L’ICEBERG
Unrated, 84 minutes

Fiona (Fiona Gordon), wife of Julien (Dominique Abel) and mother of two, lives in one of those ticky-tacky little box houses immortalized in the theme to Showtime’s “Weeds” and manages a small Belgian fast-food franchise. A manager’s work is never done, it seems, and while putting the finishing touches on her daily cleanup, Fiona accidentally locks herself inside the restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator. Returned to the relative warmth of home the next day, she is devastated to discover that her husband and kids, good-natured creatures of routine that they are, didn’t even notice she was missing.

But Fiona’s night alone among the frites did more than expose the cracks in her marriage, gauge the emptiness of her life, and turn her lips blue. Her artic adventure has awakened within her a primal obsession with the cold, specifically with the image of an iceberg. Like Roy Neary in Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Fiona is enchanted and tormented by visions of a mountainous landmark she’s never actually visited.

Fiona’s reality is so profoundly altered that she can’t resist a clandestine trip inside a freezer truck that’s restocking her restaurant. As she is shut inside the truck and taken on a surprise trip (along with a group of illegal immigrants who’ve stowed away with the burger patties), a pratfall becomes destiny. The only way she can live with herself, Fiona realizes, is to abandon her family to seek the iceberg.

“L’Iceberg” is the brainchild of Mr. Abel, Ms. Gordon, and Bruno Romy, who also appears in the film. The three writer/director/actors come from a circus and pantomime background and have previously collaborated on several whimsical, dialogue-light short films similar to this, their first feature. Composing their film almost entirely of statically framed, single-shot tableaux, the filmmakers have gone to great trouble here to spin a fairy-tale fable with their on-screen movements rather than just with words. Alternately impossibly agile and glumly immobile, Ms. Gordon’s character comes across like a cross between Chaplain’s Tramp, Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, and Olive Oyl. Mr. Abel is equally deadpan and physically expressive. During one bedroom scene, he performs what may be the single longest comic yawn in film history.

As in the Jacques Tati films and silent comedies that the trio clearly loves, some of the gags in “L’Iceberg” work and others fall flat. The film’s unrelentingly optimistic outlook is sweet, but it leaves little space for the harder-edged humor employed by Tati and is the main ingredient in the work of lesserknown American silent film comedians like Lloyd Hamilton.

Bruce Bennett

LUCKY YOU
PG-13, minutes

Throughout the innumerable poker games played in “Lucky You,” a question of performance arises again and again. Namely, how does an actor, whose job is to communicate and express, play the role of a poker player, whose goal is to conceal and mislead? If he maintained a true poker face, would it be accurate, boring, antidramatic? Is suspense impossible, emotion ever definite?

The makers of “Lucky You” might like to think they explore the same issues in the movie’s characters, but execution is another matter entirely. In Curtis Hanson’s middling, hobbled drama, Eric Bana plays the Oedipally challenged Vegas gambler Huck Cheever, forever overshadowed by poker-god dad C.J. (Robert Duvall); Drew Barrymore is his newly arrived smalltown muse and love interest; the father and son have a climactic showdown. And that’s all you need to know to predict practically every hand this film will play.

Huck needs cash in order to cover the entrance fee for the World Series of Poker. He has the pedigree and the skills, but, as might be guessed from the square-one start at movie’s opening, he’s been down so often it might start looking like up. C.J., a two-time World Series winner, is a sly old bastard who can reduce Huck to pigheaded incompetence with the slightest paternal challenge. Huck’s still furious with him for abandoning and effectively robbing his mother. It all comes out in the cards, so to speak, though the film never really comes to terms with the cruelty coursing through their history in the twisty but inevitable lead-up to reconciliation.

All of the film’s relationships, in fact, are haunted by a certain detachment, seemingly emanating from Mr. Bana but owing as well to plodding direction. Ms. Barrymore’s character, Billie, gets charmed and cheated by Huck but, for no clear reason, is drawn to him again against the advice of her protective sister (Debra Messing). Really, Billie functions as a delivery system for wisdom about Huck and C.J.’s ragged relationship.

Mr. Hanson and company do show considerable devotion to the art and science of Texas hold ’em, letting hands play out clearly from start to finish. (The perfunctory feel of scenes outside the poker rooms seems to betray an impatience to get back to the chips.) Though methodical, the outcome of most hands never feels in doubt. And the parallels to the relationships involved are shallow, except in a couple of clever moments thanks mainly to Mr. Duvall.

N.R.

THE TREATMENT
Unrated, 86 minutes

Jake Singer (Chris Eigeman) is an insecure, greasy-haired high school English teacher; Allegra Marshall (Famke Janssen) is rich and svelte. Say what you will about the “The Treatment,” but Oren Rudavsky’s debut film has a provocative premise: We live on a planet in which she would pursue him. She tries to flirt. “I’m feeling a little bereft of small talk right now,” Jake responds. (Consider this critic bereft of sympathy.)

But “The Treatment” is not completely illogical. Like the “X-Men” films for which Ms. Janssen is best known, it is set in a familiar-looking world that on occasion demands a serious suspension of the viewer’s belief — as when Jake, distracted by a hallucination of his shrink, ignores Allegra’s desperate pleas for sex.

It would be different if that sex scene were funny, but Mr. Rudavsky’s film lacks the humor that allowed Woody Allen’s couplings of Manhattan nymphs and nebbishes to gloriously transcend their unlikelihood. “The Treatment,” which really should have been conceived as an all-out comedy, attempts to compensate for what it lacks in laughs and real insight with a surfeit of self-awareness. During a Chekhov lesson, one of Jake’s students complains: “He walks around moping all day … then some young beautiful girl falls in love with him and we’re supposed to feel sorry for him?” Jake responds, a bit too passionately, that one should try to inhabit fictional characters before judging them.

But this uninspired story of a man with a clinging habit, adapted by Daniel Saul Housman and Mr. Rudavsky from the book by Daniel Menaker, is not exactly Chekhov. Jake refuses to give up on an ex-girlfriend and a problem student when he should really move on; more important, to the filmmakers at least, he can’t manage to shake free of an old-fashioned therapist who charges Jake $125 an hour for variations on the theme that he just needs to grow a pair. The eccentric Dr. Morales, played gamely by Ian Holm, has pervaded Jake’s consciousness and become his invisible companion, popping up at inopportune moments to offer the same kind of bossy advice Jake also gets from his father (Harris Yulin).

Early on, “The Treatment” makes it clear that Jake needs to jettison Dr. Morales and start to think for himself. But this teacher already uses as sounding boards for his literary opinions, which have a glib way of relating to his personal life. And minutes after Jake has defined “the difficult job in life” for them, Allegra collars him and offers a quick discourse of her own. “That’s what love is,” she concludes. Thanks for that. Class dismissed.

Darrell Hartman