LE GRAND ROLE
unrated, 89 mins.

The new French film “Le Grand Role” is like the Steve Martin/Eddie Murphy movie “Bowfinger” crossed with “Love Story,” by way of Preston Sturges. You wouldn’t be foolish to dash off to buy a ticket based on this synopsis, but unfortunately the film is not everything it should have been.

The film kicks off with sincere Jewish actor Maurice Kurtz (Stephane Freiss) getting cast as Shylock in an all-Yiddish movie version of “The Merchant of Venice.” The movie is a “Passion of the Christ”-style vanity project helmed by a fictional Hollywood star with the unlikely name of Rudolph Grishenberg (Peter Coyote). The role changes Kurtz’s life, but he gets fired when James Woods turns out to be available. Then Kurtz’s wife, Perla (Berenice Bejo), announces that she’s dying of cancer. In order to keep up her spirits, he and his friends conspire to trick her into believing he never lost the role.

While “Le Grand Role” is a perfectly pleasant 89 minutes, it has one big problem: It’s French. Most mainstream French movies these days exert an amiable charm. Characters eat in reasonably priced restaurants, live in affordable apartments, and speak quietly; you could watch them gaze adoringly at their spouses for hours on end. “Le Grand Role” aspires to high comedy, however, and it needed more energy on both sides of the camera to pull it off.

Instead of becoming wilder and funnier as it progresses, the film separates like oil and vinegar: low-key French noodling over here, schlocky Hollywood plotting over there. By the end of the movie, the director’s refusal to pick a side keeps “Le Grand Role” from being all it could.

– Grady Hendrix

JIMINY GLICK IN LALA WOOD
R, 90 mins.

Spinning off from the short-lived television show “Primetime Glick,” which itself was spun off from the shortlived talk show “The Martin Short Show,” “Jiminy Glick in Lala Wood” finds Martin Short’s clueless, starstruck celebrity interviewer leaving his native Montana to cover the Toronto Film Festival. With him are his flatulent wife Dixie (“Saturday Night Live” alumna Jan Hooks) and their two children, Matthew and Modine (named after the actor “because we’re a big fan of his work in ‘Birdy'”).

Mr. Short and his collaborators throw every joke they can against the wall here: Some stick, more don’t. The cheese-hoarding Jiminy soon finds himself catapulted into the spotlight when he lands an interview with press-reclusive Ben DiCarlo (Corey Pearson), a Johnny Depp-like star who likes Glick because he gave the only good review in America of his film “Growing Up Gandhi.” Success is fleeting, though, and Jiminy soon wakes up next to the dead body of famous actress Miranda Coolidge (Elizabeth Perkins).

The funniest moments in “Primetime Glick” came when Glick was offscreen, and that’s true here, too. Glick’s ignorance can be hilarious at times (he mistakes Forrest Whitaker for Forrest Gump), and it’s nice to see Ms. Hooks back in action. But real-life cameo appearances by Janeane Garofalo and Kevin Kline are disappointingly lackluster. In one funny gag, Steve Martin names a list of communists (Meg Ryan and Uma Thurman come up), but the closing titles assure naive members of the audience that such claims are not true. If you’re going to back down from a joke, why include it at all?

Still, Mr. Short is nothing short of inspired in his role as the owner of the Overlook-esque hotel where the Glicks stay, who serves as a sort of Greek chorus. Mr. Short plays him as a deadon impersonation of director David Lynch, and these sequences are surprisingly and joyously authentic – right down to the brooding underscore that accompanies them.

– Edward Goldberger

BROTHERS
R, 90 mins.

The team of writer Anders Thomas Jensen and director Susanne Bier follow up their wonderful debut collaboration, “Open Hearts,” with “Brothers,” another fine tragic film.

Sentenced for armed robbery and assault, Jannik (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is released into the care of his brother, Michael (Ulrich Thomsen), a major in the Danish army. The two are close, though Jannik and Michael’s wife, Sarah (Connie Nielsen), don’t mix well. Then Michael is shipped off to Afghanistan – where, in an astounding sequence, his helicopter is shot down and he is pronounced Killed in Action.

That status is false, however; he survives the crash and is imprisoned by Afghan soldiers. Under the assumption that Michael is dead, Sarah and Michael’s two daughters take a liking to Jannik, and he and Sarah also begin to grow close. When Michael returns, he is a changed man, with a secret eating him from the inside. He grows depressed and begins to act out violently against his wife and family.

Ms. Nielsen (“Basic”) has had a spotty American career, but her return to her native language proves to be superlative, and this may be her best work. Her performance is just one of several splendid things about this wellwritten, quietly moving film.

