The saga of disgraced NEW REPUBLIC journalist Stephen Glass is retraced in Billy Ray's hyphenate debut Shattered Glass, an unassuming walk across the crossed threads of deceptive webs fuelled by an interesting pair of performances from Hayden Christensen as Glass and Peter Sarsgaard as embattled editor Chuck Lane. Fascinatingly repetitive, the picture itself is something of a scam, portraying Glass' tall tales in straight flashback fashion before systematically debunking them, replicating, in a sense, the feeling of betrayal that Glass' readership, his audience, must have felt upon learning that they'd been duped with craft and imagination. Questions of journalism sliding into entertainment (and the general slackening of ethics and standards that such a descent entails) are handled with the sort of subtlety that suggests a rare regard for an audience's intelligence--a wise decision considering the subject matter. Shattered Glass is entertaining and slightly discomfiting stuff, given a snappy pace and a professional look by folks who are, after all, engaged in the same sort of mythmaking and fabrications as poor, lonesome Glass. The film is ingratiating, and more dangerous than it seems because of it. *** (out of four) | Running Time: 95 minutes

Amateurish and lit like a hospital ward, the extraordinarily unpromising feature debut for Jason Ruscio is bolstered a bit by a game cast (especially a luminous Petra Wright, who deserves better), but undermined by a determined lack of craft, a clumsy, over-burdened screenplay, and a surplus of mordant self-righteousness. A tale of a woman (Wright) who makes the mortal error of returning to her abusive husband (Michael T. Ringer), Sam & Joe is shot on jittery, ugly, hand-held DV exacerbated by what appears to be an over-affection for Tarantino's whip-pans, time-skip edits, and circular dialogue. Not a bad topic for a film (and indeed, the inescapable cycle of love and violence permeates a good portion of modern cinema to some degree or another), what grates about this picture is a feeling of arrogance--the student-film arthouse malady that infects guys with cameras, making them believe that great cinema springs full-grown from attractive actors and a hot-button topic. But nothing interesting comes from the piece: it's boring and flat, and the pathos that you might feel springs more from the understanding that embedded in Sam & Joe are the pieces of a good film--at least, an affective film--given short-shrift by a production that doesn't understand how to function within its medium (The Celebration and The Blair Witch Project are no more visually polished but are infinitely "smarter" about film), and doesn't appear overly interested in making the effort. 1/2* (out of four) | Running Time: 93 minutes

Thom Fitzgerald's rip-off of--of all things--It's My Party miscasts Parker Posey as a hard-nosed prosecutor intent on exposing the assisted suicide of a terminally AIDS-ridden man by his well-meaning coterie of family and quirky friends. While Olympia Dukakis doesn't entirely embarrass herself as the dead guy's mother, the same is impossible to say for Fitzgerald, who, by trying to ultimately equate the AIDS holocaust with the 9/11 atrocity, manages to be both distasteful and ideologically suspect. Tragedy aside, the equation, however tenuous, of a virus with Arab fundamentalists with a grudge strikes at the heart of the problem of a self-important filmmaker with an axe to grind and limited tools with which to do it with. The number of casualties doesn't equate phenomena--9/11 has as much symbolic value to the AIDS epidemic as either does to car accidents. The film is redolent with this sense of smugness: proclamations of "never fuck with a drag queen" punctuated by a rabbit-kick to the nads are only ever vaguely successful in a John Waters film; playing camp as high opera, after all, rarely breeds happy results. The death party ritual itself is mawkish and seen, for the bulk of the film, twice-removed as snippets here and again of an illicit videotape, circulated in some murky queer underworld just waiting for a straight-guy mole to ferret out and use against the well-meaning felons. The conversation about merciful euthanasia is a good one to have, no argument here, so go have it instead. *1/2 (out of four) | Running Time: 110 minutes

