Movie Reviews: Women Without Men, The Square, After.Life, Phyllis and Harold

GODSPEED His relationship with God complicated after his wife and son are incomprehensibly murdered, small-time Alaskan "faith healer" Charlie Shepard (Joseph McKelheer) moves to a trailer in the woods, grows his beard out, finds solace in the whiskey bottle and inks out all the lies in his Bible — till it's almost completely black. Not that Charlie was a saint before the unsolved crime, having cheated with a prostitute and begun his descent into alcoholism, but it's his murky reverence for the Gospel that fuels co-writer/director Robert Saitzyk's brooding, slow-burning northern-gothic drama/revenge thriller/backwoods horror. Suspense is introduced along with angelic teenager Sarah (Courtney Halverson), the daughter of one of Charlie's sick parishioners, who asks for help and brings the broken evangelist to the very men responsible for his family's slaughter. Amid gorgeous panoramas, blood spills in the name of loony, misinformed good intentions. The tone fits the material, and the performances are surprisingly measured, but Saitzyk's sappy pontifications on loss, redemption and zealotry don't register as headily as they're meant to (every character gets at least one melodramatic speech), and the spirituality invoked feels about as sincere as the Christian who only attends Christmas mass. (Aaron Hillis) (Sunset 5)

LA MISSION Watered-down Jungian analysis meets a GLAAD-approved weepie in Peter Bratt's second feature, starring brother Benjamin Bratt (who also produces) as a neck-tattooed macho who will finally realize the damage his rock-hard masculinity has caused during a funeral for a teenage gangbanger, his tears mixing with the rain. As subtle as a face punch, La Mission nobly continues a necessary conversation about homophobia, but paves the way to hell with its own good intentions. Che Rivera (Bratt), a 46-year-old widowed Muni bus driver, spends his off hours boxing, cruising in his lowrider, raging against the gentrification of his S.F. neighborhood of the title, and inviting his UCLA-bound son, Jesse (Jeremy Ray Valdez), to pickup basketball games. Jesse, however, prefers male bonding of a different sort, like Castro boy-bar fun. When Che discovers evidence of Jesse's night out, it's gay panic at the Frisco: He pummels and disowns his son. As the Bratts tick off the usual coming-out-narrative plot points, La Mission strains to be both a thoughtful tale of one man's emotional rehabilitation and a critique of outmoded, sclerotic patriarchal customs in Latino culture. It's a laudable goal but one that too often becomes nothing more than a series of teachable moments — suitable for awareness training at a PFLAG meeting but too earnestly didactic to have much lasting effect. (Melissa Anderson) (Monica, Playhouse, Sunset 5)

MID-AUGUST LUNCH Watching this lauded but fatally slight comedy of manners about a middle-aged Italian who finds himself caring for four spunky old dames, it's hard to believe writer, director and star Gianni Di Gregorio also co-wrote the bloody Mafia hit Gomorrah. Amiably self-deprecating to a fault, the semi-autobiographical Mid-August Lunch features Di Gregorio as Gianni, an aging slacker who cares for his demanding mother (Valeria de Franciscis) in their decrepit Rome apartment. Forced to take in several other matriarchs in order to win a reprieve on his overdue rent, Gianni wakes up to a functioning community of vibrant broads (all gallantly played by nonpros) whose preference for fun over balanced cholesterol levels provides whatever charm can be wrung from this desultory slice of life. By contrast — and if that's the point, it remains unexplored — Gianni is a pale ghost of a man who desires nothing and does little more than rustle up dainty dishes, knock back white wine by the liter and, in a coda you can see coming from scene one, whirl the randy old girls around in a valedictory living-room dance. Indeed, the only whiff of passion comes from the sadistic care that has gone into putting garish clothes and makeup on the mother, which give her the ghoulish air of Jeanne Moreau in a fun-house mirror. Of all the ritzy festival awards Mid-August Lunch has won (including Best First Film at Venice), it rates at least Bologna's Golden Snail Award for Best Food Feature. (Ella Taylor) (Monica, Music Hall, Playhouse, Town Center)

PHYLLIS AND HAROLD There's a secret busting out of Cindy Kleine's documentary about her parents' long and — depending on whom she talks to — unhappy marriage, but it's a pretty banal one. Kleine's mother, Phyllis, an upstanding Long Island Hadassah lady, didn't have to look beyond her workplace to find a lover with whom she conducted a clandestine five-year affair, which she briefly revived in her 70s. We learn little enough about this man to make us wonder if he was all that different from Phyllis' husband, the dentist. What's interesting about the filmmaker's rummage through her parents' conjugal closet — another in a thriving subgenre of domestic-turmoil docs as told by their spawn — is the abyss between the husband's and wife's points of view. Once a fleshy man of appetites awkwardly hitched to a bright, intense, buxom emo-glamour-puss, the unintrospective Harold, who apparently remained ignorant of his wife's infidelity until he died, remembers the period of her indiscretion as his "golden years." But that's not the only pathos — it's also that these two lived together for 59 years as strangers. Was Phyllis a self-absorbed drama queen who would have found any marriage inadequate given time, or a prisoner of the postwar suburbs wilting for lack of fulfillment? Either way, her daughter has it easier — she makes movies, knows arty types who're good for blurbs, and goes home nightly for her dinner with Andre (yes, that Andre). But I'm not entirely sure why she made this film. (Ella Taylor) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3, Laemmle’s Fallbrook 7)