Movie Reviews: La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, Planet 51, The Twilight Saga: New Moon

MR. SADMAN Saddam Hussein famously surrounded himself with identical doubles, to mislead potential assassins. In his feature debut, writer-director Patrick Epino poses the tragicomic question: What might have befallen one if he had been forced into early retirement, prior to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait? When Mounir (Al No’Mani, an impressive Saddam double) is injured on the job, gets fired and finds himself at loose ends with a wad of retirement cash, he buys a plane ticket to Hollywood. Epino maintains an amusing strategy throughout: Mounir never has so much as one line of dialogue; he’s as silent as any Keystone comic, and for a while this serves the movie well. For the first third, people project their interpretations upon him, to such lucky effect, that one hopes in vain for something like Being There. Unfortunately, the remainder of the film is weakly constructed, and rapidly falls flat. There’s a potential love story with a party-happy young passerby (Amanda Fuller) who fancies herself an identical double of Anna Karina. She’s lovely but nothing like the Danish Godard muse, a promising contrast with our hero, which goes unexplored. Her character is instead dropped cold and only picked up and dropped again later for increasingly cryptic narrative convenience. The tone then turns completely dark, which might have been interesting had Epino created any sense of anticipation. His potential as a filmmaker is considerable: The film is impeccably cast; it’s shot and cut well. Unfortunately, the secret of comedy is that it’s the highest form of suspense, and Mr. Sadman is just too bleakly episodic. (Downtown Independent) (F.X. Feeney)

PLANET 51 Like E.T. in reverse, this pleasantly mediocre CG animation tale lands an astronaut on a distant planet whose green, four-fingered, newt-ish inhabitants are living in an innocent, 1950s-style state of development. Fearing the brain-eating “humaniacs” they see at the movies, the Planet 51ers naturally view spaceman Chuck (voiced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) as a monster — except timid, green teen Lem (Justin Long), who saves Chuck from the mob: “Mom, can I keep him?” Handsome doofus Chuck is a chip off the Buzz Lightyear block, but Planet 51 lacks the Pixar polish (particularly in its writing). Still, it’s not a bad knockoff. The alternate-reality, Cold War–era design is cute: towns laid out like crop circles; women wearing beehives neatly coiffed above their antennae; and saucer-shaped cars wobbling inches from the pavement. Sounds picture-perfect, but before the alien can go home, Lem must thwart a paranoid general (Gary Oldman) and win the girl next door (Jessica Biel), which means that Chuck must act as his preeningly unreliable life coach. Fortunately, many chases and pratfalls attend their journey. The biggest laughs come from a neighborhood dog, modeled on the beast in Alien, that pees acid, and from the robotic six-wheeled NASA rover that’s strongly reminiscent of WALL-E. An awkward European-American co-production, Planet 51 mainly succeeds at reminding you of all the better movies that inspired it. (Citywide) (Brian Miller)

STATEN ISLAND Native son James DeMonaco overlaps three Staten Island stories, set amid strip-mall Italian joints, tasteless suburban manors, and ship graveyards: Vincent D’Onofrio plays Parmie, a stuffy-voiced, moonfaced mama’s-boy mobster wearing Elizabeth Taylor frames; Ethan Hawke — looking nothing like a septic-tank cleaner — plays septic-tank cleaner Sully; and Seymour Cassel plays Jasper, a lonesome deaf-mute deli counterman. After commenting on the cliché of the brutal mob interrogation he is running, Parmie splits to pursue his secret obsession: breaking a Guinness Book record. The anachronistic soundtrack of ’60s soul and botched retro newsreel opening suggest time has stopped at the end of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, while contradicted by further garishly unexpected plot twists: Parmie converts to radical environmentalism; Sully schemes to buy his unborn child IQ-boosting gene therapy; and Jasper supports a gambling habit doing meat-slicer waste disposal for La Cosa Nostra. Throughout, first-time director DeMonaco shows a predilection for white-hot patches of lighting, squeezed close-ups and actor overindulgence. His poetic realism comes out at a clunky cadence, and at the service of hoary indie conventions: Dramatis personae united in quiet desperation over their outer-borough insignificance, each gazing longingly at the so-close-yet-so-far Manhattan skyline. (Sunset 5) (Nick Pinkerton)

THAT EVENING SUN First-time writer-director Scott Teems has given 84-year-old master actor Hal Holbrook a dream role in Abner Meecham, a Tennessean who walks out of a nursing home and returns to the remote farm where he spent his life. On arrival, Meecham discovers that his son (Walton Goggins) has rented the place to a local bad apple named Lonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon) and his family. Furious, Abner takes up residence in a rundown cabin near the main house, triggering a volatile feud between the two men. An old-world Southerner, Abner is unforgiving of weakness, and of Lonzo, an often despicable character for whom McKinnon, in a charged performance, generates a surprising degree of empathy. As an actor, Holbrook is as unsentimental as Abner himself, and the beauty of his work here lies in his refusal to soften the character’s hard edges. Regrettably, Teems’ editorial choices in the film’s home stretch waste that discipline: More than once, the director inserts a gooey flashback to a tender moment between the farmer and his late wife (Dixie Carter) that not only extends an already overlong movie but also fatally undercuts the artful rigor of its leading man. (Sunset 5; Playhouse 7; Town Center 5) (Chuck Wilson)