– Edward Goldberger

A HOLE IN ONE
unrated, 97 mins.

A’ Hole in One” makes big promises, not the least of which are hard rocker Meat Loaf and a “Dawson’s Creek” actress, Michelle Williams, together onscreen. The movie posits lobotomy as a path to personal freedom, charts the rise of the mental-health industry in the 1950s, shows traumatized World War II veterans descending on small-town America like the Black Death, and features sadistic, rage-junkie gangsters spazzing out about subpar Greek salad. Any of these would be enough for an entire movie. “A Hole in One” serves them all up at once.

Ms. Williams plays a young woman who lives in the sort of small town trademarked by David Lynch. After her shellshocked brother returns from the war and gets sent to an asylum, she drifts into a relationship with the violent local gangster Billy (Meat Loaf). Around this time, Dr. Ashton (Bill Raymond) comes to town, shilling a new book on transorbital lobotomy, a charming medical procedure involving thrusting an ice pick through the tear duct and into the patient’s brain.

Ms. Williams briefly brings the movie to life when she eagerly embraces lobotomy as a patriotic and practical solution to her personal problems. Touted as a cure for everything from anxiety to alcoholism, the movie treats lobotomy as a pre-medication-era Prozac, and uses the period’s fascination with psychoanalysis as background for its run-of-the-mill gangster story.

If you’ve never seen a movie by Mr. Lynch, there may be something for you here. Otherwise, it’s depressing to see how deeply Mr. Lynch’s vision has colonized the brains of less original filmmakers.

– Grady Hendrix

UP FOR GRABS
unrated, 88 mins.

When Barry Bonds smashed his record-breaking 73rd home run of the season on October 7, 2001, it appeared that a fan named Patrick Hayashi would take the ball home. Alex Popov bitterly disagreed, however, saying that he had caught it and Mr. Hayashi had stolen it from him. Video evidence seemed to back Mr. Popov up. Thus began an absurd 14-month legal battle for the ball, a saga covered quite amusingly by Michael Wranovics in his debut documentary “Up for Grabs.”

This was a boring story in real life, but Mr. Wranovics’s film is funny and entertaining. Mr. Wranovics paints Mr. Popov as a sympathetic figure at the start, then documents his regression into a greedy egomaniac and villain. Mr. Hayashi, who is caught on tape biting a fellow baseball fan (“Do you recall yelling out ouch?” a lawyer asks the bite victim at trial. “I think it was ow,” the man deadpans), comes off better just by keeping his mouth shut.

After all this, funnily enough, Mr. Wranovics stands the chance to make the most money off the cherished ball, thanks to ticket sales. If Mr. Bonds breaks Babe Ruth’s record this summer, and Hank Aaron’s next year, Mr. Wranovics may have quite a little trilogy on his hands.

– Edward Goldberger

DOUBLE DARE
unrated, 74 mins.

“D’ouble Dare” chronicles the lives of two professional stuntwomen – one starting out on a new path, the other following the lonely and dispiriting one toward the end of her career. Jeannie Epper has been in the business for decades (she doubled for Linda Carter on “Wonder Woman”). Her father, uncles, and cousins were stunt people, and her daughter excels at the job. But she is getting old. Zoe Bell, on the other hand, had been working steadily in New Zealand as Lucy Lawless’s double on the set of “Xena” (“That’s my acting double,” Ms. Bell says of Ms. Lawless). But once that show wraps, she finds herself out of a job and travels to Hollywood to see if she can find work.

This postscript is a major setback for one of the women, and it’s too bad director Amanda Micheli’s cameras were not there to capture what surely would have been a compelling, if downbeat, finish to what was anyway an enjoyable, well-directed documentary.

– Edward Goldberger

A MAN’S GOTTA DO
unrated, 93 mins.

Eddy (John Howard) is a fisherman by day and a hit man by night. But that doesn’t really matter, since “A Man’s Gotta Do” focuses more on Eddy’s dejected daughter Chantelle (Alyssa McClelland), who’s set to be married soon but can’t find her fiance. But that doesn’t really matter, because she starts to fall for her father’s new assistant Dominic (Gyton Grantley). But that doesn’t really matter, because Chantelle’s mother Yvonne (Rebecca Frith) feels neglected by her family and wants Eddy to impregnate her so she can have a little attention. Chris Kennedy’s comedy, opening today at the Quad, has a handful of laughs, but such lightweight fare is better enjoyed as a late-night rental than a $10 feature.

– Edward Goldberger