Polish institution Jerzy Stuhr fashions a peculiarly self-serving morality opera starring himself as a man who drops out for seventeen years to serve in a monastery, only to be "outed" one day by his jilted wife, two daughters, and son. Each child represents some newly-contracted ill that his beloved homeland has acquired since his auto-sequester: youngest Kilga (Roma Gasiorowska) is a dreadlocked hophead pushing dope to thirteen-year-olds; middle Ola (Barbara Kaluzna) is the star of a smutty reality television show that features her doing every imaginable thing in a glass apartment; and oldest Marcin (Maciej Stuhr, son of Jerzy) is the Karl Rove to a seedy Polish politician. Heavy-handed in its sociology, Tomorrow's Weather (Pogoda na jutro) seeks to be an indictment of the dark side of Solidarity (poor papa Lech Walesa--sort of a ringer for Stuhr, come to think of it--never saw this coming), but more resembles a bit of self-aggrandizement, martyr-style. Stuhr's rotund everyman carries the weight of the world in the creases of his bloodhound kisser, resolving as a pale imitation of mentor Krzysztof Kieslowski's mini-parables: too leaden, too obvious, and, as it happens, too unpleasant. Kilga gets maimed, Ola gets a horror movie gash on her arm...and maimed, Marcin shoots himself in the arm and lacerates his scalp (maimed), and long-suffering wife Renata (Malgorzata Zajaczkowska) has a heart-attack (not maimed)--all this Sturm und Drang at the service of a joke epilogue and a self-pitying conclusion. Bad form to roll the old peepers, but the temptation to do so is nearly irresistible. ** (out of four)

Latvian filmmaker Laila Pakalnina delivers Python (Pitons) somewhere in the netherland between Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Roman Polanski. Her first film in colour, it's a locked-room drama about a boarding school presided over by insane Nurse Ratched acolyte Mara Kimele, doggedly trying to match feces found in her school's attic to samples collected from the students in empty matchstick boxes. Favouring long, isolating tracking shots of children being children as madness and inanity erupt around them in a quiet fog, Python reduces to a series of vignettes that range from the sublime to the interesting to the banal. Best of the bunch include a wonderful sequence where the school photographer comes in to take class pictures armed with a camera, a monkey in a cotton candy-pink dress, and the titular python ("Do you want to pose with the monkey or the snake?"--predictably, there are no takers for the snake), and the intrusion of a beaver hunter on the trail of a rabid beaver. Grounding the absurdities of the piece are the children, who to a one absorb the strangeness of the piece like the demented little aliens that kids are. It all reminds a little of that Harlan Ellison story where reality begins to adapt itself to the ways that television mutates a child's imagination. Python concerns the malleability of perception: it's almost expressionist--and as experiments in world cinema go, it's a little like a breath of bent air. *** (out of four)

Six loosely-connected vignettes form the body of Zrinko Ogresta's Croatian film Tu, a study in six parts of the difficulty of communication in a modern age (Hopper's eternal verities of nature and technology askew) and the scars left by the Balkan War on the lives of the collateral chaff. It opens with a simpleton at the mortar-torn front finding hope in the life of a bird that he saves, and ends with an old veteran unable to sleep because of his memories of conflict. Ogresta's strength isn't subtlety, clearly, but a sort of Kieslowski-esque interest in morality plays illustrated in brief and painted with a pleasantly textured cinematic eye. Tu suggests timelessness in the inevitable progression of its hermetic capsules--moving into the lives of an addict rejected by her family, a television personality driven to drink, and a loner looking for anything to call family. Devastation is the most obvious side-effect of war, the film suggests, but the long half-life of societal disintegration is the lasting fallout. The picture is rhymed by its opening pull-outs and push-ins through long tunnels--the first leaving the light at the end of the tunnel, the last rushing towards it in a suggestion of a sentiment that must be optimism, courageous and flagging, in the midst of all that decay. *** (out of four)

