Your guide to what's hot and what's not on the silver screen

Jersey Girl
Dir: Kevin Smith

In “Jersey Girl,” director Kevin Smith strays even further from his usual unconventional subject matter (“Clerks,” “Chasing Amy”) and into the comfortable realm of the repetitive Hollywood formula. The film stars Ben Affleck as Ollie Trinkie, a big-time music publicist whose wife (you guessed it, J.Lo) dies during childbirth. He is then forced to raise his newborn baby girl alone. But after humiliating then-budding actor Will Smith (the film takes place in the ‘90s) during a press conference, Ollie is fired—and for the most part exiled—back to his father’s house in New Jersey to raise his little girl. Seven years pass and Ollie wants to return to his big city life but faces the dilemma of how the move will affect his relationship with his daughter (Raquel Castro), father (George Carlin) and his wacky new girlfriend played by Liv Tyler. The film does manage to utilize some of Smith’s distinctive humor but ultimately the story is overly predictable and painstakingly obvious. —Karla Esquivel

Kitchen Stories
Dir: Bent Hamer

Not too many films celebrate the gruff sensitivity of a friendship between two men in order tell a story. Through an untraditional male gaze, Scandinavian director Bent Hamer breaks through the male ego and exposes man at his core. The film, which takes place in ‘50s Norway, is modeled after live experiments done on the kitchen habits of housewives of the same era. But in this fictional rendition, the subject matter shifts to the kitchen habits of single Norwegian men. Promised a horse, Isak grudgingly decides to partake in the experiment. Soon a car with an egg-shaped trailer attached to it parks itself right in front of Isak’s house. His observer, Folke, sets up his station on a very high chair in the corner of Isak’s kitchen and is forbidden to interact with him. At first the relationship between the two men is indifferent, verging on annoyance. But as the two spend more time observing one another, barriers are broken and they eventually find common ground, even finding the humor in their ridiculous situation. —KE

Secret Window
Dir: Davie Koepp

It has its own little career. In “Pirates of the Caribbean,” it was braided and mangy. In “Edward Scissorhands,” it appeared as a major construction—teased and mangy. In David Koepp’s “Secret Window,” Johnny Depp’s hair delivers a powerful supporting role as mangy, and mangier still. Koepp (“Spider-Man,” “Panic Room”) cast Johnny Depp as Mort (Mort? Yes, Mort) Rainey and the many incarnations of Morty’s hair: matted just-woke-up mangy, “St. Elmo’s Fire”/preppy mangy, and riverbed-crackhead-ski-cap mangy. These add more to the film’s development than the narrative arc.

Once able to scrape the eye from the “holy shit, what is up with that?” state of Depp’s ‘do, the story rides the typical tack of a thin psychological thriller. However, in the case of “Secret Window,” it is less a roller coaster, more a merry-go-round. The tension-release arcs peak predictably on cue. The “ew” factor slows the narrative down and seems rather over-thought. The cinematography gives over-played nods to “The Shining,” and, well, just about any Stephen King novella-cum-movie. “Secret Window” didn’t completely suck. There were some key moments: Charles S. Dutton in his boxer shorts, Timothy Hutton’s veined forehead, and John Turturro’s performance as Blanche Dubois. —Ty Garfield

Hukkle
Dir: György Páif

“Hukkle” is a rich pastiche of wordless imagery and sound that somehow gels into an experimental mystery about the rhythms of life and death in a Hungarian village. The director scored the incidental sounds to become what he calls a “symphony of noises,” making the film an almost music-less musical. The viewpoint continually wanders through the tiniest details of the lives of insects, plants and animals as they weave into the daily lives of the town’s human residents. This, coupled with the complete lack of dialogue, begets a detached, omniscient perspective of the village and its sometimes humorous, often brutal cycles of life, death and dinner. A Lynch-esque sense of a dark secret hidden under an idyllic facade slowly emerges from these seemingly unrelated vignettes, and also like Lynch, the deeply layered soundscape provides atmosphere and underscores the theme. In the end, the only intelligible dialogue in the film, including subtitles, is contained in a grim wedding song, which explains what is really going on. “Hukkle” is slow-moving and non-linear, but gorgeous and rewarding for those with patience and a penchant for quirky, non-traditional cinema. —KP

Hukkle plays at the Little Theatre in Seattle, Friday–Sunday, April 16-18 at 7 & 9pm