THE PERFECT MAN
PG, 111 mins.

Supposedly a comedy, “The Perfect Man” is so heavy that you’ll leave the theater feeling like you’ve been beaten with pipes. Holly Hamilton (Hilary Duff) is desperate for her mom, Jean (Heather Locklear), to find the right guy. But the real story here is Ms. Locklear’s search for a post-“Melrose Place” career and Ms. Duff’s desperate search for a hit after her last movie, “Raise Your Voice,” bombed. While their characters find paint-by-numbers satisfaction at the end of the movie, the actresses are left disappointed.

Jean is a single mom who keeps shacking up with Mr. Wrong. Whenever her latest relationship falls apart, she packs up her two daughters and relocates. This time they’ve landed in Brooklyn, which is portrayed as a quaint hamlet outside ye city of olde Manhattan. In an attempt to keep her mom in one place, Holly engages in one of those tedious and elaborate ruses you only see in the movies: She pretends to be Jean’s dream man and romances her over e-mail and IM. The sight of Ms. Duff having cybersex with her own mother is one that will be seared into your brain for eternity.

The buff and blonde Hamilton women focus intensely on their search for male perfection, reminding one of a cabal of evil Aryan scientists engaged in some kind of eugenics project, and it’s about as funny. Director Mark Rosman’s first film was the 1980s slasher flick “The House on Sorority Row.” “The Perfect Man” is a different kind of horror: a lifeless, embalmed corpse that won’t stop squawking. The last straw is Carson Kressley (“Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”), whose presence as the gay comic relief is the final twist of the knife, and the reminder that nothing is more boring than perfection.

-Grady Hendrix

THE GREAT WATER
unrated, 93 mins.

The Macedonian feel-bad movie, “The Great Water,” is so hysterically overwrought that you have to assume the director meant it to be funny. Set in the post-Stalinist era, the film starts with young Lem (Saso Kekenovski) being abandoned at an orphanage that specializes in giving the children of dead traitors a hard time.

Its Dickensian horrors look like a traveling production of “Oliver!” rewritten by V.C. Andrews. On his first day, Lem is pushed, shoved, stripped, molested, and has his family heirloom stolen. Enter Isak (Maja Stankovska), a little socialist Harry Potter: cute, nonverbal, and into doing magic. Lem gloms on to Isak, and the two team up to defeat the dirty communists who surround them.

Every door that opens, every glance, every bite of bread has so much Import and Meaning that it’s not long before the giggles kick in. But the film is candy for your eyeballs.

Turning the gothic knob up to “11,” director Ivo Trajkov fills the screen with cat torture, blindings, suicide, murder, droughts, and poorly chosen sound effects. Overheated Young Pioneers neck passionately with busts of Comrade Stalin; angelic choirs burst into full swoon when the camera goes in tight on the crotch of an athletic young lady doing her morning calisthenics. It’s like “Desperate Housewives” for the socialist set.

-Grady Hendrix

ETHAN MAO
unrated, 89 mins.

That the acting from each member of the “Ethan Mao” ensemble cast makes Ashton Kutcher look like Laurence Olivier is not nearly as big a problem as writer-director Quentin Lee’s howler script, with its superfluous narration, choppy dialogue riddled with redundancies, and flat prose.

The title character (played by Jun Hee Lee) in Mr. Lee’s kidnapping drama is a drug-addicted prostitute, who is thrown out of his house when his father (David Tran) finds out he’s gay. He returns on Thanksgiving with his friend Remigio (Jerry Hernandez) hoping to steal a locket that belonged to his late mother. When his father, stepmother, and siblings discover him, Ethan and Remigio take them hostage, demanding the treasured jewelry.

A cheesy synth score and poor use of slo-mo do nothing to keep this suspenseless film from petering out with an eye-rollingly predictable anticlimax.

THE TALENT GIVEN US
unrated, 97 mins.

By using the unique device of casting the movie with his own family (who play themselves, no less), and allowing himself to be portrayed as redemptive Godot-like figure, filmmaker Andrew Wagner certainly runs the risk of appearing, at the very least, self-indulgent. Not so with “The Talent Given Us,” however, as Mr. Wagner’s honest script and direction propel us along what could have been just a flat 100-minute gimmick, but is instead something authentic and entertaining.

Andrew’s mother is given most of the attention here. It is she who prompts her speech-impaired husband Allen and two adult daughters to take a ten day road trip from New York to California, so that they can reconnect with their elusive son and brother Andrew.

The performances here are surprisingly convincing. As is often the case with road movies, the initial motive of the trip is eased into the background, making way for those involved to reflect on their lives and relationships. Sharp-tongued, sexually frank dialogue between the cast members gives the film a slight aura of discomfort, but is also refreshing. “The Talent Given Us” is an insightful and original road movie, and an impressive debut.