Film Reviews

AN AMERICAN HAUNTING Despite their appeal to patriotic horror fans, the makers of An American Haunting end up doing more harm than good to domestic fright production. The canned creeps begin with a present-day framing story, as a terrorized young woman runs through snow-banked Tennessee woods back to the house where a family, the Bells, were harassed by an unruly poltergeist beginning in 1817. Told in flashback through the diary of mother Lucy Bell (Sissy Spacek), this “true account” of the Bell Witch haunting offers an encyclopedic rehash of spook films new and old, dressed out in murky period detail. The Bells’ daughter, Betsy (Rachel Hurd-Wood), bears the brunt of the angry specter’s wrath, with so much of the film devoted to her prolonged physical thrashings that it feels like watching a scene from The Exorcist stuck on a loop. A literal “ghost cam” that swoops and weaves around the heads of family and friends, including Betsy’s father (Donald Sutherland) and schoolteacher (James D’Arcy), seems like a gimmick lifted from William Castle. Director Courtney Solomon (Dungeons & Dragons) even imports the creepy spectral children who’ve been all the rage in recent Japanese horror films. So much for homegrown haunts. (Citywide) (Paul Malcolm)

GO ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL Set on the campus of fictional Strathmore art college, this second collaboration between director Terry Zwigoff and writer Daniel Clowes projects an altogether darker, more misanthropic view of humanity than their earlier Ghost World, which may explain why it has met with a cooler reception from critics and audiences alike since premiering earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. No matter: Art School Confidential is the more pungent and penetrating work, even if it may be fully appreciated only by those who willingly sacrifice all hope of a normal life in pursuit of what one character here calls “the narcotic moment of creative bliss.” Told through the eyes of introverted freshman Jerome (a wonderfully laconic Max Minghella), who dreams of becoming the greatest artist of the 21st century, the movie is at once an awkward coming-of-age story, a scabrous take-down of art-world hypocrisy, and even a murder mystery in which a serial strangler preys on Strathmore’s nascent aesthetes (which the filmmakers hardly regard as a bad thing). Somehow it all holds together, laced with Clowes and Zwigoff’s bitter discourse on the impossibility of originality and how, in art as in life, it’s all about how much ass you kiss. But Art School Confidential reaches its dementedly brilliant peak in the company of Jim Broadbent, as the embittered, vodka-guzzling Strathmore grad whose vitriolic rant about wishing for a great plague to wipe out his fellow man is underscored by the theme song to The Facts of Life blaring from an unattended television. That’s the kind of moment of which Clowes and Zwigoff are masters, when we’re not sure whether it hurts too much to laugh, or whether we laugh to stave off the hurt. (Selected theaters) (Scott Foundas)

GO THE FALL OF FUJIMORI Alberto Fujimori probably isn’t granting too many audiences these days. The former Peruvian president and self-styled political strongman — one of the world’s most notorious figures over the past 20 years — is currently being detained in Chile. But two years ago, Fujimori was living large: Comfortably exiled in his native Japan, where he had fled four years earlier following charges of corruption and worse, he consented to an interview by American director Ellen Perry for a documentary chronicling his life and controversial administration. The Fall of Fujimori is the result, and while its long midsection, composed of news footage documenting the bloody unrest that defined Peru during the 1990s, rarely rises above competent reportage, the film is a must-see for Perry’s one-on-one chats with her subject. For a man wanted by Interpol for kidnapping and murder, Fujimori is one cool customer: He makes The Fog of War’s Robert McNamara look squirrelly by comparison. He has a lot to answer for — staging a self-coup in 1992 that effectively turned his presidency into a dictatorship, eroding his country’s civil liberties and then mounting an unconstitutional bid for a third term in office — but to hear him tell it, his policies effectively eradicated terrorism in his country, and the only thing he’s guilty of is pragmatism. Although they’re not revealing in a “Barbara Walters gets the guest to cry” sense, the interview segments are queasily fascinating. Fujimori’s clear-eyed, unfailingly diplomatic responses to difficult questions about the crimes on his conscience (and blood on his hands) imply a dizzying level of self-confidence — or bottomless depths of denial. (Grande 4-Plex) (Adam Nayman)

GO HOOT Carl Hiaasen’s award-winning young-adult novel reaches the big screen under the auspices of fellow Floridian Jimmy Buffett, who produced, contributed several original ballads and appears onscreen as a hippie-surfer marine-studies teacher. So it’s little surprise that Hoot gets the Sunshine State to a tee, in all its garishness (cheap wicker furniture and eye-straining pastels) and beauty (deep-orange sunsets over tranquil gulf waters). The slight story, probably not one of the ones that earned Hiaasen his reputation as a master satirist, offers a crude but effective metaphor for Americans’ love affair with strip malls, chain stores and other monuments to mass consumerism. Set in the fictional coastal town of Coconut Cove, it’s a familiar David-vs.-Goliath tale about the efforts of some Green-minded teens to fend off the big-city developers who want to pave over paradise — in this case, a vacant lot that’s home to some endangered owls — and put up a pancake restaurant. Some benign ecoterrorism ensues, as a trio of plucky middle schoolers tries to stop the bulldozers while shaking the locals from their collective flapjack reverie. Hoot is flatly directed by talk-show-host-turned-sitcom-director Wil Shriner, but the young actors are spirited and appealing, and the movie’s low-key anti-establishment posture is vastly preferable to the knee-jerk fulminations of a Michael Moore. It’s all stitched together by Buffett’s groovy tunes, each one like a tequila-scented daiquiri (okay, a virgin tequila-scented daiquiri) imbibed on a white sandy beach, with not a Gap or a Wal-Mart in sight. (Citywide) (Scott Foundas)