Alexandra "Xan" Cassavetes' involving Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession documents the all-consuming movie love of former Los Angeles-area pay-cable outlet Z Channel's programmer Jerry Harvey, who, with little warning, killed his wife, then himself. The picture stops just short of overtly connecting the mania of a life lived through celluloid heroes with the demons that drove him to his ignoble end, but the suggestion is there, lurking in the margins--it's the spectre that looms over the luminaries Cassavetes assembles to discuss the influence that Z Channel had on their early appreciation for film and, in some cases, their careers. As Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, Alexander Payne, Alan Rudolph, Vilmos Zsigmond, Henry Jaglom, James Woods, and so many others speak in glowing terms of the opportunities provided them by Harvey's brilliant, elastic, iconoclastic programming aesthetic, there is the faint whiff of discomfort as we begin to recognize that the same devouring love which swallowed Harvey whole is shared by not only these filmmakers, but also, likely, the audiences for their films, for Z Channel, and, now, for Cassavetes' documentary. Knowledge that Xan's father John Cassavetes is also the father of independent cinema only thickens the broth.

A champion of the primacy of a director's vision, Harvey's Z Channel was the first to broadcast Stuart Cooper's films as well as unexpurgated versions of Sergio Leone's astonishing Once Upon a Time in America, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch--acts of critical integrity and what conventional broadcast wisdom branded poison that won Harvey the friendship of Cimino and Peckinpah, for starters. (As Cassavetes' documentary progresses, one of the more startling (and startlingly poetic) revelations is that Harvey appears to have committed his murder-suicide with a pistol given him by Peckinpah.) The most affecting testimonial comes courtesy LOS ANGELES TIMES film critic F.X. Feeney, who became fast friends with Harvey early in Z Channel's run and remembers Harvey's legacy not in the darker terms of many of the interviewees, but as one where the noble pursuit of exposing others to your obsession with knowledge and passion yielded a bounty of valuable commentary from a generation of filmmakers and scholars.

What elevates Z Channel beyond the level of interesting, if unexceptional, documentaries is the unusual extent to which Cassavetes herself is inextricable from the film's subtext of being reared on a steady diet of unusual, maverick cinema. Clips from some of the more obscure entries in the oeuvres of Nicolas Roeg, Alan Rudolph, and Paul Verhoeven seem to have been chosen based on their full frontal nudity or surprising violence--mute commentary, perhaps, on just how outside the pale Harvey was but a challenge, too, intended or not, for Cassavetes to assess to what extent Harvey's genius was reliant on unearthing lost or underestimated treasures and to what extent it was due his ability to program high-class porn. Cassavetes consistently juxtaposes clips from a regal costume drama like Peau d'Ane with heaving bosom stuff like Dance of the Vampires, or Theresa Russell showing her crotch in Roeg's Bad Timing with the chamber classic The Important Thing is to Love. Even clips from McCabe and Mrs. Miller and 1900 tend to showcase moments featuring frank nudity, correlating the success of an independent movie store that stocks Rainer Werner Fassbinder's fourteen-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz with the size of its porn section.

An extended sequence about Z Channel's Night Owl programming--with no other purpose for the channel oftentimes than to showcase exotic lovelies in the altogether--capped by Tarantino's sweaty reminiscence of Laura Antonelli and her performance in Marco Vicario's Wifemistress seems at first a peculiar skylark but does, in fact, ground Z Channel as something far trickier than mere hagiography. Cassavetes paints an uncomfortable picture of Harvey as the professional voyeur: lonesome in love and life, programming films to his melancholic (and often impeccable) tastes but, in the end, unable to escape the thrall of fantasy in his own troubled existence. A former assistant remembers the flowery way she was fired from Z Channel; another recalls seeing Harvey on the last day of his life, wandering by himself sadly in a sculpture garden. A scene where Rutger Hauer jerks off to a poster tacked on the wall in Turkish Delight becomes the prism through which Cassavetes chooses to distil Harvey, and slowly we come to understand that her commentary of him via her selection of clips and careful placement of interview soundbites is a trenchant, incisive character examination of a flawed, lonesome, peculiar fellow. For all the ancillary good brought about by his activism for film scholarship and preservation, he was in life a glass darkly held to watchers in the dark that succumb, now and again, to the rapture of the screen.-Walter Chaw

Celeste Marie Davis, who gets my vote to play Neil Gaiman's cherubic Grim Reaper in the upcoming Death: The High Cost of Living, was 14 when she wrote the screenplay for Purgatory House and 15 when she starred in the film made from it. Although Purgatory House deserves to be discussed on its own terms apart from the obvious similarities between its genesis and that of Catherine Hardwicke's appalling Thirteen (which are all but irrelevant, though it's worth pointing out that Purgatory House does not deserve to be considered post-Thirteen, i.e. the first film to leech off its novelty, as they were concurrently produced), subjecting it to a Pepsi Challenge against Thirteen actually helps its cause.

