Opens Fri April 2.
Crimson Gold begins at the end, with what seems to be a desperate criminal's doomed attempt to rob a jewelry story. The scene takes place over a single sustained shot that is largely dark, backlit by a bright doorway through which passersby watch in ineffectual horror. Before very long, there are gunshots and tragedy and a dead end: Escape is certainly not what this film is about.

We're taken back in time to find that the criminal is the decent, if brooding, Hussein (Hossain Emadeddin), a war veteran and pizza-delivery guy. Certainly his job keeps him painfully aware of the yawning divide between Tehran's classes--in one particularly uncomfortable scene, Hussein delivers a pizza to a man it turns out he knew on the warfront, a man who seems in a guilty hurry to send him away--but a deeper resentment is set into motion when his chatty friend Ali (Kamyar Sheisi) finds a handbag containing a receipt for an expensive Italian-made necklace. When, for some reason, they visit the store that issued the receipt (the luckless target of the first scene's crime), they are turned away, and then when they return, with Hussein's fiancée, the salesman that helps them is nastily patronizing.

It takes this last sharp bit of inequity to bring Hussein's anger to the surface; he lumbers around the movie in a kind of vacant daze, as if all those injustices struck a place that is furious but too far buried to be of much use. Crimson Gold is similarly lumbering, at times a bit slow, but is kept under a gloomy and constant pressure that works to its advantage. The film's best scene, a long one in which Hussein keeps an angry playboy company in his parents' opulent apartment, is so fraught with the possibility of disaster that you find yourself cringing at the most innocent things. You wonder how the upper classes stand a chance. EMILY HALL

Broken Wings

dir. Nir Bergman

Plays Fri-Thurs April 2-8 at the Varsity.
It's difficult to say whether this kitchen sinky melodrama is inherently political because it was made in Israel by an Israeli filmmaker and is about a contemporary Israeli family. If Broken Wings is political, however, the politics reveal themselves by their complete absence from the narrative, rather than (as in most films that have anything to do with Israel) by their blunt, didactic foregrounding. Wings tells the story of the working-class Ulman family--a single mother, two teenagers, and two younger kids--who live out their days in the bourgeois doldrums. Daughter Maya has high hopes for her rock band, but when her nurse mother is called to work a night shift at the hospital, Maya has to bail on a gig so she can baby-sit. This causes her to curse her mother's name, like any teenager would. Brother Yair, meanwhile, has given up his dreams of being a basketball player in favor of nihilism and a night job handing out fliers while dressed in a mouse costume. The younger sister is a bed-wetter. The younger brother likes to jump into the deep end of empty swimming pools. The mother sleepwalks through a soul-killing job. The entire family, it seems, is as racked with ennui as any American suburbanite clan--but then we learn that the recent death of the father/husband is what's keeping them so morose, and the picture comes into focus. The politics of this film are personal--though the very act of telling a story of a bourgeois family in Haifa without any mention of suicide bombs might qualify as political--and are only as affecting as your ability to invest yourself in the actors. They do a fine job, and the conflicts that arise are harrowing, but no more so than in any other halfway decent film about coping families. As Yair tells Maya after she runs away, "It could be worse." If that's the film's subversive message, he's absolutely right. SEAN NELSON

The Return

dir. Andrei Zvyagintsev

Opens Fri April 2.
If this movie had been made in the States, it would have been firmly grounded in the inner city, for the storyline parallels the ones from the New Black American Cinema of the 1990s. Two boys are being raised by a struggling single mom, but what they really need is a male role model to teach them how to be men. Then, out of nowhere, the father returns, and their fantasy of a loving father jars against the reality of this semi-compassionate taskmaster. The Return is not set in urban America, though, but rural Russia. Instead of gangbangers, young boys run around like little militants. And the cinematography is gorgeous.

Andrey and Ivan only know their father through a photograph. The story is told through their point of view, with a diary that they trade back and forth giving it an additional layer of subjective nostalgia. When the father returns, he immediately takes them on a boys-only camping trip. Along the way, he sets up test after test for them, which they are bound to fail because he wasn't there to teach them how to succeed--tests like beating up the young muggers who stole the money he entrusted to them, and basic camping skills like setting up a tent. The older brother takes to the father and starts to embrace his tough-love demeanor, while the younger brother believes the dad is some sort of war criminal who will only leave them again. Part of the beauty of The Return is that you don't know which son is correct, and this beauty leads to tragedy. ANDY SPLETZER

Home on the Range

dir. Will Finn and John Sanford

Opens Fri April 2.
Concerning three cows that live on a farm, Home on the Range is no A Bug's Life. However, it would have been in the same class (though at the very bottom of that class) as A Bug's Life if it had not been so self-referential--a problem that plagues so many recent family films. Instead of making smarty references to contemporary consumer predilections for healthier foods (fat-free milk, free-range chickens, and so on), it should have turned its back on our world and only referenced its historical period, the 19th century. Nevertheless, Home on the Range does have two things to its credit: One, it offers a great performance from Cuba Gooding Jr., who hasn't produced anything of value since Jerry Maguire. Indeed, at times Gooding as the sheriff's zealous horse (named Buck) almost approximates Eddie Murphy's incomparable performance as the dragon in Mulan. Second, Home on the Range is mercifully short; the story about three cows who become bounty hunters to save the farm from closure is completed in just over an hour. CHARLES MUDEDE