Movie reviews: Get Low, Life During Wartime

AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN Around a Small Mountain travels with an itinerant one-ring circus of proud artisans, performing to shrinking rural crowds. "We're the last classics," announces one. And after a long and stubbornly marginal career heading his creative family, 82-year-old director Jacques Rivette nears closing time with this commedia dell'arte. Leads Sergio Castellitto and Jane Birkin have appeared for Rivette before; regular Pascal Bonitzer contributes to the script; Irina Lubtchansky, taking over the cinematographer's chair, does proud her recently passed father, William, Rivette's DP of 30-odd years. The premise is skeletal: Vittorio (Castellitto), an Italian passing through the Cévennes, is waylaid by the mysterious wince in the gap-toothed smile of the troupe's tightrope walker, Kate (Birkin). There's a breathable air of Southern late-summer afternoons in the public squares and campgrounds where Vittorio and Kate play their approach and retreat. Rivette inserts parentheticals of performers at work, including a reprised routine by the clowns, into which Vittorio is drawn as an incompetent substitute in a keynote scene, funny and illustrative of Rivette's improvisational practice. Rivette is known, if for nothing else, for making epically long features; this is his shortest, sidling along after the tragic secret that's kept Kate away from performing for decades. It's all slight enough to blow away, and rare enough to warrant seeing it before it does. (Nick Pinkerton) (Monica 4, Playhouse)

CATS AND DOGS: THE REVENGE OF KITTY GALORE About as unremarkable as a film about talking animals organized into competing intelligence agencies can be, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore overcompensates for its pre-school premise (I don't know if you've heard, but these house pets — they don't like each other) with a steroidal storyline. Using a combination of live action and CGI that will give some audience members PTSD flashbacks to the recent Marmaduke (hold me), director Brad Peyton has been charged with following up the 2001 original with the sequel no one was hoping for — in pointless 3-D. The usual pop culture allusions (Bond is lamentably spoofed; Roger Moore voices a buttoned-up cat) are meant to keep moms and dads grimly entertained, but their kids will be a casualty of the overcrowded whiteboard of a plot. A hapless police dog named Diggs (James Marsden) is recruited into a doggie underground to help stop Kitty Galore (Bette Midler), a hairless cat embittered by the industrial accident that uglified her, from taking over the world. A hater of both dogs and humans, Kitty has gone rogue, and apparently learned how to launch a satellite into space. Cats and dogs (and pigeons and Christina Applegate) must work together to deliver every pet-related groaner imaginable within 85 minutes. (Michelle Orange) (Citywide)

CHARLIE ST. CLOUD In a go-nowhere Pacific Northwest town, dreamy high school sailor Charlie (played mostly by Zac Efron's abs and piercing gaze) puts his Stanford scholarship plans on indefinite hold after he momentarily flatlines in a car accident, which also takes his little brother, Sam (Charlie Tahan). Half a decade later, Charlie has sunk into a shy, brooding routine as a cemetery caretaker, and meets his dead bro in the woods every sunset to toss around a baseball. Adapted from a 2005 novel by Ben Sherwood, this blatant heartstring-puller from director Burr Steers (Igby Goes Down) is more sentimental than subtle in depicting a grieving young man whose inability to let go has stunted him. But even at its most maudlin (enter Ray Liotta as the St. Jude–praying, cancer-ridden paramedic who revived Charlie and has suddenly reconnected with him), this handsomely shot melodrama has a twist too peculiar to dismiss as some two-bit Nicholas Sparks weepie. Charlie's way up from out of the drain is through the rousing flirtations of saucy redhead Tess (Amanda Crew), and simultaneously, the vaguely supernatural device for our pretty-boy hero's coping becomes so literal that Charlie actually bangs a spirit halfway between life and death. (Aaron Hillis) (Citywide)

Life During Wartime

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COUNTDOWN TO ZERO The title of Lucy Walker's pro-nuclear-disarmament tract Countdown to Zero has two meanings: a paranoiac's ticking off down the last moments until the bomb goes off, and an exhortation to work for the cause until zero missiles and weapons remain. Synthesizing fear and optimism like that requires Walker to be incredibly ambitious in scope, and she offers up a history of the bomb and treaty talks, scientific explanations, a primer on how to smuggle uranium, and much, much more. Trying to touch, however briefly, on everything related to The Bomb means that, inevitably, much of it gets short shrift: SALT I and II are barely mentioned, but the Reykjavík summit's failure is inexplicably highlighted. Walker runs the same old archival test footage we've seen before and interviews the big names — Mikhail Gorbachev and Valerie Plame Wilson both make appearances — to reiterate her already-obvious p.o.v. She's also prone to very literal-minded exposition; to show that a tennis ball–size bomb could level a city, she just throws a tennis ball up against a black screen and has it rotate ominously. This is another well-intentioned but preaching-to-the-choir doc, and boring as well. Never trust a movie that ends with a moveon.org link. (Vadim Rizov) (Landmark)