To be released tomorrow on DVD

For the lovers of Indian films — and they number in the hundreds of millions — the coming of Raavan held the promise of celebration: Holi and Diwali in one blast of musical drama. Its creator, Mani Ratnam, is the subcontinent’s premier writer-director, though he usually works in his home town of Madras, and in the Tamil language, not in Hindi Mumbai, a.k.a. Bollywood. The movie’s stars, Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai, are Indian cinema’s golden couple: he the son of superstar Amitabh Bachchan, she the former Miss World made her film debut in Ratnam’s Iruvar in 1997. The music director is A.R. Rahman, a Ratnam discovery whose infectious melodies in more than 100 films have made him, by some accounts, the world’s best-selling recording artist. Rahman won two Oscars for his Slumdog Millionaire score.

In 2007 this eminent quartet collaborated on the popular, well-received Guru, a fictionalized biopic of the Indian plutocrat Dhirubhai Ambani. (Abhishek and Aishwarya, known everywhere as Abhi and Ash, fell in love on the set and were married shortly after the opening.) The new film would be a modern retelling of The Ramayana, the beloved Sanskrit epic about the kidnapping of Sita, wife of the monarch Rama, by the demon king Ravana; Bachchan would play the kidnapper, Rai the abductee and the Tamil star Vikram her husband. Filmed in three versions — Hindi (as Raavan), Tamil (as Raavanan) and Telegu (as Villain) — and released June 18 on 2,200 screens around the world, including 109 in the United.States, the picture had all the makings of a critical success and international hit.

Except it wasn’t. The local reviews ranged from disappointed to scathing (though the few American critics were more indulgent). The film’s global opening weekend take, of about $11.6 million, fell far below that of the recent Indian hits 3 Idiots, My Name Is Khan (see below) and Kites. Film fans were soon jamming the Internet to express derision toward Raavan and complain about Bachchan’s outsize acting style. So noisome was the tumult that on June 20, two days after the opening, Papa Amitabh took to Twitter to blame his son’s character’s “erratic behaviour” on the director’s vigorous editing style: “Lot of merited film edited out, causing inconsistent performance and narrative.” Ratnam tweeted back, “Amitji should have conveyed me whatever he wanted to say, he has my cell no.” One of India’s all-time top film stars and its greatest living auteur were dissing each other like sophomore cheerleaders in a Facebook snit.

So how is the movie? Well, Raavan — the Hindi version, being released on DVD — is better than you’d be led to think by all the outrage; it’s just not up to the director’s high standard. It begins with a vibrant chaos of images, as Rahman’s ultra-catchy tune Beera Beera (listen to it on YouTube) accentuates the propulsive pace. The movie boasts some impressive stunt work, as the stars or their stunt doubles slide down rock faces, drop through tree branches and navigate a giant waterfall. The best action scene takes place on a rickety footbridge with the purported hero dangling over a ravine, his life literally in the hand of the purported villain. At the end, the film ventures into the territory of ethical ambiguity. But in between are wastes of creaky incident without much enriching of character or plot. And the central performance by Bachchan is either a bold stab at thespic immortality or an essay in grotesque derangement. Maybe both.

A region troubled by insurgency gets a new chief inspector: Dev (Vikram), accompanied by his faithful wife Ragini (Rai). In short order, Ragini is kidnapped by the legendary rebel Beera (Bachchan) and held for 14 days — as opposed to the 14 years of the queen’s captivity in The Ramayana — while she juggles her hatred for Beera with a growing sympathy. In a flashback, we learn that Beera has abducted Ragini in retaliation for the long-ago abuse suffered by his beloved stepsister Jamuniya (Priyamani) at the hands of the local police. Meanwhile, in his desperate search for Ragini, Dev finds an ally in the forest guard Sanjeevani (Govinda). While on the wooden bridge, Den and Beera finally clash, but what seems like the movie’s climax is just where it starts to get interesting.

While Raavan may not be not up there with Nayakan, Roja, Bombay and Dil Se, it’s very recognizably a Mani Ratnam film. His work often touches on controversial real-life figures (Mafia bosses, revolutionaries) and incendiary political issues (terrorist kidnappings, the Bombay riots of 1992-93, the Sri Lankan war), and Raavan is no exception. Ahbishek’s Beera, while clearly a version of “The Ramayana’s Ravana” character, is also reputed to be partially based on Kobad Ghandy, a Maoist leader of the ongoing Naxalite insurgency in northern India.

One big difference: Ghandy is a well-educated, world-traveled theoretician; Beera is a primitive warrior. Bachchan plays him as a creature of wild gestures and grimaces, ever slapping his cranium and making chaka-chaka-chaka grunts, with a flashing of clenched teeth not seen since Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster had their showdown at the O.K. Corral. It’s a performance both feral and mopey, as if Sly Stallone had taken a crash course in the Stanislavski method before going into the jungle to play Rambo. And when Beera holds Ragini captive, the unmistakable point of reference is the fable of Beauty and the Beast. To put it in movie-monster terms, she is Faye Wray and he the Ramayana King Kong.

What’s odd is the lack of chemistry between kidnapper and victim, considering that the actors who play them are husband and wife. The love story the audience expects to develop has no hint of physical or even emotional intimacy. That’s partly because the clash of acting styles is as large as the chasm separating Ragini and Beera and partly because Rai, while easy to look at, lacks the spark of a natural performer. In Guru, Abhishek had said moonily to Aishwarya, “You shine as beautifully as polyester,” and Rai is always a fairly synthetic actress. The genuine screen charisma here is provided by the Tamil ingénue Priyamani, who invests the supporting role of Beera’s stepsister with a flirtatious charm during her bridal scene, then aching despair when the police violate her on her wedding night. And for the film’s core emotional connection, you must look to the relationship of the stalwart policeman Dev and his loving wife Ragini.

The movie looks terrific. This bucolic melodrama is set in some of India’s most spectacular natural settings, including Kerala’s Athirappilly Falls (which Ratnam also used in Iruvar and Guru), the lush hills of Malshej Ghat near Mumbai and the forests of Karnataka. Cinematographer Santosh Sivan contrasts the lushness of nature with Beera’s monochromatic mud war paint and the chalk-smeared faces of his followers, similar to the camouflage daubs worn by Martin Sheen and the Vietnamese natives in Apocalypse Now. In familiar Ratnam fashion, the camera often does 360-degree wind sprints around the actors. When the director creates a compelling fictional universe in other films, his camerabatics express the turbulence of characters in extremis. Here, the whirling technique is a case of going nowhere fast.

As a showcase for some of Indian cinema’s most renowned talents, Raavan has to be considered a disappointment. But as a 2010 epic about a forest bandit, hey — it’s better than the Russell Crowe Robin Hood. And, thanks to A.R. Rahman’s infectious songs, this one you can dance to. Grade: B

Welcome (2010) The subject of Philippe Lioret’s compelling social drama is about those who are not — welcome, that is. The bitter irony of the title is evident from first to last in the story of a young Kurd who aims to swim to England and the swimming instructor who tries to help him get there. The movie hit French screens trailing clouds of controversy after a government minister complained of its sympathetic view of illegal immigrants and those who give them aid or shelter. But Lioret hangs his polemic on a strong, simple story line that will engage viewers and appeal even to those who take a more restrictive view than the filmmaker on such issues. Lioret is able to achieve a seamless blend of the domestic and the social — the hopeless situation of the immigrants is portrayed with near-documentary realism — thanks to an impressive performance by Vincent Lindon as the instructor, whose characteristic shamble and hangdog expression have rarely been put to better use. Laurent Dailland’s nighttime photography evokes the limbo in which the unwelcome visitors exist, while the contained performances and the sobriety of the score remind us that these are individual destinies at stake. The movie offers no simple solutions, nor even a feel-good ending, but throws a cold light on the human tragedy that underlies many of today’s headlines. Grade: B-minus

Date Night (2010) Steve Carell and Tina Fey team up for an adventure that turns a run-of-the-mill married couple’s date upside down. When you’ve got two of TV’s funniest performers front and center, you don’t need much to make things click. So some of Date Night’s best moments are simply Fey and Carell quipping, deadpanning or bantering, often all at the same time. And the duo are fine in the movie’s early, bored-with-their-lives moments. The trouble is, too much of director Shawn Levy’s ‘80s-ish lark is filled with noise, when it really needed more quietly silly stuff. Through it all, Carell and Fey are charming and sly and even manage to be genteel while bumping and grinding through a strip-club routine. Neither of them are joke hogs; as in their previous big-screen efforts, they’re happy to toss laughs back and forth (this should, however, be as high-concept as Carell gets — meaning, no more Get Smart shtick). The two of them absolutely work. It’s just a shame they’re all dressed up with nowhere to go. Grade: C-plus

