Reviews of Today’s AFI Film Fest

Following are capsule reviews of today’s screenings in the American Film Institute Los Angeles International Film Festival at the Cineplex Odeon Century Plaza Cinemas:

‘Venus Trap’ West Germany, 1988, 107 minutes 6:50 p.m.

The latest film by West German sex-and-society phantasmagorist Robert Van Ackeren (“A Woman in Flames”) is weird indeed: like a fancy porno film in which all the sex has been removed, jumping from one tease to the next. We wander in and out of the fantasies of an ever-ready young doctor smirking and consummating his prodigious lusts all around the city. Its theme is the rebirth of romance in the teeth of desperation, or sex-as-calculated-rebellion, but Van Ackeren may have over-calculated, this time. How much teasing we can take?