Aren't all writers—who are constantly cherry-picking drama, characters, and scenes from the lives of others—just thieves? That's the excuse J.J. Lask gives his title character in this screen adaptation of his own 2002 novel. Think Charlie Kaufman doing a riff on Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda. On the Road stars Kevin Corrigan (as author J.J. Lask) and Aaron Ruell (best known as Napoleon Dynamite's brother Kip) as businessman/computer thief Judas, a role doubled by American Pie's Eddie Kaye Thomas in the movie's duplexed metaphysical structure. Thus, (a) actors play characters playing characters from the book; and (b) actors play actors playing characters from the book. Adaptation blends with adaptation without much cohesion save for cleverness (and a strong kinship with Kaufman's script for Adaptation). Ben Starkman's cinematography and a humorous hipster aesthetic push the film into Wes Anderson territory. (A jail-visit scene seems straight from Bottle Rocket.) But when Lask finally settles on the question of what you would do for the woman of your dreams (Amanda Loncar or Eleanor Hutchins, take your pick), On the Road finally finds some emotional coherence. Only then does Judas reconsider his thieving ways. (NR) KARLA STARR Northwest Film Forum: 6:30 p.m. Sun., May 27; 4:15 p.m. Mon., May 28.
Paprika
Based on a serialized novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui, this loopy anime from director Satoshi Kon (Millennium Actress) isn't a movie that's meant to be understood so much as simply experienced—or maybe dreamed. Psychotherapist superheroine Paprika, aka Dr. Atsuko Chiba, learns that her laboratory's dream machine has gone missing. So she seeks the errant device, digitally jacking into her colleagues' dreams and discovering clues that include menacing geisha dolls and the recurring nightmare of a guilt-ridden police detective—who happens to hate movies. Paprika is a film in which, minute to minute, basically anything can happen; the narrative is almost completely unbound. But Kon wouldn't be his genre's supreme self-reflexivist if he didn't insist on revealing frames within the frame—which here include not just characters' dreams but movie and laptop screens, plus a Planet Hollywood–esque elevator that stops on floors devoted to Tarzan and James Bond. At once cinephobic and cinephilic, Kon's heady cure for blockbuster blues couldn't have come along at a better time. (R) ROB NELSON Neptune: 9:30 p.m. Fri., May 25; 1:15 p.m. Mon., May 28.
Paris, Je T'Aime
This brimming declaration of love to the City of Lights leaves one breathless but dissatisfied. Paris' quartiers and the rainbow coalition of people who inhabit them are the connective tissue for this spotty omnibus' 18 segments; five minutes each, these trifles come and go before they've registered in the mind. Only Tom Tykwer attempts to redress this constraint by evoking a blind man's romance with an actress as a spastic glitch in time. Isabelle Coixet's and Nobuhiro Suwa's contributions are endearingly bittersweet suck-ups to love and death, but both treat the Paris setting as superfluous. Sylvain Chomet, Olivier Assayas, and Alexander Payne more sensitively consider the feelings of elation the city can rouse, while Oliver Schmitz conveys the complex politics of Paris' racial diversity with a heft and economy that evades Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas. Leave it to the Coen brothers to show everyone up with their acerbic "Tuileries," in which Steve Buscemi encounters a hellish couple inside a Metro station. (R) ED GONZALEZ Harvard Exit: 6:30 p.m. Sat., May 26; 11 a.m. Mon., May 28.
The Price of Sugar
Chances are that the sugar you stirred into your coffee this morning came from the Dominican Republic; the United States imports more Dominican sugar than any other kind. This means that your sugar likely began as cane cut by a malnourished Haitian working 12 hours a day, every day, under armed guard, and with little access to clean water or medical care. Bill Haney's documentary shows the tragic result of the Haitian diaspora: Thousands of peasants are promised good wages and a better life east across the border that divides the island. Aided by the Dominican government, sugar companies strip them of their citizenship papers and force them to toil in cane fields for pennies a day, like slaves. With the bad guys established, Haney introduces his charismatic hero, Father Christopher Hartley, the scion of a wealthy family who's devoted his life to fighting for the Haitian sugar workers' rights. The revelations in Price are sobering, and Hartley is a compelling character (though depicted a bit one-dimensionally). Interviews with his slightly bewildered family provide a glimpse of the man behind the mission, but we're left without a true sense of what motivates a guy who even the sugar companies admit is the only person protecting the workers. (NR) HUAN HSU Harvard Exit: 9:30 p.m. Sat., May 26; 4:15 p.m. Tues., May 29.
Red Road
Like all voyeurs, Jackie (Kate Dickie) lacks a life to call her own outside of her job manning a police closed-circuit television camera in Glasgow's dead-end inner city, where she lives through the small dramas that unfold on her screens. Like her protagonist, writer-director Andrea Arnold plays the source of Jackie's own grief close to her chest, focusing on her growing obsession with a shifty-looking man (Tony Curran) whom she tracks through his sordid days and nights in a graffiti-scarred housing project. No one does poetic British miserabilism with more remorseless hyperrealism than the Scots, and Arnold, who amassed a raft of reputable awards for her 2003 short film, Wasp, directs with a precociously sure touch and a raw taste for graphic sexuality rare in a woman helmer. As cat stalks mouse and vice versa, it becomes less and less clear whose heart is in greater need of softening. If the movie is marred by pat uplift at the end, it's worth bearing in mind that this is not just a feature debut but the first in a Lars von Trier–inspired Dogme trilogy in which three directors embellish on the same cast of preassigned characters. The measure of Red Road is that it leaves us hungry for what comes next. (NR) ELLA TAYLOR Harvard Exit: 9:30 p.m. Fri., May 25; 1:30 p.m. Sat., May 26.
Reprise