The Joneses (2010) The Joneses (Demi Moore, David Duchovny, Amber Heard and Ben Hollingsworth) are rich, beautiful and seem to be the perfect family. There’s only one slight problem. They’re not actually a family, but a team of stealth marketers which moves into upscale communities in order to hook the neighbors on all its wonderful toys. Writer-director Derrick Borte has a dark vision of maxed-out 21st-century suburbia where advertising is not only inescapable, but the essential fabric that bonds friends and family. What he lacks is follow-through. The perverse dynamic within the fake family — the “daughter” unprofessionally slips into bed with daddy — gives the early scenes a satiric cold-bloodedness the film gradually fritters away. Borte also succeeds, for a time, in making the family’s lifestyle seem convincingly seductive: Why wouldn’t potential consumers be enticed by the products and gadgets that are bringing happiness to this impossibly glamorous bunch? The inevitable breakdown on this commercial façade might have led the movie into more disturbing territory, but Borte goes the other direction, away from jagged comedy and toward well-meaning homilies. Grade: C

Death at a Funeral (2010) A day in the life of an American family coming together to put a beloved husband and father to rest. Possibly setting a speed record for a remake, this movie takes a sporadically funny, little-seen 2007 British slapstick comedy and faithfully restages it with a B-list American cast. Both versions were written by Britain’s Dean Craig, who has basically changed only the dialogue for the California-set remake, efficiently if impersonally directed by playwright-director Neil LaBute with an ensemble headed by a relatively restrained Chris Rock and Martin Lawrence. It’s because of a superior cast that this version is the rare comedy remake that’s funnier than the original, however slightly. Personally, though, I’m not sure it was worth the effort. Grade: C

My Name Is Khan (2010) Rizwan Khan (Shahrukh Khan), a Muslim man with Asperger syndrome, lives happily with his wife, Mandira (Kajol), in San Francisco until a tragedy drives her away after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Now he is on a quest to recapture her heart. Traveling across America, Rizwan faces prejudice because of his religion and unusual behavior, but he also inspires the people he meets with his unique outlook on life. This is a very average, ordinary film that goes haywire. Racial biases, the aftermath of 9/11 and the war on terror are dicey topics to handle in real life, let alone on celluloid, and director Karan Johar oversimplifies the issues. The film is on a large scale and beautifully shot, but the story doesn’t live up to even half of that. The director cannot seem to decide whether he is making a love story, telling the story of a man’s journey or making a statement on the biases that pervaded the United States after 9/11. Words like jihad, 9/11 and Al Qaeda are thrown around without context. Khan’s actions seem contrived and out of line with the story. A lot of the supposed emotional moments seem gimmicky. The acting suffers as a result. Any film that underestimates its audiences and dumbs down its content is letting itself in for a failure. This is a huge disappointment. Grade: C

La Mission (2010) This was clearly a labor of love for the Bratt brothers: Peter wrote and directed it, Benjamin is the star, and both took a producer’s credit. They were born in San Francisco in the early 1960s, and the film conveys an intense nostalgia for the Mission District of their youth. The garage of Che Rivera (Benjamin Bratt), a bus driver, ex-con and middle-aged low rider, is a shrine to the post-hippie, pre-gentrification 1970s: César Chávez, Clint Eastwood, Vito Corleone, Alcoholics Anonymous, Chicano culture, the Stylistics. The distinguished cinematographer Hiro Narita (Never Cry Wolf) captures the hard San Francisco light and the burnished glow of the beautifully painted cars. Unfortunately, this care is lavished on an overwrought, predictable story of an angry ethnic father: Che discovers that his son, Jesse (Jeremy Ray Valdez), is gay, and he spends the rest of the movie hitting things, including the bottle, until he has an epiphany with the help of an Aztec ceremony. Bratt, so good as a conflicted, self-effacing drug counselor in the recently canceled television series The Cleaner, is less assured as the macho hipster Che, strutting around the neighborhood saying, “Check you later” and “Where the party people at?” Peter Bratt does his brother no favors: at the height of the father-son conflict, Che actually declares, “You’re dead to me.” Erika Alexander lends some dignity to the film as the new neighbor who catches Che’s roving eye. Grade: C

The Good Heart (2010) Why are people still making movies so beholden to creaky indie formulas? You could spend all of this film counting cliches, from the melancholy score and bleached-out tone to the quirky characters and painfully predictable conclusion. Brian Cox is Jacques, the cranky New Yorker with an unreliable ticker, while Paul Dano is Lucas, the homeless waif who teaches him to love. Together, along with French beauty Isild Le Besco, they run Jacques’ bar, planning for the day when Lucas will inherit it. Dagur Kari both wrote and directed, so he has no one else to blame for so little originality. Neither does his hard-working cast, all of whom deserve better. Grade: C-minus

Multiple Sarcasms (2010) It’s no accident that the unhappy architect played by Timothy Hutton in this 1979-set movie spends his weekday afternoons at the Cinema Village playing hooky, repeatedly watching a big film from that year, Starting Over. That film features what is arguably Burt Reynolds’ best performance, as a newly divorced man in what was a response to feminist films such as An Unmarried Woman. Hutton, who won an Oscar for 1980's Ordinary People, does fine work in Multiple Sarcasms as a man whose marriage is coming apart during his mid-life crisis. But the movie itself shows how stories like Starting Over have devolved since they were abandoned by major studios for threadbare, navel-gazing indies like this one. First-time filmmaker Brooks Branch underutilizes an estimable cast in a movie that basically sums itself up in a line of dialogue: “I love you, I really do, but this f---ing whiny white-guy s--t has got to stop.” It doesn’t. Not after Hutton, fired from his job, locks himself in the bathroom with his typewriter — and his fed-up wife Dana Delany (almost as chilly as Candace Bergen in Starting Over) flees with their precocious daughter (India Ennenga). It continues when Hutton, despite warnings from his gay male best friend (Mario Van Peebles), makes a pass at his longtime platonic female best friend (Mira Sorvino). It seems unlikely that Hutton’s loser will ever complete a play he’s been working on, and even more improbable that his agent (Stockard Channing) will find someone to produce it. Multiple Sarcasms happens to be the title of the play within the movie, and it turns out to be by far the most interesting thing in the film. Not that many people will want to suffer through the first 90 minutes of this vanity production to get there. Grade: D

Letters to God (2010) Christian filmmaking takes a turn for the worst with this treacle-y tale “inspired” by the true story of an 8-year-old boy fighting brain cancer who carries on a pen-and-paper correspondence with God. An alcoholic, substitute postman retrieves them and finds his own life transformed in the process. Basically a cinematic infomercial for the power of prayer, Letters to God is far too simplistic and pandering to find success outside of the targeted church-going family DVD renters/buyers it’s hoping to reach. Decent cash register receipts can be expected from this sector but the collection plate may be empty otherwise. Tyler Doherty (Tanner Maguire) is a spirited young man plagued with brain cancer and forced to endure endless chemotherapy sessions. His faith and ability to express his thoughts in letters addressed simply to “God” are what gets him through the experience and also eventually have a profound effect on those around him, including a part-time divorced postal worker, Brady McDaniels (Jeffrey S. Johnson), who hits the local bar when he’s not delivering mail and finds his life a mess as a result of his alcoholism. On top on his other problems he learns he is now going to lose any rights to see his son after a near-fatal traffic accident and DUI lands him in hot water. His encounters with Tyler and his letters give him a respite from the Jack Daniels and seem to have a life-changing effect on him as he grows closer to Tyler’s family and especially his widowed mom (Robyn Lively), who has a series of problems of her own including Tyler’s illness and the neglect of her older teenaged son, Ben (Michael Christopher Bolten). After a number of incidents provide the film’s desperately needed sense of drama, Brady finds a way to energize the entire community by turning Tyler’s letters into positive action. First time co-writer and co-director Patrick Doughtie used his own personal experience with the death of his-10-year old son (to whom the film is dedicated) to weave this tale of hope and faith in God and religion during the most trying times of life. While the effort is certainly laudable and understandably cathartic it’s also (sadly) a real slog for us viewers. The film’s whitebread suburban setting is so hopelessly old-fashioned and homogenized you’d swear Beaver Cleaver must live right down the street. Unlike other more sophisticated recent Christian movie successes like Fireproof with Kirk Cameron there is no complexity to these characters at all and the relentless pitch for prayer as the answer to all life’s problems is laid on like molasses. Under the circumstances performances are okay, with Greg Kinnear look-a-like Johnson and Lively getting the lions share of the big emotional breakdown scenes. Maguire does fine along with ever-smiling best friend Samantha, played by the delightful Bailee Madison (Brothers). Veterans Marie Cheeatham as Grandma and Ralph Waite don’t have much to do but offer bumper sticker platitudes or sit around on the front porch playing checkers. It’s that kind of movie. And you thought they didn’t make ‘em like this anymore. Grade: D

To be released tomorrow on DVD

Near the end of A Prophet, one of those rare films in which the moral stakes are as insistent and thought through as the aesthetic choices, there’s a scene in which the lead character, Malik, travels to Paris to kill some men. The scene reverberates with almost unbearable tension but is briefly punctured by a seemingly throwaway image: Seconds before he begins shooting, thereby sealing his fate, you see him catch sight of a pair of men’s shoes showcased like jewels in a boutique window in a rich Parisian quarter. He does a double take, a reaction that might mirror that of the anxious viewer who wonders why he doesn’t just get on with it.

