Category: Reviews

The Imposter

“The Imposter” has the wildest and most unbelievable, mind-bending story seen in a documentary since “Exit Through the Gift Shop.” The 23-year-old Frenchman Frederic Bourdin played a simple Texas family for chumps by posing as their missing child, but what’s really impressive is that the movie plays us like a violin too.

The whole thing started with just a phone call. Frederic Bourdin was a drifter on the street in Spain. He called the cops from a payphone pretending to be a tourist and claimed to have found a child. But when the cops arrived, it was him posing as that child, nervous, hostile, scared and lonely. His motivation was to simply get off the streets and get care and shelter in a home. But when the cops demanded to know his identity, he invented a story that he was an American and needed an evening alone to phone his parents and let him know he was okay. He used this time to dredge up info on missing children in the US and finally claimed to be Texas’s own Nicholas Barclay.

This is where it gets interesting. Nicholas was only 13 when he disappeared and had been missing for four years when Frederic made the call stateside. Naturally, Carey Gibson, Nicholas’s sister, was on the first flight to Spain to pick up her brother. Despite the unlikelihood of Nicholas showing up, in Spain of all places, despite having dark, five o’clock shadow, despite a thick French accent and despite not having Nick’s blue eyes and blonde hair, Carey and her family bought it.

They wanted so badly to believe that they missed all of the red flags, and Frederic had dug himself so deep that he was forced to just keep digging until he came out the other side. Frederic was granted American citizenship, and he returned home to Texas to attend high school and live with Nicholas’s family. He concocted a horror story that he was part of an elaborate sex slave ring, one that changed the color of his hair and eyes, caused him to forget his past and be an essentially changed person. It was even enough to fool the FBI.

What’s more interesting here: why Frederic perpetuated his lie or why so many people believed him? “The Imposter” leads us toward both lines of questioning. Director Bart Layton stages the whole film as a dim, noir thriller, muffling voices over the phone, adding haze and static to the already gritty home videos of Nicholas and including ominous recreations of the events. Frederic’s centered close-ups during his interviews make it look as though he could be acting, partaking in his own form of screen villainy.

What really happened here? Are we seeing Frederic being filmed from jail? Did he escape? Does the family know because he came clean? What happened to Nicholas? In its final few minutes, “The Imposter” attains a level of multi-faceted urgency. It turns the table on us and for a moment makes us believe Frederic’s lie. It’s a film that not only tells an impossible story but lets us know that under the right circumstances, we can believe anything.

3 ½ stars

The Comedy

“I was reading this the other day… hobo cocks are one of the purest things on the planet.”

This is the kind of phrase with the disgusting, blunt and uncomfortable imagery that just makes you want to shut your brain off. And the speaker of this, Swanson (Tim Heidecker), can talk about this awfully long without cracking a smile.

As an audience, we’re not supposed to think Swanson is funny. We pay attention to the first part of his sentence: “I was reading this the other day.” Here’s proof that this is a bad guy who takes being repellent and abrasive very seriously, so much so that no matter how much pain he’s in, he might not be able to turn it off.

The ironically titled “The Comedy” then is a portrait of such a broken man. Its character is insulting, rude and without purpose or merit, but the film itself isn’t. It acknowledges how after a while, it must be tough always being the jackass.

Swanson might’ve once gotten many a laugh or a rise by egging people on, but now everyone knows his game, and most won’t even dignify it with a response. He carries on a Southern accent in front of his unfazed sister-in-law until he looks very pathetic. When he finally asks how his brother is doing in prison, she replies, “Are you really asking that?” He ruins the moment of course, but if she has to ask, she’s not willing to give him a serious response anyway.

Some might think “The Comedy” is a character study about a guy who gets sick pleasure out of this, but the film is more nuanced than that. At one point Swanson poses as a gardener and instigates a rich couple by asking if he can cool down in their pool. When they surprisingly agree, he storms off in a huff. Later he starts hurling around stereotypes in an African American bar, a scene so uncomfortable because he’s a second away from getting stabbed. It reminded me of Michael Fassbender’s character in “Shame,” another guy who no longer gets any pleasure from his addiction and in fact endangers himself in the pursuit of it.

Heidecker, a man who specializes in such broad anti-humor on his show, “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”, anchors “The Comedy” on his unsympathetic performance. He walks a fine line in acting very sincere about the act of being insincere.

