FilmFest KC

My Mother's Smile Is there a tortured Italian struggling with fidelity who is not played by Sergio Castellitto? As he did in Don't Move and Catarina in the Big City, Castellitto here plays a man hounded by his allegiances (or lack thereof) and struggling to maintain some semblance of identity. In this dark and confusing drama, which has the eerie music, blurred shots and stringy tension of a horror movie, Castellitto is pitted against the usual suspects, plus the Catholic Church. He plays Ernesto, an atheist artist who suddenly learns that his dead mother — killed by Ernesto's unstable brother — is a candidate for canonization. Castellitto's acting is expert — his face is a map of misery informed by rage — but he can't save the film from its maudlin, directionless fear-mongering. (M.L.)

Nobody Knows Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu's poignant, deeply affecting tale of child neglect — all the more disturbing for being based on a true story — is definitely not for children, despite its rating. Young single mother Keiko moves her four children into a tiny Tokyo apartment. More child than adult herself, she is loving but also alarmingly casual about her responsibilities as a parent. Twelve-year-old Akira (Yagira Yuya) dutifully shops, cooks, cleans and takes care of his three younger siblings, but his solemn face and anxious eyes reveal the terrible weight he shoulders. One day, Keiko disappears, abandoning the children to go off with her latest boyfriend. The rest of the film charts their struggle to survive. Flawlessly acted (all four children are nonprofessionals) but overly long (nearly two and a half hours), the film is beautiful but depressing. (J.O.)

Only Human A Spanish dinner-theater comedy, this intermittently hilarious contraption by the husband-wife team of Dominic Harari and Teresa De Pelegri heaves Jewish-Palestinian conflict onto a prop-room table already groaning with loaded guns, impromptu sex toys, a wounded duck paddling in a bidet, and a brick of frozen soup that doubles as a sandbag for unlucky pedestrians below. The dominoes start toppling when Leni (Marián Aguilera) brings Palestinian professor Rafi (Guillermo Toledo, from the underrated El Crimen Perfecto) home to meet her fractious Jewish family without warning them of his ethnicity; a misadventure with the soup triggers round after round of escalating humiliations. The movie eventually stretches its complications past the snapping point, especially once the action unwisely moves outside the family's apartment. But Leni's mother (Norma Aleandro) has a priceless suspicious deadpan to greet Rafi's every embarrassment; it's been a long time since a movie got this much comic mileage out of the devalued reaction shot. (J.R.)

Sequins In this beautiful, beguiling movie, a young woman loses her way and an older woman is suffering a loss. Seventeen-year-old Claire (Lola Naymark) works at a supermarket in her small hometown in rural France, where she is pregnant and deeply unhappy. She can't decide whether to keep the child, but she wants to hide the pregnancy. Through a friend, she meets Madame Melikian (Ariane Ascaride), an older woman who has lost her son in a motorcycle accident. Claire has a talent for embroidery; Madame Melikian embroiders for Parisian designers, including Lacroix. So begins the women's strained working relationship, which slowly grows into something more. It's a slender plot but a very rich movie, with deeply felt silences, gorgeous camerawork and a tender understanding of many kinds of grief. (M.L.)

Take My Eyes Spanish filmmaker Iciar Bollain's harrowing look at a sick marriage may be the most potent, authentically disturbed film yet about the scourge of domestic violence. But this is no cartoon: Bollain and co-writer Alicia Luna take pains to dramatize the bonds that unite even a deeply troubled couple — fond memories, residual hope, the ecstasies of sex and the comforts of habit. Beautifully acted and intelligently made, this is a film for thinking grownups — a far cry from junk like Sleeping With the Enemy or Enough. (B.G.)

Tideland The most spectacular example of kamikaze auteurism at last fall's Toronto Film Festival was Terry Gilliam's almost unwatchable, not altogether unadmirable, and certainly unreleasable Tideland. Having for once made exactly the movie he wanted, Gilliam presents an American-gothic Alice in Wonderland in which little Alice is the logorrheic offspring of two flaming junkies (Jennifer Tilly's Courtney Love—like slattern and Jeff Bridges' flatulent Captain Pissgums) and Wonderland is a pair of derelict Midwestern farmhouses seemingly furnished by Wisconsin cannibal Ed Gein. The creatures include a collection of doll heads and Brendan Fletcher's drooling Forrest Gump parody. Increasingly grotesque in its intimations of pedophilia, the movie ends with a comic train wreck, literally. It will become legend. (J.H.)