Much of what distinguishes A Prophet (Un Prophète) is revealed in Malik’s brief appreciation of the shoes, as well as the surprise it elicits. He’s window shopping — doesn’t he have some killing to do? Yet these luxury items are resonant, as is their exclusive setting and the way Malik’s admiring gaze momentarily stops the flow of the action: each adds another element to this portrait of an impoverished young Frenchman of Arab descent who is transformed in prison. Over the course of the film Malik will learn to read, to smuggle, to murder, to survive. Which is why when he pauses after unloading his guns, his pale face floating in the sanguineous dark, it looks as if he were emerging from a kind of womb: his metamorphosis is complete.

A Prophet was directed by Jacques Audiard, whose talents have deepened with each new film. (His previous one, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, from 2005, is a superb remake of Fingers, James Toback’s art-pulp thriller.) Like some other prison tales A Prophet, which won the grand prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, has the flavor of the ethnographic. Its subject is an individual in a context, and while Malik (Tahar Rahim, a stealth presence) is the story’s focus, he’s also part of an inquiry on power. When he first enters prison for a vague crime involving an assault, he arrives as a relative innocent, but, more important to his trajectory, he’s unschooled both as a criminal and a citizen.

His education is sudden and brutal. The film opens with Malik being ordered to strip for the guards on his arrival, a ritualistic divesting (and humiliation) that the inmates and the prison system continue. He soon attracts the unwelcome attention of César Luciani (the tremendous Niels Arestrup), an old lion who rules over the Corsican gang that controls the prison, including some guards. To protect his own, César orders Malik to murder another prisoner, Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), also of Arab extraction. Without friends or affiliation, Malik believes he has no choice and carries out the murder with a razor blade that he’s hidden inside his mouth and which he fumbles as the blood gushes over him, his victim, the walls.

It takes a few agonizing moments for Reyeb to die, perhaps because of Malik’s awkwardness, or maybe it just takes a while to bleed to death. At any rate it is a ghastly vision. But it isn’t simply the gore or Reyeb’s twitching body that make the scene difficult to watch: it’s the way the murder has been messily, even frantically staged and filmed, the two men thrashing inside a frame that can barely contain them. There is nothing exciting about the violence, and there are no beauty shots of the pooling blood. Audiard effectively turns us into witnesses to a horrible crime, though not in order to punish us for our ostensible complicity in the violence. He is instead, I think, insisting on the obscenity of murder.

This insistence is critical to A Prophet, as is the way Audiard wants you to feel revolted by the murder, even as he encourages you to feel something else for Malik by showing, for instance, how his body continues to tremble after Reyeb’s has stopped shuddering. Audiard doesn’t sex up Malik’s crimes, turning them into easily digestible spectacles, the kind made to accompany a large popcorn and soda. But he doesn’t solicit our pity: Malik is guilty. Yet guilt is like a poisonous gas in this film, it suffuses the prison, permeating the guards’ rooms and the cells in which corrupt lawyers counsel their murderous clients, and the larger world where politicians make decisions that send some to jail while freeing others.

All this is conveyed discreetly as Malik experiences the banalities of prison along with its shocks, surrealism and spasms of weird comedy. Having killed for César, he essentially surrenders to the Corsicans, for whom he serves a second, parallel sentence and who reward him with racist contempt. César keeps Malik busy running errands, which allows Audiard to take him (and us) all across the prison and sometimes outside of it. This expands the story and Malik’s horizon, as do some other prisoners, Ryad (Adel Bencherif) and Jordi (Reda Kateb). Every so often Audiard slows the film down and blacks out some of the image so we can linger on a detail as if to remind us to really look at what we’re watching.

A Prophet is about the education of a young man within a specific social order. You could read it as an allegory about France and its uneasy relations with generations of Arab immigrants and their children. As usual, there is room for diverging, even contradictory interpretations, and the political certainly is as much at play here as the Oedipal. Audiard, for his part, working from a screenplay he wrote with several others, avoids speeches that explain everything and instead opts for a materialist approach that attends to the realities of prison life, showing how guards and porters deliver the prisoners’ food (baguettes!) and how Malik, as he shakes off César’s grip, helps distribute illicit drugs.

Much as he does inside the prison, Arestrup, who played the thuggish father in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, initially dominates A Prophet, boring into the story with unnerving small gestures and the force of his presence. He’s playing another patriarch in this film, of course, the kind who rules small worlds with cruelty. With his overcoats, bulky frame and proud carriage, he can bring to mind the later-life Jean Gabin, though Arestrup’s terrifying smile quickly snuffs out such nostalgic thoughts. César is not a figure of sentimentality. Among other things he is a businessman, and the cold-bloodedness with which he wields his power might be a matter of personal depravity. It also serves his bottom line.

Like his character, Rahim’s performance sneaks up from behind. With his wispy mustache and a body that scarcely fills his clothes, Malik makes an unlikely center for such a thrilling film. The camera doesn’t love him, no matter how closely it hovers. But Malik was not meant for our love, and Rahim’s performance, while strong, is purposefully not flashy, as movie outlaws often are. Audiard seems to be after something else, and in A Prophet he shows us the truth of another human being who might otherwise escape from our sight because he is too foreign, or whom we might try to pity just to feel safe. But the world we make is not necessarily safe, and neither are those we leave alone to fight for their survival. Grade: A-plus

Other recently released films on DVD tomorrow:

The Ghost Writer (2010) A writer (Ewan McGregor) stumbles upon a long-hidden secret when he agrees to help former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) complete his memoirs on a remote island after the politician’s assistant drowns in a mysterious accident. The darkly brooding sky that hangs over much of this film, the latest from Roman Polanski, suggests that all is grim and gray and perhaps even for naught. But this high-grade pulp entertainment is too delectably amusing and self-amused, and far too aware of its own outrageous conceits to sustain such a dolorous verdict. The world has gone mad of course — this is a Polanski film — so all you can do is puzzle through the madness, dodging the traps with ironic detachment and tongue lightly in cheek. Polanski is a master of menace and, working with a striking wintry palette that at times veers into the near-monochromatic — the blacks are strong and inky, the churning ocean the color of lead — he creates a wholly believable world rich in strange contradictions and ominous implications. Polanski delivers this pulpy fun at such a high level that The Ghost Writer is irresistible, no matter how obvious the twists. Everything — including Alexandre Desplat’s score, with its mocking, light notes and urgent rhythms suggestive of Bernard Herrmann — works to sustain a mood, establish an atmosphere and confirm an authorial intelligence that distinguishes this film from the chaff. Unlike many modern Hollywood and Hollywood-style thrillers, which seek to wrest tension from a frenzy of cutting and a confusion of camera angles, Polanski creates suspense inside the frame through dynamic angles and through the discrete, choreographed movements of the camera and actors. He makes especially effective use of the enormous windows in Lang’s house through which the sky and ocean beckon and threaten. It would be easy to overstate the appeal of The Ghost Writer just as, I imagine, it will be easy for some to dismiss it. But the pleasures of a well-directed movie should never be underestimated. The image of Brosnan abruptly leaning toward the camera like a man possessed is worth a dozen Oscar-nominated performances. And the way, when Lang chats with the writer — his arms and legs open, a drink in hand, as if he were hitting on a woman — shows how an actor and his director can sum up an entire personality with a single pose. Polanski’s work with his performers is consistently subtle even when the performances seem anything but, which is true of this very fine film from welcome start to finish. Grade: B-plus

