PRIMER

PG-13, 80 mins.

Primers are books for rudimentary instruction; “Primer” is a movie for advanced obfuscation. In this mesmerizing debut film, writer-director Shane Carruth has rigged up a science fiction like no other; a strange, shiny, object-like movie that grows more compelling the more it recedes from its audience. Planet “Primer” may look like Planet Earth – industrial-park Texas, to be specific – but it is ruled by its own inscrutable physics, subject to its own weird weather, inhabited by life forms who speak their own private language.

When we first telescope in, Abe (David Sullivan) and Aaron (Mr. Carruth) are mucking around in their garage, tinkering with an assemblage of wire, copper tubing, silicon chips, and assorted what sits. Initially it does little more than go zzzzz; later it will begin to incubate a fuzzy protein. “There was use in the thing, clearly,” deadpans a mysterious voiceover, “but what was the application?” Once redesigned to the proportions of a casket, it appears to send objects (and people) several hours back in time.

All of which becomes more or less clear after 80 minutes of the most outrageous ellipsis ever inflicted on an ostensibly narrative movie. “Primer” is about the invention of a time machine and the Escher-job it does on the space-time continuum: specifically, the appearance of doppelgangers of Abe and Aaron, each with their own agendas (and their own set of time machines). Ultimately the movie defies synopsis – is designed, in fact, to deny synopsis. “What the hell is this thing?” is less a question for the thing than for “Primer” itself.

Mr. Carruth offers no explanation for the scenario, no back-story for the garage wonks, and no skeleton-key for their elaborate pseudo-science discourse; he simply plunges you into a woozy, proliferating headtrip in media res. He gives you a sharp scatter of fragments, pieces of a puzzle, footnotes to a thriller penned in the fourth dimension. We don’t quite know the rules of the game, but we can feel them operating with integrity.

“Primer” plays like a Super 16mm analogue to Duchamp’s “Large Glass”; the viewer isn’t meant to decode the meaning, but to interact with a fascinating opacity, to groove on the push-pull pleasure of interpretation. An exhaustive explanation of “Primer” would sound as silly as any academic deconstruction of Duchamp’s erotic machinery and be just as irrelevant to the experience.

A nonsense thriller that makes perfect sense, “Primer” is the most audacious genre film of the year, a minor masterpiece of WTF cinema.

– Nathan Lee

AROUND THE BEND

R, 85 mins.

‘Around the Bend” is a reasonably effective father-son reconciliation drama, and those with a soft spot for films like “It Runs in the Family,” “Big Fish,” and “Secondhand Lions” should stock up on the two-ply beforehand. The beats here are familiar: Generations clash mightily but understanding and reconciliation (often in the form of bear hugs) come by the end, usually accompanied by a death.

Christopher Walken, admirably restraining his inner space alien, plays Turner Lair, the deadbeat dad. He shows up one day at the house his grown son Jason (Josh Lucas), a bank clerk, shares with Turner’s ailing father Henry (Michael Caine). After Henry dies, his will instructs the others, including Jason’s young son Zach (Jonah Bobo), to drive his ashes across the Southwest, scattering them at various locales. The rest of the film could probably have been generated by a computer program.

When “Around the Bend” works, it is because of the uncommon conviction Mr. Walken brings to his part. This fine actor, once a shining light of his generation (he won an Oscar for “The Deer Hunter”), too often phones in weirdo parts in forgettable tripe like “The Rundown,” “Gigli,” and “Kangaroo Jack.” His nuanced work here lives up to the promise of his early years.

– Bilge Ebiri

ANDROMEDIA

unrated, 108 mins.

At first glance, one is tempted to make excuses for “Andromedia,” Takashi Miike’s 1998 sci-fi adventure featuring, among others, the Japanese all-girl pop group Speed. Mr. Miike has, after all, signed his name to some of the strangest movies of our time – from the romantic-comedy-cum-grisly-serial-killer-thriller “Audition” to the bizarro musical “The Happiness of the Katakuris.” Surely, if anyone can mine the bland wasteland of family-friendly techno thrillers for irreverent humor, it’s Mr. Miike.

Don’t count on it. “Andromedia” does have a sense of humor, but it’s an annoyingly square, humdrum one, resembling Hollywood children’s adventures more than the nightmarishly inventive genre bending pranks on which the director built his reputation.

Mai (Hiroko Shimabukuro), a teenager dealing with the travails of growing up and discovering romance, gets run over by a truck (don’t get excited – Mr. Miike plays it frustratingly straight). So her scientist inventor father loads her memory onto a computer, creating an artificially intelligent version of Mai (called, appropriately enough, Ai). When armed corporate thugs come after Dad, he uploads Mai/Ai onto a laptop belonging to her distraught boyfriend, Yu (Kenji Harada). The baddies then proceed to chase Yu and Ai. It’s like “Videodrome” meets “Short Circuit.”

Perhaps it’s unfair to expect too much from a predictable trifle such as this. But the only reason the film is seeing the light of day here is the Miike imprimatur, and anyone familiar with his work will gape in disbelief.