Thom Fitzgerald makes movies that celebrate the cult of himself. Carefully nourished by his sense of smug self-satisfaction like a private pleasure garden, his pictures, numbering five, are auteur in the sense that they're predictable now: one cannot fail to be scolded when sitting down to a Fitzgerald piece, and even his best work (The Hanging Garden) shows flashes of the pedantic sermonizer he's about to become. The topics into infinity are the holy trinity of the father: oppressed subcultures (especially homosexuals); the son: AIDS; and Fitzgerald himself the holy ghost, floating above it all with an air of moral superiority, wielding his baton of obvious metaphor and loaded arguments. Consider The Wild Dogs, a film set in post-Ceaucescu Bucharest overrun by stray dogs that function as a lead pipe metaphor for the cast-offs and victims of the dictators savage reign. Beggars tainted by what John Frankenheimer would have dubbed "freakism" are grounded by Fitzgerald himself as a pasty pornographer seeking to exploit the barely legal women of Romania; in the gesture of casting himself the exploiter, the filmmaker sees himself absolved of his sins of exploitation, but not nearly enough to forgive the condescension that oozes from every frame of the picture. With no connection too clear not to be elucidated and no character too stock to be underlined, The Wild Dogs casts light on a worthy topic by highlighting exactly the sort of trap a filmmaker can fall into when he believes himself to be smarter--better somehow--than an audience that must get tired of being underestimated. ** (out of four) | Running Time: 97 minutes

Like many of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's pictures, Bright Future is about the virulence of apathy, the way that malaise seeps into the cracks of character, infecting ambition into inaction or inspiring sudden, malevolent acts inspired not so much by violence, but by a lack of prevention of violence. The Yin to Takashi Miike's Yang, Kurosawa increasingly finds himself at the fringe of narrative, making this film a remarkable companion piece to Gus Van Sant's similarly haunted, lyrical, and allegorical Elephant. Yuji (Joh Odagiri) is a shiftless youth working in a towel factory; his friend Mamaro (Tadanobu Asano) functions like Masato Hagiwara's drifter in Kurosawa's amazing Cure, an enigmatic catalyst for an almost existential refusal first to act, then to take responsibility for any action no matter its significance. Kurosawa's worlds are contaminated with Bartlebys--sick with them the way that Yuji and Mamaro eventually manage to infect Japan's waterways with a meticulously engineered freshwater jellyfish, an entity as malignant in its feckless, mindless drift as Kurosawa's disaffected, isolated antiheroes. The bright future of the title isn't ironic in a traditional sense because it's genuinely hopeful in the way of the New Testament's Revelations, understanding that for Yuji and Mamaro the completion of the quest is predictably apocalyptic and, like Camus' Sisyphus, finding joy in the reassuring inevitability of a never-deviating eternity. A closing shot of a canal packed with diaphanous death touches on the Christian (and T.S. Eliot-ian) image of Christ the river, divider and unifier (note the split-screen device that frames Yuji's conversations with his father)--understanding that the return of that particular catalyst is also certain death for a mythology that, like post-modernism, proselytizes salvation of sorts in the life of a sheep. ***1/2 (out of four) | Running Time: 92 minutes

Claude Chabrol, the master of the French thriller, is perhaps better described as the master of the French femme-fear film, making an art of women empowering themselves through the destruction of class and gender distinction. With The Flower of Evil (La Fleur du Mal) (no relation to the Baudelaire), Chabrol continues his slide into quaint, comfortable insignificance with his umpteenth treatment of a theme--he's become sort of a French Ozu, if you will, but with murder. This time around, the aging spinster with a secret sociopathology is Tante Line (Suzanne Flon), a toothless Raymond Chandler hothouse fatale wilting in a Parisian home with political aspirant Anne (Nathalie Baye), womanizing sleazebag Gérard (the aptly named Bernard Lecoq), and Anne's daughter Michéle (Mélanie Doutey). A moment where Chabrol frames Michéle and Line through an empty birdcage screams "Hitchcock" in a way as jarring and unbecoming as the sudden bursts of Matthieu Chabrol's drop-needle score, recalling the Nouvelle Vague pioneer's trademark detachment and irony (and fascination with Hitchcock: he co-authored an exhaustive examination of Hitchcock's work with Eric Rohmer in 1957), but also pointing to an undeniable fatigue with working over the same ground he's been ploughing for over four decades now. Still, there's no arguing Chabrol's amazing command of the medium--his edits and choices are rapturous; just too bad that Chabrol favourite Isabelle Huppert isn't around to lend the piece a little fascination to go along with its expertise. *1/2 (out of four) | Running Time: 105 minutes