Kick-Ass (2010) Inspired by his love of comic books, high school student Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) decides to transform himself into a masked crime fighter — a decision that eventually thrusts the teenager into Internet stardom. Soon, Dave’s antics inspire a wave of would-be heroes to don costumes and live out their superhero fantasies, one of them a little girl (Chloe Moretz) who’s the star of her own splatter-happy head trip. Fast, periodically spit-funny and often grotesquely violent, the film at once embraces and satirizes contemporary action-film clichés with Tarantino-esque self-regard. There’s something about the killer schoolgirl that turns some filmmakers on, and audiences, too — who knows what further dangers lurk beneath that kilt? However chastely, British director Matthew Vaughn plays on that unsettling image, which shores up the false impression that because Moretz’s character, Hit-Girl, is a powerful figure she’s also an empowering one. Moretz certainly walks the walk and jumps the jump, loading a new gun in midrun like a baby Terminator. But as her deployment of a four-letter slur for women indicates, and as the cop-out last blowout only underscores, Hit-Girl isn’t a wee Wonder Woman. She’s not even a latter-day Lara Croft, who, however absurd, works on screen because of Angelina Jolie’s own outsize persona. A supergimmick, Hit-Girl by contrast is a heroine for these movie times: a vision of female might whittled down to pocketsize. Grade: B

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010) Middle school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be for self-described “wimpy kid” Greg Heffley, who discovers a frightening new world teeming with boys who are taller, tougher and hairier than he is — and decides to document it all in his diary. In this film adaptation of Greg’s life, however, a team of writers and an uninspired director are responsible for his woes, translating his tale to the screen with little verve, wit or grace. This Diary of a Wimpy kid is too often dull, unappealing and clumsy, hobbled by unnecessary changes and inventions that add no charm, energy or, truly, point. Zachary Gordon and Robert Capron play Greg and his doofy best buddy Rowley, and they’re fine for the most part. But director Thor Freudenthal (Hotel for Dogs) is a klutz, unable to do much of anything except watch along with us. The thing in this film that feels most alive is a slice of cheese rotting on a playground blacktop — which would be a funny joke if it was intentional. Grade: C-plus

Blood Done Sign My Name (2010) A drama from director Jeb Stuart based on the real-life 1970 murder in Oxford, N.C., of black Vietnam veteran Henry Marrow by virulent racists subsequently acquitted by an all-white North Carolina jury despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt. The flatness of the characterizations, combined with the slow, meandering pace of Stuart’s storytelling, drains some of the intensity from the story. This movie has the mood and tone of a made-for-television drama dutifully explaining an important piece of history, and at times the film’s ambitions stretch beyond its abilities. The cast is enormous, and Stuart’s evident desire to respect the truth of the story in all its details leaves him without a clear, emphatic dramatic structure. And yet these very shortcomings sometimes manage to turn into virtues. The difficulty in fixing on a central character means that the town of Oxford becomes both hero and villain. What the film lacks in psychological nuance it makes up for in unassuming, intimate social observation. Some of the people may seem to wear virtual signs around their necks. But the place itself — its physical layout and especially the manners and speech patterns of its citizens — breathes with an unusually delicate sense of reality. Stuart, himself a native of the Tarheel state, takes his time over family meals, informal parties, and the everyday exchanges of news and courtesies that make up Southern life even in times of tumult. He also shows how racism, rather than being the pathology of a few bad apples, was woven into the fabric of daily existence. This is a curious, somewhat ungainly movie. But it is also rich and fascinating. At times you think you are watching a clumsy stage pageant superimposed on a documentary; it’s so stiff, and yet at the same time so real. Grade: C

The Living Wake (2010) When his doctor informs him he’ll die soon from an unnamed disease, self-proclaimed artist K. Roth Binew (Mike O’Connell) — who’s never completed a work of art — decides to celebrate his life with a party. The film seems but a protracted act of stultifying self-indulgence (but then maybe that’s the point) and its star nothing more than a shorter, stockier Conan O’Brien. O’Connell’s K. Roth Binew speaks with unstinting grandiloquence and is transported everywhere in a rickshaw attached to a bicycle ridden by his adoring manservant Mills Joquin (Jesse Eisenberg). Binew remains enraged at having been abandoned in childhood by his father, spouts off on this and that and drinks a lot. None of this seems amusing or enlightening or even all that original. The film becomes a cautionary tale on self-importance fed by a need for recognition so desperate that it smacks of fantasy and madness. Grade: D-plus

After Life (2010) As the life of young Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci) hangs precariously in the balance, funeral director Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson), who has a mysterious ability to help the dead transition to the afterlife, has complete control over her fate. Though it’s possible she isn’t dead after all, it’s equally possible that she’s already in hell. Director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo can’t figure out how to build on her base, overusing a melodramatic score to boost the mild shocks and solemn philosophizing. And as a first-time feature director, she doesn’t have the confident hand needed to guide her actors, who are so out of sync that they barely seem to be in the same film. While nobody comes out especially well, Ricci is the only one required to spend much of the movie naked. And for what? The only thing worse than bad horror is pretentiously bad horror. From title to finish, After.Life takes itself far more seriously than you will. Grade: D-plus

Finding Bliss (2010) Jody Balaban (Leelee Sobieski), a promising filmmaker, works at a porn studio while secretly creating her own “legit” movie when no one is looking. When she’s discovered, Jody is forced to work with porn director Jeff Drake (Matthew Davis) and a cast of adult film stars. This is a carnival of horrors. Writer/director Julie Davis’ Borscht Belt sensibility keeps the jokes coming at a rapid clip and even though nearly all of them are flopping, there’s a generosity to the attempt that keeps the film from scraping bottom. It’s a big-hearted, well-intentioned disaster. Grade: D

Happiness Runs (2010) Having been raised in a polygamous commune — where the clan guru, Insley (Rutger Hauer), uses his powers of persuasion to woo women into his bed — Victor (Mark L. Young) is finally old enough to realize he wants a different life. But now that childhood crush Becky (Hanna R. Hall) has returned to care for her ailing father, Victor is concerned she’ll fall prey to his own mother’s (Andie MacDowell) fate. As the film builds to a feverish hysteria, you have to work hard to keep from laughing. Victor finally escapes and moves to Hollywood to make movies, but first there’s beaucoup nudity, insanity, hallucinogenic mushrooms, self-mutilation with razor blades and suicide. O.K., life without structure or purpose leads to disillusionment and angst, but we knew that already. I’ll be darned if I know what deeper lesson we’re supposed to learn after suffering through 88 minutes of misery. Don’t raise your children in a commune? Duh. The struggle of the individual against the collective is a worthy theme, but the dismal Happiness Runs — amateurishly directed, clumsily written and choppily edited —l acks form and takes on the look and feel of personal therapy at the audience’s expense. Sometimes a filmmaker’s private hell is better off left behind the closed door of an analyst’s office. Grade: D-minus

To Save a Life (2010) After tragedy strikes a childhood friend, Jake Taylor (Randy Wayne) reevaluates his life. By reaching out to lonely outsider Jonny (Sean Michael), Jake risks losing everything that matters most to him, including a college scholarship and his friends. The director, Brian Baugh, was the cinematographer for the conservative screed An American Carol, a clumsy parody of Michael Moore movies, and here similar politics come in adolescent camouflage. The film would be a mere nuisance if not for its shameless exploitation of school shootings to advance its agenda. But forget the lame performances and arch, preachy sentiment; the movie’s sham hip-hop and spurious alternative music alone should keep teenagers from renting this. Thank goodness. Grade: F

To be released tomorrow on DVD

Those who fail to learn from history should repeatedly watch films like Vincere. The untold story of how fascist strongman Benito Mussolini rose to power by trampling on the woman who loved him is a bracingly cinematic lesson in how all politics is personal.

Fascism is an extreme right-wing philosophy, an alliance between government force and corporate power. That’s why the Italian socialists shun the brash young Mussolini (Filippo Timi), who repudiates Catholicism, advocates racial purity and agitates for his nation’s entry into World War I. Director Marco Bellocchio dramatizes the right-left divide in a scene in which fascists and socialists snipe at each other across a movie theater aisle while watching a war newsreel.

The propaganda value of images is a recurring motif. It’s straight out of a silent melodrama that Mussolini marches into a battle as an adoring woman named Ida Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) ties his shoes. Dalser was an Austro-Italian who financed Mussolini’s newspaper and bore him a son. For years, she proclaimed that she and the Italian dictator had been secretly married. Vincere is as much the story of this long-forgotten woman as it is Mussolini’s.

While convalescing from battle wounds, Mussolini marries a peasant woman named Rachel Guidi. As Mussolini consolidates his power with speeches about resurrecting the Roman Empire, Rachel becomes the model of the silent fascist wife, while the volatile Dalser is erased from Il Duce’s dossier. Dalser is separated from her infant son and sent to a series of mental institutions, yet she refuses to renounce her claims. Through barred windows and over asylum walls, she continually flings letters to the authorities, including the Pope and the king of Italy.

Mezzogiorno is almost fascistically focused as the undeterred Dalser, while Timi is remarkably protean, playing both the magnetic Mussolini and the grown son who goes mad in the shadow of his estranged father.

