first, Will Roberts' 1985 American Rebel, was released a year before Reed's apparent suicide by drowning, so Red Elvis should benefit from 20 years' reflection. But there's precious little perspective to be found in this disorganized compilation of impressions, which fails to sort out the question of Reed's motivation — idealist, radical or opportunist? Still, the sight of a Pat Boone-coiffed pretty-boy signing autographs in Red Square or raising Kalashnikovs with Arafar can't fail to astound. —S.B. (April 4, 7:15 p.m., TB; April 7, 7 p.m., RE)

Premièred under a pseudonym to give director Claude Lelouch some breathing room after the midstream failure of an ambitious trilogy, Roman de gare is preoccupied with questions of authorship, and the notion that pleasing surfaces are not inimical to deeper content. Fanny Ardant plays a mystery novelist on the verge of a transition to "serious" literature, but her reputation is jeopardized when the pedophile who may have been ghost-writing her books (Dominique Pinon) breaks out of prison. Lelouch's jaunt through metafilm territory is lightweight, as flashy and false as the magic tricks Pinon uses to lure his victims, but there's every sign Lelouch means it to be so. —S.A. (April 5, noon, R5; April 9, 9:30 p.m., R5)

Spain is so cool, with its beaches, cheap table wines and Almodovar films. How quickly we forget that it was a fascist dictatorship for more than 40 years. José Manuel González's directorial debut is here to remind us that it wasn't all fun and games and tapas. Set in a mental institution, the film introduces us to a series of inmates, each of whom represent a segment of society uncomfortable or inconvenient for the Franco regime and its supporters to deal with. The love that develops between inmates Lola and Mateo pushes the boundaries of the institution that houses them; will they bend, break or escape? —Joel Tannenbaum (April 7, 7 p.m., BMFI; April 8, 7 p.m., R5; April 10, 2:30 p.m., TB)

Robb Moss and Peter Gallison's documentary is an essential and eye-opening look at the growth of government secrecy in the post-WWII U.S. Using visuals inspired by their Cambridge neighbor Errol Morris, Moss and Gallison interview ex-intelligence agents and free-information absolutists, evaluating the pragmatic purposes of covert ops as well as their collateral fallout. Ex-CIA bureau chief Melissa Mehle makes the case for black-bag interrogations with alarming clarity; however you feel about her rationale, the lack of doubletalk is disarmingly honorable. The movie's biggest bombshell is historical, revealing that the privilege to act in secret has been abused from the start, and yielding a surprise Philadelphia connection, to boot. —S.A. (April 8, 9:15 p.m., PMT; April 13, 4:45 p.m., RE)

Raucous and scattershot to the point of exhaustion, Thai director Taweewat Wantha's sci-fi comedy plays like the Farrelly Brothers remaking David Cronenberg. It never actually settles down long enough to be funny, but the throw-everything-at-the-wall audacity rockets through a story that hinges on masturbation, Japanese porn, mad scientists, aliens, giant slackers and inflatable henchwomen. Beneath all that is a standard teen-comedy sweetness, only with its volume set to heavy metal intensity. —S.B. (April 8, 9:30 p.m., TB; April 13, 9:30 p.m., R5)

Zipping through the life of filmmaker and gimmick-meister William Castle in a scant 78 minutes, Jeffrey Schwarz manages to provide an exhaustive account at a brisk, ever-grinning pace that its subject surely would have appreciated. Each of Castle's patented "processes," from Emergo to Percepto, are covered, with gleeful firsthand recollections by the likes of John Waters and Joe Dante. Even Marcel Marceau is on hand to recall his involvement in Castle's final film, the mind-boggling horror fairy tale Shanks. Castle's life was seemingly as audacious and free of complications as his films, which makes this straightforward bio just as goofy and enjoyable. —S.B. (April 8, 9:30 p.m., IH; April 12, 4:45 p.m., BB)