Peter Riegert, Animal House's Boon, makes his directorial debut with King of the Corner, a Jewish mid-life crisis of a film that casts Isabella Rossellini in the long-suffering wife role she played so well in Fearless and Riegert himself as a traveling salesman on the verge. Eli Wallach is the father, Rita Moreno is the mother ("He started calling me a 'wetback'"), and Eric Bogosian has a splendid cameo as Rabbi Fink, a man without much patience for mincing words. A eulogy he delivers late-film ("What did he have to offer? Not much") is something like a minor classic--no surprise that the confessional monologue is the man's stock and trade. (With Spalding Gray tragically out of the picture, it's just Bogosian and David Sedaris keeping the home fires glowing.) The film grinds down, though, in its contrivances--a lot happens to this schlemiel Job, and it doesn't take long for the constant keen to get a little Woody Allen-cum-Seinfeld wearisome. A daughter (Ashley Johnson) is underwritten, while an almost unrecognizable Beverly D'Angelo deserves more screen-time as an old high school flame passed along the way. With all the problems in its pocket concerning first-time directors and trying to adapt books of short stories (if your name isn't Robert Altman, don't do it), King of the Corner does have a nice, familiar warmth to it. It's not going to set anything on fire, but it's not a bad way to cleanse the palate between more challenging, piquant fare. **1/2 (out of four)

Liu Fendou's Green Hat opens with a jab: a man on a beach muses about the difference between an art film and a popular film, and he does so by pondering the place of masturbation in polite conversation. In a nutshell, Fendou provides the madness and the method for his directorial debut, an onanistic roundelay concerning the nature of love that begins with another bank robber (sigh) who finds out he's been doing it all for a love he's been cuckolded to, proceeds with the impotent cop who bears witness to the last moments of the robber's life, and finishes with the audience's dawning understanding that Fendou is probably attacking the hypocrisy of the myth of masculinity. Guns and intimidation rule the first portion, castration and humiliation rule the second, and, armed with the knowledge that Fendou originally envisioned a trilogy of short films instead of this schizophrenic vehicle, Green Hat's maddening emptiness swims into focus. The whole thing is a self-satisfied exercise in militant cinema (militant in the face of repressive regime--and not our repressive regime) loaded down with the worst of independent film (talkiness, quirkiness for quirk's sake) and the worst of mainstream, too (gunplay, sexplay). Green Hat is a bad, disjointed film, but sadly just another example of the direction that Chinese cinema has taken, with few exceptions, since Hong Kong slid back under the Mainland's control. * (out of four)

A cross between Chris Noth and Clancy Brown's The Kurgan from Highlander, Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi) is the Oedipal anti-hero at the heart of Hungarian director Nimród Antal's drop-dead brilliant Kontroll. A ticket-taker and a rent-a-cop, he's assigned to a misfit crew at odds with every other misfit crew in their Orwellian transit agency. The film, a surprisingly violent and kinetic slapstick comedy reminiscent of Clive Barker's "Midnight Meat Train," begins with one character aping Harpo Marx's blowtorch lighter bit from Duck Soup and ends with scenes that recall Vincent Ward's visionary The Navigator. Bulcsú is a Hal Hartley protagonist, too smart and too damaged for the world, set adrift in the film on the heels of a hooded figure pushing commuters into the path of onrushing trains. He tries to find love with a young woman (Eszter Balla) who rides the subway dressed in a bear suit while seeking his own identity in the motivations of the killer haunting his adopted, infernal home. Vilmos Zsigmond apprentice DP Gyula Pados' fulsome cinematography makes of the subterranean sets the kind of textured iconographic landscape of Wim Wenders' late American films. (The picture was shot entirely in the labyrinthine subway warren beneath Budapest.) A Jungian dream (paced by electronica group Neo's rowdy, fantastic score) in which Bulcsú finds himself crawling through something like an endless vaginal tunnel is the moment when Kontroll comes fully alive: it's the juncture between metaphor, craft, and narrative--and for almost all of its final hour, the picture maintains an unbelievably high level of invention and insight. It's a great science-fiction piece, a razor-sharp satire, and an impressive calling card for an emerging Hungarian cinema. **** (out of four)

At times deeply affecting, erstwhile "Punky Brewster" Soleil Moon Frye's second film is a personal memoir of a two-week trip taken by Soleil and her father, actor Virgil Frye, across the physical landmarks of the latter's life, with Virgil's Alzheimer's-afflicted mind disintegrating in chunks of recollection as the film progresses. At its best, Sonny Boy captures the troubled emptiness of the back roads of the rural United States, expanding its personal story into an almost metaphysical statement about being lost in America; as it happens, Virgil even worked on the production of friend and confidante Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, which shares curious parallels with Sonny Boy in its road trip and unmasking. (Aiding its extra-textual fascination, the picture fits comfortably in 2004's abundance of films dealing with memory.) But moments that begin as revelatory at times become uncomfortably intimate. It's not that we're too close, it's that looking at someone else's photograph album--flipping through a stranger's diary--is at once a violation and an example of trying to decode signs without a key to the signifier. We feel sympathy because we're human and we feel moved for the same reason, but with a project this personal, there is almost always the moment where you realize, during a passage too extended or a reference too opaque, that the scissors were put away prematurely. Soleil at least demonstrates a supple eye and a canny use of images, an ability to blend different film stocks to good effect, and a knack for soundmixing, while the farewell at Virgil's supervised care facility lands with the weight of an Emily Dickinson poem--and all the cruel disassociative irony of one, too. *** (out of four)

