Lost and Found

This is risky territory, and ripe for caricature and cliché. As you'd expect from the first feature-length production of a new-media studio with the rather wince-making name of Wovie, Group bristles with self-conscious method. Yet the experimentalism serves its subject rather than the other way about. Freeman and de Marcken, who were inspired by their own experiences in therapy, jettisoned their original script in favor of an improvisational process not unlike that of the British director Mike Leigh, in which the actors spend months generating histories for their characters and meet only on the set, where they improvise in much the way a successful process of therapy is improvised. For most of the movie we see the women, on a screen split six ways, as they react to one another (and themselves) with anger, disbelief, contempt, detachment and, as time goes on, a degree of empathy. The camera pulls back to show the cameras that made the movie, which may be one too many meta-gestures. Some psychobabble ("We're all trying to be who we are") is inevitable, but somehow or other the thing works, largely because the acting, though primarily reactive, invests the movie with enough immediacy and specificity to turn the most excruciating banality into an original thought. It won't surprise anyone that by the end a fundamentalist Christian and a lesbian amputee discover they have more in common than they could have imagined. It's the way they get there that satisfies.

FULL FRONTAL | Directed by STEVEN SODERBERGH | Written by COLEMAN HOUGH | Produced by SCOTT KRAMER and GREGORY JACOBS | Released by Miramax Films | Citywide

GROUP | Written and directed by MARILYN FREEMAN and ANNE DE MARCKEN | Produced by FREEMAN, DE MARCKEN and MARGERY B. BROWN | Released by Artistic License Films | At Laemmle's Fairfax Cinemas