With a dry spell of linkables, here are notes on recent releases, including Manderlay, Marebito, Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story; Nightwatch; and Neil Young: Heart of Gold, as well as the loathsome London and the low Dirty Work.

Manderlay (**) That Lars Trier is such a scamp. Manderlay, an adaptation of Pauline Reage’s sadomasochistic surmise “The Story of O” set in a Depression-era southern backwater where slavery has persisted 75 years after the end of the Civil War, is the second installment of his stage-bound “USA” trilogy (which Trier says he’s now abandoned). Taking over the role of Grace from Nicole Kidman, who played her in Dogville, Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village) enunciates Trier’s otherworldly English with the practiced disdain of a haughty, vain schoolmarm as played in a junior high recital. (To be fair to what gifts Trier allows her to display, the pale Ms. Howard does display a lovely russet bush during the explicit Mandingo-styled interracial sex scene.) John Hurt has fun with the racially charged narration, which hurts the ear more than the heart, and Trier reprises David Bowie’s “Young Americans” for a closing montage of lynching, murder and degradation of African Americans. With Lauren Bacall, Isaach de Bankole and Danny Glover. 139m.
Night Watch (***) (Nochnoy Dozor, 2004) Convoluted, grimy, gruesome, Gothic, Slavic, giddy humbug, Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch was a massive hit on its Russian turf, with a sequel in the works and a third, shot-in-English installment rumored. Moscow’s a marvelous backdrop for Bekmambetov’s relentless camera hijinks—post-Jeunet, post-Fincher, mid-Wachowski and post-Lord of the Rings—and the otherworldliness of its vampires of day and night evoke a Russian culture both medieval and post-modern, derivative of every visual culture keen on big-budget eyeball kicks, along with an occasional dollop of Eisensteinian battle. The plot is seldom decipherable, but boils down to a battle for the soul of a boy born in 1992 at the fall of the Soviet Empire. The American subtitles are also post-Tony Scott, drawing from the playfulness of his Man of Fire verbiage with the kind of play—letters jumping, jittering, turning red, melting away in inky, smoky spirals—seldom seen since silent picture intertitles. “Just what we need,” a character says knowingly, “Another asshole with visions of the future.” (A Chicago reviewer read the movie as “pro-life propaganda” without considering how different the Russian culture is from that of the U.S. or South Dakota.) 114m.
Tristram Shandy (*** ½) Earlier this month, director Michael Winterbottom debuted The Road to Guantanamo at the Berlin Film Festival; the restless director has several more gun-and-run productions in the works. His prolific output makes a clever lark like Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story almost antique, despite only having debuted at film festivals in the fall just as Winterbottom’s rock-porn short feature 9 Songs was in American theaters. There’s something both obtuse and grand about the stuff he’s putting out. Like Steven Soderbergh, antoher filmmaker in his early forties, Winterbottom seems to want to produce as much as he can so long as his energy and finance hold out. Riffing outward from Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel, “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” which a character in the movie calls “a masterwork of postmodernism before there was any modernism to be post,” Winterbottom and his customary screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (writing as “Martin Hardy,” a near-anagram for “Tristram Shandy” ) draw on Winterbottom’s toher semi-pseudodocumentary successes like 24 Hour Party People to satirize the notion of adaptation, but also filmmaking and film love and big fat egos. Among the many delights are Steve Coogan playing “Steve Coogan,” a petty, vulgar, detestable ego-moron of an actooooor who perfectly suits Sterne’s comedy. There’s also “Coogan”’s flirtation with a young production assistant (who’s actually read the book) that may the first on-screen meet-cute-let’s-fuck steeped in an invocation of the battle scenes in Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac. (The actress’ name is Naomie Harris, and I could listen to her character rant for hours.) This is one attractive, feature-length wink. With a cooing, coosome Kelly MacDonald, Ian Hart of the magnificent ears, Rob Brydon and Gillian Anderson as “Gillian Anderson.” 94m.
Neil Young: Heart of Gold (*** 1/2) Gentle, intimate and elegant, Jonathan Demme’s homespun Neil Young: Heart of Gold is the height of understatement and the depth of heart. Shooting a two-day engagement at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, working with small Super 16mm cameras, Demme’s earthy images emphasize the quiet moments between Young and his family of on-stage musical collaborators. (The final number, an unbroken take of Young on acoustic guitar by himself, is a heart-breaker and one of the best things Demme’s ever done.) Many of the songs are from his current album, written and recorded across several days before an aneurysm operation last year. Wise and tender are not the only notes: there are spirited. Young’s dozens of collaborators on the shows include his wife, Pegi, Hank Williams’ guitar, and Emmylou Harris, whose stoic features and shoulder-length grey hair are a vision of immense beauty, and in a duet with Young, in a broad-brimmed pale straw hat and wrinkled linen suit, the pair don’t make a couple, but aren’t they a pair of swells? And Young’s voice into his sixties, this unique Manitoba white soul, singing lines like “I just want to thank you for all the things you’ve done, I was just thinking of you.” No banality, only truth, only wisdom and love. (The battered varnish of Williams’ guitar is another image that lasts.) 97m.
