13 TZAMETI
Unrated, 93 minutes

“13 Tzameti” is structured around a simple conceit: In a large house in the middle of the French countryside, a group of brutish men with black briefcases stuffed with Euros gather to wager on a game of high-stakes Russian roulette. Once the bets have been placed, 13 contestants, their nerves frayed by fear and morphine, stand in a circle, each pointing a six-chamber revolver into the back of the head before him. A light bulb is lit; the guns fire. Several contestants fall listlessly to the ground, while the others breathe tortured sighs of relief, having survived until the next round.

Into this hellish house steps Sebastien, the hard-working 22-year-old son of Georgian immigrants, who knows only that he may have found an opportunity for a little easy money. Learning what this will require, he tries to escape, but instead is forced at gunpoint to be contestant number 13. Not surprisingly, he discovers a bit of beginner’s luck, survives round after round, and, winning the final duel, walks away with the sack of cash he came for. But victory comes with a price. Sebastien’s initiation into this allmale cult of blood and money leaves him stumbling from the house into the dark woods, no longer an unmarked boy.

This film is billed as a thriller, and though it has a few hair-raising moments, it’s too predictable to allow for the sustained tension necessary for genuine suspense. A second problem is the lack of convincing acting, which can make it hard to buy into the desperate fear and moral depravity that is supposed to motivate the characters.

And yet, despite these flaws, there is an obvious reason why this debut feature by the 26-year-old Georgian filmmaker Gela Babluani has won awards at Venice (Best First Feature Film 2005) and Sundance (Grand Jury Prize World Cinema 2006): “13 Tzameti” is a film with considerable style. From its opening shot, in which the young Sebastien pushes a wheelbarrow with several long ladders roped to it (he is a roof tiler), the director introduces you to a strange alternative universe poised somewhere between the past and present. The film successfully plays on this tension throughout, fusing a contemporary fascination with violence and greed to an aesthetic sensibility that recalls the silent-film era.

Shot entirely in black-and-white, the film uses deft camera work and carefully crafted minimal sets. Its visual sensitivity extends to the characters’ faces, with slavishly unshorn cheeks, glassy eyes, and severe widow’s peaks communicating more than the acting or the dialogue. The result is a memorable picture at once bleak and beautiful, which stands as a promising introduction to an exciting young filmmaker.

– David Grosz

BROTHERS OF THE HEAD
R, 90 minutes

What to make of the faux documentary “Brothers of the Head”? Not light, for starters. The film takes a bizarre, improbable premise — a pair of conjoined twins make a bid at rock and roll fame — and runs with it, beyond the shallows of the Farrelly-brothers’ frolics and the metaphorical moorings of David Cronenberg’s delightfully creepy “Dead Ringers” and into risky waters: a serious, literal consideration of two lives (or is it one?) as they were really lived.

Except they weren’t. That is to say, the film’s subjects — Tom and Barry Howe (Luke and Harry Treadaway), a literally attached-at-the-hip adolescent duo that enjoyed brief cult status before becoming casualties of drugs and their destructive codependency — were born and raised in the brain of the novelist Brian Aldiss.

The plot elements that were announced to him on that occasion, however, are secondary to the directors, Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton. The film masquerades as a rockumentary about two brothers, but its real target is the limitations and glib pretensions of the biographical form. The twins shift abruptly from open conflict to intimate communion, and the secretive stares they direct at the camera suggest some sort of primal riddle. In short, they completely elude our comprehension.

Some of the impressionistic sequences — the “footage” of the band’s concerts in all their loud, sweaty madness and an evocative swan song of pre-lingual murmurings laid over images of the twins’ native English coast — are memorable, but the viewer ends up stranded in mystification. The film never fully detaches itself from the Twins’ birth defect, and can only follow them so far.

– Darrell Hartman

JOHN TUCKER MUST DIE
PG-13, 87 minutes

Arriving certifiably pre-hated, “John Tucker Must Die” is one of the better teen comedies to come along in a while, and I can only figure that all the animosity it’s earning online and in the press is because everyone’s jealous of the cast’s supernaturally perfect skin. Scrubbed hard and sundried, these kids all hail from “One Tree Hill,” “Gilmore Girls,” and “American Dreams,” and they look like they were grown in some secret WB Network lab.