In all honesty, the two pictures are as didactic as each other, but Thirteen is astonishingly hypocritical in the process: not only does its uncompromising gaze at modern vices serve to broaden the aspiring young hedonist's horizons (witness the barely-pubescent protagonist's hidden-in-plain-sight stash of sex toys, cementing Thirteen as a kind of gateway drug), the film also refuses to hold its teenage heroine accountable for her actions, framing her comeuppance as an ironic twist meant to further demonize her corruptor. At the risk of similarly exonerating Nikki Reed, Thirteen's glamour-puss co-screenwriter and co-star, it would seem that Hardwicke, her collaborator on the script and mother figure in life, was entirely too protective of Reed's on-screen avatar--a by-product, no doubt, of doing most of the typing.

Director Cindy Baer, an occasional actress who became a "Big Sister" to Davis through the Los Angeles chapter of the program, is more conscientious about sending mixed messages than she is about implicating Davis in any wrongdoing (hence a critical pan away from an ecstasy tab being dropped), and Purgatory House, by avoiding the exploitation gestures that pass for truth in contemporary fiction, feels like a breath of fresh air with or without Thirteen entering the conversation. What Baer revels in is the guilelessness of Davis' screenplay, which remains palpably "undiluted by adult sensibility" (to quote the online literature) despite Baer's rigorous direction. (Purgatory House doesn't coddle or titillate its key demographic, but it does offer them the rare opportunity for communion.) Indeed, even Baer's intellectual aesthetic--a smorgasbord of Video Toaster'd, borderline-voyeuristic images that are refreshingly free of documentary posturing (the crutch du jour)--is by no means imposed on the film, moored as it is to Davis' trenchant conceit of the media as a constant filter through which the teenager observes and is observed.

After melancholy goth girl Silver Strand (Davis, a natural) deliberately O.D.s on pills in an intense sequence synchronized to Violent Femmes' "Kiss Off" ("Two, two, two for my family/Three, three, three for my heartache"), she is forced to compete for her fate on an episode of "Who Wants to Go to Heaven?", hosted by a transsexual God (charismatic Jim Hanks, essaying multiple roles à la brother Tom in The Polar Express). Far from a victim of the (lazy) topicality that curdles the Shrek movies, this irreverent parody--Silver's multiple-choice question is "Do I find it acceptable for 14-year-old kids to throw away the lives I so generously gave them?"--works as both a wily allusion to the church's lagging embrace of the zeitgeist and an introduction to the tantalizing suggestion that Silver is not dead at all, but rather having a lucid dream. (Note that in the afterlife, she's never really confronted with anything outside her ken.) Purgatory as an extrapolation of teenage ennui makes perfect sense.

The price of the movie's bracing authenticity is a certain elementariness, natch: while there's no resisting the spunk of high-school-playisms like a monologue in which Silver reduces her fellow Purgatorians to literal matchstick boys and girls (older viewers will be struck by nostalgia for the nascence of their analytical mind, younger ones will have epiphanies), the youthful impulse to be comprehensive gets the best of Davis in a glib passage that raises the spectres of Columbine and--in the extra-textual sense, at least--Paul F. Ryan's overreaching, overbearing Home Room. I wonder whether the power of the film's coda would've been so ineffable had Purgatory House not ultimately obscured the perhaps-hairline distinction between a teenager imploding and a teenager exploding--or dug deeper to find a common denominator. Still, the picture is achievement enough to put the names of Cindy Baer and Celeste Davis on the V.I.P. list of promising new filmmakers.-Bill Chambers

I'll admit to groaning when I learned that Getting Out of Rhode Island was about a small-town filmmaker with naked ambition--flashbacks to film school and to the people there who had no frame of reference outside their own pipe dreams of cinematic immortality ensued. Imagine my surprise to discover a film that critiques such petty fantasizing instead of merely embodying it, pulling it off via a well-edited and brilliantly-mixed synthesis of growled insults and soul-dulling white noise. This is the rare sub-indie feature possessed of its own style and point-of-view--and if Getting Out of Rhode Island is a little ragged at times, it's so ambitious and well-observed that it nevertheless puts a narcissistic satire like The Player to shame.

