‘Laundry’ is awash in cliches

There’s a smart, hip, perhaps even necessary film to be made about a sophisticated African American coming out to his small-town Georgia family, but “Dirty Laundry” isn’t it. Overwritten and under-directed by Maurice Jamal, the movie contains several honest moments but remains too awash in cliches and stereotypes to take seriously.

As Sheldon, a snooty writer who returns to his Southern roots after living large in New York for the past decade, Rockmond Dunbar (TV’s “Soul Food,” “Prison Break”) never finds a way past his unsympathetic role and into our good graces. The normally engaging Loretta Devine as his mother, Evelyn, an ornery, tippling laundress coming to terms with her gay son as well as her hard-knock life, is also undermined by the unfocused script. Despite her obvious commitment, the actress is as uneven as her material.

Jamal, who also plays Sheldon’s resentful brother, packs this overlong dramedy with too many broadly drawn characters (the hateful Aunt Lettuce is especially egregious), needless segues and side stories, and a raft of weakly developed conflicts. The revelation that Sheldon has a 10-year-old son (from a once-only assignation he’s conveniently forgotten) propels much of the action, but it’s remarkably unconvincing. The same goes for Sheldon’s romance with Ryan (Joey Costello), who makes “Will & Grace’s” Jack McFarland look like Clint Eastwood. As an openly gay filmmaker, Jamal should have known better.

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“Dirty Laundry.” MPAA rating: PG-13 for language, some sexual content and thematic elements. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes. Exclusively at Mann Beverly Center Cinemas, 8500 Beverly Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 854-0071.

Mending a broken heart, French style

Ah, the French. If only American movies could be as sexually fluid as those of our Gallic friends. How refreshing would that be?

The Paris-set “Looking for Cheyenne,” with its distinctly laissez-faire attitude toward whom -- and how -- one chooses to love, is a compelling, if modest take on romance, with a girl-on-girl slant.

As is often the case with French films, the characters’ sociopolitical stances can be far less relaxed than their sexual outlooks, and that dichotomy gives this import its real depth. For Sonia (Aurelia Petit), an amiable, attractive high school science teacher, she’s open to whatever amorous possibilities come her way -- especially if they’ll help her forget a painful split with the love of her life, the severely anti-establishment Cheyenne (Mila Dekker). Though Sonia hooks up with a puppy dog of a guy (Malik Zidi) as well as a self-possessed gal with a sadistic streak (Guilaine Londez), she still pines for Cheyenne and must resolve her feelings once and for all.

Sonia’s passionate but emotionally charged reunion with the unemployed Cheyenne, who’s now living “off the grid” in the French countryside, moves the film in some unexpected and satisfying directions.

The film, adeptly directed by Valerie Minetto (from a script she wrote with Cecile Vargaftig), suffers from some awkward subtitling and a few ineffective fantasy bits but is otherwise provocative and well-acted. This one’s worth looking for.

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“Looking for Cheyenne.” MPAA rating: R for some sexuality and language. Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes. Exclusively at the Regent Showcase, 614 N. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 934-1770.

Where ‘Eagle’ shouldn’t dare

“Midnight Eagle” is a stupor-inducing, would-be thriller from Japan whose sporadic action and inept storytelling is as generic as its title. Based on a reportedly popular novel by Tetsuo Takashima, the film patches together a plot so faux it would be laughable if the whole thing weren’t so terribly humorless. When an American stealth bomber known as the “Midnight Eagle” crashes in the snowy Japanese Alps, it sets off a wan, defuse-the-nuke mission implausibly linking a widowed war photographer (Takao Osawa), his frosty journalist sister-in-law (Yuko Takeuchi), a gung-ho newspaperman (Hiroshi Tamaki), a robotic prime minister (Tatsuya Fuji, barking his lines) and an upbeat Self-Defense Force commander (Eisaku Yoshida). Political messages abound, but their actual point is anyone’s guess.

Izuru Narushima’s sledgehammer direction, Yasuo Hasegawa and Kenzaburo Iida’s superficial script and Takeshi Kobayashi’s cheesy, incongruous score are among the chief culprits here, but veteran editor William Anderson gets a special raspberry for the film’s leaden pacing. You’d think someone who cut pictures with the urgency of “The Year of Living Dangerously” and the economy of “Tender Mercies” would have known an extra half-hour of flab when he saw it.

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G.G.

“Midnight Eagle.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running Time: 2 hours, 11 minutes. Exclusively at the ImaginAsian Center, 251 S. Main St., Little Tokyo, (213) 617-1033, and AMC Rolling Hills, 2591 Airport Drive, Torrance, (310) 289-4262.

An assassination as turning point

Robert Stone’s “Oswald’s Ghost” is a straightforward documentary on the assassination of President Kennedy, focusing on the devastating effect it had on the America public’s faith in government. Stone’s distinguished roster of interviewees, headed by the late Norman Mailer, recalls how the subsequent assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and revelations of President Nixon’s extensive plans to destabilize unfriendly foreign governments fueled conspiracy theories already in play from the time of JFK’s death and thereby shattered America’s political idealism.

Stone covers territory all too familiar to most Americans old enough to remember the JFK assassination.

Having thoroughly explained how a complexity of circumstances and personalities, most notably that of rabble-rousing New Orleans Dist. Atty. Jim Garrison, unleashed a conspiracy frenzy, Stone gives Mailer the last word. Lamenting that the ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald continues to haunt American life, Mailer admits he could not get any of the conspiracy theories to hang together, and he -- and historian Priscilla McMillan -- make a strong case as to why Oswald had the motive, capability and desire to act alone.

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Kevin Thomas

“Oswald’s Ghost.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 23 minutes. Exclusively at the Laemmle Grande 4-Plex, 345 S. Figueroa St., L.A., (213) 617-0268.

Estonia’s vocal symphony

For Estonians, the Laulupidu (song festival) held every five years is more than a cultural mecca for thousands: It’s a chance to honor how a populace in unison often held this oppressed nation together over decades of Soviet rule and eventually spurred it to win its freedom. As chronicled in the gripping if flawed documentary “The Singing Revolution,” Estonia’s turbulent 20th century is on one level a story of how feelings became songs, songs became a national voice and voice became action.

With a background in educational films and commercials, first-time feature directors James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty strictly adhere to a snappily edited formula of timelines, archival footage and Linda Hunt’s instructional voice-over.

The history of Estonia’s nonviolent resistance under communism is duly wrenching and inspiring -- especially at the 1969 festival, when the banned national anthem was defiantly sung in public by 30,000 citizens -- but too often it feels like there’ll be a quiz afterward on dates and movement names.

Most regrettably for a movie with “singing” in the title, Estonian music is addressed only in the context of political occupation.

There’s no art-for-art’s-sake sense of what it takes to put on Laulupidu or what musically characterizes a beloved Estonian folk song or performing style. Many are interviewed -- activists, singers, historians -- but few artistic contours emerge to give personal shape to the greater tale of one nation’s cultural victory over propaganda. “The Singing Revolution” might ignite history buffs, but for musicphiles, it’s unfortunately a one-note symphony.

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“The Singing Revolution.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes. Exclusively at Laemmle’s Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.