Jindabyne

dir. Ray Lawrence

It drives me crazy (bonkers, even!) when people in movies can't think up the simplest little ass-saving lie. I mean, first of all, acting is already the same as lying. You are a professional liar, so that's a leg up there. And second, a writer wrote that for you! Bad lying is simply unacceptable.

Anyway, in the movie Jindabyne, four dudes go fishing on an Australian mountain, and find a dead body soon after setting up camp. They don't want the body to float away, so they tie the body to a log. Then they fish some more. When they finally get back to town, the townsfolkies are all like (allow me to paraphrase), "HOLY SHIT when did you dudes find that dead fucking body?" and the dudes are all (here's where any normal person would get busy LYING), "Oh, that? We found it like four days ago. So anyway...."

I mean seriously, WHAT THE FUCK?

So everyone's pissed, especially Laura Linney, who can't figure out how or when her husband (Gabriel Byrne) turned into a callous, corpse-ignoring, fish-a-holic grump. The cruelly disregarded corpse, which formerly housed a pretty Aboriginal girl, inflames the always-tender abscess of Australian race relations. And meanwhile, nobody seems particularly concerned that there's a killer creeping about the yellow, boulder-strewn hills.

The film (based on a Raymond Carver story nicely titled "So Much Water So Close to Home") is almost unbearably spooky, despite the fact that nothing at all happens. Australia, very big, empty, and quiet, is more threatening than any human villain, and the old town of Jindabyne—submerged under a dammed river—will be the new landscape of my nightmares. And on top of all that, there are some eerie little kids running around, whispering about zombies in the lake: "I touched one once. It licked my foot. Its tongue was green slime, poison, but I kicked it in the head and got away." That's why kids are better than adults: They understand that lying is key. LINDY WEST

Fay Grim

dir. Hal Hartley

Judging the rise and fall of an idiosyncratic filmmaker can be a bit of a dicey proposition, particularly in the case of someone like Hal Hartley, a director who first made his bones with a series of movies (The Unbelievable Truth, Trust) that thrived delightfully on repetition and awkward silences. Watching his last handful of projects, you can't help but wonder: Are the increasing number of pauses and dead spots intentional? Is his style evolving into something beyond the audience's current level of hipness? Will all this awkwardness eventually fuse into some sort of funky gestalt?

Fay Grim, Hartley's latest, only serves to further muddy the waters and double the negatives. Despite advance word trumpeting this as a return to form, Hartley's quasi-sequel to 1997's Henry Fool thuds more than it hits. Even accounting for an intermittingly amusing first hour and a central performance by Parker Posey at her most hyperly blasé, it still feels like a case of severe wheel spinning.

Picking up a decade after the enigmatic climax of Fool, the rather newcomer-unfriendly premise finds jittery Fay struggling to cope with stressors such as her jailed poet brother, an amorous literary agent, and her porn-obsessed son. Things pick up considerably when she learns from a shady CIA agent (Jeff Goldblum) that her vanished husband Henry's collection of pompous scribblings actually holds the key to a number of state secrets, including the current whereabouts of a notorious terrorist. Cue the quirky cloak and dagger. Hartley's increasingly mordant spy spoof may still hold interest for fans of his earlier work—I can't find it in my heart to entirely dis a movie where Posey runs around Paris while wearing a trench coat and a garter belt—but the majority of the signs point to a director on the decline. Or not, maybe. It's complicated. ANDREW WRIGHT

The Page Turner

dir. Denis Dercourt

The elements of the movie: There is a manor in the mist, a swimming pool in a basement, a powerful lawyer, a famous pianist, a vulnerable boy, and the daughter of a butcher with nothing on her mind but revenge. She (Déborah François) wants to harm the famous pianist (Catherine Frot), who is married to the powerful lawyer—the boy is their son, and their manor is 25 miles from Paris.