Bitter Jester is a hard-to-watch record of an irritating, dangerously self-destructive stand-up comedienne named Maija who, with a video camera and goombah ex-boxer boyfriend Kenny in tow, imposed herself on the frighteningly neurotic underworld of stand-up performers. With the endorsement of Kenny's legend-in-the-stand-up-world pal Richard Belzer and Maija's dead therapist, the pair set out to make a documentary on the effectiveness of throwing oneself on the mercy of antagonistic comedy club audiences as therapy in working out childhood trauma and pathological personality defects. What results is a surreal, Hunter S. Thompson-esque travelogue wherein we learn that Kenny quit boxing because he had reached "the pinnacle" of the profession (and witness the aftermath of Kenny trying to kill Jerry Seinfeld)--that professional pinnacle being the in-ring murder of one of his hapless opponents. We learn a lot about Kenny because, while the pair wins interviews with a few of the biggest stars on the stand-up circuit (Rita Rudner, George Carlin, Chevy Chase, Whoopi Goldberg, and so on), Kenny is completely incapable of not revealing the breadth of his scary pathology. The tragedy of Maija and Kenny is equalled by the tragedy of these comedians clamouring to be included in this project--many of them solely because they see other people clamouring to be a part of this project. An honest and frightening confirmation of more than I ever wanted to know on the subject of fame and performance (particularly when the picture watches as Kenny joins the rescue effort at ground zero following 9/11 before organizing a benefit for the children of the victims of the atrocity attended by most of the people interviewed), Bitter Jester lends something like an amazing perspective on how complicated a person can be--and, oddly enough, how transforming September Eleventh was on a collective and personal level. *** (out of four) | Running Time: 90 minutes

I have long been sustained by the belief that film can change the world and that the most interesting dialogues I have ever had about the medium (the idea that it is the logical child of the oral storytelling tradition--Lord Byron's seed and wind, both) are connectable some way to the larger issues of my, or any, day. Dirk Szuszies and Karin Kaper's Resist: To Be with the Living draws a line of crystal purity from the cycles of Greek tragedy (the eternal fight for individuality, moral objection, and freedom of "Antigone") and the primal power of public theatre to the possibilities of the film medium to be a vehicle of change and revolution. A document of fifty years of New York's "The Living Theater," a collection of the ideological children of the impossibly tumultuous summer of '68, the picture is a refutation that everything is lost to apathy in a modern age that seeks to sanitize and market atrocity and crusade into patriotism and some perverse version of manifest destiny. Resist follows this group of idealist performers, engaged in a ministry of outraged pacifism, capturing them and their performances in the cell of film that, in its own way, is as invasive and jarring as any Living Theater guerrilla performance. With this film, Paul Cronin's Amos Vogel documentary, Sam Green & Bill Siegel's The Weather Underground, and Errol Morris' The Fog of War, there seems a pointedly renewed interest in issues of socio-political unrest, of the arts in crisis, of youth in revolt, and of the importance of civil disobedience as the most patriotic form of expression. It's not for hatred of the country but rather for mistrust of the government, and at its core, Resist is about the joy of passionate communication and that kernel of sublimity in art that represents the meaning of living. **** (out of four) | Running Time: 93 minutes | Saturday, October 11, 3:45PM Starz FilmCenter; Sunday, October 12, 7:15PM Starz FilmCenter