But director Rick Alverson has transformed the goofy performances of Heidecker into something real, painful and human. In another setting, there might be something funny to Swanson sliding around on church pews, but in Alverson’s jarring close-ups, jostling camera and sporadic editing befitting Heidecker’s show, there’s something more unsettling going on.

“The Comedy” is a hard pill to swallow, a difficult indie film with even more obnoxious people and situations at its core. But it’s a sharp realization that even these awful, monstrous individuals are human enough to hit rock bottom.

3 ½ stars

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present

You might have to stare at Marina Abramovic’s artwork a long time before you accept it as anything other than pretentious. This HBO documentary named for her Museum of Modern Art exhibition in 2010, “Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present,” maybe places too much weight on the artist’s brilliance without questioning her methods. But the more you watch, you become enchanted by how sincere it really is.

This is precisely what happened to nearly 750,000 people back in March through May of 2010. Abramovic, a Yugoslavian modern artist known as the Grandmother of performance art, staged her simplest, yet most daring performance to date. In a large empty room in New York’s MoMA, Abramovic sat motionless at a table as she gazed into the eyes of anyone who chose to sit in front of her.

They sat, and she looked back, mysteriously and sympathetically. The longer they stayed, the more she became a mirror unto them. This film beautifully captures the pain, happiness, sadness and anger in countless faces.

Abramovic’s art, as the film explains, has always been about being forced to engage with a person in ways you may not have prepared for. For years, her art involved her posing naked or abusing her body such that you could not look away. It was striking work, and the film’s editing splices all of these shocking images together in super quick flashes of obscurity.

More importantly, it gives us Abramovic’s modest moments that reveal her humanity and her struggle. Now she’s 65 and has been accepted as an alternative artist, but she’s at an age where she’s long done with being alternative. She meets with David Blaine, who at first gives a convincing proposal for a joint collaboration in which he hacks her to pieces with an emergency axe, but she soon realizes that this stunt would go completely against her artistic philosophy.

She believes that unlike in movies or theater, in art there is a fine line between performance and acting. If she isn’t totally in the moment and is just playing a part, why should anyone believe that she isn’t just doing a stunt for shock value?

“The Artist is Present” walks this line as well, and it wins you over because it believes in its artist as much as those people in that gallery believe her.

3 ½ stars

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Let “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” be a lesson to those thinking of adapting a novel to the screen. “An Unexpected Journey” is the first of three movies spread out over the next two years designed to retell J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” a children’s book and prequel to the Lord of the Rings series.

As it stands, Peter Jackson has made a lumbering, long, familiar and padded opening to a trilogy that I fear is equally as bloated. It falls prey to nerd-baiting, deciding the best way to adapt a novel is to be brutally faithful to the source, shoe-horning in meandering details and piddling small talk that do nothing to make the characters interesting or attempt to surpass the level of spectacle found in Jackson’s original LOTR franchise.

All this has little to do with Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” itself. Yes, it is a different story altogether, one that is more whimsical, lighter in tone and not as dense of a mythological tome. But “An Unexpected Journey” finds Jackson basically making a grandly proportioned cartoon, not least of all helped by the fact that in 3-D and 48 frames per second it looks like one (more on that later).

A far stretch from the visceral, but bloodless action of the original trilogy, here we see dwarves leaping and dangling from trees, trolls scratching their butts, giant rock titans fighting Transformers style and talking orcs that look like they have scrotums dangling from their chins. It’s chaotic, nonsensical action befitting a Dreamworks kids movie, not fantastical, just a CGI maelstrom that defies logic.

All of this somehow seems familiar. The initial journey from the Shire followed by set pieces across New Zealand mountains and on to Rivendell: we’ve been to all these places before, and none of it is as fresh or spectacular.

They feel obligatory, because neither Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) nor the 12 dwarves he’s accompanying have much of a purpose for this quest; they’re just on an adventure.

Take Bilbo, who we get to know by watching him say “Don’t eat that” and “That’s an antique” over and over to the oafish dwarves who have without warning invaded his house and begun eating his food. He’s been informed through a lengthy backstory and obligatory flashback battle sequence that these 12 dwarves are embarking on a quest to reclaim their home, Erebor, from a dragon called Smaug. In order to do so, they need a stealthy hobbit who can sneak past Smaug. And after just a little prodding, he chooses to go because the plot needs to move forward.

