African Gothic: Perhaps because his parents — Joe Bologna and Renee Taylor — have cornered the comedy market in the family, their filmmaker son, Gabriel Bologna, tends towards directing movies with a more dramatic bent. Certainly that is the case with his latest feature, a quirky, twisted, surreal thriller set on a remote, decrepit South African farm. There brother and sister, Frikkie (Damon Shalit) and Susie (Chella Ferrow), eke out a simple, incestuous existence.
Their lives are soon disrupted by the arrival of a sweaty, bald, city attorney named Grove, who arrives to inform them of their aunt’s demise and their inheritance of her substantial estate. For their part, however, Frikkie and Susie seem more interested in mocking Grove and making him feel uncomfortable. Eventually, he heads out on foot, seeking the telephone at a neighboring farm, three miles away, into the dead of night, made more ominous by the wilderness sounds and the tribal jazz background score.
Shalit, who wrote the screenplay and co-produced the film, is aptly inscrutable, but inevitably upstaged by Ferrow, who cones off like a Afrikaaner Baby Doll.
Showing: 2 p.m. Sunday, Muvico Parisian 20, CityPlace.
Smiling Through the Apocalypse: It probably helps if you have some emotional connection to the demise of print journalism — particularly magazines — or if you remember Esquire during its literary heyday in the ’60s. For that is the era that filmmaker Tom Hayes takes us back to in his affectionate salute to the magazine, during the time that his father, Harold T. P. Hayes, was its most innovative editor.
The elder Hayes turned Esquire into a significant cultural force, bringing to its pages such literary lions as Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Gore Vidal and Nora Ephron. They not only found a unique way to report on the issues of those tumultuous times, but did so in a way that remained fresh and relevant despite the publication’s five-month lead time. Editor Hayes wrote a monthly column on jazz, a personal passion, and his son takes a cue from that, telling this history of a periodical and a period with a visual equivalent of the improvisational music form.
Showing: 12 p.m. Sunday, Muvico Parisian 20, CityPlace; 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Stonzek Studio, Lake Worth.
The Girl on the Train: Put yourself in the hands of a talented storyteller, writer-director Larry Brand, who entertainingly keep his audience off-balance, peeling away the onion-like layers of parallel tales in separate times and places.
At its heart is a documentary filmmaker named Danny (Henry Ian Cusick of television’s Lost), enthralled by a Holocaust survivor (stage veteran David Margulies) whose account of his deportation to a death camp involved a fleeting glimpse of a young girl, seen through the slats of his cattle car.
In the parallel story, Danny is struck by the sight of a young woman (Nicki Aycox) on a contemporary train, so he sits down next to her and tries to make a personal connection with her. Then there is an interrogation of Danny by a police detective (Stephen Lang), about the girl and her subsequent whereabouts.
Brand ties these separate tracks together in a brief, efficient 80 minutes, a rare case of a film which you are likely to wish were longer, rather than shorter.
Showing: 6:45 p.m. Tuesday, Muvico Parisian 20, CityPlace; 3:45 p.m. Thursday, Cobb Downtown at the Gardens, Palm Beach Gardens.
BFFs: When Katherine (Tara Karsian) receives a birthday gift certificate to Closer to Closeness, a healing retreat for couples, but she just broke up with her boyfriend of two years, she decides not to waste the present. She will go with her best friend Samantha (Andrea Grano), posing as lesbians with made-up relationship issues. After all, the resort and its pool look so inviting in the brochure.
That is the premise of a smart, if somewhat predictable, comedy by filmmaker Andrew Putschoegi called BFFs — Best Friends Forever — and yes, their longtime friendship gets put in jeopardy by the experience and, yes, during the weekend they stumble onto the possibility that they have romantic feelings for each other.
Karsian and Grano wrote the screenplay, much of which sounds improvised, and while the situation is strained, you will go along with it, because chances are you will start having feelings for these two actresses.
Showing: 8:30 p.m. Monday, Cobb Downtown at the Gardens, Palm Beach Gardens.
Fabergé: A Life of Its Own: These days the name Fabergé probably conjures up images of cologne and toiletries, but back in the days of Imperial Russia, it meant the epitome of jewelry art as designed and executed by Peter Carl Faberge, craftsman to the tsars. In the documentary Fabergé: A Life of Its Own, director-writer Patrick Mark chronicles the rise of the house of Fabergé and entwines it with the tumultuous history of Russia.
Mark received great access to company spokesmen and to the Fabergé collection, which he displays lovingly and in admirable close-up views, most notably the famous Easter eggs, their beauty and wit. The film also works as a travelogue, as it jets from St. Petersburg, throughout Europe and eventually to the contemporary corporate base of the company in New York. If the film has a drawback, it feels a bit too slick, more glorified infomercial than art history lesson.
Showing: 4 p.m. Sunday, Cinemark Palace 20, Boca Raton; 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Muvico Parisian 20, CityPlace.