RECOMMENDED

“Vicky Scarlett Christina Rebecca Penelope Javier Barcelona” is one of the more endearing pile-ups emanating from Woody Allen’s assembly line of late. Like much of his output since “Husbands and Wives”(1992), and certainly since production and budgetary constraints have restricted his ability to make substantial reshoots, “Vicky Christina Barcelona” seems like a series of interesting accidents rather than focused, purposeful filmmaking. Written, Allen says, to fulfill a fat bolso of cash proffered by Spanish producers, the movie is about as flat—and as sunny—as any film by Almodovar’s customary cinematographer, Javier Aguirresarobe, could be. Two American women in their 20s go on an adventure in Barcelona. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is about to marry a New York moneyman, embodied with loathsome zeal by Chris Messina. Christina (Scarlett Johansson) is the neurotic female Allen’s always fixating on. An older friend (Patricia Clarkson) takes the women around town, and at an art gallery, they glimpse Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a wanton Lothario who’s still in love with his troubled, mercurial wife Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz). Extended dialogues about banal romantic complications and the implications of commitment, shot like dispirited bouts of table tennis, are later leavened by the knock-down-drag-outs between Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, deflated somewhat by a dozen or more times Bardem is guided to say “Speak English!” when Cruz’s inflammatory performance is at its most Anna Magnani-ish when she’s flinging her native tongue. There’s also an incessant narration by a male narrator, as in a novel, “Little Children” or “Frontline” that’s not as aggravating as it might be with less eye candy in the compositions and settings. As in most recent Allen, the performances flirt with incoherence, with each actor bringing their skills to an ill-measured whole. A lingering whiff of misogyny hangs over the proceedings as well: it is possible to lovingly enact shallow dialogue. There are a few slow burns by Johansson that delight, and Hall manages to bring her own likeable presence, and by turns, Allen himself and Mia Farrow, into her performance of a diffident woman of privilege. The ending would be glorious in another movie: a chilling moment of Chabrolesque finality applied to adult lives that have only just begun. 98m. (Ray Pride)

RECOMMENDED

Australian director Scott Hicks made a smashing debut with “Shine” (1996), but his other work, such as “Snow Falling on Cedars” (1999), has suffered from dramatic inertia atop his accomplished pictorialism. Hicks’ cute-in-the-kitchen “No Reservations” (2007) was scored by Philip Glass, and their working relationship allowed for this procedure-driven doc, “Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts”; reportedly he was also given, from 2005 on, a year-and-a-half of access to Glass. Old friend Chuck Close, whose monumental portrait of a younger Glass is one of the artist’s most iconic works, is among the interviewees, including Ravi Shankar, directors like Martin Scorsese and Errol Morris, who only just made a film without Glass’ signature sound. “Philip does existential dread better than anyone,” Morris says in cheery observation. Woody Allen also consented to Hicks’ presence in his editing room for “Cassandra’s Dream.” There are brief glimpses of the 70-year-old composer’s life not behind the computer, including a confession by his much younger wife that does not surprise. ” Get up early and work all day. That’s the only rule,” Glass says. Hicks’ film demonstrates the results of that ethos. (Ray Pride)

By Ray Pride

There’s a style of filmmaking, at once concrete yet elusive, that draws me in: Antonioni, certainly, who conveyed attitudes and behavior through architecture that surrounds less-than-articulate characters, and Rohmer, whose confections of conversation in fact mask intensely structured storytelling schemes.

The relatively young Korean director Hong Sang-soo, who studied at the School of the Art Institute, is one of the younger directors whose characters’ seemingly diffident or reckless behavior is in fact only an apparition of normalcy or the everyday. A male character may be unkind to the women he longs for (in virtually every Sang-soo film) or may linger in drink when confounded (cogito ergo soju, if you will), yet choices of editing rhythms, framing of locations and exchanges of glances are always so artfully arrayed it could leave the wrong audience confused. Yet there are subtleties galore, and he’s a master of the telling, mysterious image.