Campbell Scott's Off the Map reminds me of some dimly-remembered authors I used to read when I was younger: Harper Lee, maybe Tony Hillerman in a contemplative mood--alien cultures and modes of thought set to soothing rhythms against a saguaro sunset. More to the point, the film resembles the book that its characters read to each other by lamplight: Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s wonderful Two Years Before the Mast, which I first read when a beloved professor recommended it as a corollary to Melville's Moby Dick and as a primer for Patrick O'Brian (due to receive his own adaptation with this holiday's Master and Commander)--Off the Map is a look at the nautical life and the contemplative philosophy that evolves from it, the ocean tied to the desert in a word and watercolour by William Gibbs (Jim True-Frost) and cemented in the gift of a boat from young daughter Bo (Valentina de Angelis) to depressed father Charley (Sam Elliott). The picture is a wonderfully off-kilter character drama and the kind of movie directed by a man with the sensitivity to cut on a swallow; even if it never quite escapes its theatrical roots, the picture has the poetry to score a love scene with a house settling in a desert breeze, understands the power of uncommented-upon sunsets, and mentions a dead goat named "Harry Dean Stanton." It's about art as a conduit to the sublime, pure and prevailing, created of a moment but eternally relevant, and so Off the Map is also about the creative process--the rationale for making a film that is personal and passionate. Understated, intimate, Off the Map feels a little like the art of Egon Schiele (and so reflected in Gibbs' paintings): melancholy, lost, but looking. *** (out of four) | Running Time: 111 minutes | Friday, October 17, 9:00PM King Center; Saturday, October 18, 9:30PM Boulder/Muenzinger Auditorium

With an excellent first hour and a less impressive, almost sprawling second, Toni Kalem's hyphenate debut A Slipping Down Life finds an excellent cast in the employ of a Southern Gothic about a young woman "awakened" by the "shout outs" of a small-time backwater singer/songwriter. With tunes by Peter Himmelman and nice performances from Guy Pearce and Lili Taylor (too pretty to play the overweight teen protagonist of the Anne Tyler novel on which the film is based), what starts out as unusual and compelling loses its way at some point to become a more conventional comedy of manners, Grant Wood-style. Though it reminds of May in a way for Taylor's self-mutilation and studied romantic intensity, Kalem strives more for the grimly uplifting than the grimly ironic. Still, there's something smart going on in the picture's visual design and return to doubling motifs, the difficulties of communication, and Taylor's trademark obsession with young women on journeys of discovery and love. Add a genuinely affecting moment between Taylor and veteran Tom Bower, not to mention a few pointed unicorn images given poignancy when Taylor's character carves a name on her forehead, and A Slipping Down Life finds itself, if not entirely successful, at least ambitious and, for a long while, even brave. **1/2 (out of four) | Running Time: 111 minutes | Friday, October 10, 6:15PM Starz FilmCenter; Saturday, October 11, 1:15PM Starz FilmCenter

It feels increasingly as if John Sayles is a little sick of making John Sayles films. This dramatically inert ensemble piece about a group of American women in a South American limbo hoping to adopt babies feels curiously underwritten and stale despite the heaviness of the dialogue. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes the best impression as a woman of privilege who hopes a child will save her marriage, but like the rest of the cast (Daryl Hannah, Marcia Gay Harden, Lili Taylor, Susan Lynch, Rita Moreno, Mary Steenburgen), her character is composed of one dramatic moment, a few uncomfortably didactic lines, and a sketch that doesn't go much beyond workshop outline. Coming off worst are Harden as a shrill kleptomaniac and Hannah as a Coloradoan health nut with a tragic history. Sayles' obsessions with the plight of the working class and the lefty disdain for television and the lottery (handled with more grace in the director's City of Hope) seem threadbare here, almost perfunctory, and his last South American epic, the amazing Men with Guns, seems already to have said all there needs to be said about the plight of youth in tension between capitalist imperialism and third world civil unrest. More puzzling is the decline of Sayles as a lyrical craftsman and careful visual stylist--the trade-off between his most fruitful collaborations with Haskell Wexler for the flatness of DP Maurizio Rubenstein's images renders Casa de los Babys something contrary to Sayles' core beliefs in the story of place and the power of cinema as the modern "oral" tradition. * (out of four) | Running Time: 110 minutes | Saturday, October 11, 9:15PM Starz FilmCenter; Sunday, October 12, 9:30PM Starz FilmCenter; Saturday, October 18, 7:00PM Boulder/Muenzinger Auditorium