Vincere, which translates as the battle cry “Win!,” is like invisible ink on the ledger of war, a secret record of love and loss. Grade: A

Other recent movies to be released on DVD tomorrow:

Clash of the Titans (2010) If he is to save the life of the beautiful Princess Andromeda (Alexa Davalos), the valiant Perseus (Sam Worthington) — born to a god but raised as a man — must lead a team of intrepid warriors on a quest to battle a host of powerful, beastly enemies. Clanging swords, thundering gods, shrieking monsters — about all that’s missing from the self-consciously kitsch retread of Clash of the Titans is Laurence Olivier pitching a fit in a toga. If you don’t remember the original 1981 film or the myth, not to worry: there are titans, they clash. Along the way Perseus triumphs, and a villainess loses her head, though by the time that happens, you might wish the reverse were true. The remake doesn’t as much improve on the original as match it goofily amusing moment for moment. The director Louis Leterrier, who started out working for the French producer Luc Besson (Unleashed) before graduating to bigger-budgeted junk (The Incredible Hulk), brings nothing new or noteworthy to Clash of the Titans. The characters, including the inevitably valiant warriors who aide Perseus during his computer-assisted adventures, are as predictable as the action scenes, which is what some companies want when they manufacture global products of this type. But enough of the myth remains to keep your eyes open, as do some of the performances — Ralph Fiennes earns his pay — even when the frenetic editing at times pitches the movie into near visual incoherence. The finale, which lurches among locations, destroys all notion of time, space and sense. Grade: D-plus

Repo Men (2010) In the futuristic world of this film, humans have extended and improved lives through highly sophisticated and expensive mechanical organs created by a company called The Union. The dark side of these medical breakthroughs is that if you don’t pay your bill, The Union sends its highly skilled repo men to take back its property with no concern for the recipient’s comfort or survival. The first third or so of Repo Men is good-natured, albeit in a sick way, and the movie works so hard at having a style that you might be momentarily distracted from the fact that there’s no real story here -- at least not one worth following. The script, by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner (adapted from Garcia’s novel The Repossession Mambo), devolves into a ho-hum narrative of deception and betrayal, with a handy surprise twist at the end. If you squint hard enough, Repo Men might be read as a treatise on the ruthlessness of the American healthcare system — but that’s a stretch. Mostly, newcomer director Miguel Sapochnik borrows gimmicky editing techniques from movies like Trainspotting (he was, incidentally, a member of that movie’s art department) and in general betrays a fanboyish enthusiasm for pictures like Fight Club and anything made by Guy Ritchie. But Repo Men isn’t even flashy enough to be engaging: Its action sequences are disjointed and dimly lit. There’s no passion in them — they clank but never dazzle. Sapochnik tosses in some camp touches for fun, scoring one of the ruthlessly efficient organ-harvesting forays to Rosemary Clooney’s Sway, for example. But he doesn’t have the light touch this kind of grisly-funny violence requires. Everything in Repo Men feels belabored and overworked, except, perhaps, the performances. Those have been pretty much tossed off: Jude Law squints, scowls and flexes his exceedingly obvious muscles, but he barely seems connected to the story Sapochnik is trying to tell, much less committed to it. And while Liev Schreiber might have made a devilishly slick bad guy, he has so little to do here that his presence barely registers. Repo Men could have been a sick little number laced with disreputable thrills. Instead, it’s a self-conscious exercise that keeps advertising its stylishness without actually having any. All of its vital organs are missing in action. Grade: D

To be released tomorrow on DVD

When he’s really cooking, the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho seems to reinvent movie storytelling itself. The word “Hitchcockian’’ keeps coming up in discussions of his latest sublime outrage, Mother, not because there are elements of violence, obsession, and wrong-man suspense in the movie — oh, there are, there are — but because Bong has us so completely in his grip. You never know where Mother’ is going to go next. All you know is that you’re in the hands of a master with an appreciably bent sense of humor.

Remember, this is the director who in The Host (2006) used the timeworn Godzilla genre as a vehicle for slaphappy social satire. Bong’s latest is, on the face of it, a melodrama with classic bones and a novel conceit: a loving mother (Kim Hye-ja) turns detective to free her imprisoned son (Bin Won) from a murder rap. Yet a playful, deadpan surrealism transforms each scene into a nail-biter in miniature, and Bong delights in showing how South Korea’s rigid social structure can’t help devolving into murder, madness, and all-around bad behavior.

It’s clear from the beginning that this mother, a neighborhood herbalist and unlicensed acupuncturist, takes maternal devotion too far and that the object of her affection, a 20-something son named Do-joon, is a barely functioning idiot. As is typical for Bong, that opening scene involves an extremely sharp paper cutter and a speeding Mercedes, your guess as to which will draw first blood.

With the help of his putative best friend, a strutting neighborhood bad boy named Jin-tae (Goo Jin), the son wreaks revenge on the owner of the Mercedes in a very funny donnybrook at a golf course. What’s shaping up as a comedy of errors, though, takes a dark turn when a local schoolgirl is found dead on a balcony in view of the entire town. The police immediately arrest Do-joon, who was seen drunk and grabby at a bar the night before.

The path by which the mother turns snoop is similarly roundabout. Poor thing, she’s not the sharpest needle in the acupuncture kit, but she’s unshakable when she gets a notion in her head. Convinced (for a while, anyway) that the friend did it, she sneaks into his house and is forced to hide in the closet when he returns home with a girlfriend. Old idea, but Bong gives it stylistic bounce and dread and something harder to pin down — a sense that the mother is sailing into an unknown world where she may as well make her own rules.

The plot keeps cranking forward, turning up daft surprises as it goes. Mother eventually involves recovered memory, cellphone hacking, police detectives who karate-chop apples from suspects’ mouths, and the proper insecticides to use in a suicide. All this is delivered in high cinematic style. Hong Kyung-Pyo’s camera swoops and dives, sometimes pulling back until the mother is a tiny figure in a vast landscape, at other times rushing in to register the many shades of consternation on an old lady’s face. Mother is smooth work — on a formal level, the Hitchcock comparisons aren’t far off — but Bong is going for a deeper disorientation.

He’s aided immeasurably by his leading lady. Kim, 68, is a longtime fixture of Korean TV dramas (in which she often plays mothers), and her unnamed character here has the dazed, determined look of the put-upon soap opera heroine she doubtless is in her own mind. The mother’s impassioned love for her son is a hint she hears music no one else does, and in a few eerie scenes, when things are going particularly wrong, she breaks into a demented private rumba. Kim neither ennobles this woman nor makes fun of her — an elegant balancing act.

Bong, meanwhile, does his level best to keep us off balance. He favors gorgeously constructed scenes that bristle with random elements. Why does the dead girl’s friend send the mother off to buy Kotex when she wants to get rid of her? Is it another reminder of the blood that has spilled and will continue to spill? Is it a coincidence that, for the most part, only women bleed in this movie?

If there’s a flaw in Mother it’s that you sense, far below the genre games and dada slapstick, an exhaustion, an anger, with Korean society that Bong will probably need to address more directly someday. For now, he’s an inspired craftsman with an appealingly fiendish sensibility — the more apt comparison may be to Polanski rather than Hitchcock — but he could be much more. He has a mother of a movie in him, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get to see it. Grade: A

Other new movies to be released tomorrow on DVD:

A Town Called Panic (2009) Plastic toys Cowboy (voiced by Stéphane Aubier), Indian (Bruce Ellison) and Horse (Vincent Patar) buy 50 million bricks, setting into motion a crazy chain of events at their rambling rural home. Belgian animators Stéphane Aubier’s and Vincent Patar’s A Town Called Panic has the most in common with the old Nickelodeon series Action League Now!!, in that it’s a little too rough-and-tumble for young kids, but it isn’t exactly subversive or smart-ass, either. It’s more like what a preteen with an overactive imagination might come up with if left alone with a farm playset for an afternoon. It’s more clever than funny, but it’s very clever. The film is equal parts cute and frenetic, and may disappoint those expecting something more scabrous. It may also exhaust some viewers once they realize that there isn’t much more to the movie than one nutty incident after another. But those who stick with it may be surprised by how involving those nutty incidents become, and by the amount of thought put into every scale model and every surreal plot twist. Just know this: A Town Called Panic is the kind of movie in which you will see a horse in a Santa Claus suit, riding on a manta ray in order to dupe a race of wall-stealing fish people. Adjust expectations accordingly. Grade: A-minus