Shrill and unlikeable, Being Julia is reasonably assessed as an at least thematically faithful adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's soulless novel Theatre, just as it's fair to compare it to the acclaimed Mephisto, director István Szabó's other condemnation of the stage. But that doesn't mean it's any good. Annette Bening plays Julia Lambert, a grand dame of the London stage accurately labelled a cold, evil bitch by her emotionally-unavailable actor husband Michael (Jeremy Irons). Julia beds down with young Tom (Shaun Evans), who in turn beds down with ingénue Avice (Lucy Punch), and in a fit of pique, Julia sets out to destroy Avice. The idea is that poor monster Julia is incapable of separating reality from the stage--setting the stage, as it were, for a film that addresses layers of sign and signifier through a penultimate play-within-a-play-within-a-film. But it's all done with so much spite and so little self-awareness that Julia is actually made the hero in some kind of klutzy pre-Blitz version of The First Wives Club. Older women deserve to be humiliated for sleeping with younger men and young women deserve to be humiliated by older women. Only the men win, an important thing to remember when this male-dominated production is brought up in conversation as an example of a woman's film. Lesbian and gay subplots abound, mainly for the purposes of giggling at their whimsical perversity (there's more giggling in Being Julia than there is at a Japanese schoolgirl convention), and no other middlebrow peeve goes unpunished either when writers and the expressionist theatre are mocked for the bemusement of what the picture refers to as the jackassery of the unwashed, anti-intellectual public. *1/2 (out of four)

Priestly black in its absolute stentorian corruption, Curtiss Clayton's brilliantly twisted Rick is an essay on the cancerous progression of machismo, on the dehumanizing influence of power structures--on the ultimate, ironic strength and futility of family bonds. Written by Daniel Handler, better known for his Lemony Snicket novels, the film's veneer of misanthropy and nihilism hides a strong sense of moral certitude in decay: the affirmation--even if it offers neither succour nor shield--that despite the pervasive rot of the day-to-day, there remains one true place in the space between a father and his daughter. Rick (Bill Pullman, brilliant) is a middle-management prick as imagined by Kafka, running through mazes and crawling around the floor of his boss' (Aaron Stanford) office as part of his daily ritual and spending his bottled bile on a hapless applicant (Sandra Oh) for an executive assistant position. It's Secretary-interrupted, if you will, a celluloid update of Verdi's Rigoletto incorporating Internet sex, murder for hire, and social satire elevated to piquant grand comedy and, in fact, high opera. A holiday-themed film, Rick is an attack on venality (think It's a Wonderful Life set entirely in Pottersville and written by Neil Labute) that charts the topography of the cratered new-millennial language of cinema. A scene of revelation, happening late in the game and following a virtuoso sequence where Rick walks through a labyrinth to emerge in the barred-shadows underneath (Clayton cut his teeth as ace editor on the films of Gus Van Sant and Vincent Gallo's Buffalo '66), is shot, in a stroke of genius, as a literal shadow play. And so Rick finds its central motif and intention: commentary on the act of filmmaking and the experience of film-watching, as well as the creation of new mythologies with new morals for a rough, uncertain age. ***1/2 (out of four)

Monster Road details the life and process of underground claymation hero Bruce Bickford, best known for a pair of collaborations with underground music hero Frank Zappa. Knowing that the work itself is the best entrée into the mind of the artist, director Brett Ingram uses a great deal of invaluable footage from Bickford's archives to lend balance to his subject's obsessive, somewhat dismal existence in his cramped basement studios. The tragic fate of Bickford's brother and the failing capacities of his father (who lives in an even more obsessive-compulsive environment than Bruce's, if such a thing is possible), whom Bruce visits often throughout the piece, find subtle life in the animator's miniature epics of consummation and cleavage. His is a process of desiring absorption and requiring separation--instincts at odds with one another, creating in the art this sense of tense, anxious, constantly-redistributed energy. Ingram's picture doesn't break any new ground in the documentary field, but it does what it does with a clear, workmanlike precision. Monster Road shines a light into a corner unexamined with no little poignancy besides, and if by the end we're a little edified if essentially unchanged, there must be a place for that, too. **1/2 (out of four)