But Bilbo doesn’t even really have much to do for a solid hour or more. He virtually disappears from sight amongst all the chases, flashbacks and side plots. His part involves cracking wise in front of some dumb trolls and of course Gollum (Andy Serkis, as deliciously funny and expressive in his motion capture ware as ever), which don’t really get the dwarves any closer to Erebor, but they’re supposed to be fun or funny I guess.

If this really is a faithful adaptation of the novel, the dialogue is awfully reductive and hardly literary. Much of it is low-brow and silly, but every once and a while Gandalf (Ian McKellen) has a fortune cookie line about bravery and the movie can call itself epic and profound.

There’s so much that feels weird and half-baked about “The Hobbit,” but most of all it just doesn’t look cinematic. 48 fps is designed to reduce the amount of strobing and blurring effects typically seen as the camera is quickly panning or tracking, and this can be very noticeable when watching a movie in 3-D. You’d arguably want this when you’re watching sports or other live TV. The typical line is that it’s “like looking through a window.”

But if everything in your movie is computer generated or you place your actors in front of movie sets, everything you see through that window is going to look fake. The movie is bursting with unnecessary amounts of light, the CGI looks strangely cheap, and the characters look like cardboard cutouts in front of a backdrop. If the blurring problem has gone away, it now looks like objects are awkwardly brushing up against the frame.

These have been comments that critics have made against 3-D itself for the longest time, and now Jackson has almost willfully amplified those problems for the sake of “accuracy.” It reflects the broader problem of “An Unexpected Journey,” which is that faithfulness to “reality” or to “source material” does not intrinsically make for a compelling movie.

2 stars

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Ai Weiwei exists on the border of all things. This Chinese artist is presented in the documentary “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” as a man who operates outside of the system, both in the art world and the political arena, and yet is deeply involved in each. This has not only allowed him to operate as an outspoken artist, activist and individual in a Communist society, but also kept him alive.

Weiwei is a modern Chinese artist who has amassed a global following by taking to the web and to Twitter because his own nation has censored his free speech. He became famous for designing the Bird’s Nest Stadium as part of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but it ironically also gave him the power and cultural influence necessary to criticize the government that established him.

Now he’s noted for his alternative, yet straight forward and forthright artwork. One piece is a photograph of him giving the finger to Tiananmen Square. Another piece has his entire staff reciting “Fuck You Motherland” in various Chinese dialects. A third is him shattering an ancient Chinese urn from the 7th Century, a simple reminder that this desecration of history happens every day without anyone thinking about it.

After an earthquake ravaged China and left thousands dead, many of them not accounted for by the government, Weiwei took action and made a series of documentaries intended to shine a light on China’s lack of effort. This is the sort of work that is in your face and shocking, but not pretentious or inclusive. And like its subject, “Never Sorry” is a flashy documentary, but ultimately direct in its careful historical documenting.

What Director Alison Klayman is quick to notice is that other journalists and activists have disappeared for less than what Weiwei has said. She walks a careful line in portraying Weiwei as the forward-thinking genius that he is without glorifying him to the point that he’ll be in danger.

But Weiwei walks that treacherous line enough himself. After being beaten by government thugs to prevent him from testifying at a hearing, Weiwei decides to make a stand by simply filing a complaint. He knows full well that the system is broken and that his request will go nowhere. But it’s important to work within the system to show just how flawed it is.

“Never Sorry” paints Weiwei as someone with gigantic resonance and influence around the globe. His actions and elicited reactions have made him a symbol, a martyr, and to some in China, something of a god. But all the same, both the film and the man recognize that his reach is limited. Weiwei has been beaten, censored, watched and financially harmed. It’s the avatar that has all the influence, and above all this film shows that in this day and age anyone can be just as powerful and expressive as he.

3 ½ stars

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

If it wasn’t already taken, I might’ve called “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” “The Master.” Here is a cute documentary about the best sushi chef in all of Tokyo, and yet through little pieces of fish it examines the idea of mastery and the endless pursuit for it.