An Italian version of Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter in many respects, what there is to truly admire about Gabriele Salvatores' I'm Not Scared (Io Non Ho Paura) is its ability to evoke the dreamy disconnection of childhood--the startling realization at some point along the way that your parents may not be merely flawed, but occasionally malicious. A young boy, Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano), finds a child imprisoned in a hole next to an abandoned house in the middle of an impossibly beautiful fall Tuscan landscape, all yellow wheat and verdant hillock. Shots of wildlife--owls and toads, snakes and chickens--evoke Laughton's film, while ants crawling on eyes and animals killed by automobiles suggests the intrusions of the things of man into the things of the wilderness. A quiet picture, I'm Not Scared is ultimately hopeful as well, finding in its young protagonist the innocence of childhood and the boundless courage it requires to become a man in a savage universe. Lovely to behold and almost as lovely to reflect upon, the picture is inevitably corrupted by a weak conspiracy narrative--pointedly, the only portions of the film that don't centre on the child or the will and ordeal of maturation. *** (out of four) | Running Time: 110 minutes | Saturday, October 11, 9:15PM Starz FilmCenter; Sunday, October 12, 9:30PM Starz FilmCenter

Documenting the rise and fall of New York International Film Festival director Amos Vogel, who got his start in the programming business as the mastermind behind the legendary "Cinema 16" film society, Film as a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel and Cinema 16 provides a traditional documentary treatment of an unconventional man. A refugee from Hitler's Germany, Vogel, a fierce antagonist of censorship, introduced the United States to folks as diverse and vital as Yasujiro Ozu and Stan Brakhage. The sort of thing dying in an America that embraces the mundane and the comfortable in its movie-going choices, Vogel's Cinema 16 defined over and again the things that any film society worth its salt should embrace: the extraordinary, the controversial, and the uncomfortable. That NEW YORK TIMES critic Bosley Crowther never once lent his weight to Cinema 16, a slight cited by Vogel as perhaps the primary reason for its eventual collapse, is one of those ignorant omissions that's only gotten worse with the vast majority of this generation's "major daily" newspaper "movie writers." The picture is a reminder of what it means to love and respect the medium, and something of a call to arms to resurrect the corpses of movie clubs and societies in cities and universities across the country. *** (out of four) | Running Time: 60 minutes | Saturday, October 11, 3:45PM Starz FilmCenter; Sunday, October 12, 4:30PM Starz FilmCenter;

Petty to fixate on such things, but what to make of a heavy Boston accent that appears and disappears so randomly (in a character from New Hampshire, for God's sake) that it causes one to wonder why they even bothered in the first place? The performances in the digital cheapie What Alice Found are uniformly awful, but Emily Grace as titular trailer-park refugee Alice is a special case, trembling between Tori Spelling and Melanie Hutsell's SNL impersonation of Tori Spelling--all zombie stares, eye-rolling, and lop-sided sneers. Out of the park and into the mobile home, Alice finds herself through the looking glass as it were, traveling with a kindly lot lizard (Judith Ivey) selling her wares at the rest stops of the Eastern Seaboard. Not long before Alice decides to hustle a little cheesecake herself, the picture is wall-to-wall with acoustic girl-folk meant, I guess, to inject some pathos and irony where there is none. Credit due for its decidedly unglamorous look at sex for hire (recalling Lizzie Borden's Working Girls in that respect), and for including a nice Beth Orton tune, What Alice Found--heavy with self-importance and dolphin symbolism--is a grim little ditty more unintentionally hilarious than thought-provoking, more cheap thriller than social exposé. 1/2* (out of four) | Running Time: 96 minutes | Friday, October 10, 6:15PM Starz FilmCenter; Saturday, October 11, 9:00PM Starz FilmCenter