An Iranian film of surpassing simplicity and beauty, Khosro Masumi's debut Tradition of Killing Lovers involves a man sent to prison for smuggling lumber. While interred, his young son Jallal tries to pay off the family's debts by running the remote region's lone chainsaw to scattered smuggling camps. Shots of Jallal, impossibly dwarfed by the chainsaw blade poking straight up from a knapsack on his back, framed against a bleak Iranian winter, conjure innumerable visual references from as varied of visionaries as Satyajit Ray and the Akira Kurosawa of Dersu Uzala. Moments where Masumi shows civilization as a series of close-set houses, thick as mushrooms, sprouting corpse white from the blighted earth, hint at the corruption just beneath the surface of what seems a sunny fable. (Not otherwise a supernatural thriller, Tradition of Killing Lovers boasts of one of the most chilling reveals of any film this year.) And though the performances veer from the excellent (Salar, the father, and Jallal) to the Bollywood (sister Majan and her Dudley Do-Right constable/suitor, Latif), with a courtship subplot and kvetching mother threatening at every moment to disrupt the quiet poetry of the central story, it doesn't really matter, as the stars of the show are the Iranian outback and the young boy bravely travelling across his desolate reality. Think of it as an Iranian The Swimmer (the Burt Lancaster film about a man getting home by loping across the backyard pools of his suburban neighbours): at its best a sad, existential journey through the emptiness of the self, interested in something so simple and complex as honouring the father, and being to his own self true. *** (out of four)

An impossibly conflicted film about the impossibly complicated issue of child sex offenders (that is, their recovery, recidivism, and release), Nicole Kassell's The Woodsman retreats, perhaps understandably, into the refuge of allegory. Before it does, though, Kevin Bacon's hollowed-out, haunted performance as a man released from prison with an indelible human stain moors the picture in a strong, melancholy reality. He moves in across the street from an elementary school, gets a job in a lumber yard, and befriends a woman (Kyra Sedgwick) who, a little too conveniently, suffered at the hands of molesters somewhere back down the road. Things start to fall apart as a new pederast begins to circle and a suspicious detective (Mos Def, mos def) starts making surprise visits. The Woodsman's vision, courtesy that all-too-rarity of a female writer-director, is beautifully shot and, as it should be, bleak: the world is an ugly, dangerous place--especially for little girls, Kassell suggests. It's a hard message told in an uncompromising way, at least it is until the film's final act, where a reference to the "Little Red Riding Hood" story, already signified by the title, is dragged kicking and screaming into the text, dispelling the starkness of its reality in favour of an ending that suggests big closets and the kind of rosy optimism the rest of the film's done such a masterful job of shaking. It's a problem--and not a small one--that the lingering last shots of The Woodsman include temptation in the rear-view and the monster turned, for however briefly, into the woodsman hero of a fairy tale that doesn't entirely deserve its happy ending. ** (out of four)

A Samuel Pepys quotation opens Stage Beauty, something about how in the seventeenth century, Ned Kynaston was the most beautiful woman on a stage that forbade women from strutting and fretting their hours. Playing Desdemona in a mannered production of "Othello", Kynaston (Billy Crudup) is king of the roost, oblivious to the crush of his ahistorical assistant, Mrs. Margaret "Maria" Hughes (a sort of well-cast Claire Danes), the first lady of the theatre, who fulfills her destiny when bawdy King Charlie II (Rupert Everett in fine form--why not a film about him?) turns the gender tables and declares it illegal for women's parts in the theatre to not be played by women. The one comparison that sticks is a somehow more dewy Shakespeare in Love, where delighted trills of "ribaldry" threaten to roll ironically off the tongue in the voice of Jon Lovitz's late, lamented English dandy theatre critic from "SNL". Playful but not fun, teasing but not sexy, Stage Beauty is an airless exercise in method that, when the time comes for the film to finally reach its apogee, suggests that Stanislavsky/Strasberg was born on a stage in 1660. Intended as piquant, the ending is just shades of that episode of "Cheers" where nobody notices that someone is actually killing Diane in a bar-bound production of, you guessed it, "Othello". It was better--and shorter--the first time. ** (out of four)

