LUNACY
Unrated, 118 minutes

The recent crop of animated summer movies gets a super new friend with the premiere of Jan Svankmajer’s “Lunacy.” The silly CGI cows of “Barnyard” and the wise digital ants of “The Ant Bully” will run screaming in horror from this flick’s gaggle of animated pig brains, eyeballs, meat marionettes, and cow tongues that slither, slurp, and hop across the screen. In a summer of braindead blockbusters, Slovakia’s master animator has turned in a double-barreled blast of Euro-cult outrageousness.

A potent cocktail distilled from the blended essences of Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade, “Lunacy” follows Jean, plodding home from his mother’s funeral in live action and meeting “the Marquis” in a local inn. A pervert living in an isolated castle who’s prone to throwing amiably blasphemous rituals, the Marquis seems a lot more interesting than the dwarves and grizzled field hands who make up the rest of the population, so Jean decides to be his guest for a few days. This is, needless to say, a bad idea. Meanwhile, the live action film cuts to animated sequences of cuts of meat doing an eminently watchable herky-jerky dance whenever things slow down.

“Lunacy” is a notable entry in an entire genre of movies spawned by Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether,” a genre that includes 1971’s “Mansion of Madness” and 1979’s “The Ninth Configuration.” Poe’s story established the literary idea of the inmates taking over the asylum and here it’s leavened with a dash of “Quills” and a pinch of Peter Weiss’s “Marat/Sade.” But the final result, with its carriages clip-clopping down busy interstate highways, its insane raw meat ballets, and its fevered political meditation on regimented totalitarianism vs. anarchic democracy, marks this movie as 100% Svankmajer.

— Grady Hendrix

SATELLITE
Unrated, 100 minutes

In this precious independent romance, Ro (Stephanie Szostak) meets Kevin (Karl Geary) when she follows him home from the subway one night. Both are trapped in the rat race and both are lonely and cute, so they sit on a rooftop and muse about the stars, satellites, and the speed of the earth’s rotation, and then hop right into bed. After two days of scrumping, they vow to be completely honest and to do what they want to do instead of what’s expected of them. In short order they push each other into quitting their jobs; they learn Spanish, hang out in diners, and take photographs of children on playgrounds. Fortunately, when money runs low they turn to crime. Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of crime that’s interesting to watch. And that’s the problem with “Satellite”: It’s not badly made, but it’s as tastefully quirky as an American Apparel T-shirt.

The early scenes of 20-something New York living are well observed but within minutes this has become a fantasy of what college students think life will be like, rather than what life is like. With their winsome expressions and limpid eyes, Kevin and Ro are the baby seals of the movie screen — so cute they need to be clubbed. Director and writer Jeff Winner has made one of those rare lowbudget digital video movies that actually looks good, and his actors turn in lowkey, realistic performances, but the guiding intelligence behind his movie is the kind you hear in a Williamsburg diner on a Sunday afternoon, and when it reaches its logical conclusion you’ll want to bang your head against a wall. If this is the voice of the new generation then I’d like to kindly ask it to shut up.

— G.H.

THE TROUBLE WITH MEN AND WOMEN
Unrated, 80 minutes

Boy loses girl. Boy is back on the market. Some films whisk this basic scenario into interesting territory; most simply take it around the block. “The Trouble With Men and Women,” which was released in its native UK in 2003, may be the first one that doesn’t even manage to get it out the door. In fact, this bland chronicle of a young Briton’s efforts to find love never really makes it past the snooze button.

The hero (Joseph McFadden) is a long-lashed, unassuming Tweedledee named Matt whose ex has fled to New York, citing his general lack of ambition. “I’ve got more than ambition,” he whines. “I’ve got dreams.” (He also has a job at an Internet café.) Matt deserves our sympathy, the film presumes, because he is that rare breed: a true romantic. He doesn’t just serve coffee during the day, he thinks about things. He envisions backpacking in Thailand.

Everyone else’s attitude toward coupling is that it’s jolly good fun, but Matt thinks it’s something more. It is a testament to his innocence that he is helpless when it comes to seducing women. And yet fate — or rather, director and screenwriter Tony Fisher — sends a steady supply of them into his bedroom, including a lovely, sophisticated Frenchwoman Karine Adrover) briefly charmed by Matt’s sweetness and utter lack of guile.

But the viewer suspects, as the viewer often does in such cases, that the perfect female (Kate Ashfield) has been under the hero’s nose all along. The viewer will have to hold his horses, however, because there is a whole lot of chatting to be done first. “Trouble” is one of those talky films that never warms up to its subject — in this case relationships — but merely surrounds it with hot air.

— Darrell Hartman