Film Reviews

AUTUMN In this elegantly stylized but emotionally strained first feature by Francophile American writer-director Ra’up McGee, the highly decorative Laurent Lucas (With a Friend Like Harry, Lemming) plays a hit man bothered by a freshly grown conscience and his rekindled love for an even more decorative, but potentially unreliable, childhood friend (Irène Jacob). Together they creep around a very noir, very quiet Paris giving and getting grief from far less photogenic mobsters aided by the exhilaratingly weird-looking actress Dinara Drukarova, known to discerning moviegoers as the resourceful Russian child in Vitali Kanevsky’s terrific Freeze, Die, Come to Life. There’s a missing suitcase, frequent flashbacks to beautifully framed childhood trauma in an autumnal forest, and scads of serial betrayal. It’s all very Nouvelle Vague, but though McGee clearly has talent, it’s not at all clear that he has a subject beyond the skillful creation of cinematically mid-Atlantic mood leavened with self-conscious comic business. In the absence of something to think about, it’s fun to watch Jacob, who at 40 has matured from the seraphic but somewhat vacant young muse of Krzysztof Kieslowski in The Double Life of Véronique into a rougher but more substantial beauty that could make her a worthy successor to Charlotte Rampling. (Westside Pavilion) (Ella Taylor)

 GO  THE HEART OF THE GAME Ward Serrill set out to make a short documentary about the girls’ basketball team at Roosevelt High School in Seattle and especially its coach, Bill Resler, a tax professor with no experience. But a season later, Serrill encountered Darnellia Russell, who ended up the star of the team and the star of a movie bound up not just in the X’s and O’s of winning, but the politics of race, gender, and class. The Heart of the Game is a sweet, engaging journey with the Roosevelt Roughriders, whose kindly coach encourages the girls to snarl like wolves and devour like lions. Resler’s still at the heart of the movie, only now he shares it with Russell, a phenom who left her friends behind to play ball at a crosstown rival populated by white girls. The film has its bleak moments, but it aspires to inspire and uplift; you revel in the moment when the girls discuss their reluctance to touch each other on the court, and their eventual love for the pushing and shoving of hardwood war. (ArcLight) (Robert Wilonsky)

THE KING The first fully narrative feature by director James Marsh, who previously made the striking fact/fiction hybrid Wisconsin Death Trip, is a lurid, overheated Southern Gothic that wallows in its own unpleasantness like a pig in shit, then tries to pass itself off as a high-minded treatise about guilt and redemption. Gael García Bernal plays Elvis (not Presley), newly discharged from the Navy and making his way back to his Texas hometown, where he hopes to locate the father (William Hurt) who bore him illegitimately and who’s now a respected Baptist preacher complete with picture-perfect wife (Laura Harring), Christian rocker son (Paul Dano) and lissome teenage daughter (Pell James). As played by Bernal, Elvis couldn’t be a more obvious snake in this latter-day Eden if he hissed and stuck out his tongue, yet Marsh (who also co-wrote the script with Monster’s Ball scribe Milo Addica) almost seems to prefer him to the rest of the characters, who are uniformly held in contempt by the director for their Bible-banging ways. Incest and patricidal impulses are not far at hand, along with the guarantee that everyone will behave in a manner sure to cause the maximum possible suffering for themselves and their loved ones. At one point, Bernal stabs someone in the gut and asks “How does it feel?” — which is more or less what The King does to the audience for the entire two hours it’s onscreen. (Sunset 5) (Scott Foundas)

THE LONG WEEKEND Remember the early-’90s HBO comedy series Dream On, conceived by John Landis as an excuse to reuse old TV clips from the Universal vaults in the service of a contemporary sex comedy? Same idea here, except the clips being recycled are unused submissions to America’s Funniest Home Videos, mostly depicting animals grabbing their genitals or people accidentally setting themselves on fire. Oh sure, that sounds like fun, but rather than simply releasing the uncomfortably amusing clips on DVD as a Jackass-style compilation, executive producer Vin Di Bona and Gold Circle Films president Paul Brooks have spliced them into the umpteenth unfunny cinematic variation of the “sensitive guy and obnoxious womanizing best friend try to get laid” story, with nary a laugh to be had unless you’re one of those who finds toilet scenes and prison-rape jokes to be automatically hilarious. (Director-for-hire Pat Holden loves ’em). Brendan Fehr is the introverted advertising executive trying to save his job and stop pining for his ex, while Chris Klein puts a whole lot of energy into being unfunny as his crazy brother with a penchant for wacky misadventures. The worst part is the clips aren’t even used all that much — they’re explained away as old home movies, which could have been a funny idea if the filmmakers had shown the brothers living near the zoo with a bunch of pyromaniacs. But alas, no. (Fairfax; One Colorado; Fallbrook 7) (Luke Y. Thompson)