Jiro Ono is an 85-year old sushi chef, or shokunin, with a small restaurant in Tokyo. Jiro only serves sushi, no appetizers or drinks. If you’re a fast eater, a meal may be done in 15 minutes. This gets you about 20 pieces of sushi. There are also only 10 seats at a short bar inside, and Jiro stands with assertive patience as he waits for you to eat. Some feel it’s a scary, intimidating experience. But at a starting price of 30,000 yen, or roughly $360, it’s also scary good.

Jiro runs the only restaurant of his size that has received a perfect three star rating from the Michelin Guide, which quite literally suggests traveling across countries to try this sushi. Food journalists all agree that he’s the best, that you never have a lackluster piece of sushi while you’re there, and that what he does is tantamount to an art form.

The film feels the same way, editing together Jiro and his team massaging an octopus, cooking rice or delicately placing sushi on the plate in slow motion and to classical music with true, visual virtuosity.

It begins to get at the mentality that governs all Japanese culture, not that you should simply enjoy your job but that you should become a master of it. Jiro has been working all his life to improve upon the art his teachers believed to have mastered. Now he even expects mastery from those he works with, employing fish vendors who are the utmost experts on a given fish and requiring apprenticeships that last for 10 years before you’re even allowed to cook the eggs.

But Jiro is just a simple, nice man. Whether or not his sushi really is the best, his legacy has surpassed it. One employee explains that if Jiro’s son were equally as good as his father, he would still be seen as inferior. Only if he became twice as good could they be equals in spirit. That’s the nature of mastery.

3 stars

Take This Waltz

We applaud when women in the movies are strong, self-assured and dealing with problems the best they can. But they can’t all be headstrong and confident. Surely some of them are immature and even destructive.

Sarah Polley’s “Take This Waltz” is an admirable attempt to paint such a woman, but its ideas feel vague and uncertain, and its lead character Margo feels strange and unbelievable, even with one of today’s best and most relatable actresses at the helm, Michelle Williams.

We meet Margo on a plane ride home after a business trip, where she’s just met a handsome, but somehow cocky guy named Daniel (Luke Kirby). They talk on the plane and share a cab, and it turns out he lives quite literally across the street from Margo. This is already too good to be true, so as she’s about to leave the cab, she says, “I’m married.” This is the sort of thing you say when you’ve at least thought of sleeping with someone, but it goes against your better judgment.

And it’s a good thing, because Margo is in a fairly happy marriage with the loveable Lou, played by the equally loveable Seth Rogen. The two whisper abusive sweet nothings to one another in bed for fun (“I’m going to skin you alive with a potato peeler,” “I bought a melon baller and want to gauge your eyes out”), which is weird. They seem happy, but without warning she’ll become distant to his games, and of course she hasn’t stopped flirting with that guy across the street (he’s got some violent imagery played off as romantic too).

Margo’s problem is oddly specific. It’s a fear of being afraid. She doesn’t like to “be in-between things.” It takes her the whole movie to figure out that not all of life is full of action, which is fine, but the number of problems caused in her life because of this insecurity makes you wonder if Margo is really just unhealthy. Daniel annoys her at times, but she can’t tell him to screw off, nor just screw him. She won’t address the problems with her husband, but she won’t leave him either.

What does she want? I don’t think she knows. Maybe that’s intentional, but for a while it doesn’t seem like the movie knows either, and for how much we like Lou, audiences may get uncomfortable at Polley over-stylizing these moments of emotional adultery. We see Margo and Daniel swimming elegantly in a glistening indoor pool, their sex scene is dizzyingly erotic and her carnival ride with Daniel to the tune “Video Killed the Radio Star” makes you wonder why she doesn’t have more moments like that with her loving husband.

2 ½ stars

The Invisible War

“The Invisible War” has forever changed my perception about the American military. It will stay that way for me and the people profiled in this film until action is taken. Kirby Dick’s documentary is a horrifying exposé about sexual assault and rape in the armed services. The countless veterans here speaking out about their rape considered themselves valuable individuals in an army of one. Now even that privilege has been taken away with this repulsive act. These people speak of the soldiers they once called brothers as the “they” who turned them into victims.

According to U.S. Government Studies cited by “The Invisible War,” nearly 20 percent of all the women who have served in the American military have reported being sexually assaulted while in the line of duty. As is true of most rape cases, many more go unreported. But “The Invisible War” analyzes the systemic problems in the military legal system in addressing this issue, including why so few victims openly report abuse, why little to no action is taken and why this continues to happen.

