Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi

Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi
Opens Fri., Sept. 10, at Varsity

This beautifully crafted Israeli film follows the struggles faced by 16-year-old Shlomi (Oshri Cohen) as he attempts to find himself amid the chaos of his colorful family. His overbearing mother is convinced he's slow (though he can whip up gourmet feasts on a dime); his perverted older brother taunts him with exploits about a sex life that may or may not be fictitious; and his father (kicked out for infidelity) sulks around dreaming up ways to win back his wife (hint: Even pretending to have a fatal disease doesn't guarantee forgiveness). Shlomi is so preoccupied with navigating his overly dramatic family that his own dreams are lost, at least until his grandfather encourages him to embrace his life, which means embracing the beautiful next-door neighbor and a more challenging education. This film, with its use of bright, lively colors and stunning shots that seem to overflow with life, is constructed in a gentle way that is guaranteed to touch all audiences. Cohen has gigantic, innocent eyes (which apparently won him the part) and a gigantic future ahead of him. (NR) HEATHER LOGUE

Bright Young Things
Opens Fri., Sept. 10, at Egyptian

Stephen Fry knows a lot about the pain that's smothered underneath most laughter. As an actor, he brought out the heartbreak of the epigrammatic Oscar in 1997's Wilde, and he himself has displayed a complicated public temperament as one of Britain's most talented wits. He seems a perfect choice to direct an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's 1930 acid satire, Vile Bodies, a classic short novel in which several bright young things find their drunken, desperate, everything-for-a-joke party days ever more difficult to sustain in an England headed for World War II. Yet, somehow, the movie only really works when it leaves the sadness just to the side.

Things are, in fact, pretty wonderful as long as Fry (who also adapted the source novel) wants to keep us amused. Armed with what is perhaps the best ensemble cast we'll see all year, the film is a lesson in lightning-quick British insouciance. Writer Adam (Stephen Campbell Moore) feels real love for sweet social butterfly Nina (Emily Mortimer) but can't seem to hold on to the necessary funds to wed her. Meanwhile, they're both having far too much fun avoiding reality with a bunch of other carefree spirits: Miles (Michael Sheen), recklessly bored and insistently gay; Simon (James McAvoy), a gossip columnist with a sharp pen; and, best of all, alcoholic Agatha (Fenella Woolgar), who wakes up pickled in the home of the prime minister and tells his horrified family, "I shall write the tenderest thank-you letter, I promise."

The blotto, bohemian misadventurers are a riot—Woolgar's lovable souse steals every scene she's in—and Fry surrounds them with old pros: Simon Callow, Jim Broadbent, and Peter O'Toole all show up in terrifically funny character bits. Moore and, particularly, Mortimer (who is as achingly chipper as she was in Lovely and Amazing) both make appealing innocents, but Fry can't create that unnerving feeling that the world is always about to collapse beneath their frivolity. They seem to be having an awfully good time as far as we're concerned; tragedy is as big a wet blanket to us as it is to them. The movie doesn't quite ring as true when the music gets terribly meaningful and melancholy and everybody starts moping around—and it certainly isn't as much fun. (R) STEVE WIECKING

The Brown Bunny
Opens Fri., Sept. 10, at Varsity

Vincent Gallo stole my story! I came up with the idea of an emotional invalid driving cross-country, stopping every few states to neck with supermodels, then berating a girl midfellatio when I was 14! Of course, it was a wet dream, and I was too embarrassed to commit it to paper, so irony of ironies, now I'm reviewing his exhaustingly pretentious, pompous, self-indulgent, smutty fantasia!

Bunny has generally been labeled as "unwatchable," as you've likely heard, unless you're an admirer of Gallo's maverick, fuck-you-if-you-don't-understand-me aesthetic or find impish charm in his megalomaniacal interviews. I weigh in for the latter camp, just barely; Gallo challenges us to do all the heavy lifting in unearthing the poetry in a threadbare, half-mute road-trip dirge. While his dare is admirably progressive and necessary, Bunny plays like one of Lars von Trier's high-concept symphonies: It's hell to sit through.

Motocross racer Bud Clay (Gallo) drives from New Hampshire to L.A. beset by haunting memories of ex-love Daisy (Chloë Sevigny). His daily drudgeries are meticulously detailed in all their first-person, bugs-splattered-on-the-windshield glory, and his sporadic, ethereal encounters with similarly soft-spoken Women of the Road are painfully awkward (if inexorably gorgeous). Like Billy Brown—protagonist of Gallo's debut, the far more accessible, quirky Buffalo '66—Clay is a childlike introvert, a grown man who speaks dreamily of "liking girls" and disparagingly of competing "other boys." Gallo/Clay ultimately receives a notorious real-deal Hoovering from Daisy/Sevigny—a cynic would call this the ultimate manifestation of Gallo's unchecked narcissism—and much of their tragic back story is finally revealed in a cathartic, five-minute postcoital breakdown. It's not nearly enough to justify the middle finger Gallo stuck in our faces for the first 85 minutes, but the melodramatic coda is a fitting signature on an incomparably strange, confrontational statement about the nature of our basest expectations of cinema. (NR) ANDREW BONAZELLI