The film revolves around Morgan Stipe (Jeremy Banks), a prototypical goateed aspiring director hosting a party to raise the profile of some sure-to-be-terrible magnum opus. His ace in the hole is hometown pride Jacob Mattison (Robert Merrifield), a low-ebb actor lending his falling star-power to his onetime close friend. Unfortunately, Morgan is so consumed with a desire to break out of his Rhode Island bubble that he's become a manipulative monster: Jacob is confined to a closet until he can make a "big" entrance, and as the guests file in, it's clear that Morgan's turned their fame-hunger into a Fassbinder-on-the-cheap psychodrama. Jacob just wants to be alone, perhaps with the girl he left in the lurch five years ago, but Morgan will have none of that.

That's the springboard--there are, in fact, dozens of threads in this Nashville on a Faces budget, all involving incredibly needy people who have hung their hopes on the flicker of influence Morgan exudes. And as the party goes on, the gloves come off and their disappointment turns to rancour. I don't want to spoil the richly textured tapestry of failure for you--it deserves to unfold without expectations; suffice to say, the closing title card stating the production's improvisatory nature is supremely startling. If the dialogue is a tad stilted, the picture's sharp observations about the pain of wannabe status are so considered that it's hard to believe they were made off the cuff. It's a testament to the dedication of director Christian de Rezendes and his non-professional cast that they've done enough homework on the characters that at no point do any of them suggest acting-school exercises.

To be sure, the film has unfinished elements: improvisation sometimes taketh away in the department of smooth aesthetics, and the actors occasionally get stuck on the word "fuck" in the manner of earnest amateurs. But for every bump on the formalist road, there's a miraculous effect or brilliant glimmer in a performance to make the rough patches seem insignificant. This is most evident in the soundtrack, which manages to turn background chatter into a character of its own, smothering the characters in room tone and seamlessly hiding the soundtrack impurities while artfully drowning out our heroes as they say their tragic peace. The effect is so effortless that you're astounded, and it goes a long way towards lending the film the credibility it needs to pack a punch. It's a film that rewards wading through the torrent of terrible Cassavetes imitators, a rose at the top of a pile of garbage crafted with care enough to honour the master's memory.-Travis Mackenzie Hoover

Shot by three cinematographers and first announced over four years ago, Wong Kar Wai's long-awaited 2046 is a non-linear, atemporal requiem for missed connections and the trainwrecks of love and loss. But unlike his In the Mood for Love, to which this is an unofficial sequel (in truth, all of Wong's films seem to fold into one another--his is not so much a progression of works as an ever-expanding work-in-progress), 2046 is more about frustration than about anticipation--more a series of mildly abrasive non sequiturs with an increasingly unsympathetic hero than an accumulation of ravishing sorrows that build one upon the other imperceptibly like the desiccated bodies of dead moths. If Wong is an acquired taste for the subtlety of his personal apocalypses, 2046 is easily his most accessible work in that it showcases a hardboiled anti-hero of sorts, the slightly-re-imagined Mr. Chow (Tony Leung), here a writer of sex stories who provides voiceover narration and moves into room 2047, right next to the titular fantasia where he may or may not have made love to Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) in In the Mood for Love. The bridge between the two characters is completed first by a short cameo from Cheung as the two draw cards (the first and last in a train of cards spread on a table) to determine their future together, then by one of a parade of beautiful occupants of room 2046, ghosting a martial arts story for a bed-ridden Mr. Chow through a green, slatted wall.

Visually, the film is beautiful, especially those portions shot by ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle (and you can tell the difference between Doyle's work and that of comparative amateurs Kwan Pun Leung and Lai Yiu-Fai)--there's a tactile quality to it magnified by triple-threat costume/production designer/editing William Chang, notably in the pulling of the textures from the wallpaper into the dresses of Wong's inamoratas (Gong Li, Zhang Ziyi, Faye Wong). Wong and Doyle offset the women in extremes, peering at them from behind walls and curtains or through various apertures that suggest the last scene of In the Mood for Love and the oft-repeated tale concerning the value of sharing a secret with a hole carved in a tree, then covering the hole with mud. Sexual in its most obvious interpretation, the story of a secret about a doomed love affair takes on something like thematic cohesion were 2046 to be read as Mr. Chow's whispered confession (perhaps) of all his self-loathing and regret into a suddenly imperfect manifestation of himself. As Mr. Chow inflicts himself on his lovely neighbours (when you reject Zhang Ziyi's offer at exclusivity, you're a special kind of rebel, my friend), steadfastly sacrificing the possibility for permanence at the altar of his lost affair with Mrs. Chan, he writes a science-fiction story in which a man from the year 2046 falls in love with an android suffering from a terminal case of "delay" whilst riding a transglobal train in a future-world that's Wim Wenders in look, Fassbinder in feel, and slick, distracting CGI in execution. Wong's debt to the German New Wave deepens in the use of Fassbinder's composer Peer Raben's rich score.

