IN BRIEF

WE DON’T LIVE HERE ANYMORER , 104 mins .Anyone who enjoyed Todd Field’s “In the Bedroom” (2001) would be understandably excited by the prospect of “We Don’t Live Here Anymore.” Like that earlier movie, this one – directed by John Curran and written by Larry Gross – is based on the work of the writer Andre Dubus and deals with primal pain expressed covertly. But where Mr. Field’s picture used denial and repression to heighten our interest, and ultimately earned our concern, the strongest reaction Mr. Curran’s movie engenders is a yawn. We just don’t care who’s sleeping with whom here, and who’s feeling bad about it.Jack (Mark Ruffalo) and Hank (Peter Krause) are friends and literature professors at a small college. Their respective spouses, Terry (Laura Dern) and Edith (Naomi Watts), are also friends. Jack is cheating on Terry by sleeping with Edith, and he’s pretty sure Hank and Terry would like to try something similar. But rather than tell his wife he’s in love with Edith, he attempts to assuage his guilt in a more novel manner, moving Jack and Terry toward each other by being caddish.Most of the action takes place in the characters’ heads. Mr. Gross communicates this with interior monologues, an effect that works far better in books. He and Mr. Curran reduce the central quartet to caricatures. Jack and Terry are the sloppy ones, their house in perpetual disarray, their finances precarious, their children loud and undisciplined. Hank and Edith, conversely, look as though they’re advertising earth-friendly laundry soap. Their house is light, airy, and scarily pristine.Perhaps the material adapted by Mr. Gross, who fused two linked Dubus stories, is inferior to what Mr. Field used. Maybe death and murder (which were at the heart of “In the Bedroom”) are inherently more engaging than betrayal and infidelity. Yet something far more basic enervates this new movie. You can hear it in Michael Convertino’s somber, arpeggiated score and see it in Maryse Alberti’s severe cinematography: the air of archness, the drumbeat of self-importance, the scent of freshly unpacked index cards ready for term-paper use.YU – GI – OHPG , 85 mins .It’s hard to say just what exactly is going on in “Yu-Gi-Oh” (PG, 85 mins). The story is nonsensical, the dialogue preposterous, but that in itself almost makes it a good time.The animated movie, based on the popular children’s show, consists of watching two characters play an overly physical game of crazy-eight’s for an hour and a half. (The game Yu-Gi-Oh is a little complicated, but basically entails cards that manifest themselves and fight other monsters in the game. In an unwritten rule, each time a player makes a move, they must justify their choice (“I summon my familiar knight in defense mode!) as if any of what they were saying made sense to begin with.The film opens with a quick prologue that, in theory, brings the uninformed up to speed. In ancient Egypt there was an evil mummy, Anubis, whose affection for the game led to his desire to destroy the earth. When the pharaoh caught wind of the plot, he locked Anubis in a pyramid, trapping him for all eternity. “But even eternity doesn’t last forever,” a narrator informs us. Five thousand years after Anubis’s entrapment, a teenager named Yugi inadvertently frees the mummy.As a newcomer to this franchise, I found the vast majority of particulars has gone straight over my head, but anyone who can make heads or tails of lines like “You may have destroyed my clown card, but you forgot about my deck virus card!” or “Attack with ionic spear burst!” should love it. Stoners might like the pretty colors, too.

IN BRIEF

IN BRIEF

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