THE STEPFATHER Awkwardly chummy guys with weird glasses who disappear into darkened rooms with your laughing mother to listen to Donald Fagen solo albums — the stepfather was a ready-to-villainize archetype for the kids-of-divorce who saw the 1987 Terry O’Quinn thriller. That Stepfather was Donald Westlake’s reworking of Hitchcock’s wolf-in-the-suburbs Shadow of a Doubt, and now Westlake’s screenplay has been rejiggered. The kickoff is good — the finale effectively literalizes the expression “broken home” — but director Nelson McCormick doesn’t keep things “taut” in between. Rather than do scenes right the first time, he tends to déjà vu them (this usually involves Amber Heard, wearing not-too-much). Menaced family and friends include a Gossip Girl guy and a bunch of actors who look faintly like other, more-famous actors, but The Stepfather is, finally, only as good as its stepfather — and Dylan Walsh ain’t bad. He’s nondescriptly handsome in a subdued, strong–jaw line, L.L. Bean–fashion, shortish-as-bullies-will-be, and oversensitive and overpolite in a hard-to-pinpoint way. Still, comparison with Jaume Collet-Serra’s recent and superior Orphan — also about a breached family — shows the difference between a by-the-numbers journeyman and a serious student of genre. Anyhow, closing on a butt-rock cover of “Happy Together” should leave ’em laughing. (Citywide) (Nick Pinkerton)
(UNTITLED)(Untitled) aims wide and misses, its satire of the contemporary-art scene seemingly lifted from the transcripts of late-’80s Senate debates about the NEA. Two highly competitive brothers — Josh (Eion Bailey), a successful painter of dull hotel art, and Adrian (Adam Goldberg, who also serves as executive producer), a perpetually indignant, brow-furrowing composer of atonal music — fall for wildly ambitious New York gallerist Madeleine (Marley Shelton). Director Jonathan Parker, who co-wrote with Catherine DiNapoli (the duo behind 2001’s Bartleby), wants to have it both ways, snidely mocking his protagonists and then granting them happy, art-affirming endings. Adrian scribbles furiously in his Moleskine, Madeleine wears noisy textured clothing (though Sarah Lawrence tees are her preferred sleepwear), and crybaby Josh wonders, “When did beauty become so fuckin’ ugly?” Tepid spoofs of Damien Hirst and Charles Ray creations fall flat as finger-wagging proof of contemporary art’s aesthetic bankruptcy, a Warholian-like aphasic thrown in for more laffs. (Untitled) tries to reignite who-gets-to-call-it-art debates that haven’t been taken seriously for at least a decade — which may explain the recurring presence of a plastic bag that appears to have blown in off the set of American Beauty.(The Landmark; Sunset 5; Town Center 5; Playhouse 7) (Melissa Anderson)
