CARS
G, 112 minutes

Pixar had finally done it. Against all odds, it has succeeded: “Cars” is Pixar’s first bad movie. It’s a sluggish knockoff of “Doc Hollywood” with cars in the place of Michael J. Fox. Emptied of jokes and overflowing with life lessons, this inert dud will be enjoyed only by easily hypnotized children and adults who can’t see past the Pixar logo.

Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) is an arrogant race car. His agent (predictably played by Jeremy Piven) is heartless, his pit crew hates him, and he wants to ditch his hillbilly sponsors for the big time. But on his way to California for the big race, he gets lost in the flyspeck town of Radiator Springs. Sentenced to repave the road he damaged by the judge, Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), he learns to slow down and discover What Really Matters in a series of folksy sermons delivered by Tow Mater the tow truck (Larry the Cable Guy), a hippie Volkswagen bus (George Carlin), and a Hispanic lowrider (Cheech Marin). He falls in love with a Porsche (Bonnie Hunt) and learns how the interstate system ruined America, bypassing small towns, and …

I’m sorry. I fell asleep for a minute there. And you will, too. Pixar’s movies are usually a frantic cascade of ideas that crowd the screen, but the clever ideas in “Cars” can be counted on one hand. Sentimentality overwhelms the movie and drowns it in a sticky sea of syrup. There’s no doubt that director John Lasseter sincerely believes the hokum he puts onscreen, but that’s not enough to make it a success.

– Grady Hendrix

HEART OF THE GAME
PG-13, 97 minutes

There are some movies where you come out a better person than when you went in. You emerge from the theater overflowing with the milk of human kindness, vowing to give up smoking, to get more exercise, to do six impossible things before breakfast. “Heart of the Game” is that kind of movie. But this documentary about a high school women’s basketball team isn’t all hearts and flowers. It’s full of teen pregnancies, lawsuits, revoked scholarships, vicious rivalries, and rape.

The Roosevelt Rough Riders are a going-nowhere girls basketball team in a Seattle high school when Bill Resler, a tax law professor and amateur basketball coach who looks like a medium-sized Santa Claus, comes along. He turns the team around, treating his gawky adolescent players like warriors and sending them hungrily tearing off after dreams they didn’t know they had. It would have made for an inspirational short film if not for the appearance of Darnellia Russell, a black freshman who’s a hoops-shooting prodigy. Her roller coaster life gives the movie its spine, and director Ward Serrill confidently moves through the complicated issues of race, class, and gender without preaching.

The movie takes digressions into the history of women’s basketball, which seems largely to consist of a bunch of men trying to protect women from themselves. But as this flick reaches its genuinely moving climax, and the players risk everything they’ve achieved to stand by Darnellia, you realize that these braceswearing, pizza-faced, foghorn-voiced kids don’t need to be protected from themselves. They need to be protected from us, because they’re capable of far more than we can ever imagine.

– G.H.

AUTUMN
R, 110 minutes

Ra’up McGee’s “Autumn” is a strange hybrid: half violent American indie, half European existential drama.

Owing a sizable debt to “Pulp Fiction” – and “Kiss Me Deadly” before it – this French-language film directed by an American director follows a newly contemplative hit man named Jean-Pierre (Laurent Lucas) as he struggles to pin down a mysterious briefcase. Aping Mr. Tarantino not only in content but in form, the film proves a sea of oddball details (Jean-Pierre’s boss, Noel, doubles as a restaurateur) and happenstance (a rape is narrowly averted by a well-timed phone call).

At the same time, the nimbler genre touches are often undercut by the incongruously dour tone. Indeed, this is a thriller where even the seamiest characters expound on their moral dilemmas. None of Noel’s hit team ever pulls a job without first stating how many nights’ sleep he or she will lose over the murder, and Noel himself (Michel Aumont) goes so far as to lay flowers at the graves of the men he’s ordered killed.

The plot spins and flutters, employing a convoluted flashback structure that serves little purpose beyond obscuring the story’s hollow core. Emphasizing the film’s Greek-tragic undercurrents, Jean-Pierre wonders aloud whether he owes his violent tendencies to a traumatic incident he and his girlfriend (Irene Jacob) witnessed as children.

The protagonist’s name is clearly a nod to Jean-Pierre Melville, but Mr. McGee – despite his flair for framing bullet wounds – lacks the modernist precision and patience that Melville brought to his own hitman thriller, “Le Samourai” (1967).

The model really should have been Jules Dassin, a blacklisted American who in France made “Rififi” (1955) – one of the greatest films noirs, and one where a final stab at redemption isn’t bogged down by overt declamations of guilt.

– Ben Kenigsberg

PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS
unrated, 98 minutes

“Psychopathia Sexualis,” now playing at Two Boots Pioneer, looks like erotica made by the History Channel. This risible adaptation of an 1886 text by Austro-German psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing imagines overheated tales based on the good doctor’s case studies of sexual behavior. Vampirism never seemed so uninteresting.