Dick finds several dozen women, many of whom appear on camera for only a moment, who were raped while serving. They belong to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard. Each had their own reason for enlisting, and each now has their own personal trauma, but Dick’s gift is in finding how their stories are strikingly similar.

They remember their heads hitting the wall, a friend or officer suddenly being on top of them, a gun being held to their head and finding out they were pregnant later. Some of them remember this happening numerous times.

These are strong women who have been through the same training as their attackers, although now Kori Cioca, whom the film follows most closely, carries both a cross and a Smith & Wesson knife. Jesus can only provide so much protection, she says.

As a result of being attacked, Kori is suffering from severe pain in her jaw, restricting her to a diet of soft foods. For months she has been calling the VA office to receive medical coverage, but she remains at the end of a long waiting list. The movie uses jump cuts of her listening to call-waiting music on speakerphone, emphasizing her perpetual wait. When she finally goes into the office, on Veteran’s Day no less, the doctors order X-Rays for her back and nothing for her jaw. We see Kori’s mind-boggling struggle and rigorous patience and think of the many other veterans also being denied medical coverage. How can we treat our own so poorly?

But Kori is not alone, nor are the rape numbers merely statistics. It is now abundantly clear to me that rape does not just affect your body. It impacts health, society, romance, careers and lives. Dick’s film finds a terrific balance between facts and drama. Take for instance that 40 percent of female veterans who are now homeless were once rape victims, women so haunted in their PTSD that they could not bring themselves back to society to find jobs. If the numbers are unconvincing, ask Kori what it’s like to be too scared show your husband affection or what it’s like to read your own suicide note aloud.

How could these numbers be so shocking? How could this system be so broken? How is it that every general and commanding officer can claim the military has a Zero Tolerance policy? How is it that even our best and brightest Marines are neither safe nor innocent?

The hard truth is that for all intensive purposes, these soldiers are not citizens when it comes to receiving justice and legal rights. In the army, punishment and justice is administered in a closed system, delivered solely by the commanding officer. In 15 percent of the cases, the CO himself is the rapist. In the others, witnesses and suspects can simply keep silent, and the person who has reported the rape is suddenly at risk of their own court martial, threatening their rank and placement.

It’s a boys’ club that celebrates strength and nobility, and some of these investigations that aim to sweep the rape cases under the rug are enraging. One woman named Elle was raped after her fellow soldiers forced her to drink. Her case was closed due to a lack of evidence, and she was later investigated for public intoxication. Another named Ariana was told she was welcoming an assault by wearing the regulation Marine skirt. A third woman, she an active duty Marine who remained anonymous, was raped by a married officer and was cited with having committed adultery.

You begin to ask, why aren’t there more screening procedures for enrolling? Why is the percentage of rapists in the military double that of sex offenders in America? Why do preventative campaigns focus on women, not on finding the guilty? “The Invisible War” makes it seem as if these questions and problems will never end, but it calls attention to them with urgency and poignancy. It addresses flimsy counter arguments with hard-hitting numbers and a wealth of moving testimony. It even extends the need for action into the real world through a convincing portrait of rapists as predators who will act again and again, even once they enter back into our communities.

At the end of the film, Kori visits a veteran’s memorial for women and sees a display of a Purple Heart medal. Maybe she deserves a medal too, she wonders. To her this was an ordeal equivalent to going into combat, and this was her own story of survival. Is this the sacrifice she was supposed to make for her country?

4 stars

Rampart

After the 1992 Rodney King beating was caught on tape, everyone had questions about the victim we were seeing. “Rampart” looks at the other side of the police brutality video, profiling a bad, racist cop who deserves all the pain that comes to him but recognizes he’s human all the same.

Oren Moverman’s (“The Messenger”) film takes place in 1999 Los Angeles, when the LAPD was notorious for corruption. For Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson), racism is a part of his daily routine. He’s got the mentality that we know to be stereotypical and wrong, and yet he’s been around so much that he displays a logic and understanding that can be hard to fully disagree with.

When a Mexican gangbanger collides with Dave’s cop car, the man shoves his car door into Dave and tries to make his escape, only for Dave to chase him down and beat him senseless. The violence is caught on video, and the DA’s office feels Dave is the perfect scapegoat to throw to the press as they juggle their own corruption allegations.