An extremely auspicious hyphenate debut from actor-director Scott Caan (son of James), Dallas 362 is a kinetic and visually literate film composed of Nan Goldin-inspired two-person tableaux that offer a startlingly clear-eyed balance to the force of transitional sequences. An opening montage reminds in the best way of the still-photo manipulation over the main titles of "The Rockford Files", an interesting photo-scoping technique seen in the recent documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture and revisited in the body of the film as a particularly interesting way to tell a flashback. The power of images, black-and-white, juxtaposed with hard-driving music or narration is a nice reminder of the nature of picture's storytelling authority--enough so that when the flashback substitutes its black-and-white for colour, the effect is startling and elucidative. Shawn Hatosy and Caan provide the film's centre, but in truth Dallas 362 soars on its ensemble democracy that counts as its assets Jeff Goldblum in his best performance in years and Kelly Lynch, likewise. Its story eventually a crime drama, Caan's writing and direction betray a greater interest in character and dialogue. Not an unqualified triumph, Dallas 362 nonetheless feels too good to be a first film and represents a bar for Caan that'll be difficult to best. ***1/2 (out of four) | Running Time: 90 minutes | Friday, October 10, 9:30PM Starz FilmCenter; Saturday, October 11, 9:15PM Starz FilmCenter

Uncompromising and surprisingly gentle for all that, Lone Scherfig's Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is an unmannered character drama about Wilbur (Jamie Sives), despondent and suicidal after the death of his father; Wilbur's older brother, Harbour (Adrian Rawlins), who's taking the family's loss much better; and Harbour's new wife, Alice (the self-swallowing, eternally imploding Shirley Henderson), who finds love for the first time only to find it again in her husband's mordant brother. A psychiatric support group is funny in predictably quirky ways (though its resolution in an icy drink mines surprise from the premise), while Wilbur's evolution from self-obsessed asshole into less of a self-obsessed asshole is done with an observational humour veering on the brilliant. And for all the embracing of topics of life and death, there is remarkably little that rings false or strident in Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, a great black comedy in the vein of Harold & Maude or The Loved One and an announcement, if one were needed, that Scherfig--after her oxymoronic "kind" Dogme Italian for Beginners--may be the best director of dark romantic comedies going. ***1/2 (out of four) | Running Time: 106 minutes | Friday, October 10, 6:30PM Starz FilmCenter; Sunday, October 12, 4:15PM Starz FilmCenter

Fernando Sariñana's grimy Dark Cities (Ciudades oscuras) is essentially a series of hardboiled vignettes that criss-cross in perfunctory ways over the course of one miserable night. Infanticide, rape, castration, long chats with corpses, murder, graft, and a criminal amount of hysterical camera tricks combine in a stew so sour and unintentionally funny that it plays out like the love child of City of Hope and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer--with hookers. Not enough can be said about the invasiveness of Sariñana's camera: it's epileptic and obfuscating when the aspiration is clearly towards some kind of uncompromising vérité. The Bernard Herrmann-inspired strings score identifies the film as an urban horror story (as an homage to Psycho's drain shot identifies the filmmaker as drunk on delusions of grandeur), but with an endless series of melodramatic fits and starts functioning as the meat of the picture, such as it is, it all seems a little too neo-Tarantino silly. Silly, of course, the last thing a shocking exposé can afford to be. 1/2* (out of four) | Running Time: 113 minutes | Saturday, October 18, 9:00PM