Prodigal Sons (2010) In high school, Kimberly Reed was male, a straight-A student and captain of the football team. But since leaving his rural Montana hometown, he's become a woman — and a filmmaker whose documents her return for her 20th high school reunion. At the heart of the film, a family drama in the form of a succinct, eloquent personal journal, is a sibling rivalry whose reverberations touch upon the very essence of human identity: what we inherit, what we learn, how we move forward and to what degree we look back. Reed’s on eggshells with one of her classmates, Marc, her adopted brother. Since he was left back in preschool, Marc has been the struggler to her high achiever, his behavior problems exacerbated by a brain injury. He's on multiple meds and given to hair-trigger explosions that he says aren't the real him — even as Kim looks at pictures of herself as a boy and says with certainty, “That wasn't me.” Marc's research into his biological roots leads to the revelation, 30 minutes into the film, that he's the grandchild of two of the biggest names of 1940s Hollywood. This tantalizing twist may provide answers, but it doesn't prevent Marc's deepening mental illness or quell his conflict with Kim, who comes to understand that “we were both haunted by the same ghost.” Reed insists on pursuing difficult questions, and this is a film not easily forgotten. Grade: B-plus

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2009) A documentary that chronicles Pentagon insider Daniel Ellsberg's daring endeavor to leak top-secret government papers that disclosed shocking truths about the Vietnam War and Nixon's presidency. How rare it is for anyone, working at any level in the public or private sector, to “give priority to conscience over career.” Or over a paycheck. But Daniel Ellsberg did just that, and in the highest echelons, engaging in an act of civil disobedience that, during a conflicted time, earned him conflicting labels. To some, he was an unalloyed hero; to others, including Henry Kissinger, he was “the most dangerous man in America.” Those like me who lived through the Vietnam War era, and paid attention, will find this documentary short on revelation but long on poignant reminders. Those who didn’t, and haven’t studied up, will not only be edified but flat-out impressed. The film argues that the seeds of Watergate are traceable directly to Daniel Ellsberg. No doubt, but it’s partial truth. Actually, the Pentagon Papers, although widely disseminated in the summer of 1971, went largely unread by an American public who, in the fall of 1972, returned Nixon so resoundingly to office. In the later endgame, Ellsberg was a factor, but only one of many. No, the fascination of Richard Nixon is that he was the leading, and by far the best, architect of his own demise. Grade: B

The Runaways (2010) Dakota Fanning stars in this musical biopic as Cherie Currie, lead singer of the 1970s all-girl rock group the Runaways, whose meteoric rise up the charts was saturated with drugs and other excesses of the era. Kristen Stewart, who plays Currie's bandmate Joan Jett, is surprisingly good; the head-down non-responsive attitude that is so annoying in the Twilight films is much more at home here. Jett is lost, after all, until she cranks up her guitar, at which point Stewart comes alive, as well. And Fanning, famous as a child star, is all grown up as Currie — or at least as grown up as Currie was allowed to be. What's lacking are surprises or any sort of different take on the traditional rags-to-rock-riches story. The performances help make up for that — Michael Shannon is an absolute scream (who is often screaming) as the band’s manager. Even better, the songs hold up particularly well. Jett would go on to a massively successful career with more of a pop-rock sound. The Runaways were more raw, more primal. The Runaways broke new ground. And if The Runaways doesn't, it's still a movie worth watching — and listening to. Grade: B

The Losers (2010) After learning that their handler, Max (Jason Patric), has set them up, a group of disavowed CIA operatives led by Clay — aka the Colonel (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) — bands together to bring down their betrayers. The movie is a stupid, over-the-top comic-booky action picture with the occasional cheesy effect, oddball casting and an utterly predictable get-that-guy-before-he-gets-us plot, but Chris Evans and a couple of his mates make it passable entertainment. It is a PG-13 action film — so the blood, profanity and sex are discreet. Director Sylvain White (he did Stomp the Yard with Columbus Short, who’s also in this one) keeps it loose and jokey, referencing the comic books and skipping by the silly plot. He also has to battle Morgan’s lack of charisma (Idris Elba chews him up in their scenes together). Morgan’s expected easy journey from Grey’s Anatomy to the movies has been filled with flops, unreleased films and Watchmen. He seems downhearted. But Evans fills in some of that void with a cat-got-the-canary performance. Grade: B-minus

Cop Out (2010) Jimmy Monroe (Bruce Willis) and off-kilter Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan) are two suspended cops trying to track down a stolen and very valuable 1950s baseball card. Take these two cops who love each other and drive each other crazy. Construct a rickety story involving a Mexican drug cartel (in New York?), the disappearance of Jimmy’s invaluable 1952 Andy Pafko trading card, a stolen Mercedes, a kidnapped hooker (Ana de la Reguera), and two smug rival officers (Kevin Pollak and Adam Brody). Make Paul unbearably obnoxious, and then make him look better by adding an even more obnoxious thief (Seann William Scott). Have director Kevin Smith (Chasing Amy, Dogma) throw it on the screen. The result is a quintessential buddy-cop film ... and I don’t mean that in a good way. Smith is a very funny guy, but plot has never been his specialty, and this is nearly all plot. There are a few hilarious bits, but even those are drowned out by constant gunfire and Morgan’s motormouthing. Willis is going through the motions; Scott is funny, if irritating; Morgan is irritating and not so funny. Grade: D

To be released tomorrow on DVD

Greenberg is about embracing the life you never planned on — albeit awkwardly and with a flurry of caveats and complaints. It may not appeal to those seeking escape or non-stop action. But for those looking for realistic, complex characters coping with believable emotional hurdles, this is an unexpected gem.

Director Noah Baumbach wrote a perceptive slice-of-life script from a story he conceived with his wife, actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. As with his sharply observed The Squid and the Whale in 2005, Baumbach finds humor and pathos in a smart, neurotic and self-involved character. Ben Stiller is superb as the curmudgeonly Roger Greenberg, a character who is light-years away from most of Stiller’s comic foils.

Roger is 40ish and riding out an especially virulent midlife crisis. He leaves his New York existence to house-sit at the Hollywood Hills home of his brother Philip (Chris Messina), who is on an extended vacation with his wife and two children. Roger brings his New York state of mind to Los Angeles. Though raised in Southern California, he refuses to drive and mistrusts most people. He stays primarily inside his brother’s sprawling house, keeping an eye on the family’s German shepherd, Mahler, and venturing out sporadically to build a doghouse or pick up groceries.

Florence (a pitch-perfect Greta Gerwig) works for Philip and has promised to look in on the dog. She’s 25, an aspiring singer and as open-hearted and accepting as Roger is cantankerous and edgy. But both are supremely ill at ease. When Florence and Roger connect romantically, it’s in clumsy fits and starts. Stiller and Gerwig are terrific together.

Disarmingly honest, Florence has an inherent goodness about her. Roger, on the other hand, is mercurial and given to bouts of both cruelty and sweetness. When he’s not lackadaisically building Mahler’s doghouse, he’s firing off angry letters to everyone from American Airlines to Starbucks, railing against ineptitude and general corporate policies.

Rhys Ifans is also excellent as Ivan, Roger’s passive but slightly more mature best friend. Their friendship is focused on shared history, so when they finally delve below the surface, moving observations bubble up.

Baumbach has an undeniable feel for the natural rhythms of speech and telling details of behavior, which makes this rambling story powerfully honest, insightful and poignant. Grade: A-minus

Other recent movies to be released on DVD tomorrow:

Terribly Happy (2010) When Copenhagen cop Robert (Jakob Cedergren) winds up in the isolated town of Skarrild, he plans to bide his time recovering from his disreputable past so he can return to the city. This must surely be the greatest Danish Western ever made. Director Henrik Ruben Genz builds a world so soggy with muck it practically drips (he accentuates this feeling with a lot of squishy sounds). He also populates his film with actors who perfectly portray the dead-end life of small-town Anywhere, with its secrets and lies, disappointments and betrayals. Genz, who co-wrote the screenplay (based on the novel by Erling Jepsen), makes the getting there enjoyable, and throws in a few surprises as well. What seems to be a white hat-black hat showdown becomes something much more twisted — much more. At times it’s vaguely reminiscent of Blood Simple, but Terribly Happy is very much its own movie. Cedergren is outstanding, bringing empathy to the big-city cop who thinks his stint in South Jutland will be a dull-but-straightforward form of penance, but quickly learns otherwise. Grade: B-plus

Chloe (2010) Suspecting her husband, David (Liam Neeson), of infidelity, doctor Catherine (Julianne Moore) hires sexy escort Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) to seduce him and test his faithfulness. Few filmmakers have the gift of Atom Egoyan, the Canadian director of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, of establishing a mood so supercharged that your internals combust. If my brief synopsis sounds vaguely French, you’re right. Chloe is an English-language remake of Nathalie..., Anne Fontaine’s 2003 marriage a la mode starring Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Beart and Gerard Depardieu. The story is more plausible in French, the language of Claude Chabrol and carnality that flows like wine, than in English, which to the native speaker is less suggestive of things that go on below the neck. In Egoyan’s telling, the characters’ motives are opaque and their surroundings transparent. From Catherine’s modernist house to her atrium office to the greenhouse where Chloe hooks up with David, the characters are on public view. Their vitrine-like enclosures suggest another saying, the one about those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. All the glass walls, windows and ceilings create a pervasive suggestion that the situation could shatter at any moment. And so it does. Moore, Seyfried and Neeson each boast sufficient sexuality to power a single movie on his or her own. Collectively, they are the erotic dream team. Moore’s tightly wound coiffure and tension suggest a human loaded gun. Seyfried’s flowing blond curls and dangerous curves are the definition of a man trap (or woman trap). Neeson’s supreme physical confidence and seductive charm (for his character, even the act of ordering wine is a flirtation) heat up the scenes he’s in. There are two questions to ask about a film such as this: Is it erotic? Yes. Is it good? Yes, until it devolves into third-act pretentiousness and preposterousness. But sometimes I rent movies not for the story but for the erotic promise. On the latter, Chloe delivers. Grade: B-minus.

