Capsule movie reviews: ‘Alien Girl’

From its title, “Alien Girl” seems to promise some kind of playful intergalactic adventure. That, it is not. Rather the film is a grim, artless Russian-made gangster picture that is neither stylish nor fun, the debut feature by director Anton Bormatov adapted by Sergey Sokolyuk from a graphic novel by criminal-turned-blogger Vladimir Nesterenko.

When a low-level Ukrainian criminal is captured by the police, his higher-ups send a team to Prague to bring back his sister (Natalia Romanycheva) for leverage to keep him quiet. Along the way she reveals herself to be a bona-fide movie-style tough chick, leading dimwits around by their libidos before finishing them off with a gun. From this movie one would gather that everyone in Eastern Europe is either a gangster, pimp, peasant farmer, junkie, hooker, government functionary or some combination thereof.

Anyone looking to actually learn something about the culture and workings of the Russian mob in the post-Soviet era would be better served watching David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises,” a film made by a Canadian and set in England. Instead, Bormatov has created something that neither satisfies the genre jones for kicks nor the demands of a more realistic movie that might give the viewer some genuine insight into its world.

“Alien Girl” explains its title late in the film with a sad, rather random invocation of the film “Alien,” and the movie itself works along the same lines — unformed, not thought-through and dislikably listless.

—Mark Olsen

“Alien Girl.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes. At Laemmle’s Sunset 5.

Filtering political history through lurid melodrama, “Little Rose” makes fairly obvious points about life under Poland’s Communist regime. The title character is the center of a love triangle that’s not without its share of intrigue but drawn in strokes broad enough to dull the intended impact.

Director Jan Kidawa-Blonski’s feature is inspired in part by the story of writer Pawel Jasienica and his relationship with the woman assigned to surveil him. Beginning in the summer of 1967 and culminating with the March 1968 uprising by Warsaw’s students and intelligentsia, the film concerns a young woman’s transformation as she’s drawn into secret-service operations. Actress Magdalena Boczarska makes that transformation convincing, and the film’s best-observed moments belong to her.

She plays Kamila, a.k.a. Little Rose, a university typist who’s enlisted by her Security Service boyfriend (Robert Wieckiewicz) to gather information on a professor (Andrzej Seweryn). He’s suspected of being a Zionist and therefore an enemy of “true Poles.” A distinguished, widowed writer with a taste for fine wine, her “mark,” as she calls him in her reports, awakens Kamila’s dormant literary aspirations and ignites her affection.

Even with archival footage providing solid political context, what unfolds too often feels like a contrast in lovemaking styles: the clearly conflicted brute versus the genteel and sensitive intellectual. But between its overheated encounters, “Little Rose” offers telling glimpses of the ways institutional paranoia infects hearts and minds.

—Sheri Linden

“Little Rose.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes. At Laemmle’s Music Hall, Beverly Hills.

There’s a tale of passion and tenacity behind the baseball-and-family drama “Touching Home,” but it’s in a published book about the making of it, by identical twins and first-time filmmakers Logan and Noah Miller. The semi-autobiographical movie they actually wrote, produced, directed and star in is handsome but standard-issue heartland fare.

Forged from the baseball-is-pure corner of Americana storytelling, the Millers’ script introduces them as hardscrabble brothers Clint and Lane, strapping (and often shirtless) young men with big league aspirations. When the dream is cut short, though, they’re forced to return to their working class Northern California town, the sweat and toil of quarry jobs and conflicted dealings with their alcoholic dad, Charlie (Ed Harris), who lives out of his Ford camper. Needless to say, family reconciliation becomes paramount to the brothers’ chance to escape once more.

There’s a sweetly picturesque charm to the Millers’ directing style, even if their dramatic touch is squarely middle-of-the-road. There are early indications that they have an eye for people against landscapes and — since the twins once held their characters’ same dreams — baseball scenes. Plus, they know a thing or two about acting fraternal tension, even if as rookie directors they don’t make it easy to tell them apart. (Couldn’t one of them have gotten a different haircut?)

The boys’ casting coup Harris, meanwhile, is reliably dissipated — even humorously so, at times — without either villainizing Charlie’s mistakes or aiming for pity. But it still feels cobbled together from the scraps (prime scraps, still) of this veteran’s career, and the Millers treat their star player almost too reverently to make him a galvanizing, chaotic figure in the boys’ deferred lives. It all gives “Touching Home” a feeling of getting walked around its bases, rather than hitting singles, doubles and triples to score its points.

—Robert Abele

“Touching Home.” MPAA rating: PG-13 for thematic material involving alcoholism, language, brief violence and for smoking. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes. At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, West Hollywood.

Often unreadable subtitles cannot dim the brilliance of Karen Shakhnazarov’s “Ward. No. 6,” an inspired reworking of Anton Chekhov short story. This beautiful, elegiac film presents an indelible portrait of the head of a mental institution, Ragin (Vladmir Ilyin), eventually ending up an inmate himself. Ragin’s fate unfolds in deliberately disjointed fashion within the framework of a faux documentary.

We learn that Ragin, a bald, middle-aged man had wanted to become a cleric but instead went into medicine on pain of being disowned by his father. Ragin spends half his income on books, drinks more vodka and beer than he should but is lovingly cared for by an elderly neighbor woman who serves as his housekeeper. He also has a friend who persuades him to vacation in Moscow, but an unending round of strip clubs and slot machines only intensifies his depression.

Ragin’s unraveling is triggered by his realization that Gromov (Alexey Vertkov) is the only intellectual he has found to debate with in 20 years in a town “without theater or art.”

Since the film is firmly rooted in Chekhov, it is philosophical and fatalistic, steeped in a despairing view of the human condition, lightened by a humorous sense of the absurd. Lots of meanings could be read into “Ward No. 6,” but Shakhnazarov and her equally gifted colleagues wisely leave the viewer to make of it what he or she will.

—Kevin Thomas

“Ward No. 6.” Unrated. In Russian with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 23 minutes. At Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex, Santa Monica.