Capsule movie reviews

It’s hard not to admire the visual artistry in co-writer-directors Alexei Kaleina and Craig Macneill’s “The Afterlight,” with its beautifully composed shots of lyrical, sometimes-ominous countryside and near-painterly, lived-in interiors; Zoe White’s cinematography is nothing short of masterful. At the same time, it’s hard to embrace this glacially paced, symbolism-heavy film’s elusive — when it’s not being elliptical — story about a city couple’s escape to rural life.

Andrew (Michael Kelly) and Claire’s (Jicky Schnee) move into an abandoned, upstate New York schoolhouse does little to mend the emotional rift that began after Claire became pregnant, though she has yet to tell Andrew of their impending child or of an eerie, related accident that occurred.

A handful of new neighbors — a blind, adult orphan (Ana Asensio); her aging aunt (the late Rhoda Pauley); and a nosy child (Morgan Taddeo) — variously intersect with Andrew and Claire before and during a climactic solar eclipse, but their effect on the unmarried lovers, like the tone of the rest of the movie, feels overly muted.

A single, vivid scene between Claire and Andrew’s haunted father (Rip Torn), the culmination of an ongoing conversation that until then is heard but unseen, brings welcome momentum. But it provides only a temporary jump-start to this Bergman-lite mood piece.

— Gary Goldstein

“The Afterlight.” No MPAA Rating. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes. At the Downtown Independent, Los Angeles.

This ‘Shark’ is no ‘Snakes’

Sharks have it bad enough as endangered, misunderstood predators with a terrible public relations image without seeing their serial-killing stardom drowned out by hammy acting and torture-porn villainy. But that’s the take-away from “Shark Night 3D,” a disposable hard-body-count B movie in which party-hearty college students (including “American Idol” alum Katharine McPhee) hit the Louisiana bayou for a weekend of looking tan and beautiful so moviegoers can hit the multiplex for low-rent “Jaws”-knockoff carnage.

Writers Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg introduce nefarious hillbilly-accented locals using carefully cultivated sharks in their saltwater lake as a private snuff film factory, a “Deliverance”-meets-”Hostel” lurch that — pardon the pun — feels like creature-feature bait and switch.

Director David R. Ellis gamely tries to bring the same hucksterish energy to the feeding-zoo genre that he did to his notoriously hyped yet sporadically amusing “Snakes on a Plane,” but apart from an appropriately shark-like keep-moving-or-die filmmaking ethos, the shocks are weak (see “Deep Blue Sea” for the original and freakier airborne kill). The comin’-at-ya 3-D feels more than ever like a vestigial gimmick, and there’s no Samuel L. Jackson.

Stay past the credits, though, and you’ll find a tongue-in-cheek rap video recap with the cast — and directed by star Dustin Milligan — that carries the kind of spoofy insouciance missing from the main attraction.

— Robert Abele

“Shark Night 3D.” Rated PG-13. Running time: 91 minutes. In wide release.