AFI Fest A to Z: Hey Man, Yeah

OUTRAGE After a few years spent indulging himself with goofy, self-referential postmodern "comedies" — you really have to see 2007's insane Glory to the Filmmaker! to believe it — Takeshi Kitano returns to the ultraviolent yakuza genre that made his reputation. Alas, his heart doesn't seem to be in it anymore. Where his earlier films walked an arresting line between brutality and tenderness, Outrage seems content to merely serve up gruesome carnage à la carte, gradually excising various body parts until the film's entire sprawling ensemble cast is dead, horribly mutilated or (usually) both. For a while, the sheer absurdity of this over-the-top spectacle makes for fine black comedy, but well before the finale, Kitano's empty parade of functionally anonymous butchery becomes monotonous, numbing, even dull. He's reached an aesthetic dead end. (MD) (Nov. 8, 9:15 p.m., Chinese)

CRITIC'S PICK  PINK SARIS Veteran British documentarian Kim Longinotto makes portraits of strong women who lay down the law — or just throw down. Rural Indian women's rights advocate Sampat Pal Devi probably could do either: She's like a frontier sheriff as she settles disputes and leaves men dumbstruck in her wake. Bride beatings, Romeo-and-Juliet romances and other village affairs are settled in the open; she turns shame back against male wrongdoers and teaches girls respect. Sampat is savvy about her public on a small scale (a typical rousing one-liner: "This man's an idiot. That's all there is to it") and on the media stage: The title refers to the dazzlingly dressed gang of supporters she convenes for protests. But instead of belting out a girl-power anthem, Longinotto also shows Sampat's own deeply wounded private side, in a wrenching wind-down. (NR) (Nov. 9, 7:10 p.m., Chinese)

Certified Copy

The Myth of the American Sleepover

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POETRY Lee Chang-dong's latest feature won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes this year, but like his equally acclaimed Secret Sunshine, Poetry throws a bunch of tonally disparate elements together and dares you to assemble them into something coherent — an approach easily mistaken for profundity. Yun Jung-hee is a marvel as Mija, an elderly woman who impulsively signs up for a poetry class and struggles to find inspiration in everyday beauty. Her distractions include, in no particular order: a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, which has begun to plunder her memory; negotiating a financial settlement to compensate the family of a young girl who committed suicide after being gang-raped by a group of school bullies, including Mija's grandson; and an old man with cerebral palsy for whom Mija cares, who keeps demanding a mercy fuck from her. How does this all fit together? That's the poetry, I guess. (MD) (Nov. 10, 6:45 p.m., Chinese)

PRECIOUS LIFE The story of a poor family from Gaza whose desperately ill son receives treatment in an Israeli hospital by a politically progressive Jewish doctor, Life may be another documentary celebrating life-affirming instances of Israeli/Palestinian cooperation, but it's elevated above the pack by its powerful illustration of the difficulty humans can have assimilating information that defies stereotype and expectation. A hospital scene between the film's director, Shlomi Eldar (a respected reporter/activist), and the child's mother is excruciatingly tense as it captures such a moment while planting seeds for epiphanies — joyful and painful — to come. (EH) (Nov. 6, 9:30 p.m., Chinese)

THE PRINCESS OF MONTPENSIER Bertrand Tavernier's handsome but painfully dull costume drama, adapted from a 1662 novel by Madame de La Fayette, opens with one of those historical-context scrolls that Monty Python justly attempted to kill decades ago. ("1568. It is a time of great strife in Europe. Le blah blah blah.") Pretty but bland Mélanie Thierry plays the title role, swooning over the hunky Gaspard Ulliel while fending off the respectfully amorous advances of various other incarnations of Gallic masculinity, including Lambert Wilson as her tutor and Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet as the earnest husband to whom she's been brokered. The film is scrupulously accurate, immaculately designed, ably acted, highly intelligent. All it's missing, really, is even a microscopic hint of the wit and fire that, say, Jacques Rivette brought to his magnificent The Duchess of Langeais. Bring a date if you want to ensure that they refuse to see anything but Jackass and Saw sequels from that day forward. (MD) (Nov. 6, 3:15 p.m., Chinese)

PULSAR Samuel's lovely live-in girlfriend Mireille takes an internship in New York, leaving him alone in Brussels, pining and progressively dependent on the feeder pedals of Skype, chat and e-mail. Distance leads to insecurity leads to paranoia, and Samuel soon becomes convinced that someone has hacked into his wi-fi network, preventing him from getting online and even impersonating him in correspondence with Mireille. Pulsar is directed by Alex Stockman, a Belgian film critic–turned-filmmaker, and ambiguity is its best asset: As Samuel slips deeper into delusion, the film becomes increasingly enigmatic in structure, and its final few minutes are puzzling in the best way. But Stockman never solves the inherent problem of his material: It is boring to watch people send and receive e-mails. (KL) (Nov. 6, 4 p.m., Chinese)

PUTTY HILL A skate-park junkie overdoses in an impoverished Baltimore suburb, uniting family and friends at the young man's wake to sing heartfelt karaoke in a shabby, wood-paneled hall. This vaguely Big Chill–esque narrative is mainly a device to connect the lived-in moments within writer-director Matthew Porterfield's impressionistic follow-up to Hamilton, which takes a slackly structured amble through the prefuneral lives and rituals of its fringe ensemble — tattoo artists, teenage girls, elderly homebodies and other sympathetic souls, all played by nonprofessional locals. Evocative sound design and heart-rate-lowering long takes accentuate the titular district's moody milieu of wooded lakes, abandoned houses and paintball fields (gorgeously shot by Murder Party director Jeremy Saulnier), punctuated by Porterfield's off-camera interviews of his "characters" — an ambitious, sporadically seamless integration of documentary methods. As a communal portrait, the naturalistic rigor doesn't always ring true. But as a no-budget American indie swimming in a sea of navel-gazing mediocrity, Putty Hill is downright inspiring. (AH) (Nov. 5, 9:30 p.m., Chinese)