New Movie Shorts

AGENT CODY BANKS 2: DESTINATION LONDON

I’m having difficulty imagining the population of readers looking to this space for advice and insight about whether or not to see this particular film, just as I can’t conceive of voters who are unsure whether or not they want to re-elect the President. I offer a cautionary tale to both -- possibly overlapping -- demographics: the President has a mind control device installed in his dental work, and only 16-year-old CIA agent Cody Banks (Frank Muniz) can remove it and save the world. Directed by Kevin Allen, this slapdash sequel sends secret Cody to Jolly Olde for no good reason, except maybe to give co-executive producer Madonna a shorter commute. We’re thankfully Hilary Duff-less this go-round, but really that just means more of Muniz’s pop-eyed gawk, so no net gain. What else? There’s Anthony Anderson as yet another bumbling sidekick (don’t see also My Baby’s Daddy, Malibu’s Most Wanted and Kangaroo Jack), some uninspired spy gadgetry like a magnetic yo-yo and exploding Mentos, and whole reels of footage separating the few non-snore-inducing moments. --Ryan Godfrey (UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview)

ON THE RUN

Recent film trilogies have taken on a distinctly white-elephant cast, but Lucas Belvaux’s The Trilogy revives the termite approach. Rather than a meal too big to eat in one sitting, Belvaux’s three films -- On the Run, An Amazing Couple and After Life (scheduled to open in successive weeks) -- tell three overlapping stories that crisscross in ways both meaningful and incidental. An Amazing Couple opened the series in Belvaux’s native France, but the films’ American distributor has moved On the Run to the head of the line, perhaps because Belvaux plays the lead in the film, perhaps because the story involves firearms. The flip-flop seems like a mistake, since despite its ostensible "thriller" structure (the films trade genres as well as casts), the distended On the Run is far less welcoming than the comparatively breezy Couple, but the series as a whole is worth the investment in time. In On the Run, Belvaux plays Bruno, a left-wing terrorist who escapes from prison and attempts to revive his old cause. That the "Popular Resistance" now consists only of him doesn’t seem to bother this taciturn figure: He cranks out communiques, plants bombs and demands his comrades’ release. Eventually, he seeks out an old comrade, Jeanne (Catherine Frot, of Chaos), but she’s settled down and not eager to relive her extralegal past. "There are no more masses!" she reminds him, and On the Run’s bleak, wide-open frames bear her out: The world around Bruno seems to be empty, a moral void. Succeeding films fill in some of those spaces; scenes reappear in different contexts and from different perspectives, so what might have been threatening now seems funny or absurd. Belvaux doesn’t have the technical skill to bring off his hat-trick of genres, but the interaction between the films creates a work greater than any of them individually. They don’t just accumulate; they recombine. --Sam Adams (Ritz East)

THE RETURN

Crossing Tarkovskian mysticism with father-son melodrama, 39-year-old Andrei Zvyagintsev’s first feature bursts forth with the force of a fully-formed aesthetic. From its first sequence, in which Andrei (Vladimir Garin) challenges younger brother Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov) to scale a high tower and jump into a chilly lake, the film’s use of space is startling; the camera creeps up on the boys from below, then cuts directly above them, showing the gaping void below. That emptiness suggests yearning, a loss that might be remedied when the boys run home and find the father they’ve never known (Konstantin Lavronenko) waiting inside. The blank austerity of their first family dinner suggests otherwise, however, as does their father’s brutal capriciousness. He takes the boys fishing, but the voyage soon morphs into a business trip, and then begins to seem more like a kidnapping; like the lost wanderers of Gerry, their peregrinations seem to take them across continents, from a desert plain to an island swollen with lush greenery, always pounded by the rain. Where Andrei seeks his dad’s approval and is beaten for it, Ivan withdraws, proving himself to be the image of the father he refuses to acknowledge. The Return’s portentous ending seems like a last-ditch attempt to impose meaning on a story whose virtue is in ambiguity, but the young actors’ performances are so nakedly real that they make up for any false steps. --S.A.(Ritz East; Ritz 16)

SECRET WINDOW

Based on a Stephen King novella, David Koepp’s movie manages about an hour’s worth of decent creepiness (helped by Philip Glass’ score) before it spins into King’s standard "writer goes mad" finale. The egregiously named Mort Rainey (played by the most fabulously twitchy Johnny Depp) is holed up in his upstate NY cabin, sleeping on the couch in a tattered robe and flashbacking to the awful motel moment he discovered his ex (Maria Bello) with her lover (Timothy Hutton). A knock on the door changes everything: one John Shooter (John Turturro) accuses Mort of plagiarizing his story, and threatens him with violence if he doesn’t change -- that is, perfect -- the ending. Mort hires a detective (Charles S. Dutton), avoids the small town sheriff (Len Cariou) and frets inordinately about his ex. And yes, the ending is imperfect and unsurprising. Still, Depp’s performance shifts from subtle to goony to tense so neatly that it’s most often just fun to watch him work. --Cindy Fuchs (Bridge; UA 69th St.; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant;

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