London (*) A flashy-splashy pop-music-spiked widescreen drugs-in-New-York-City exploitationer, the off-off-Broadway talkathon London (the name of Jessica Biel’s elusive title character, not another city) is set at a going-away party in a billionaire-scaled Manhattan loft, but most of the story takes place in recurrent drug-and-skull sessions in an upstairs toilet. Syd (Chris Evans) is a baseball cap and goatee-bearing turd who could never tell his ex that he loved her and now she’s skipping town, boo-hoo. After wrecking his very large, dirty loft earlier in the day, Syd encounters the non-Bret Easton Ellis “Bateman” (a game Jason Statham without direction, but with a tidy, dark hairpiece), a drug trafficker who joins him in a night of blow and gab amid other loft-living partygoing drug abusers. ”I’ve just come out of the most psychotic therapy session I’ve fucking had in years, I was going to smack some cunt for a taxi, I don’t know if I’m really ready for this shit,” Bateman explains. The hostess, played by Wedding Crashers Isla Fisher, notes in an Aussie-English accent of our protagonist, “He’s fucking touching my Buddha’s head… He’s a fuckin’ cocksuckah.” The line, “So how is this shit? Pretty good?” does not have a pretty answer. Hunter Richards’ writing-directing debut also features Kelli Garner, Leelee Sobieski, and Dane Cook as “Cockblocker.” (Casting director Bonnie Timmerman is credited as co-producer.) 92m.
Marebito (** ½) (The Stranger from Afar) Chicago Mayor-for-Life Richard Daley likes to watch. Snug behind his cocoons and cul-de-sacs of security and seclusion, he’s announced in the past week that he’d like to make the Second City first in surveillance, eradicating any notion of privacy in public space. For whatever rationale, which likely will never been fully articulated, the swaddled, ever-watched politician finds no folly in the same fate being handed down to us all. One of the most vital recent blips of horror at the idea of the unblinking eye is Takashi Shimizu’s 2004 Marebito, shot by the director of all the Grudge movies (and a protégé of Kiyoshi Kurosawa) in eight days with consumer-level video equipment. A cameraman who lives in a nest of wires and video equipment, obsessed with idea of fear records a suicide in Tokyo’s subway system, with a bleak, ghastly succession of secrets to be revealed. It’s creepy bosh, for the most part, but Shimizu remains more clever than most people obsessed with the act of staring at one’s fellow (wo)man. Tetsuo director Shinya Tsukamoto stars as the haunted cameraman. 94m.
Dirty Work (0) A disaster in every conceivable respect, the made-in-Chicago Dirty Work (2004) is appalling, subliterate trash. Dirty Work is built upon the kind of numb, meretricious plotting that goes from A, gets scared at the sight of B and scurries back in vulgar haste to A. The feature debut of director-co-writer Bruce Terris suggests Chicago as a crude backwater—not for its inauthentic storytelling but for what it suggests about the possibility of having a sustainable film culture in this city. It’s yet another Chicago production that attempts the grittiness of genre with little flavor but a lot of odor. Composition, tempo, literary qualities, resemblance of real-life motivation or even plausible behavior? Nope. Every woman’s a drunk or a whore, every man a crook or a fraud. Lance Reddick (“The Wire”) stars as a chrome-dome, whore-mongering cop-on-the-take, spouting bromides petulantly to his more petulant daughter along the inspired lines of “He’s a pohnk!” Ed Burns stalwart Mike McGlone plays an assistant states attorney up for election; his “fuck”-obsessed alcoholic wife badgers him until he strangles her—“You fucking lush! You fucking bitch!”—and a cover-up ensues along with bizarre badinage from an unlikely gang boss played by wee Austin Pendleton, who, for his twee efforts, gets two topless sex scenes. There’s also a young Polish woman who, implausibly, cannot find a single person in Chicago’s Polish community to help her when she gets in trouble, played by Georgian Nutsa Kukhianidze, who was a small sprite in Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief but an object of contempt and punishment here. (“It’s hard for a beautiful young girl these days,” she’s told. “I wish I no go to party,” she says.) What’s the dialogue like? “Oh, don’t forget you have to call the governor later” is the wise counsel afforded McGlone by his campaign brain. “I’ll kill you, you fucking bitch, you fucking bitch!” Or as a hood mutters of a deserted cafe, “It better come soon or he’s going to have to torch this motherfucker.” (“What?!” may be the most repeated line, as if the actors could not believe what they are being asked to do.) Various Chicago theater regulars have embarrassing turns, including Rich Komenich, Larry Neumann, Jr. and Mike Nussbaum. One hopes they at least got a hot lunch. There are unfortunate resemblances to the execrable Lana’s Rain, with similar plotting and ploddingness about the torture and potential slaughter of Eastern European women; Terris, who has also directed short films, was first assistant director and second unit director of that crummy 2000 Chicago production. The night exteriors under Chicago’s characteristic sodium vapor light are muzzy as if shot through peach Charmin. The original score credited to Mark Messing and Benn Jordan is attractive but inappropriate. 97m.

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