Movie Reviews: Day Watch, Mr. Brooks, Paprika

PICK  PAPRIKA Based on a serialized novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, this loopy anime from director Satoshi Kon (Millennium Actress) isn’t a movie that’s meant to be understood so much as simply experienced — or maybe dreamed. Here’s what I know for sure (and plotwise, it isn’t much): Our psychotherapist superheroine Paprika, a.k.a. Dr. Atsuko Chiba, learns that her laboratory’s dream machine, the DC-Mini, has gone missing. So she goes looking for the errant device, digitally jacking into her colleagues’ dreams and discovering clues that include menacing geisha dolls and the recurring nightmare of a guilt-ridden police detective — who happens to hate movies. Like the best work of Kon’s compatriots Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), Paprika is a film in which, minute to minute, basically anything can happen; the narrative is almost completely unbound. But Kon wouldn’t be his genre’s supreme self-reflexivist if he didn’t insist on revealing frames within the frame — which here include not just characters’ dreams, but movie and laptop screens, plus a Planet Hollywood–esque elevator that stops on floors devoted to Tarzan and James Bond. At once cinephobic and cinephilic, Kon’s heady cure for blockbuster blues couldn’t have come along at a better time. (Sunset 5; Playhouse 7) (Rob Nelson) See film feature

PIERREPOINT – ENGLAND’S LAST HANGMAN See film feature

SHOOTOUT AT LOKHANDWALA After a successful, bloody raid against Pakistani terrorists circa 1991, legendary Mumbai police detective Aftab Ahmed Khan (Sanjay Dutt) creates a new, SWAT-like unit designed to attack the mobsters who are terrorizing the city, transforming crime scenes into free fire zones. Based on actual events, director Apoorva Lakhia’s tumultuous Shootout at Lokhandwala has a neat genre-flick premise that recalls the Johnny To media-circus crime thriller Breaking News: Hundreds of cops surround a downtown apartment building containing six of the city’s most-wanted thugs, while the resulting gun battle becomes a live TV spectacular. The movie is a slapdash piece of work that cries out for a few more weeks of editorial fine-tuning. Worse, it’s morally incoherent: It never decides whether to portray the cops as slo-mo manly heroes or as prisoner-executing fascists. (As a result, they are both and neither.) But Shootout at Lokhandwala may still be a rush for action fans because it never slows down long enough to become even remotely boring. The flamboyant hand of producer Sanjay Gupta, the genre-movie gourmand who directed Kaante and Musafir, is unmistakable in jet-propelled action and chase sequences that feel like the mutant offspring of John Woo and Costa-Gavras. And there are crucial grace notes in the performances: The actress Amrita Singh, a Bollywood vamp in black leather back in the 1980s, does a beautifully creepy turn as the movie’s scariest character, the chief gangster’s mother, whose supportiveness is decidedly unhealthy. Is Sanjay Gupta channeling White Heat here, or did he just get lucky? (Naz 8) (David Chute)

SHOWBUSINESS: THE ROAD TO BROADWAY Movie buffs who don’t know their way around the Great White Way will be struck by the endless parallels to Hollywood in this Broadway documentary: There are star-powered mega-productions (like the $10 million Taboo, produced by Rosie O’Donnell) and smaller, hipper projects (the $3.5 million Avenue Q); shows designed to draw the largest possible audience (Wicked) and more personal, intellectual ones (Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change). The film’s producer-director Dori Berinstein knows her way around a Broadway show — she’s produced 11 of them, including her latest, Legally Blonde — and her insider status no doubt helped secure behind-the-scenes access as she tracks one season in the life of four musicals. It also explains the unusual level of intimacy between interviewer and subjects, including a sampling of New York’s theater critics, who, unlike their film-watching brethren, have a much stronger influence on the bottom line. Still, their inability to predict the winners at the box office (who would see Avenue Q?) or at the Tonys (what could beat Wicked?) shows Broadway’s inherent unpredictability, which makes for good entertainment in any art form. (The Landmark) (Matt Singer)

SIX DAYS Short on insight and artistry, Six Days takes a dry approach to the hottest of conflicts. Detailing 1967’s Six-Day War, Ilan Ziv’s doc reiterates hashed-over history: With an unprepared and outmatched military, Egypt’s Abdel Nasser foolishly forced Israel into battle; rocking an eye patch, Moshe Dayan took every opportunity during the short war to expand Israel’s borders, nabbing east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, pulling back just miles from Damascus. Yes, historical accuracy and collective memory matter, but if there’s one thing the region needs, with the last of Israel’s founding hawks lying comatose in a hospital bed, it’s imagination. Instead, we get the suffocatingly conventional — narrated footage, talking head, repeat — though Six Days does make a strong, likely unintentional argument for people over power: Nasser and Dayan left their citizenry in the dark, wielding strategic misinformation to keep hate alive in the street. Young Diaspora Jews poured into Tel Aviv, eager to help their brethren, who, unbeknownst to anyone but the commanders, didn’t need a hand (Israel’s air force wiped out Egypt’s, Jordan’s and Syria’s capacities in just hours), all as the Egyptians celebrated false news reports of the Jews’ crushing defeat. Four decades later, pan-Arabism has given way to religious fundamentalism and the conflict over land still rages, but the war’s lasting legacy may well be deliberate delusion on both sides. (Grande 4-Plex) (Allison Benedikt)