AFI/L.A. Fest Ends Tonight

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

‘Ghosts of the Civil Dead’

Australia, 1988, 92 min utes 6:50 p.m.

Australian John Hillcoat has a style of almost unnerving clarity, like Godard, salted with Kubrick and laced with Walter Hill. Here, he and several other writers, including avant-garde rocker Nick Cave (who also wrote the music and plays a psychopathic cameo) spin out a metallic, spiky fable about how prison corrupts, how the system creates its own malcontents and drives them on to futile rebellion or sociopathic binges. It’s grueling, grinding and sometimes fascinating. But it doesn’t reach you, and, at the end, despite a number of ex-cons in the cast, it seems like something of a cheat: heavy metal bombast in the service of a blinkered radical vision.