Art School Confidential

dir. Terry Zwigoff

Art School Confidential is a movie about whether it is worse to be an art poser or a serial killer. The serial killer character has a strike against him from the start, since he is strangling strangers all over campus. But, we learn, the killer is a sensitive, wounded painter who has been driven to madness by the corruption of the art world. In the end, our hero, the freshman art student, decides to adopt the identity of the serial killer. How else will he get a gallery show? Oh, Daniel Clowes. What Pratt Institute must have done to you.

Clowes first created Art School Confidential in his comic-book series Eightball (also the source material for Zwigoff's Ghost World). The story lampoons his experiences at Pratt, where he was crushed when professors dissed his drawings, then marginally consoled by the fact that those teachers were failures in their own careers. Clowes's fictional stand-in is the wide-eyed suburbanite Jerome (Max Minghella), who plans to become the greatest artist of the 21st century by locating his muse (Sophia Myles) and copying Picasso's sinuous portraits of women. Meanwhile, his fellow students are ensconced in a double intrigue: how to get their big breaks, and how to catch a strangler.

Art School Confidential feels like a teen flick compared to Ghost World. There are laughs, but there's no sympathetic character or relationship to cling to, and Jerome's goals are as trite as his fellow students' are contrived. John Malkovich does his signature obnoxious-pretentious thing as a professor. Anjelica Huston makes little more than a cameo. Jim Broadbent plays a caricature. When the regular-guy cops finally arrive, it's a relief. One of them pushes the insipid students aside and mutters, "Go draw something, will ya?" JEN GRAVES

Water

dir. Deepa Mehta

Chuyia (Sarala) is a plump 8-year-old with a damp stick of sugarcane clenched tight in her fist. She's so absorbed in munching the treat that she barely seems to notice she's on her way to be married; she certainly has no inkling that she's in danger. But married she'll be, and shortly thereafter, her husband will die. In 1930s India, with home rule still a decade away and superstition deeply entrenched in the villages, Chuyia the child-widow is shunted off to an ashram, condemned to spend the rest of her life shaved bald and desperately poor.

Deepa Mehta's final film in a socially engaged trilogy (first came Fire, about arranged marriages and lesbian desire, and then Earth, about religious pluralism), Water addresses an issue that's relatively remote from the concerns of Western audiences. The characters, however, are awfully familiar. Chuyia shakes up the pit of crones with her (of course) irrepressible spirit. One of the widows (Lisa Ray) is a beautiful, doomed prostitute with a heart—nay, an entire cardiovascular system—composed of gold. Will she run away from the ashram and marry a sexy follower of Gandhi? Your guess is as good as mine (and I've already seen the movie).

Still, Mehta and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens illustrate their story with images that do much more than awaken the prescribed moral outrage. The widows may wear dingy white, but they live on the terraced stone banks of a deep green river. There are spices of orange and yellow, and a spectrum of festive confetti as bright as powdered dye. The trail of colors leads you through the narrative gently, and pushes the melodrama upward into a starker, purer realm. ANNIE WAGNER

Sisters in Law

dir. Florence Ayisi and Kim Longinotto

In Kumba, Cameroon, a little girl named Manka is found wandering alone, covered with scars, her belly distended and an eyeball bloodied. She is 6 years old. The men think she is a spirit and they stay away. Another girl is raped by a neighbor, then dumped in the street. Two women seek divorces from abusive husbands as their Muslim families urge them to work things out at home.

All find their way to the offices of the Women Lawyers Association where, in Florence Ayisi and Kim Longinotto's massively satisfying documentary, Sisters in Law, prosecutor Vera Ngassa and her colleagues dole out the old what-for with fierce and rightful indignation. "Even if a man provides the oxygen you breathe," one lawyer tells her client, "he has no right to beat you. He wants to spoil your face and then abandon you."

The legal process is personal and raucous; defendants, it seems, often go without representation. After routinely beating her niece with a hanger, Manka's aunt's excuse is simple: "I only beat her when I'm angry." The neighborhood rapist defends himself with, "The girl came to my house and requested sexual intercourse... I was studying my Bible."

The film's narrow focus (it follows four cases intimately from start to finish, but offers little broader perspective) leaves plenty of questions unanswered—about the lawyers, Cameroon's legal system, and the statistical success of cases like these. But who cares? Every frame is engrossing; every case harrowing, but not bleak. After 104 minutes of rape and abuse and death, I left Sisters in Law feeling better, more hopeful, than when I entered. LINDY WEST

Somersault

dir. Cate Shortland

Sixteen-year-old Heidi is just figuring out the relationship between her woman's body and her ability to get what she wants from men. She tests these newfound powers on her mom's boyfriend, unfortunately succeeds, and flees mom's wrath to an Australian ski resort. There, Heidi learns about the creepy side of being sexually attractive, and the nice side, too—thanks to Joe, a grim-jawed, mulleted local who falls hard for her but won't admit it. The film emphasizes the child inside Heidi with an embarrassing heavy-handedness (yeah, donuts, clapping games, handholding, we get it), and her repeated accusations that Joe is "too scared" to love her are beyond trite. But when you think about it, that's exactly the kind of silly shit a teenager would say. "When you leave, you still feel her," Joe says. It's weird, but something about Somersault stuck with me too. LINDY WEST

Adam & Steve

dir. Craig Chester

Adam & Steve begins in 1987, when our title characters meet in a Manhattan disco. Adam (Craig Chester) is a nebbish young Goth with a plus-sized female sidekick; Steve (Malcolm Gets) is a buff Dazzle Dancer with a plus-sized coke habit. Despite their differences, the duo share a sweet and thrilling first night together—until things go horribly, excruciatingly wrong, and Adam & Steve is set on its twisted, present-day gay romantic comedy path. Written and directed by Craig Chester, the film offers an impressively messy look at finding love in the gayest city in America. But it's also messy in a whole bunch of less meaningful ways, switching tones and styles like a too-eager-to-please drag queen, and leaving viewers with a confused jumble of goop. Still, the movie has its moments, most of them provided by Parker Posey, who nails her role as Adam's fat-damaged best friend, with a performance so sharp and nuanced it almost justifies recommending the film as a whole. DAVID SCHMADER

Goal! The Dream Begins

dir. Danny Cannon

Goal! The Dream Begins, the first in a projected trilogy espousing the wonders of soccer, hits all of the hoary old inspirational bull's-eyes—and maybe even invents some new ones. After an illegal- border-crossing prologue, the story picks up with hunky teen gardener/soccer god Santiago (Kuno Becker) playing pickup games in L.A. With the encouragement of a vacationing Limey talent scout, he scrapes together enough money for an all-or-nothing audition with Newcastle United. The clichés are a mile wide and the characterizations an inch deep throughout (Santiago's disapproving father may as well have CGI cloven hooves), but director Danny Cannon conducts with enough good-natured polish to make the movie flow. Becker is a tad blank, but he's backed up by an endearing supporting cast, particularly Alessandro Nivola as the team's gone-to-boozy-seed franchise player. (After this and his hilarious turn in the under-seen Laurel Canyon, he's pretty much snagged the lovable prick mantle for his generation.) Featuring a cameo by David Beckham and a noticeable lack of hooliganism, this should be mandatory viewing for anyone who's able to spell Zinedine Zidane on the first try, and an essentially painless two hours for anyone else who gets dragged along. If it inspires a few rugrats to drop their Xboxes and pick up some shin guards, so much the better. ANDREW WRIGHT