The movie's background: When the butcher's daughter was around 10 (the child is played by Julie Richalet), she wanted to become a famous pianist and practiced night and day on her family's upright piano. She was the only child, she almost never talked, she already had in her eyes the dead look of evil. Finally her moment arrived: a recital before judges who would determine her future. One of the judges happened to be the famous pianist, and during the recital, this particular judge did something that ruined the girl's performance. Her career destroyed, the girl closed her family's piano, put her Beethoven bust back in its box, and committed the rest of her life to avenging that one moment.

The steps leading to the final act: The evil-looking girl becomes an evil-looking young woman. By using her demonic form of charm ("charm" in the French sense of the word and not the English), she becomes the nanny for the famous pianist's boy. Again, by using her charm, the butcher's daughter becomes the famous pianist's page turner. Having established a very close position to her prey, what remains is the way she shall execute the harm.

That is the entire substance of The Page Turner, which owes an unusually large debt to the cinema of Claude Chabrol. But despite the size of this debt, the film lacks the depth of its master. The inner world of the butcher's daughter is far too simple; unlike the terribly twisted evildoers in Chabrol's thrillers, she has only one twist, one motive, one resolution. CHARLES MUDEDE

Air Guitar Nation

dir. Alexandra Lipsitz

Air Guitar Nation is a documentary about the dudes (and a few dudettes) who get on a real stage to shred imaginary axes while pretending to be rock stars at an imaginary rock show in front of a real crowd.

There's C-Diddy, the national champ who's on his way to the world championships in Finland. On stage he's a Hello Kitty–wielding, tongue-flashing monster, and offstage, he's the friendly but geeky David Jung.

And then there's perennial loser Björn Türoque (Born to Rock, get it?). After he's defeated by C-Diddy in the East Coast semifinals, Türoque coerces late-night talk-show host Carson Daly to foot the bill for a trip to L.A. so he can try to defend his honor in the West Coast finals. But he loses again. This time, unable to accept that he just isn't the best air guitarist in the nation, Türoque raises money via friends, family, and the internet with the hope of getting the $1,200 needed to enter the world championships in Finland and—yet again—battle C-Diddy. The dude is hilariously relentless.

While Türoque is busy scrounging up cash, the rest of the world's air-guitar finalists (Austria, Australia, London, etc.) are at guitar boot camp, learning the tricks necessary to win—they're jumping, they're slaying, they're perfecting their "I fuckin' rock!" faces.

Because of all the painful comedy, you expect Air Guitar Nation to get all mockumentary on your ass, à la Spinal Tap. This air-guitar movement simply can't exist for reals, right? But it does—and it's hysterical. MEGAN SELING

Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea

dir. Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer

Created in the early part of the 20th century by an overflowing Colorado River and a monumental engineering snafu, the Salton Sea is America's freakiest body of water this side of Elvis's bloated corpse. Situated 20 miles south of Palm Springs in the Southern California desert, the sea bloomed with promise during the 1960s and '70s, when developers sold the region as California's answer to the French Riviera, home to plentiful land, year-round fair weather, and that miraculous 35-mile-long, 15-mile-wide sea, which during its heyday provided the most extravagant fishing in the country. By the mid-1980s, run-off from tropical storms caused its waters to rise and devour the majority of the existing beachfront property—and the developers fled. The standing-water sea turned deadly for its inhabitants, with the concentrated salinity killing a reported 7.6 million fish in a single day—completing the transformation of this would-be American paradise into an abandoned, stagnant, putrid-smelling wasteland.

The documentary Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea splits its focus between the sea's history, inhabitants, and ongoing ecological legacy. The history is fascinating—the basic facts of the sea's creation and evolution are enough to power a good, strong hour-long doc. But the characters who call the region home—a motley mishmash of sun-wizened dreamers, Hungarian drunks, old nudists, and welfare families—aren't nearly as interesting, and the John Waters–supplied narration overplays the kookiness considerably.

In the home stretch, the film comes out swinging as a call to ecological action, a mildly klutzy turnabout that captures the Salton Sea's legacy of loserdom perfectly. In this age of impending ecodisaster and inconvenient truths, who can get too worked up over alkaline dust flats with the potential to stink up Palm Springs? DAVID SCHMADER