The Cuckoo

dir. Alexander Rogozhkin

Opens Fri Aug 22 at the Varsity. There's nothing immediately alluring about Anni (Anni-Christina Juuso), a lonely Laplander living on a farm during the Second World War: She is plain of face, without glamour, and wrapped in shapeless layers of reindeer hides. Upon first meeting her in The Cuckoo, we might conclude that she will function in this film as a stolid Earth Mother, on screen to teach us some valuable, if necessarily humorless, lessons on Life and The Land and, since this is a wartime film, undoubtedly Man's Inhumanity to Man.

Well, not so fast. As we get to know Anni, it turns out she's been without her husband for a couple of years, and what she really, really, really wants is to get laid. Bad. So the sudden arrival, thanks to the war, of two wandering slabs of manflesh is rather more urgent than any concerns she might have about all that Man's Inhumanity stuff. This is merely the first of many expectations to be upended in Alexander Rogozhkin's film--which is not to say the movie doesn't get around to Man's Inhumanity. This is a Russian parable, after all. But Rogozhkin's wry approach keeps you agreeably off your feet.

The soldiers who come to roost at Anni's spartan lakeside yurt are Veikko (Ville Haapasalo), a Finnish sharpshooter, and Ivan (Viktor Bychkov), a Russian kicked out of the Soviet Army. The three characters share not a single word of language in common, so their conversations are exercises in surreal misunderstanding. I suppose this should run out of comedic gas by the time we're halfway through the film, yet it remains productive--it's like one of those endlessly repeated Letterman bits that probably ought to be unfunny by the 20th time he's done it, but somehow gains something by its repetition. (Well, I think it gains something.) The Cuckoo eventually comes 'round to war's absurdity, but now it has heft because we've been disarmed by this trio's humor and humanity. Throw in the exotic-in-its-own-way landscape of tundra and shore, and the boundless mischief of Juuso's performance (she was a nonprofessional discovered for the film), and The Cuckoo becomes a nifty piece of enchantment. CLAUDE ROC

Step Into Liquid

dir. Dana Brown

Opens Fri Aug 22 at Guild 45. The thing about surf movies is that they're like porn: After a few glorious frames, the money shot loses its power, and the filmmakers have to scramble to make it sexy and surprising again. You have to hand it to Dana Brown (son of Bruce Brown, director of the original The Endless Summer), though--he keeps Step Into Liquid sexy for longer than you would think possible, and when the beautiful footage starts to pale, he throws in all the thinkable variations on the surf theme: girl surfers, aging surfers, a surfer who's paralyzed below the neck, and (my personal favorite) dedicated surfers in not-so-photogenic Sheboygan, Wisconsin. And there are some characters who make the film come to life, such as an appearance by Robert "Wingnut" Weaver, who stole the show in The Endless Summer 2, toddling around on the end of his unfashionable longboard. Along the way there's a lot of bad poetry and pop philosophy, and sometimes you wonder if Warren Miller is lurking around somewhere in the background. But mainly what this is about is some really quite stunning filmmaking, and when it's good it's very, very good. In one shot, the camera moves backward through a wave, going from the surfer in the curl to the back of the wave itself, a curve so smooth and psychotically blue that you have to pinch yourself to remember it's not CGI but the real thing. It took me about a half-hour to realize that all those disembodied heads floating around in the wave--embedded like raisins in bread--were not fallen surfers, but cameramen. At the end of the film, someone waxes poetic about the sport, saying, "We hang all this crepe and bullshit [on surfing] and it survives--the ride is that good." I think that's overstating it, but point taken. EMILY HALL

The King and the Mockingbird

dir. Paul Grimault

Opens Fri Aug 22 at

the Grand Illusion Directed by Paul Grimault and scripted by Jacques Prévert, The King and the Mockingbird is a feature-length French animation that's difficult to describe or adequately explain. It's beautiful, it's twisted, it's funny, it's morbid, and while watching it, while deep in its warped world of fairytale characters, Christian lions, and police jet skis, you'll be disturbed (or fascinated--depending on your disposition) by that eerie sense of being exposed to something so completely alien to your intelligence. It is the perfect film for children, and a challenging one for adults.

The movie is set in the deep past (the medieval period of Hansel and Gretel) and also in a faraway future--as it was imagined by early-20th-century futurists. By 1979, the kind of cold, clinical, and oppressively efficient dystopia that the The King and the Mockingbird minutely details was a thing of the past; sci-fi writers and directors of the '70s instead imagined a near future with big cities that were not clean but instead a total mess of multiracial populations and unceasing pollution (Soylent Green, Alien, and so on). This blending of two time periods links the film in important ways to Brazil, which also fused two time worlds (the Roaring '20s and Orwell's 1984) into one nightmare.

Many will reduce the The King and the Mockingbird to an allegory of modern capitalist society. But to access the real rewards of this film, one must forget theories and simply marvel at its bizarreness. Only in your most febrile dreams will you find something that comes close to this world of orphans and mad kings. CHARLES MUDEDE