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Before veering off on her own, documentarian Nanette Burstein collaborated with Brett Morgen, best known for the Robert Evans doc The Kid Stays in the Picture (and the recent Chicago 10). In that film, rather than act as a corrective to Evans' grandiose ego, Kid helped reinflate it, offering up the fallen, shticky uber-producer for a whole new generation.

The four main subjects of Burstein's American Teen have little in common, on the surface, with Robert Evans. But they share a similar psychological temperament--egocentric, narrow-minded, prone to inflate the most mundane personal predicaments into cataclysmic events--which, as Morgen did in Kid, Burstein happily offers up, sans judgment or even agency.

Burstein spent a year in super-bland Warsaw, Ind.--"mostly white, mostly Christian and red-state all the way." She stays close to a central quartet of broad high school types: sensitive artist Hannah; super-nerd Jake; square-jawed jock Colin; and pretty, evil, popular girl Megan.

Throughout their final year of high school, the teens undergo circumstances both unique (to them) and familiar (to us). Hannah suffers a breakdown after her boyfriend abruptly calls it off. Megan plots and schemes and hangs out with her terrifyingly Stepfordish pals. Jake plays video games starring hot female characters. B-baller Colin has the most earthquaking conundrum--if he's not picked up by a college he'll wind up in the Army--though his stony, taciturn mien reduces some of our interest.

Does Burstein--whose boxing doc On the Ropes (made with Morgen) was a beaut--stir this standard high school business into a unique treat? Not really. Aesthetically it's in the MTV/VH1 vein, distinguishable from The Hills only in that it's refreshingly egalitarian. There's little doubt Burstein was a Hannah herself in high school, but she extends the same shoulder to all, whether they're pimply and nervous (Jake) or spray-painting the word "fag" on a guy's house in petty retaliation (Megan).

Much like its title, American Teen is on the generic side, but that's partly the point: It wants to bottle up that moment when people still fall into broad types, before whatever happens after high school puts them into more specific groups. Still, it's hard to get too worked up about a film, doc or no, that goes out of its way not to offer any insights--or, for that matter, anything you haven't seen on cable the night before.

Bottle Shock
Directed by Randall Miller
C-
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Wed., Aug. 6

Sure, you love Sideways, but do you know the long and mildly interesting story about how the Napa Valley first made its name in the wine world? It happened in 1976 at the "Judgment of Paris" when a Chardonnay from then-unestablished California trounced local vins in a tr�s snooty blind taste test. Oenophiles consider this a triumphant event.

Now this West Coast victory has become a sort of Sideways sequel--only this time the neuroses of its characters don't overwhelm the inside baseball shenanigans. In Bottle Shock a sprawling cast reenacts the creation of that winning vintage without an interesting personality among them.

Soon to become the 21st century's Capt. Kirk, Chris Pine channels Brad Pitt (when he was younger and way more into Method acting) as the wastrel hippie son of Bill Pullman, a former lawyer who dropped his profession to tend to his vast grape fields. Frustrated Parisian wine shop owner Alan Rickman drops by Pullman's winery and becomes so bewitched that he returns home with a couple bottles, seeking to submit the wine in the competition it eventually wins.

As helmed by Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School director Randall Miller, Bottle Shock is a longwinded, wildly uninvolving film, whose occasional stranger-than-fiction moments are undermined by banal subplots and who-gives-a-shit digressions.

Pine, you see, is a young man of privilege who needs to get his act together (i.e., trim those hippie locks) or Pullman will kick him out. Pullman, meanwhile, is a stubborn, stick-up-his-butt type who can always be counted on to make irrational, idiotic decisions to make the plot move in certain directions.

Rickman does his best to inject some jolts of Alan Rickman-ness, and Dennis Farina, as Rickman's partner, provides some yuks with his '70s pompadour. But were Bottle Shock a wine, it'd be described as vinegary, with a rancid aftertaste.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe
Directed by Chris Carter
D
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Now showing

It's been six years since the television series slumped off screens in shame, and probably at least twice as long since The X-Files felt like it mattered, but here we go again, whether you asked for it or not. David Duchovny's Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson's Dana Scully are dragged out of seclusion for a morose, low-stakes slog that owes more to our current network forensic procedurals than to the duo's previous paranoid adventures.

Mulder and Scully's prior big-screen cash-in, 1998's Fight the Future, was hobbled by the convolutions of creator Chris Carter's alien colonization plot, but at least it was a bona fide movie, boasting big-budget production values, varied locations and Rob Bowman's muscular direction. By contrast, I Want to Believe is astoundingly cheap-looking and glacially paced. Carter himself takes the helm this time around, sticking with the same three or four cramped, ugly Vancouver sets, painfully unable to wring even the slightest bit of suspense from his nonsensical premise.

So there's this gay Russian veterinarian who lives in the woods, where he kidnaps and mutilates young women because he needs their body parts in order to keep his husband's severed head alive inside a lab. The only clues the FBI can muster are the deranged visions of a psychic pedophile priest, overplayed here by the horrid Billy Connolly. I guess when your new top agents are ditzy Amanda Peet (bearing the porntastic name "Dakota Whitney") and ride-pimper Xzibit, the Bureau's no longer in any position to be wary of rogues like Mulder and Scully.

So sloppily written (by Carter and Frank Spotnitz) that it takes almost an hour for us to figure out that our heroes are now living together, I Want to Believe squanders a decade's worth of flinty sexual tension, devolving into a series of long-winded arguments by a boring old couple who don't seem to like each other very much anymore. Duchovny mumbles monotone monologues without a hint of his former wit, while Anderson--who's grown only more strikingly beautiful over the years--appears annoyed to still be having the same debate about faith vs. science with this kook.