With “Woman on the Beach,” a title that sounds like it could hark back either to Jean Renoir or to Eric Rohmer, Sang-soo covers familiar ground as he continues to lovingly triangulate desire in lower case with explosions of frustration. Surely the 47-year-old director psychoanalyzing himself sans self-awareness (or self-wariness) in these repeated patterns and patterning that has been a strength of his little-known work, an output of eight features between 1996 and 2008, from his debut, “The Day A Pig Fell Into a Well” (an unexplained title that Sang-soo years later claimed was taken from a John Cheever short story), the only older title not available on DVD in the U.S., and which does not reveal its narrative shape until the very, very last shot, which it does with shocking symmetry and grace. Other Western notes are reflected in his films and titles, including 2000′s “ Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,” referring to Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture, “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors”; and 2004′s “Woman is the Future of Man,” brilliantly encapsulating that film’s protagonist’s protracted romanticism while also taking its title from radical-surrealist Louis Aragon’s poem.

There is something simple and irascible in Sang-soo’s fixations: ornery, he here turns to a plentitude of everydayness, of platinum-numbskulled repetitive behavior, ingrained narratives or innate desire and ill-proportioned mortification. Yet, unlike Woody Allen, his male characters are shown up for their self-regard, their overweening sense of entitlement, their romantic knavery that wishes to be chivalry but usually is a mirror of their own self-absorption. His central figure on the “Beach” is a film director whose career is stalled. Could he go from Rohmeresque Sang-soo-style films to accomplished action pictures like Bong Jun-hoo’s “The Host”? Hardly likely; there’s a woman in the picture. Suffering writers’ block, director Joong-rae (Kim Seung-woo) convinces his production designer Chang-wook (Kim Tae-woo) to take a trip to the west coast of the country. Chang-wook had made separate plans with his girlfriend Moon-sook (Ko Hyun-joung), and decides to bring her along. Confusion and passion erupt, with Chang-wook and Moon-sook having their own mutual appreciation society on the side. Resemblances to “Jules and Jim” shift after Joong-rae returns to Seoul and brings another woman to the resort to rediscover the romance he’d had with Moon-sook… who just happens to turn up. Sometimes a screenplay writes itself…

Sang-soo had this to say in a director’s statement: “I relied on the actual environment provided by Shinduri Beach, where I spent each day writing and filming. I worked hard to discover all that I wasn’t convinced about but wanted to express, and then to render them tangible. Repetition is a great framework and basis for filmmaking. On the other hand, if repetition is part of a person’s behavior, we can take that as an indication of obsession. I wanted to see through repetition, but also to reduce repetition.”

But, to repeat, this schematic-sounding work is all done with unassuming grace and self-deprecating humor. I recently worked my way through the DVD set of Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales,” and marveled at the screenwriting skill, the dramatic force, underlying the waves of words, concrete yet transparent at once. Rohmer and Sang-soo accomplish similar yet parallel goals, capturing behavior in a narrative studded with misgivings, misunderstanding and musing, offering amusing self-critiques through his director-protagonist’s behavior. Yet, as he told an interviewer for Cinema Scope, “People around me gave advice, telling me that if you changed his profession, you’d grow more by exploring people different than yourself, but I didn’t listen… When I choose a character’s profession, it intrinsically forms expectations about what he can and cannot do.” Viewers who know Sang-soo’s work know what he can do, and can see what he’ll be able to do in the future, increasingly finding a way to incorporate his female characters into the cockeyed diagrams he makes of the world of desire.

“Woman on the Beach” opens Friday at Siskel.

Writer-director Woody Allen’s follow up to 2005′s “Match Point” is another greed-murder-guilt thriller. Brit brothers played by Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell hit up an uncle (Tom Wilkinson) for cash, but he enlists them as hitmen to get a witness out of his way. “I need the help of people I can trust with my life,” he confides. “Family is family, blood is blood… You protect your own.” After all, he counsels, the target is a “total stranger” to his nephews. Even if Allen dispenses with his signature Woody-like characters and cadences, not to mention Manhattan neuroses, his favorite moral concerns surface in the U.K. on a sailboat bearing the title. The film’s strength is the brothers’ struggle to justify, then rectify, their deed: “If we were in the army, we’d kill strangers every day.” The mordant irony is limited to quips about Greek tragedy, a clue to the undergrad gravitas that’s all Allen-like. The auteur recently quipped that overseas financiers and locations let him fulfill a youthful fantasy: “When I started making movies, I always idolized people like Bergman and Fellini and Buñuel and De Sica. I always wanted to be a foreign filmmaker.” With Sally Hawkins and an uncharacteristically non-sinusoidal score by Philip Glass. 108m. (Bill Stamets)