Movie Reviews: Mugabe and the White African, Peepli Live, Animal Kingdom

MUNDO ALAS Following a group of handicapped Argentine musicians as they embark on a 2007-08 national tour under the stewardship of famed folk artist León Gieco, Mundo Alas (co-directed by Gieco) presents feel-good sentimentality without depth or nuance. Taking multiple pages from the Spellbound populist-documentary handbook, the film sets its stage with cursory snapshots of its various players — including a wheelchair-bound dancer, a singer with no arms or legs and a tango troupe whose members have Down syndrome — which reveal scant details about their personalities and day-to-day realities, and even fewer specifics regarding how they came to be associated with Gieco in the first place. Actual insight into these people's hearts and minds is replaced with skin-deep montages of cheery tour-bus road-tripping, hanging out with friends and writing songs in the studio. The performances, which culminate with a show at the famed Luna Park, are stirring enough to make the portrait's superficiality all the more pronounced, the musicians' accomplishments undercut by the fact that Gieco avoids depicting any genuine adversity. Instead, what his road movie offers is merely nonfiction comfort food that packages his inspiring subjects' stories into an easy, formulaic triumph-of-the-spirit template. (Nick Schager) (Sunset 5)

GO  PEEPLI LIVE First widely reported in the '90s, an ongoing suicide epidemic in central India has claimed the lives of several tens of thousands of farmers too miserably destitute to go on, in part because their families are thereafter bestowed with a piddling government grant of about $2,000. In first-time filmmaker Anusha Rizvi's amusingly bittersweet satire, bushy-haired introvert Natha (Omkar Das Manikpuri, one newcomer in a cast of mostly rural locals) fears his land will soon be seized due to an unpaid loan, and is coerced by his older brother into offing himself for the financial good of his family. Another villager overhears the plan and tells someone else, the escalating game of "Telephone" pulling in the scoop-hungry national media, nervous bureaucrats and two rival politicians who are leveraging the issue for electoral gain. The grand joke of it all, less subversively executed than in Alexander Payne's all-eyes-on-one-pawn farce Citizen Ruth, is that nobody has bothered asking poor Natha what he really wants. It's an unusual taste of mainstream Indian cinema (or, thanks to superstar Aamir Khan's production company, it's a small film given an unusually mainstream push), unexpectedly irreverent, with an earthier, folkier sound track than the typical Bollywood electro-bounce. (Aaron Hillis) (Citywide)

TALES FROM EARTHSEA This 2006 Ghibli Studios adaptation of the Ursula K. Le Guin novels is the handiwork of first-timer Goro Miyazaki, son of Hayao — and the lack of the master's poetic control shows. Miyazaki movies (Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away) are always bewitched by dream logic, but this cookie-cutter fantasy saga — a good wizard and bad wizard battle over the karmic "balance" of the titular kingdom, with a troubled prince caught in the middle — is slack and often incomprehensible, full of vague magical rules and eruptions of nonsense without explanation. There are dragons, but to no significant purpose; nightmares about tar; out-of-nowhere body/spirit schisms occurring only for plot convenience; and so on. Goro Miyazaki lacks his father's charm and humor, though he obviously worked the studio's army of background painters to the bone, creating yet another gorgeous medieval Eurocity. Despite the Willem Dafoe–whispered, androgynously evil mage and the incongruous presence of Cheech Marin dubbing the villain's head lackey, Earthsea seems to be a stupendously dull place. It would try the patience of any kid. (Michael Atkinson) (Landmark W.L.A.)