2046 (also the year that Mainland China's promise of a continued form of sovereignty for Hong Kong expires), then, is a manifestation of a conjectured whisper told as a sixties hardboiled melodrama, and then embedded in all that, is a story-within-a-story--an allegory--of Mr. Chow's spiritual sterility, told from the point of view of a Japanese man and an android winding down in the last year of freedom for a twice-emancipated, twice-occupied colony. The picture is complicated visually and narratively, and symbolically and structurally, but it isn't particularly insightful, whimsical, or resonant. The things that Wong's films are without fail, in other words, are missing; the only thing left behind is this beautiful wake, collapsing in on itself in an endless, endlessly diminishing, sequence. What does stick in the proverbial craw, however, is the nagging idea that even in this crashing emptiness Wong might be making a stab at illustrating self-destruction and reductive repetition as the only possible aftermath of arriving late at the station to greet the love of your life.-Walter Chaw

I envisioned that Return to Innocence, described as a narrative about bogus accusations of child molestation by an ex-victim, would chart the distance between the trauma of actual abuse and the hysterical public responses that threaten to overshadow it. (A work, in other words, that explored all discursive positions instead of narrowly pursing just one.) Little did I know that it would barely touch on any of those issues and commit to simply being a courtroom drama "with a difference." In fact, the sexual abuse matters are less important to Return to Innocence than is clearing the name of the saintly man dealing with them--in considering the young accuser an unknowable enigma and abandoning any analytical point of view that might reference beyond itself, the film becomes doggedly one-sided. Combined with director Rocky Costanza's technical ineptitude and Gary M. Frazier's ham-fisted dialogue, it's an uncomfortable chore to sit through with no real intellectual payoff.

When Glen Erskine (Richard Meese), the chief of staff at a group home/treatment centre for abused boys, discovers that a counsellor has had a sexual encounter with Tommy (Andrew Martin), one of his charges, he naturally begins to file a report, only to shelve it once the counsellor dies in an accident. It's an attempt to protect the late counsellor's wife that proves vain: the boy's relationship with the counsellor was so intense that he blames the director for breaking it up, and gets his revenge by trumping up charges against Erskine. Things look bad for the protagonist, especially as he's published controversial papers on adult/youth sexual behaviour--and even Erskine's lawyer admits that his client's life is over. But who's that young man watching from the periphery? A surprise witness, perhaps?

It's impossible to divine the ultimate purpose of Return to Innocence. To the bitter end, Tommy remains an opaque and peripheral character largely defined by his abusive past and hostility towards the hero, and the blank-faced Martin is incapable of betraying any nonverbal insight into Tommy's personality. And we have to take Erskine's prowess as a counsellor on faith: not only is this fact more insinuated than established, but the issue of his contentious theories is left completely unexamined, too. This is not to say that his teachings don't have merit or that he is possibly a bad counsellor, but that the film is totally unwilling to flesh out these details in order to create a picture of all the players--it's basically a dramatization of an exoneration, leaving the motives and feelings of the abused boy completely out of the picture. In so doing, it takes a loaded issue and translates it into standard melodrama, leaving us with no insight beyond the manipulative emotions at play.

Worse, that melodrama is ineptly handled. To call Frazier's dialogue wooden is an insult to wood everywhere--he doles points out in blunt exposition and caps it with unlikely exchanges, ending one rueful conversation: "If you'll excuse me, I have to go tell my wife that her husband's a child molester." (That his script is based on his own novel conjures an image of prose stylings that steal my sleep.) And Costanza is a shatteringly unimaginative director, letting actors ramble on in tight close-up and rarely utilizing montage. The only person to get away clean is DP Steve Rowe, doing what he can to wring some interest from Costanza's boring compositions. At least the lighting is inoffensive, an achievement the rest of the production is unable to match.-Travis Mackenzie Hoover