Formosa Betrayed (2010) When FBI agent Jake Kelly’s (James Van Der Beek) investigation into the murder of a Taiwanese American professor takes him to Taiwan to pursue the killers, he soon finds himself at odds with everyone - including his own government. The movie has dual agendas that collide more readily than they mesh. It is partly a tutorial on the tense relations among Taiwan (the island of Formosa), the Chinese mainland and the United States, and partly a clumsy cloak-and-dagger political thriller. The naïve Jake, who apparently has not been briefed on the history of the region, lunges headlong into danger, upsetting diplomatic apple carts in the blind pursuit of “the truth.” Van Der Beek, manlier than in his Dawson Creek days, gives an able performance in a movie whose Asian actors tend to overplay the intrigue in an exaggerated 1940s style, exchanging sinister meaningful looks and, in general, hamming it up. Wendy Crewson’s portrayal of Susan Kane, a duplicitous United States diplomatic attaché keeping a sharp eye on Jake, gives the film’s strongest performance. When he blithely ignores her instructions on how to behave and acts, in her scolding words, “like a cowboy,” you feel how difficult, wearisome and ultimately infuriating it must be to try to manage an ignorant brat, who thinks he knows it all, on a self-righteous rampage. You also understand how easily politics can turn diplomats into cynics. Grade: C-plus

8: The Mormon Proposition (2010) Filmmaker and ex-Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints member Reed Cowan examines that church’s nationwide efforts to prevent the legalization of gay marriage — including California’s Proposition 8, which was passed by voters in 2008. There is no requirement that a documentary be objective; if we’ve learned nothing else from Michael Moore, it’s that. Thus, 8: The Mormon Proposition, loses no points for having a clear agenda: Directors Cowan and Steven Greenstreet mean to expose the gargantuan fundraising role the Mormon Church played in the 2008 passage of California’s Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that defined marriage as existing solely between man and woman (thus nullifying the same-sex marriages that had been legalized months before), and they do so. Not in an especially gripping way; the filmmakers’ passion is unquestioned, they lay out the facts, certainly, but in rather pedestrian, straightforward ways. The film is all over the place, taking off in a segment toward the end on a tangent about the alarming suicide rate among young gay Mormons and the claims of terrifying efforts to “change” them — which is more compelling than the story of the fundraising efforts against gay marriage. It’s as if Cowan and Greenstreet slipped a second short film in at the end, only tangentially related to the first. It doesn’t undercut their argument that the church violated the separation of church and state, exactly, but it does make it somewhat less interesting in comparison. The interviews throughout are the best part of the movie — the least heavy-handed, yet most effective, element. There is a message here of the necessity for tolerance, but 8: The Mormon Proposition would have been better had its makers presented it in a more consistent, artful fashion. Grade: C

The Greatest (2010) Allen (Pierce Brosnan) and Grace (Susan Sarandon) Brewer are still mourning the accidental death of their teenage son, Bennett (Aaron Johnson), when the boy’s troubled girlfriend Rose (Carey Mulligan) reveals that she is carrying his baby. The veterans do their best to avoid being buried by the cliches, with Brosnan emerging fairly unscathed. The movie’s most affecting image is his ashen, searching expression during one unbroken take as the family leaves the funeral. Sarandon’s natural fearlessness is misused in scenes where a sleepwalking Grace babbles about her “missing baby,” or is thrown by Allen into the ocean to alleviate her anger. Michael Shannon, though, is a welcome splash of cold water in his single scene as the man responsible for Bennett’s death. Mulligan — Oscar-nominated for her terrific breakthrough in An Education, which was made after this — must hit too many notes: scared, life-affirming, down on her luck, ethereal. That’s a lot to put on her thin shoulders. It is, however, consistent with the smothering style of The Greatest, which takes its title from Rose’s assurance to the insecure Bennett that he was her greatest lover. So much for subtle suffering. Grade: C-minus

Our Family Wedding (2010) Forest Whitaker and Carlos Mencia butt heads as two domineering dads forced to set aside their culture-clash differences and team up to plan their children’s wedding, with only two weeks until the big day arrives. This is a broad and formulaic culture-clash comedy built on fill-in-the-blank wedding comedy clichés. This meek little comedy doesn’t have the wit to take things into uncomfortable territory and doesn’t have the cast to make the thin set-ups — an inter-family softball game, inter-family cake fights, “tradition” bashing and bonding — sing. The leading man is bland, the older generation of Mexican and African-Americans are played as Tyler Perry buffoons and Rick The Wood Famuyiwa’s film sags in the middle as the writers run out of jokes. The film is like a wedding for an iffy marriage: It begins with a little promise and attains a hint of edge before the air goes out and we’re all turning off the TV before they shove cake in each other’s faces. Violently. And a goat and spilled Viagra tablets aren’t enough to save it. Grade: D-plus

The Back-Up Plan (2010) When Zoe (Jennifer Lopez) tires of looking for Mr. Right, she decides to have a baby on her own. But on the day she’s artificially inseminated, she meets Stan (Alex O’Loughlin), who seems to be just who’s she’s been searching for all her life. This is the most generic of romantic comedies. With its animated opening credits, outtakes playing during the closing credits and a hackneyed relationship storyline in between, you’ve seen it all many times before. To get into any of this, one has to first accept that a woman who looks like the glamorous Lopez, and whose maternal clock isn’t exactly winding down yet, would have such a desperate need to be inseminated right away because she can’t find a man. Once you get past that, you still have to believe her character’s angst at telling this news to a man — whom she had gone out with on only one date — as if she was telling a fiancé that she has a terminal illness. The Back-Up Plan is clearly the type of movie Lopez can handle in her sleep. She’s good in it. Too bad the material isn’t good to her. With movies like this, Lopez might want to start leaving low-end romantic comedies alone and look at her movie career’s backup plan. Grade: D-plus

Saint John of Las Vegas (2010) Insurance investigator and reformed gambler John (Steve Buscemi) faces some old demons on a business trip to Las Vegas, where he and his hotshot colleague (Romany Malco) must investigate a wheelchair-bound stripper (Emmanuelle Chriqui) trying to collect on a big claim for lost wages. This was a bad script that somehow got made into a bad movie with good people in it. It marks the feature debut of writer-director Hue Rhodes, who tries something in this film that he probably needed to try — and needed to see — in order to find out that it doesn’t work. It’s an experiment in a style of comedy grounded in absurdity, not an existential Ionesco-ish or Jim Jarmusch-type absurdity, but a pedestrian absurdity in which everyone is just a little bit stupid for no reason. It isn’t absurd enough to be risky, just silly enough to undercut itself. Making all human exchange meaningless and making every character stupid is, in the end, just a way of evading the task of creating interesting situations and characters worth watching. Rhodes may have wanted to make a movie that’s as ridiculous as real life, but instead he’s created something divorced from life — and devoid of life — a mere series of empty gestures. Grade: D

The Bounty Hunter (2010) Milo Boyd (Gerard Butler) is a bounty hunter who finds out that the bail-skipper he must chase down is his own ex-wife, Nicole (Jennifer Aniston), who has no intention of getting nabbed without a fight. At the beginning of the film, the Milo and Nicole characters are divorced. It is obvious enough that this condition will reverse itself by the end, but it would have been better for everybody concerned, the viewers most of all, if they had just stayed split. On the bumpy road to reconciliation the once and future spouses fight, squabble and slap handcuffs on each other, and also scamper across New Jersey on the run from several different groups of murderous thugs. What they do not do is give the slightest indication that they belong together, except by virtue of having signed contracts to appear in this movie. These characters, whose feelings are supposed to be at stake, are blunted, dumbed-down caricatures of notional human beings, rather than sharply etched epitomes of human behavior. Milo and Nicole broke up because she was too attached to her career, but while Aniston is able to give a reasonable impression of a person doing a job, Butler seems fundamentally incapable of giving any impression beyond that of a self-absorbed boor just awakened from a nap. Neither Milo nor Nicole succeeds in being very interesting, and while Aniston can fall back on her easy, nicely worn charm, Butler has only the opposite of charm to work with. His charisma is aggressively negative: a petulant, sneering, bullying disregard for other people (and for his own hygiene) that is meant, I guess, to represent a kind of rough-hewn, politically incorrect masculine honesty. I suspect, though, that his character in this movie, directed by Andy Tennant (Hitch, Fool’s Gold) from a script by Sarah Thorp, is meant to offer comfort to the panicky men watching it, who can be reassured that it’s O.K. to act like a jerk, and that in any case this guy is a bigger jerk than any of the rest of us could ever hope to be. Grade: D

To be released tomorrow on DVD

The face of grief that the actor Colin Firth wears in A Single Man is crumpled and gray. There is little movement in the face initially: it’s a beautiful and gently furrowed mask, not yet old, despite the small brushstrokes of white at the temples. You might think that gravity alone was tugging at its mouth. But George, the middle-aged professor and single man of the title whom Firth plays with a magnificent depth of feeling, has had his heart broken, and the pieces are still falling.