Something like the bastard spawn of Russian cult hit Night Watch and your favorite childhood trauma movie, Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein's 2005 Swedish hit practically jumps off the screen begging to be remade into an American CGI-fest starring some mop-top lady killer like Jim Sturgess. Donny "DD" Davidsson (Eric Ericson, also alliterative) is a jaded journalist, approaching everything with the slouched malaise of an urban too-cool-for-schooler. Things change when the mysterious, ridiculous Lova (Eva Rose) shows up brandishing a Marcellus'-suitcase-like metal box and warns she's being hunted for it. What follows is a trippy adventure into DD's messed-up past that plays hopscotch with space, time and the prophetic panels of a graphic novel. Conceptually a true original, but too many long walks without major payoffs prevent it from fully coalescing. —D.L. (April 5, 2:30 p.m., TB; April 7, 9:45 p.m., PMT; April 13, 9:30 p.m., RE)

Inspired by, and likely travestying, a real incident, the latest from Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) sends homeless Stephen Rea flying through wayward Mena Suvari's windshield. Or rather halfway through, where he stays lodged in Suvari's garage while she frets over her next move. There ought to be some traction to a dark comedy about self-interest trumping accountability, but Gordon merely thumps at the same point for an hour and a half, forcing Suvari into shrill caricature until you're wishing someone would run her over, too. —S.A. (April 5, 10 p.m., RE)

Like Stand By Me with a Welsh accent, Julian Richards' film is of the outcast-friends-bonding-in-the-woods variety, only everyone calls each other "wanker" instead of "asshole." And rather than trying to find a dead body before some guy named Eyeball gets to it, they're mostly just screwing around, being teenagers. But upon encountering a stranger who is not who he says he is, singular characters emerge amid the tension (if only briefly). Among them are the martyr, peacemaker, coward, protector, hasty hero — all powerful ideas worthy of character development. But without sufficient backstories to enrich these ideas, Summer Scars is uncomplex: It's just a story about friends in the woods who run into some trouble. —Carolyn Huckabay (April 6, noon, PMT; April 12, 2:45, RE; April 13, PMT)

Better take a friend to this Chinese curiosity; without backup, explaining the plot could get you locked away. Set both at the end of the Cultural Revolution and in 1958, although not explicitly and not in that order, Jiang Wen's dizzy-headed fable takes on a welter of romantic tangles and familial secrets, filmed in a hyperkinetic pop-art style that makes Moulin Rouge look like Bresson. It's a tough going, although visuals captured by a power trio of ace cinematographers (including In the Mood for Love's Mark Lee Ping-bin) light up the pleasure centers. —S.A. (April 7, 9:15 p.m., RE; April 11, 2:30 p.m., TB)

Swiss director Jacob Berger's film follows the intermingling story of an extramarital affair and a hit-and-run accident told through the points of view of a husband, his wife and their inquisitive young son. Is everything happening simply a bad dream? Is the boy living vicariously through his reckless parents or is it vice versa? The film leaves the answers up to you, ultimately playing out something like American Beauty — a mix of haunting, heartbreaking and creepy. —A.S. (April 9, 5 p.m., RE; April 11, 3 p.m., RE)

Holocaust survivor, talk-show fixture and grade-A kook, Theodore Gottlieb was a wild-haired visionary who sold out halls in the 1950s but has since drifted into obscurity. Sadly, you'll learn almost none of that from Jeff Sumerel's documentary, an unwatchable soup of degraded video clips and voice-over interviews. Perhaps trying to emulate his subject's mercurial wit, Sumerel blends Theodore's performances from varying eras and venues, but he never stops long enough to provide a clear sense of what his subject did — an infuriating omission, given that the likes of Woody Allen, Eric Bogosian and Dick Cavett testify to his status as a performance artist avant la lettre. Brother Theodore deserves rediscovery, but you'd be better off surfing YouTube. —S.A. (April 5, 9:15 p.m., PMT)