As he tries to escape his punishment and remain on the police force, “Rampart” follows Dave’s descent to rock bottom. Before long he’s pulled all of his strings with a former colleague (Ned Beatty), his on the street contact (Ben Foster) and the defense attorney who is his current lover (Robin Wright), and he’s got no one left to turn to in support of his reckless ways.

Less of a crime procedural and more of an emotionally poignant character drama, “Rampart’s” effort to make us feel empathy for this evil man is built on the fiery performance by Woody Harrelson. Blackmail, framing, adultery, brutality and racism; this guy does it all, but Harrelson is careful never to let Dave take sadistic pleasure out of all his hatred.

We see him as a nuanced man, powerless amidst his own family. He was married to two sisters (Cynthia Nixon and Anne Heche) and fathered a daughter with each. His oldest, Helen (Brie Larson), is now a man-hating lesbian and holds his dad responsible after Dave earned a reputation as “Date-Rape Dave” for allegedly murdering a man trying to rape a woman. He had his reasons for doing what he did to that guy, and they may have even been noble, but what matters is that his family doesn’t feel the same. You wonder then where Dave’s external hatred comes from.

Moverman shoots from canted angles and behind grated bars and windows to show just how skewed a perception Dave has on life. It gets over-stylized at times, and you beg for the simple gritty realism to be found in his previous film “The Messenger.” That movie contained more raw emotion in one, motionless shot that lasted for nearly nine minutes than “Rampart” does in its portrait of a much more emotionally intense character.

Still, “Rampart” is a powerful film. The movie’s cryptic screenplay and open-ended climax has left many audiences frustrated, but the ending doesn’t matter so much as the hard truth that for even the worst guy in the world, we wouldn’t wish upon him the pain of having nothing left.

3 ½ stars

Damsels in Distress

“Damsels in Distress” is like an art house “Mean Girls.” It’s about a foursome of college girls who are insufferably quirky and manufactured indie cute instead of the usual cliché catty. They look at every thing with sunny optimism and act to help crazy, depressed and stupid people from suicide. But the movie is so wrapped up in its own craziness that it ends up being about nothing at all.

As soon as the movie begins, Violet, Heather and Rose (Greta Gerwig, Carrie MacLemore, Megalyn Echikunwoke) flank a new, timid girl on the first day of college orientation. This girl in need of their help and friendship is Lily (Analeigh Tipton), who starts off as a normal human being but changes when she quickly realizes her new friends are cut from a different cloth.

Their speech sounds bookish and scripted, and their voices are rigid and without normal inflection. They use vocab heavy expressions like “youth outreach,” “golden oldie,” “only numerically,” “vulgarity is in essence blasphemous” and most notably of all, “Playboy Operator.” When Lily asks about the frat houses on campus, it turns out traditional slang, like “Greeks,” is also foreign to them, but that can be excused because their campus only has houses with Roman letters.

They operate a suicide prevention center in which they encourage depressed people to tap dance and eat donuts. Violet wants to start a new dance craze like the Charleston or Twist, but it turns out she’s an emotionally damaged orphan and is struggling with relationship problems.

The problem with these characters is that they’re hypocritical. They’re just as damaged and crazy as the people they aim to help, so this level of sunny optimism has never sounded more condescending. But the movie tries to write this off as intentional, firstly because Violet isn’t depressed, she’s just “in a tailspin,” and secondly because she doesn’t see why suffering from a fault prevents you from criticizing it in others.

But it’s a cheat, and “Damsels in Distress” seems to break its own silly rules at will. They aim to date frat boys, preferably moronic ones so they can improve them, but claim to resist the urges of other handsome men. It seems as if they carry a specific kind of odor. They also object to institutions and elitism found in the school newspaper, but they celebrate the frat houses and argue there is a difference. The movie isn’t really sure what these girls believe but knows it should be offbeat and quirky.

“Damsels and Distress” plays like a perpetual eye roll. It is exhausting semantics and word play for its own sake. The movie is directed by Whit Stillman, who is called a precursor to both Mike Leigh and Wes Anderson and certainly borrows other pages from Woody Allen. But Stillman lacks the realism in Leigh, the visual bravura in Anderson and the endearing wit of Allen. It’s unlikely that the three of them combined could put out something this insufferable.

1 ½ stars