The film, directed by Tom Ford, follows the outlines of the landmark 1964 novel of the same title by Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), the openly gay British-born author whose story Sally Bowles was turned first into the play I Am a Camera and later the musical and movie Cabaret. An intensely, at times uncomfortably, intimate work of fiction, A Single Man condenses George’s story — much of his very life — into one emotion- and event-charged day. What makes the day special, and the book too, is George’s existential condition. George is single. And he is a man. But he is also a homosexual, which helps set him and his lusting, fading body apart from almost everyone in his life.

But other things distinguish George, including his profound grief over the death of his longtime lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), seen in intermittent flashback. The film opens with an image of George slowly sinking naked in water, a vision suggestive of rebirth and fatal submersion. This is immediately followed by a starkly different image of him slowly entering, as if in a trance, a disquieting tableau in which Jim and a terrier lie dead in a snowy field next to a wrecked automobile and a large, vivid blot of blood. Carefully, George lowers himself next to his dead lover and tenderly kisses his mouth, a gesture that seems to cause George — who had actually been sleeping and presumably dreaming — to wake in his bed.

Numbness follows, as do routine, work, sorrow and perhaps another kind of awakening. Set in 1962 — news of the Cuban missile crisis crackles through the air — the film tracks George from the brutal loneliness of his morning through his day and transformative night. Along the way, he passes in and out of the Los Angeles area college where he teaches Huxley to bored students who stare at him with curiosity when the subject turns to invisible minorities and fear. He crosses paths and wits with a flirty student, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), and a charming hustler, Carlos (Jon Kortajarena), while also making time for his close friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), a British expat like George. At one point, he buys some bullets.

It’s axiomatic, at least for Chekhov and a lot of Hollywood directors, that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must go off in the third. Ford, who shares screenwriting credit with David Scearce, introduces a gun largely because the novel has so little obvious dramatic tension. The gun is a matter of narrative convenience that sometimes works, if sometimes not, with the bits Ford borrows from Pedro Almodóvar and Wong Kar-wai. Ford, for instance, partly frames George’s encounter with the hustler in front of a billboard for Hitchcock’s Psycho featuring a wild-eyed Janet Leigh, an image that recalls a similar shot in Almodóvar’s All About My Mother and invokes the unsettlingly sexual menace of Psycho.

Bringing Hitchcock and Almodóvar into the picture is risky because it creates a ridiculously lofty level of expectation. O.K., show me, you think. (It also intimates that the director and the audience belong to the same cine club, which can seem like a form of pandering.) But Ford, one of the most famous names in fashion and in luxury branding — he was the longtime creative director of Gucci — has taken an enormous chance just by taking on A Single Man, a foundational text in modern gay literature. The novelist Edmund White, for one, called the book “the first truly liberated gay novel in English.” That kind of legacy would have intimidated a lot of inexperienced directors, but Ford betrays few signs of intimidation.

Firth’s delicately shaded performance no doubt helped steady Ford’s nerves. Certainly, the director knows how to exploit his actor’s reserve to terrific effect, as when he sets the camera in front of Firth’s face in one critical scene and just lets the machine record the tremors of emotion cracking the facade. It’s hard to know if Ford’s most flamboyant visual flourish, the use of a changeable palette to show shifts in George’s mood — the character’s normally gray face floods with color in the presence of another life force, like Kenny — was born out of a filmmaking conceit or a lack of confidence. Whatever the case, while the color changes are initially distracting, Firth’s performance soon makes you forget them.

Ford has excellent taste in lead actors — Goode and Moore are very fine — and in cinematic influences. But he hasn’t fully learned how to work inside the moving image plane, a space in which people and objects must be dynamically engaged rather than prettily arranged, as they occasionally are here. And at times his taste seems too impeccable, art-directed for a maximum sale, as in a black-and-white flashback that brings to mind a perfume advertisement. In a film by Wong, whose influence is evident in the visuals and on the elegiac score, a luxuriant bloom, a curlicue of smoke and the curve of a lover’s back express what the characters themselves cannot, rather than the filmmaker’s own personal style. The composer Shigeru Umebayashi has written music for several of Wong’s films and contributed to this one.

That Ford has placed so much weight on Firth suggests that he knows how valuable his actor is to his first effort. And while A Single Man has its flaws, many of these fade in view of the performance and the power of Isherwood’s story. Part of the radical importance of Isherwood’s novel is its insistence on the absolute ordinariness of George’s life, including with Jim, whose relationship together is pictured only briefly in both the novel and the film, and yet reverberates deeply (then as now). Ford’s single man might be less common than Isherwood’s, a bit too exquisitely dressed. But with Firth, Ford has created a gay man troubled by ordinary grief and haunted by joy, a man apart and yet like any other. Grade: B-plus

Other recent movies to be released tomorrow on DVD:

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2010). Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and rebellious computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) team up to investigate the unsolved disappearance of wealthy Henrik Vanger's (Sven-Bertil Taube) teen niece, only to uncover dark secrets about Vanger's powerful family. In the mitts of an American director, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo might have become a Bruce Willis thriller or the pilot episode of CSI: Stockholm. But in the nimble hands of Niels Arden Oplev, this Swedish sensation is a magic trick that jolts the murder-mystery genre back to life. Like a filmic Frankenstein, it assembles pieces of other movies into a uniquely frightening whole. The titular heroine is a worthy sister to the tough cookies in La Femme Nikita and Run Lola Run. Her partner in the project is a dogged journalist in the tradition of the ones in The Parallax View and All the President's Men. And the brainy sleuthing and serial-killer subplot are reminiscent of Zodiac and Silence of the Lambs. The duo is set to return for two sequels, and an English-language version is planned by Se7en director David Fincher, because The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo gets under the skin. Grade: B

Brooklyn’s Finest (2010). Antoine Fuqua directs this drama about three wildly different New York cops whose paths collide in a Brooklyn housing project. Cynical, washed-up Eddie (Richard Gere) no longer cares about the job or the rules; cash-strapped Sal (Ethan Hawke) sees a shortcut to solvency; and Tango (Don Cheadle) is torn between conflicting loyalties. This perfectly adequate cop drama would feel awfully derivative even without a cast mostly consisting of the Morally Ambiguous Police-Movie All-Stars. Seemingly half the gritty undercover thrillers of the past 25 years are represented. For those keeping track at home, Finest stars Internal Affairs’ Gere, New Jack City’s Wesley Snipes (playing, of all things, a charismatic, larger-than-life drug dealer), Sea Of Love’s Ellen Barkin, and Traitor’s Cheadle in a film that reunites one of the leads (Hawke) and director (Fuqua) of Training Day. To quote Yogi Berra, it’s déjà vu all over again. From the moment Gere is introduced waking up to whiskey for breakfast, Brooklyn’s Finest segues smoothly and slickly from one cliché to another. When it’s established that Gere is but days away from retirement, the film skirts self-parody; it wouldn’t be out of place for him to grouse that he’s getting too old for this crap. Fuqua stretches 90 minutes’ worth of material to a heavily padded 140, but he’s blessed with a cast far better than the TV-ready script deserves, especially a smolderingly intense Cheadle as a cop rotting away from the inside. Brooklyn’s Finest was one of the big sales at Sundance last year. Movies that score big Sundance paydays tend to be either so great their potential is obvious to everyone, or incredibly commercial genre films. Fuqua’s star-studded Finest fits one of those criteria, and not because it’s a towering masterpiece. Grade: C-plus