– Bilge Ebiri

RAISE YOUR VOICE

PG, 103 mins.

While there are teenagers in the world who pray and don’t drink, they rarely show up in garden-variety coming-of-age flicks. But they do make an appearance in “Raise Your Voice,” starring Hilary Duff. In this sense, the film is a welcome departure from most similar productions. But otherwise “Raise Your Voice” is a pretty much formulaic teen movie.

Ms. Duff plays the happy, friendly, and vocally talented Terri Fletcher. This character is so good and pure that she sweetly tosses out goober lines with an enormous smile: “Call me a dork, but I love choir practice!”

Family tension erupts over Terri’s application to the summer program at a famous conservatory in Los Angeles. Her provincial, overprotective dad (David Keith) refuses to consider it, but her brother Paul (Jason Ritter) sends in a DVD demo anyway. After Paul is killed by a drunk driver, Terri doesn’t want to sing anymore, but when she gets into the summer program her downtrodden mother (Rita Wilson) and groovy artist aunt (Rebecca De Mornay) motivate her and manage to get around Pops.

Ms. Duff spends a lot of time crying in this film, and even more time soul-searching, especially as she struggles to make friends. With the help of a cute British boy (Oliver James), she finds her place in the social landscape and participates in the big finale talent show – where the ghost of “Dirty Dancing” rears its head.

“Raise Your Voice” has its share of cornball moments. But the cheesiness is balanced by an honest portrayal of a family in crisis: The aftermath of Paul’s death is handled succinctly, and it reverberates throughout the film. The film’s references to religion are connected to the brother, who wore a Celtic cross that Terri then adopts and feels comforted by. At a time when she needs to find strength to get over his death, Terri winds up outside a church and stops in to pray. Moments like this make “Raise Your Voice” a teen movie with heart – and a sense of reality.

– Pia Catton

VODKA LEMON

unrated, 90 mins.

With Chekhovian languor, Hamo (Romen Avinian), a penniless Armenian patriarch, sits in his living room, where the Soviet-era arabesque wallpaper is peeling off, wearing his winter coat. His drunkard son and grandchildren drink vodka or tea from glasses with silver handles. Through the window is a landscape of the sort you might expect to wake up to on the Trans-Siberian railroad: snow all the way to the horizon, trees, darkness, and absolute quiet.

Many films coming out of the former Soviet republics tell a similar tale: the decay of the apartment buildings, the lines of babushki selling off household goods, the checks from family members abroad, the nostalgia. Director Hiner Saleem struggles to make the scenario quaint, dressing it up with goofy accordion music, silly antics, and superficially absurdist humor. The result isn’t quite sublime.

Hamo meets a robust widow, Nina (Lala Sarkissian), at a cemetery. She enlists his help in dragging her out-of-tune piano to market. (Hamo, strong as an ox, makes a habit of dragging things to market.) But halfway there they stop and sit on the bench, mountains all around them. A lone passerby stops and asks if they are selling or buying. Hamo says they are not selling. They fall in love.

This isn’t the only love story. An ethnographic series ensues in the scene of Hamo’s granddaughter, Avin’s, wedding.

The beautiful, black-haired, red cheeked girl (played by Astrik Avaguiam) sits in a white gown with a puffy red veil beside her husband, facing a long table of well-wishers. Her father shoots the girl’s husband in a dispute over her dowry, but the newlyweds depart soon thereafter, nevertheless, for Novosibirsk. Nina, then, joins Hamo in the living room.

– Johanna Conterio

THE HILLSIDE STRANGLER

R, 85 mins.

Chuck Parello directed the failed, direct-to-video sequel to “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.” With “The Hillside Strangler,” he has taken another run at similar material and come up with something completely devoid of style and atmosphere.

The film, which recalls the true story of cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, stars C. Thomas Howell (channeling Steve Buscemi) as the loser Bianchi, who moves out to California from New York, to start his life over with his creep cousin Angelo (Nicholas Turturro). When their plan to kidnap young girls and force them to prostitute themselves sours, the pair start killing prostitutes to deal with their frustration.

The film tries to follow in the footsteps of the serial-killer benchmark “Henry,” but where that was a low-key, relatively subtle movie, this is exploitative – presented in an over-the-top, almost satirical manner. Vile stuff – not to mention an uninspired, unmitigated bore.

– Eddie Goldberger

THE CHILD I NEVER WAS

unrated, 83 mins.

T’ he Child I Never Was” is another serial-killer film based on fact. It concerns the childhood of German psychopath Jurgen Bartsch, a young man who indulged in sex with younger boys after he had already killed them.

The movie intercuts footage of an incarcerated Bartsch (Tobias Schenke) giving his confession with scenes of him as a teenager (Sebastian Urzendowsky) acting out his crimes. The opening 30 minutes provide intrigue and tension, as well as insight into Bartsch’s life as an unloved child abused by clergymen. But as a whole the film is episodic, tedious, and repetitive.

Once Bartsch’s crimes and character are fully established, the film presents the same situation and circumstances again and again. I imagine this would work better as a short.

– Eddie Goldberger