‘Stuck’ in a selfish and grim world

A young female caregiver with a wild side (Mena Suvari) and a kicked-to-the-streets jobless man (Stephen Rea) meet decidedly un-cute in director Stuart Gordon’s “Stuck,” a grisly black comedy of ill manners inspired by the head-spinning case of a Texas nurse’s aide who hit a guy with her car and kept him lodged in her windshield in the garage until he died two days later. (Yes, Hitchcock, as you intended to show in “Torn Curtain,” it’s difficult to kill a man.)

But unlike the real story’s justice system resolution, Gordon’s scenario whips up a nasty duel of wills as caregiver Brandi wishes her unintentional passenger would just expire already -- “Why are you doing this to me?” is her hilariously whiny response to his bleating pleas for help -- while Tom tries increasingly desperate means to extricate his broken and shard-snagged body from his predicament.

Appropriately dingy in style and verve, Gordon has fun ratcheting up the death chamber stakes with squishy sound effects, nick-of-time tension and violent turns in luck, but the performances are what elevate it. Suvari’s increasingly loopy and cruel selfishness is its own nifty moral suspense, while Rea’s sad sack vibe -- he already looks like a collision victim in the pre-accident scenes -- is a bleakly amusing counterpoint to his gritty refusal to go quietly.

-- Robert Abele

“Stuck.” MPAA rating: R for strong violence, disturbing content, sexuality/nudity, language and drug use. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes. At the Nuart Theatre, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 281-8223.

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Hope holds on in a ‘Chop Shop’

There have always been child actors who have left remarkable impressions on the screen. The latest is Alejandro Polanco, the vibrant 12-year-old star of “Chop Shop,” the stunning follow-up to Ramin Bahrani’s heart-rending 2006 feature, “Man Push Cart.”

Polanco’s Alejandro is among a number of youngsters who survive working in Willet’s Point, Queens, an area known as the Iron Triangle, a vast junkyard across a highway from Shea Stadium. While Alejandro and his pals are always looking for ways to make a buck, he has found both regular employment and shelter with Rob (Rob Sowulski), a rugged, gruff but kindly middle-aged auto-body shop proprietor. He allows Alejandro to live in a makeshift office-storage space, and Alejandro’s story gets underway when, with Rob’s blessing, Alejandro’s lovely 16-year-old sister Isamar (Isamar Gonzales) moves in with him. When Alejandro lines her up with a job working at a food van the two happily start dreaming of owning their own van.

The Iron Triangle may be ramshackle but is a striking, incredibly vital and evocative setting, and proves to be the stuff of poetry from cinematographer Michael Simmonds. Alejandro is bright, handsome, resourceful, enterprising and skilled, but at 12 has no awareness of how naive he actually is; his toughness helps to blind him. “Chop Shop” charts Alejandro’s loss of innocence as he makes two discoveries that devastate and dangerously threaten to embitter him.

“Chop Shop” exudes a sense of joyousness amid harshness. Bahrani celebrates those who never give up, no matter how badly their dreams are shattered.

-- Kevin Thomas

“Chop Shop.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes. Exclusively at the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500.

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Creative acts prompt ‘Wonder’

The harnessing and exploitation of energy applies to both science and art -- as does the power each has to illuminate our understanding of the world -- and it’s a great starting point for Jon Else’s enriching documentary “Wonders Are Many: The Making of ‘Doctor Atomic.’ ”

Going behind the scenes of the creation and staging of composer John Adams’ and director Peter Sellars’ San Francisco Opera world premiere “Doctor Atomic” -- a lavish production about the 48 hours preceding the first atomic bomb test at the New Mexico site dubbed Trinity -- Else finds a ruminative and entrancing filmic space between the narrative of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s controversial physics breakthrough and the molecule-shifting excitement of great artists at work. The film’s parallelist bent never tires, either, as the interviews, archival footage and fact-laden narration pertaining to the bomb’s history enmesh thoughtfully with the nuts and bolts of the opera’s formation.

Eventually, a prop shop seems like a secretive lab; the bomb’s spherical, polyhedral shell looks like an objet d’art; and the numbers on a physicist’s blackboard begin to resemble the notes on a sheet of music. By the end, the beautifully shot “Wonders Are Many” has both probed issues of moral responsibility and scientific curiosity, and paid homage to the strange transcendence that can attend any anticipation of a thing created.

-- R.A.

“Wonders Are Many.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes. At the Laemmle Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394 9741.

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Much is stolen by this ‘Thief’

Written and directed by Gil Kofman, a playwright making his feature film debut, “The Memory Thief” follows a young man (Mark Webber) as he becomes obsessed with recording and watching testimonies of aging Holocaust survivors. He quickly begins to unravel, envisioning himself as having suffered the atrocities he hears of.

There are intriguing issues swirling around the film -- how do we process the suffering of others, what meaning are past tragedies meant to have to future generations -- but Kofman never brings it to a boil, never finds the deeper, truer meaning inside the ideas he is grappling with. Webber gives an unnervingly placid performance, all externals and surfaces, which while suitable to the character also makes an already inscrutable story that much more impenetrable. Kofman repeatedly shows footage from Holocaust survivors’ actual testimony, a tactic that seems somehow better suited to a theatrical piece than a fictional film. “The Memory Thief” becomes just like what it portrays, a creepy and exploitative sucker fish leeching illicit emotional power and impact from the very real horrors it attaches itself to.

-- Mark Olsen

“The Memory Thief.” Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes. At the Laemmle Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869.