The vignettes range from a couple of minutes of leech and coffin abuse and detour through “lust murder,” to an interminable and mawkish tale of a closeted spinster. An unctuous voiceover frames most of the period-costumed, mustily lighted scenes, performed with almost ceremonial earnestness by actors who might as well come from plot inserts in a video game.

Director Bret Wood, who mined outre source material to better effect in his 2003 highway-safety-reel doc “Hell’s Highway,” here drains all energy out of the terse, bracingly mundane density of human experience that makes many case studies compulsively readable. Gestures toward a silent-cinema aesthetic, like image masking and “Nosferatu” references, are little more than distraction.

There is, however, something morbidly fascinating (and educational) about “Psychopathia,” but it has nothing to do with Mr. Wood’s bogus objectivity about the period’s views on deviance. Rather, it’s how Mr. Wood extracts the conceits and undertones that have churned away in horror movies and French art house movies for years, and makes them utterly pedantic and devoid of tension or passion.

Mr. Wood’s decision to pick and choose the moralizing of the original text is dubious. As a result, the collection of stories includes the uncomfortable juxtaposition of a distasteful “Divertissement” about a pedophilic baron and baroness, and a segment in which Krafft-Ebing tries to persuade a young gay man of the error of his ways. But, generally, the most perverse “Psychopathia” gets is in its interest in inflicting the ridiculous on the viewer.

– Nicolas Rapold

EL PERRO
unrated, 94 minutes

Argentine director Carlos Sorin brings a gentle touch to this dog-saves-man story of a recently laid-off, lackadaisaical middle-aged man. Generally more simple than slight, the movie, opening today at Cinema Village, ultimately peters out because of its endearing but sleepy amateur lead’s limited range.

Juan Villegas (played by… Juan Ville gas, part of a cast of mostly nonprofessionals) lives with his daughter, trying to peddle decorative knives with homemade handles. The rosy-cheeked fellow, a friendly retiring sort, helps a woman in a stalled car get back home. He is rewarded with a robust white dog, an Argentine “dogo” (a legacy of her deceased father’s fledgling breeding operation).

Suddenly, Juan is somebody: The dog proves a purebred, people want to hire him as a guard, and a banker invites him hunting. Walter (Walter Donado), a garrulous roly-poly fellow at a racetrack who’s a dog-exhibition veteran, teams up with Juan, and the pair look set for success.

Mr. Sorin’s previous film, “Minimal Histories,” was a road movie intertwining three characters, and the dog here plays the role of revelatory journey, opening to Juan a world of possibilities, emotional as well as financial. Mr. Villegas looks like a charming older man who’s walked on to a movie set (which is not too far from the truth), giving a credibly ordinary feel to his scenes, and there’s a sweet interplay between him and Walter, cheerfully barging into the older man’s life.

But despite some sly comic moments, Mr. Sorin’s movie drifts where you think it might, when Juan catches the fancy of a singer of Arabic ballads while out with Walter to celebrate a show victory. Ultimately, Mr. Villegas proves unable to develop his bemused-decency routine, leaving the movie with nowhere to go other than an (admittedly funny) subplot about his dog’s libido.

– N.R.

AGNES AND HIS BROTHERS
unrated, 115 minutes

The title of this laborious German dramedy makes ostentatious reference to the robust Visconti classic, much as the film’s shallow characters fruitlessly pretend to be worth caring about. Three grown brothers – a sex addict, a suburban husband, and a transsexual dancer – weather the antic crisis of emotional dysfunction and emerge, respectively, as slightly less of a sleaze, slightly less of a prat, and even more noble and damaged than you thought.

Behold, the Tschirner siblings: dweebish Hans-Jorg (Moritz Bleibtreu) works at a university library where hotpantsed students inflame his nymphomaniac libido; Green Party politico Werner (Herbert Knaup), on the verge of disposablecontainer reform after 10 years, neanderthals his way around his despising family; and Agnes (Martin Weiss) gets dumped by a live-in jerk, finds she has only a few months to live, and reconnects with an old flame who’s become famous.

The director, Oskar Roehler, slathers on broad satire and body humor (e.g., Werner defecating on to paper while on the phone with a colleague), while urging his two heteros on the way to their predictable, yet utterly inexplicable redemptions via contrivance. Hans-Jorg gets out of therapy and into the porn business to fall in love with his inexplicably infatuated co-star; Werner sees his wife leave him only to reunite improbably through their shared concern when their hateful son disappears for two days.

Amusingly, the film seems for a stretch to forget about Agnes, before remembering that her character is the only pleasant company of the three. Then Mr. Roehler cranks up her melodrama, beatifying her and proving how love conquers all.

I kept telling myself that senses of humor differ from one country to the next, but I think viewers will learn that glib mediocrity knows no borders.

– N.R.