Civic Duty

dir. Jeff Renfroe

I'll get to this cheap little thriller in a moment, but first I have to say: The movie premiered at Tribeca a year ago and nobody noticed that the news ticker on every television set in the film goes backward so you have to remember the end of each sentence while you wait for the subject to crawl into view? Surely this error could've been mended in postproduction. I mean, it's a serious distraction. How am I supposed to freak out about the possibility that my next-door neighbor is a terrorist who extracts poison from tap water when they can't even convince me the main character is watching cable TV? I realize this is a minor point, but if director Jeff Renfroe fancies himself the next David Fincher, he'd better pay closer attention.

Civic Duty is about a laid-off accountant named Terry Allen (Peter Krause) who flips out after watching too much jingoistic cable news. It seems that before he lost his job, Terry and his peace-loving, yoga-mat-toting wife (Kari Matchett) had been about to purchase a house. On top of all this, a "Middle Eastern guy" (Khaled Abol Naga) has the chutzpah to move in next door. Terry doesn't explode right away. First he collects "evidence" from the safety of his second-story window. Then he breaks into the poor guy's apartment and spies from between the slats of a closet door. Meanwhile, an FBI agent (Richard Schiff, marvelous) gets irritated at Terry's increasingly paranoid, illegal antics. The camera keeps rolling around and getting unfocused like it's got a lazy eye. Clearly the filmmakers are on the side of Terry's sensible wife, who addresses the neighbor by his first name (Gabe, how sweet) and brings him flowers. Right?

Actually, spying on the neighbors is what all the cool kids are doing right now. Just ask Shia LaBeouf. ANNIE WAGNER

The Flying Scotsman

dir. Douglas Mackinnon

A biopic about Scottish cycling champion Graeme Obree, The Flying Scotsman weaves between sports-training clichés (Obree invented the superman position, which certainly sounds exciting) and a meditation on the roots of mental illness. The etiology proposed by the script is insultingly simple. Obree was bullied as a child, which led to feverish self-hatred (at least I assume that's what the crying jags are supposed to represent) and an insatiable desire to go fast (mostly in tight circles on an indoor velodrome, but never mind). It's tempting to think that a few serious attempts to explore Obree's frame of mind—rather than the repeated shots of a grown man crying in a corner—could have opened up this rather chilly and frightened view of bipolar disorder.

Obree (Jonny Lee Miller, considerably cleaned up since his turn as Sick Boy in Trainspotting) is working as a lowly bike messenger when he resolves to beat the world one-hour record, held by the suave Italian Francesco Moser. With the help of his infinitely understanding wife, Katie (Morven Christie), and some ball bearings from her washing machine, he constructs a whole new kind of track bike, designed to maximize aerodynamics and reduce internal friction. With no thanks to the evil German caricatures who run the World Cycling Federation, Obree rides "Old Faithful" to a new world record—which he then promptly loses to an Englishman.

The movie is gripping where it counts: watching Obree speed around the banked track, counting whooshes with the onlookers and then hopping aboard for a breathless first-person lap around the track. But when this exhilarating footage is blended with Obree's attempt at suicide by hanging, you have to wonder whose perspective the flashback is supposed to represent. ANNIE WAGNER

Disappearances

dir. Jay Craven

In Disappearances, Quebec Bill (Kris Kristofferson) isn't exactly Robin Hood, but he's an affable outlaw—a schemer, fiddle player, and former whiskey runner in Prohibition-era Vermont who needs to get back in the business to save his family after their farm burns down. He brings along his timid, whey-faced son and some good-hearted, bumbling relatives (including Gary Farmer, who gives the only notable performance in the movie including, sadly, Kristofferson's). To sweeten the righteous-outlaw pot, Quebec Bill and family are stealing the whiskey from an evil, mystical pirate who has a Civil War jacket and comical buckteeth. Which is what makes Disappearances a kids' movie: the buckteeth, the bumbling relatives, the portentous aunt who appears as a hallucination to the son and spouts off quotations from Shakespeare.

Disappearances makes up for its small-budget, straight-to-video feel with an amateur charm and a sweet glaze over its smugglers' story. The flat cinematography is offset by inherently interesting settings (old farmhouses, a misty lake, a smuggler's hideout in the Quebec woods) and the buck-toothed clumsiness is easily forgotten when the film bumps into characters like the smuggler-monks rowing a canoe in cassocks or the boozy train conductor. But when Kristofferson's son, stammering in the middle of the woods, confesses that he killed one of the evil pirate's minions and Kristofferson just says "good," it feels like director Jay Craven is spreading our credulity for its romantic-outlaw mythos too thin. BRENDAN KILEY