Culled from what seems like B-reel footage of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson in the months leading up to the filming and release of Terry Gilliam's film adaptation of the author's seminal Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Breakfast with Hunter is interesting now and again for the extent to which Thompson is revered in certain circles, but feels curiously prosaic for the wicked incisiveness of its subject. The highlights of the film are Thompson's interactions with Johnny Depp and Alex Cox, the former the actor tabbed to play him in Gilliam's film and the latter the director that Gilliam replaced on the project. A scene where Hunter serves Cox and Cox's frequent collaborator Tod Davies fried sausage before screaming at them for minutes on end suggests with more profundity the reasons behind Cox's eventual firing than that to which Cox's own weblog cops. As he begins preparations for the role of Thompson, Depp, meanwhile, gets genuinely creepy. If the whole of Breakfast with Hunter is assuredly less than the sum of a few of its parts, there are enough moments of insight here to reward the curious, though it's really just a love note for the devout. ** (out of four) | Running Time: 91 minutes | Friday, October 17, 6:30PM Starz FilmCenter; Saturday, October 18, 11:00AM Starz FilmCenter; Saturday, October 18, 1:45PM Starz FilmCenter

Dagur Kári's Noi the Albino (Nói Albinói) is a film about emptiness, really--a terrific picture crouched in the centre of a blasted Icelandic winter, with its titular hero, Nói (Tómas Lemarquis), too smart for the isolation. When the beautiful Iris (Elin Hansdóttir, wow) comes to work in the town-of-maybe-100's convenience store, Nói finds himself for perhaps the first time motivated for long enough to aspire to something larger. A Steve Earle song directed by Jim Jarmusch, the picture is deadpan hilarious and haunted by the oppressive power of dark and chill, which presses down on the characters with a smothering insistence. Kári's direction is understated and the performances he elicits from his cast of newcomers are the perfect pitch for the low timbre of the film. A look at adolescence as yearning and blue as The Ice Storm, Nói Albinói is tragedy punctuated by repeated glances into a ViewMaster: a vehicle for escape like the picture on Barton Fink's wall, with the box Nói's underground bunker, Zippo-lit protection from natural disaster and the life of the mind. **** (out of four) | Running Time: 90 minutes | Friday, October 17, 6:00PM Starz FilmCenter; Saturday, October 18, 1:30PM Starz FilmCenter

Michael Tolajian's Bought & Sold is a low-aspiring inner-city fairy tale featuring an Oscar De La Hoya-looking hoodlum protagonist named Ray Ray (Rafael Sardina) who dreams of buying DJ turntables from the local pawn shop while working part-time at a shoe store. He falls in with the wrong crowd, ends up going undercover for a local godfather in the pawn under kindly Armenian storekeeper (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), and gets twitterpated for the pawnshop owner's niece, Ruby (beautiful Marjan Neshat)--all of which unfolds in a herky-jerky kind of way as Tolajian's dialogue too often intrudes on the performances, each better than they probably have any right to be. Boasting of the comfortable familiarity of an old pair of slippers, the picture earns some points for the energy of the cast but fails to do much that's surprising, illuminating, or, ultimately, affecting in any meaningful way. ** (out of four) | Running Time: 91 minutes | Tuesday, October 14, 6:15PM Starz FilmCenter; Wednesday, October 15, 8:45PM Starz FilmCenter

Playing at times like a documentary (indeed, the film used the residents of its retirement-home setting as extras), Assisted Living is a troubling picture, balanced as it is midway between fiction and essay, with some actors feigning dementia and others clearly in its sway. Todd (Michael Bonsignore) is a pot-smoking twentysomething working at a nursing home--a kind-hearted soul, it seems, burned out in more ways than one and fixated on one of his charges, Mrs. Pearlman (Maggie Riley). Their relationship really not much more than a sketch, Todd's "rescue" of Mrs. Pearlman is heartfelt but verging on the sentimental and the pyrrhic besides. On the one hand a portrait of decline, on the other a heavy-handed sermon on it, Assisted Living has a few moments that charm and a scene or two that even transcend the discomfort of its premise and presentation, but not enough stamina in the end to justify its smoke and mirrors. ** (out of four) | Running Time: 77 minutes | Friday, October 10, 7:00PM Starz FilmCenter; Saturday, October 11, 1:30PM Starz FilmCenter