Another installment in the ongoing Ice Storm chronicles, screenwriter-turned-hyphenate Dan Harris' Imaginary Heroes also incorporates elements of stuff like A Home at the End of the World and Moonlight Mile. The picture shows its hand early and often, with a star swimmer (Kip Pardue) killing himself before the main titles have finished, thus leaving his already-dysfunctional family to pick up the suburban Ordinary People pieces. Mom is Sigourney Weaver, sis is Michelle Williams, Pa is Jeff Daniels, and the star of the show is likeable Emile Hirsch; the early scenes where Hirsch goes back to school to a slo-mo parade of kids doing their best to be sympathetic (see: Donnie Darko) demonstrate a sort of comfortable indie familiarity with the material. Dad drinks too much and doesn't go to work anymore, Mom discovers the joys of joints and the humiliation of being arrested (a reaction extreme that doesn't ring true), sis falls in love with an emotionally shattered but affable young lad, and the "other" son decides to kiss his best friend one night whilst standing under a plastic snake that acts as an ersatz Freudian mistletoe. (To its credit, the picture resists the Judd Hirsch-ian (no relation) shrink, though given the situation, one does wonder why none of these people are in therapy.) So, if you're sick of this master plot and these stock characters, rest easy that you know all there is to know without needing to suffer through it. But if you miss Sigourney Weaver and wouldn't mind seeing her transfer over to the Joan Allen role in another white-collar blues bit, hell, Imaginary Heroes is just the ticket. ** (out of four)

Benoît Jacquot's homage to the Nouvelle Vague has a weird, emotionally-detached feeling to it, something to do with the fact that paying tribute to the French New Wave is, at its essence, paying tribute to a tribute. (Something to do, too, with the nihilism that has infected world cinema in the new millennium.) The story proper concerns a young girl in the Anna Karina mold (Isild Le Besco) who, fashioning herself a bohemian, rebels against her bourgeois parents, beds down with a bank robber, and gets abandoned in a foreign country before coming home to France to face the music. It's dreary when it should be breathless and obscure when it should be incandescent, enough so that the freedom our heroine tastes (sexually, parentally, financially) feels like a gathering storm without the surcease of sorrow that a good, clean cloudburst brings. A tout de suite is heavy without being weighty. Besides, the bank robber melodrama is hardly a genre in need of revitalization in the public mind (what is au currant in American cinema? The comic book film, perhaps? The Charlie Kaufman?), nor is, more to the point, the New Wave in need of a breath of fresh air. A tout de suite, then, which translates somewhat ironically as Right Now, is a film of a style and an inclination that fulfills no need, and ultimately does nothing to nourish soul of the now. ** (out of four)

Liam Neeson plays the venerable zoologist-turned-sex scientist Alfred Kinsey, who, buoyed by a supportive Indiana University Bloomington dean (Oliver Platt) and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, single-handedly drew back the curtains on the human libido in the rigid 1950s (1948-1953). The picture (written/directed by Gods and Monsters' Bill Condon) covers Kinsey's contentious relationship with his stentorian father (John Lithgow, reprising his evil preacher performance from Footloose), his open relationship with wife Clara "Mac" Kinsey (Laura Linney), and his stewardship of young Clyde Martin (Peter Sarsgaard). The importance of Kinsey, a typical biopic in a lot of ways, is ultimately identical to the importance of Kinsey himself: it opens the conversation again on the infinite varieties of human sexuality. Kinsey says at one point that he's examined hundreds of thousands of gall wasps and found not a one to be the same; when he turns his obsessive eye on humans, he muses that he just found a more complicated insect. Neeson, Linney, and Sarsgaard are all excellent, though special credit is due for the casting Tim Curry as a prudish faculty member--Condon, you cad. *** (out of four)

With Unknown Soldier, a film that militarizes the terminology for the plight of inner-city youth, debuting writer-director Ferenc Tóth demonstrates a nice touch behind the camera but an anvil's touch at the typewriter. The story of a young man (Ellison (Carl Louis)) who loses his father--then his mooring, then his home, then his girl--before being shamed back into respectability, takes on all the tedious trappings of the new urban template for coming-of-age dramas. The digital video looks a touch over-sharp, even as the rest of the morality play washes out as a series of rote conflict-resolution scenarios delivered without much spark or surprise. Yet it's the perfect film for the festival audience, which tends towards self-congratulation on issues of social consciousness. There is a pervasive desire at these events to not only be seen, but also to be seen as sensitive to the people who can't afford to attend, and so easy-to-understand pictures like Unknown Soldier that have their hearts in the right place (i.e. right there on their sleeves) attract a lot of attention within--and almost no attention without. I'll be interested in what Tóth does next, I'm just not all that interested in what he's doing now. *1/2 (out of four)