LAND OF THE BLIND
R, 110 minutes

Robert Edwards’s satire about a revolution in a fictional dictatorship is sure to be dismissed as a facile political provocation, and that’s fine. But though “Land of the Blind” sinks into soggy self-importance, Mr. Edwards does briefly sustain a mood of dislocation that one wishes had been put to better use.

Joe (Ralph Fiennes, shyly intelligent as ever) is a prison guard in the autocratic regime of Maximilien Junior (Tom Hollander), the vaguely Caligulan inheritor to a land (of the blind!) strafed by pseudo-Marxist guerrillas. He guards Thorne, an imprisoned playwright turned revolutionary icon, played at a slow burn by Donald Sutherland in yet another glorious hair creation.

Good soldier Joe gets a little too sympathetic with his charge, whom Max is for some reason forced to tolerate as a political prisoner. When Thorne is finally released as a sop to the revolutionaries, Joe helps him plan an assassination. Thorne installs his own government, but wouldn’t you know it, re-education camps and enforced poverty ensue. (I would have bolted the moment Thorne started quoting from Yeats’s “Second Coming.”)

So a good lesson is learned by all. But didacticism aside, Mr. Edwards does essay some neat tricks of disorientation that even catchier dystopic playgrounds like “V for Vendetta” lack. Mixing period markers, he clothes the aristocratic elite in a pastiche of high-diplomat regalia and shows the disturbed Maximilien hosting private performances of blackface vaudeville. The bled-out gloss of the film’s style is broken up by a weird earthiness, from Mr. Fiennes’s bloodied face to Thorne’s writing on his prison cell walls with his own feces. Then there’s the far-away twanging buzz of the soundtrack, somewhere between Indian drone and British invasion.

But Mr. Fiennes seems a little stranded taking Mr. Edwards’s lecture too seriously. Mr. Sutherland at least has the knack with wry characters that let us believe his generalissimo put-on.

– Nicolas Rapold

LOWER CITY
R, 97 minutes

For all the love-triangle agony, sweaty favela detail, and bump-and-grind trysts, it’s striking how little real heat the Brazilian export “Lower City” arouses. The grungily handsome but somehow distant performers, shot in saturated color amid carefully deployed Bahia set pieces (like a cockfight arena), make the film feel more like a lazily sexy travelogue than a drama.

One thing “Lower City” is certain about: friends should never let a woman get between them – except when they do. Pals Deco (Lazaro Ramos) and Naldinho (Wagner Moura) both fall for Karinna (Alice Braga), a no-nonsense prostitute who rides their boat one night in exchange for sex. She takes a recreational fancy to carefree Deco, while Naldinho jealously broods.

It’s an old story, but “Lower City” brings little to the familiar tugs of competing loyalties and libidos. Most curiously, the actors are restrained, even sluggish. Ms. Braga wears the tropical languor of sexuality well, but the men bank too much on their routine of weary rapport.

Director Sergio Machado has a modish way of leaving out bits of explanatory plot, but overplays other scenes for shock. When Deco gets stabbed early on and Karinna comes to nurse him back to health, “Lower City” can’t resist picking that moment for Naldinho to proposition her. It’s the cheap but reliable movie idea that people in intense grief want to shag that is supposed to be the height of messy honesty.

A final dust-up between the two friends aims for bone-crunching release, but it feels ceremonial: “the end.”

– N.R.

THE OUTSIDER
unrated, 83 minutes

Fans of the maverick director James Toback will enjoy the hang-out time provided by “The Outsider,” a new documentary about the man who created “Fingers,” “The Pick-Up Artist,” and “Black and White.” Part hagiography (thanks to Mr. Toback’s idolizing pals) and part making-of, this DIY-style film follows Mr. Toback in all his gambler’s cool during the improbable 13-day shoot of 2004’s “When Will I Be Loved.”

Biography may be the best way to encounter Mr. Toback, but it’s slightly redundant. His movies, typically about nervy or ballsy people hungrily pushing boundaries (sexual, racial, and financial), are here confirmed to be largely about him. A Harvard man cribbing notes from the underground, he got zonked as an undergrad on a bad LSD trip, scored scads of women with Jim Brown in the 1970s, and finally settled into respectable shadiness through gambling, schmoozing, and occasional moviemaking.

It’s certainly easier to hear out Mr. Toback as an affable raconteur who counts Norman Mailer, Robert Downey Jr., and Mike Tyson as best buds than to enjoy all the flirtations with fiasco that mark the director’s improvised, confrontational style. The doc soaks in the director’s inspiring liberal energies, which have persisted for 30 years, while covering the key highlight reels: Tyson strangling a flirty Downey in “Black and White,” a spiritually strung-out Harvey Keitel (naked, of course) in “Fingers,” and Warren Beatty’s spittle-flecked tirades in “Bugsy” (for which Mr. Toback wrote the screenplay).

Ultimately, “The Outsider” may seem an odd title for so expert a schmoozer, one whose agent is the chairman of ICM and who’s lionized here by an ex-Sony executive. But secret fans don’t always mean big business, and the indomitable Mr. Toback emerges as an understandably appealing idol for one mode, at least, of testosterone-fueled, street-philosophical indie filmmaking.

– N.R.