Kate (Brittany Snow) is a social zero at high school. In a set-up swiped from the Hilary Duff vehicle “The Perfect Man,” her horndog mom (Jenny McCarthy) speeddates a succession of losers and then escapes to a new town every time the onenight-Romeos blow up in her face. Kate and Mom finally arrive in the realm of John Tucker, a white boy basketball hero who has the females of the student body eating out of his hands — and who has three different gals all thinking they’re his one and only. When they find out he’s playing the field, they inexplicably team up with Kate to plan their revenge.

Director Betty Thomas (“The Brady Bunch Movie”) deploys crisp slapstick and a quiver of snarky one-liners to keep this predictable flick jumping along. The script piles plot twist on plot twist and finally paints itself into a corner that no last-minute revelation can undo. Just as the story looks ready to burst, it breaks down completely and the characters have a food fight. Cut to the last scene and everyone is friends again. It’s a bizarre ending, but one that perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the film: a capable teen comedy that gets you out of the heat and into the air conditioning for 90 minutes, so why take it seriously?

– Grady Hendrix

I LIKE KILLING FLIES
R, 79 minutes

Recipes and opinions pour forth in equal measure from the eponymous eatery chefowner Kenny Shopsin, a true cult figure of old New York and the subject of the documentary “I Like Killing Flies.” The director Matt Mahurin’s no-frills portrait, which opens today at Cinema Village, records the profane wisdom and cockeyed principles of Mr. Shopsin amid the bustle of his holein-the-wall kingdom. It’s like a visit to the notoriously fickle proprietor’s restaurant, except you can’t get kicked out.

“I Like Killing Flies” finds Mr. Shopsin philosophizing in the eatery’s last days at the corner of Bedford and Morton in the Village. As so often, the end of an era is caused by the end of a lease, but the impending relocation is not played for cheap suspense. The real surprise is wondering what will tumble out of Mr. Shopsin’s mouth next, and how much sense he actually does make.

Take his off-the-cuff treatise on American foreign policy in an age of asymmetrical warfare, sneakily explained in terms of fly-swatting. Or his use of the existentialist Japanese film “Woman in the Dunes” to describe his short-order life.

Most of this occurs in the custom-built kitchen where the husky Mr. Shopsin moves with rough-and-tumble grace (and curses), with a flip of the flapjacks here, a backhanded pour of cream there.

Mr. Mahurin’s methods are commensurate, his hand often visible holding out a tie-pin microphone. It’s not pretty to look at, nor is Mr. Shopsin always particularly lovable (especially around his family, who have adapted to his ways). But insights like his refreshingly dirty-minded take on intermingling cuisines make him easily worth this movie’s mealtime length.

– Nicolas Rapold

ANOTHER GAY MOVIE
Unrated, 90 minutes

“Spoof” doesn’t quite capture what “Another Gay Movie” is up to. The story of four horny teens trying to lose their virginity hits all the marks of the genre, but everyone acts in a guilelessly upbeat manner as if it all were being done for the first time. In a sense, it is, by queering “American Pie” in a new milieu of gay-scene stereotypes. Director Todd Stephens’s comedy, opening today at the Quad Cinema, amounts to a curious combination of the self-conscious and the unself-conscious, even in the depths of silliness.

The occasionally clever updates to its hetero counterpart accompany faithfully broad humor not to all tastes. Fresh-faced Andy (Michael Carbonaro), jock Jarod (Jonathan Chase), Harold Lloyd-like nerd Griff (Mitch Morris), and oddball Nico (Jonah Blechman) throw themselves into a gauntlet of embarrassments in pursuing their pre-graduation hook-ups. Some are gross-out (e.g., overenthusiastic enemas), others goofy (an S/M misadventure with a monstrous phallus), but most rely on the appeal of the four leads, made up to be adorable as their highly stylized types.

The movie is weakly written, though, and most of its appeal lies in references and hormonal haze. Mr. Stephens leans on a breakneck pace. Celebrities of various ranks also show up, including Brit talk-show host Graham Norton, Lypsinka as Andy’s mom, and, bizarrely, Richard Hatch as Nico’s disastrous date. Even Scott Thompson, as Andy’s square dad, tepidly revives his clueless routine from “the Kids in the Hall.”

It’s hard to knock the effort entirely, especially when it’s so unpretentious. The sexual gusto of this unrated movie is an amusingly explicit variation on the titillation of mainstream comedies. But despite the clever and intriguing premise, “Another Gay Movie” really just needs more laughs and a willingness to shed the lazier aspects of its sources.

– N.R.