Behind the Burly Q, Breath Made Visible, Mother and Child

HAPPINESS RUNS Born and raised on a polygamous commune in the wilderness, embittered teen hippie Victor (Mark L. Young) has realized that the nonconformist ideals of his elders—like his parents (odd-duck pairing Andie MacDowell and Mark Boone Junior) and a seductive hypnotist guru (Rutger Hauer)—have produced a litter of burnt-out, oversexed, downright oppressed kids without the ability to see their looming self-destruction. Loosely based on writer-director Adam Sherman's similar cult upbringing and disillusionment, the film builds on a fascinating cautionary tale, but doesn't develop its characters past whatever movie-of-the-week crisis each suffers from. We get that everyone's folks are too busy getting high or laid, but without a deepening of those parent-child dynamics, we're left with a tacky Lord of the Flies scenario, seemingly filmed by Larry Clark like a trippy '60s surf movie. Victor doesn't have the scratch to move away, and he's also distracted by his constantly naked, childhood love, Becky (Hanna Hall, the youngest sis from The Virgin Suicides), who has returned to care for her ailing dad and fuck every boy just to feel anything. (Aaron Hillis) (Sunset 5)

IRON MAN 2 As Iron Man 2 begins, Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark — mechanical genius, Forbes 400 perennial, the pop star CEO of Stark Industries — has dropped any pretense of a secret identity, dealing now with the murderous envy created by conspicuous success. Enter Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), a rogue Russian physicist whose lifelong grudge against the Stark family inspires him to weld together his own knockoff suit. He'll find a sponsor in CEO Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), a Tony Stark imitator whose Hammer Industries finishes a consistent second place to Stark. The screenplay, by Justin Theroux, trusts that More is More. There's techie lifestyle porn, hot cars, hot guns, establishing shots jetting from Moscow and Malibu to Monaco, and three dozen comic books' worth of exposition girdled into two straining hours. The elements that made the first Iron Man a rather likable blockbuster have not entirely evaporated. Director Jon Favreau brings together interesting American movie stars and lets them actually play through scenes (even though Rourke and Rockwell play theirs together as if in two different — both interesting — movies). But the only reason Sam Jackson's Agent Nick Fury shows up is, essentially, to do press for the upcoming Avengers movie. This sub-subplot is symptomatic of the franchise-first mind-set in the era of the $200M "Episode," where films are constructed less as freestanding edifices than as elements in superstructures. The idea is that we learn to trust that any extraneous-seeming thread will connect to something in another couple of summers and pay off, assuming the movie does. (Nick Pinkerton) (Citywide)

THE LIGHTKEEPERS Though her makeup is too modern for this 1912 period piece, Blythe Danner is luminous in the role of housekeeper for a wealthy young heiress, played by Mamie Gumer. Danner, the film's sole strength, does what she can with the material, but it's not enough to offset writer-director Daniel Adams' cliché-ridden script and leaden direction, or the excruciating hamfest that is Richard Dreyfuss' lead performance. The film opens with curmudgeonly Cape Cod lighthouse keeper Seth (Dreyfuss) browbeating his latest assistant, who huffily quits. Immediately, the Fates wash a mysterious, handsome man (Tom Wisdom) up on shore. Claiming to have lost his memory save for his suspiciously generic name — John Brown — the young man sets about ingratiating himself with Seth, whose tiresome rants against women are lifted straight from the Little Rascals' He-Man Woman Haterz Club. When the heiress and her housekeeper move in next door, all the pieces of both Seth's and John's shadowy pasts too conveniently and obviously fall into place. Adams strains for charm and whimsy, interjected with wackiness (runaway horses being clumsily chased; mishaps with lobster traps) and it's all a bust, as is the sappy score that swells every time the camera pans o'er spacious skies and crashing waves. (Ernest Hardy) (Citywide)

MERCY Johnny (Scott Caan) is a Hollywood party boy/successful novelist who tosses out bon mots like, "You hitting that?" Then his best seller is panned by Mercy (Wendy Glenn), a New York critic with the bone structure of a supermodel, who accuses Johnny of "lacking" depth." In a town full of overly eager and opportunistic easy lays, Mercy gets Johnny's attention with her dis. "Usually, with women, I can only hear the teacher from Peanuts," Johnny tells his bros. "But with her, I heard her." Scripted by Caan and directed by fashion photographer Patrick Hoelck, Mercy looks like an Urban Outfitters catalog and plays like A Very Special Episode of Entourage, only sporadically convincing that it's taking such form to mobilize a critique of the same. It's literally a vanity project; Caan has written himself a character who utilizes his own unusual physicality. His boyishly handsome face suits the vulnerability of a romantic hero, but he also has the body of a linebacker squeezed down to the height of a jockey, and his short-guy-with-something-to-prove swagger befits Johnny's blend of cockiness and insecurity. The performance is a bit too perfect, leaving no room for spontaneity or happy accident. Speaking of accidents, Caan's written a hell of one — as Chekhov promised, an asthma inhaler brought out (and cloyingly commented on) in the first act points to tragedy in the third. At the risk that giving him a bad review will cause Scott Caan to fall in love with me, I must note the irony in a film that seeks to critique superficiality, only to (spoiler alert!) fall back on the old, shallow "dead fiancées deepen dipshits" trick. (Karina Longworth) (Sunset 5)