UNCUT
unrated, 76 minutes

The chief performer in “Uncut” is, indeed, uncut; the shot itself may have had a few snips. This film is composed of what looks like a single take of actor Franco Trentalance’s penis, with the camera firmly positioned to face his pelvis and his legs spread out to span the widescreen frame.

According to Guinness, male genitalia have never before been on screen for this duration – although here, as in Hitchcock’s “Rope,” strategic cover-ups (blankets, blackouts, a photo of Bill Clinton) periodically obscure the subject from view.

One of the major benefits of digital video is that, in movies like “Uncut,” the camera can create longer takes than 35 mm could ever produce. The obvious curse of DV, though, is that it makes film technology accessible to prankish amateurs, a group that director Gionata Zarantonello announces himself a part of with a sound mix that seems to have been recorded on answering machines.

In any case, the apparatus belongs to a bedridden writer, trapped at home with a fractured pelvis and eagerly trying to get laid. (He also repeatedly fends off a detective who suspects he murdered his girlfriend.)

“Uncut” is ultimately no more or less than its gimmick, with the penis providing a pre-made text and subtext. The situations are too blatantly staged for the film to convince as a real-time object study, or even as a fake-time spatial study in the manner of Michael Snow’s “Wavelength” graciously alluded to at the end).

And as a story? Here’s a lonely man trapped in his apartment, faced with a murder that may or may not have occurred: Set aside the gross-out comedy – as well as matters of drama, acting, and taste – and “Uncut” is identical to “Rear Window.”

– Ben Kenigsberg

GARFIELD: A TALE OF TWO KITTIES
PG, 100 minutes

In this sequel based on Jim Davis’s cartoons, Garfield (voiced by an amusing but bored-seeming Bill Murray) is a cat out of water in England, having stowed away with his owner, Jon Breckin Myer), on a trip to London. While the two kitties of the title are animated, the rest of the cast is live-action – most notably the adorable Odie, Garfield’s dim-witted canine sidekick. Jon keeps busy trying to propose to his girlfriend (Jennifer Love Hewitt), while Garfield changes places with Prince Tim Curry), a look-alike cat who has just inherited a castle. With the help of a gang of animal friends, including a cheeky ferret, a pretentious parrot, and a bulldog butler (Bob Hoskins), Garfield must foil the bullying schemes of Lord Dargis (Billy Connolly), who will inherit the estate if Prince goes missing. The slapstick adventures that follow are funny, though tame, except for a memorable scene of commotion in the castle’s kitchen. In all, “A Tale of Two Kitties” provides a love story for mothers though Garfield rightly comments that if his owner’s romance gets “any cuter and ‘ll puke”), Jennifer Love Hewitt for fathers, and enough burps, farts, and dogs attacking the crotches of evil-doers to keep the kids happy.

– Erin Thompson

THE MOSTLY UNFABULOUS SOCIAL LIFE OF ETHAN GREEN
R, 88 minutes

The worst part of “The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green” is not the bad acting, or the poor story, or the tired jokes – although those aren’t really anything to brag about. It’s not the bad camerawork, bargain basement set design, or glacial editing, either, although again, I wouldn’t go bragging. No, it’s that every actor is reduced to little more than a screechy gay caricature delivering DOA jokes. I moved through pain, to suffering, and then denial before finally settling down at anger.

Based on a popular alternative comic strip, “TMUSLOEG” is about the gay 26-year-old child of Meredith Baxter-Birney. He is looking for love and not finding it, which confuses him. But the explanation is simple: He’s annoying. No one wants to be around him, least of all the audience. And his pesky love interest, kooky roommates, ex-boyfriends, and lesbian friend don’t help. If this project were a labor of love, I would cut it a break, but it’s apparent it is little more than a career move for its producers and director, and as a result it’s cold, empty, and boring.

– Grady Hendrix

THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT
PG-13, 104 minutes

If men are attracted to cars because they’re extensions of their reproductive organs, and if car racing is a metaphor for sex, then based on “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” the state of American lovemaking is noisy, meaningless, and ends before it begins. The third installment in the franchise, this flick moves the action to Tokyo, making its debt to “Initial D,” the Hong Kong movie about drift racing that was 2005’s Asian box office sensation, baldly apparent.

Sean Boswell (Lucas Black) is a 30-year-old who hangs out with others who are too old to be in college, let alone high school. He makes trouble, fixes cars, and drives fast. This combo gets him shipped off to Japan, where his military dad is stationed in a tiny apartment in downtown Tokyo. Fortunately, he finds a Japanese high school for 30-year-old students that comes complete with the necessary stock characters: a white girl (to fall in love with) and a black guy (for comic relief). He gets mixed up in drift racing and some kind of vaguely defined criminal enterprise that involves passing around large bundles of banknotes.

The only actor in the film is Japan’s legendary Sonny Chiba, who dominates the film like a force five charisma hurricane. But his grand entrances and dramatic monologues sputter out into a pop-eyed silence as the script repeatedly fails him. Director Justin Lin (“Better Luck Tomorrow”) can edit a racing scene but he’s hopeless with actors and story. For those who require little more from their movies than CGI cars zipping down mountain roads and half-naked Asian gals falling out of their Hello Kitty! stripper-wear, this one’s for you.

– G.H.