Emily Hubley's feature debut is a family affair, with animation influenced by her parents, Faith and John, and music by her sister Georgia's band, Yo La Tengo. And it feels like something nurtured rather than constructed. A whimsical meditation on the healing power of art, Toe Tactic feels like flipping through a sketchbook, with nuggets of meaning emerging from the accumulated force of ideas. The family's connections are evident in the cast list, which includes Eli Wallach, John Sayles, Robyn Hitchcock and Don Byron in person or as the voices of the animated creatures playing a game via intervention in the live-action world. —S.B. (April 5, 12:30 p.m., RE; April 6, 6:45 p.m., IH)

What do you get when you put together an elderly Jewish lady and an elderly Muslim lady? In Philippe Faucon's sweet but forgettable film, you get a teensy bit of tension that resolves itself too easily. At first, the women are naturally weary of each other, complicated by the fact that the Muslim is working as a personal chef for the anger-prone, wheelchair-bound Jew. That their lifelong prejudices quickly give way to friendship feels unforgivably phony. Little misunderstandings about, say, mixing milk and meat, blow over after a discussion, but the bigger differences — like, how they hate each other's people — are never dealt with at all. All the stickiest issues seem to vanish the moment they meet. —Tami Fertig (April 7, 2:30 p.m., R5; April 10, 7 p.m., BMFI)

While it's nice to see perennial supporting character Richard Jenkins make the most of a rare opportunity to take the lead, Thomas McCarthy's follow-up to The Station Agent is equal parts dewy-eyed sentiment and heavy-handed political polemic. The meeting of Jenkins' paragon of white upper-middle-class stagnation and the Syrian/Senegalese couple occupying his Manhattan apartment takes a series of condescendingly liberal turns. But even as voices are raised and fists pounded at the injustice of U.S. immigration policy, Jenkins gets a shot at midlife romance, reminding us that nothing's so important as the white man's resurrection. —S.B. (April 5, 7:15 p.m., R5)

Any movie that features a character masturbating to a picture of Voltaire deserves at least a shred of your attention. So's the case with Who Is KK Downey?, a Canadian romp that fancies itself to be a skewering of artists and their goddamned art. Theo (Matt Silver) can't sell Truckstop Hustler, a "fictional" tale of a grizzled male prostitute, so Terrance (co-writer/director Darren Curtis) agrees to costume up as protagonist Downey to lend the book realism, all the while hoping to win back ex Sue (Kristin Adams). Though some of the characters are painfully stupid (does Sue really not realize that KK is just Terrance with sunglasses and a hat on?) and the film's take on hipster cultism is dated (what, no bloggers?), well-spun dialogue and some spot-on lampoonery make it a generally watchable affair. —D.L. (April 7, 9:30 p.m., RE; April 9, 5:15 p.m., RE)

The idea of senior citizens belting out modern rock songs is another hideous manifestation of the sidelining of the elderly as cute and disconnected. British filmmaker Stephen Walker takes an equally condescending approach, aw-shucksing at the Young@Heart chorus' efforts and nearly baby-talking through interviews. But simply by virtue of following this group through a season's rehearsal period, Walker can't help but capture the reality of these seniors' situation, where the music, as alien to them as Sonic Youth and Talking Heads may be, is secondary to the social aspect in lives not yet over, despite assumptions to the contrary. —S.B. (April 3, 6 and 8:30 p.m., PMT)

At very least, there is truth in titling. Eleven twentysomethings go through six stages of sex, from foreplay to orgasm to afterglow. Unfortunately, it's not good for viewers. Despite some cute topless women — who act hornier than the guys — and blandly attractive depantsed men, none of Martin Gero's movie is erotic. Its point, of course, is not about sex, but about partners communicating. However, the characters are whiny and unlikable, and much of the dialogue is lame and unconvincing. Perhaps the only smile to be had is when one character admits — as her husband goes down on her — that she fantasizes about Ian Ziering. What the fuck, indeed. —Gary M. Kramer (April 7, 9:30 p.m., IH; April 12, 2:15 p.m., PMT)

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