Philadelphia Weekly

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Everybody loves Ludivine Sagnier, that golden-tressed muse of director Fran�ois Ozon and object of many an art-house dweller's fantasies thanks to her revealing turn in 2003's hit Swimming Pool. The tireless 78-year-old former French New Waver Claude Chabrol playfully uses Sagnier's "it"-girl status as the starting point for another of his sinister excursions into the icy double-dealings of the bourgeoisie.

Sagnier stars as Gabrielle Snow, an ironically named weathergirl torn between two lovers. First she's the mistress of legendary novelist Charles Saint Denis (Fran�ois Berl�and), a seemingly stuffy literary icon with a secret yen for underground sex clubs and underage women. Seduced by his wealth and taste, girlish Gabrielle ignores all the obvious warning signs. When slimy Charles at first pushes her away, it's actually a brief bout of conscience--he's simply trying to protect the poor kid from himself.

Her other suitor is even less appealing. Paul Gaudens, the ridiculously rich heir to a chemical fortune, is played by The Piano Teacher's Benoit Magimel. The sickest joke Chabrol plays here is that for all the money, power and lavish extravagances conspicuously displayed in every burnished frame, these miserable sods only ever seem to want whatever they can't have.

Chabrol slowly eases his way into this sordid saga, parceling out crucial plot points strictly on a need-to-know basis. Relying mainly on menacing glances and abrupt narrative ellipses, he keeps such rigid formal control of the material that for most of its running time A Girl Cut in Two feels more momentous than such a tawdry tale has any right to.

It's a bit distant overall, leaning heavily on Sagnier's uncanny, instinctive rapport with the camera to fill in a character who starts out beautifully empty and only retreats deeper into abstraction. Magimel is a peacock of posturing and pouts, overplaying the deep-seated feelings of inadequacy that drive this hothead over the edge. It's Bereland you'll remember most, though, his exquisite manners and sophistication beckoning toward bedroom doors behind which the movie dares not venture.

For the extraordinary second season of his BBC television series Extras, Ricky Gervais cast himself as a struggling comic who traded his integrity for superstardom on a ghastly audience-pandering sitcom called When the Whistle Blows. An exquisitely painful cautionary tale, the show soared into the comedic stratosphere when David Bowie popped up to serenade Gervais with an impromptu composition about "the sad little fat man who sold his dreams."

David Koepp's Ghost Town isn't quite as awful as When the Whistle Blows, but it's incredibly dispiriting nonetheless to see a talent like Gervais headlining such Hollywood slop.

Koepp is Hollywood's go-to fix-it screenwriter for every troubled big-budget production plagued with multiple drafts of conflicting scripts from various writers. Whether we're talking Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man or the most recent Indiana Jones flick, Koepp can always be counted on to synthesize it into something filmable at the last minute. Fitting, then, that his latest directorial effort is a mishmash of The Sixth Sense, Groundhog Day, Ghost, The Frighteners and at least a dozen more original movies.

Gervais stars as a grouchy dentist who discovers he can see dead people after he gets a botched colonoscopy. Led by Greg Kinnear's tuxedoed bore, this annoyingly needy gang of ghosts pleads with Gervais to settle their unfinished business upon this mortal coil. It's an exhausted setup, one that isn't even particularly interested in its own internal consistency. Trying to ignore the familiar stench of Spielberg's stinker Always, Kinnear convinces Gervais to bust up the remarriage plans of his neurotic, put-upon widow (T�a Leoni).

There's meager enjoyment to be sussed out from the star's obvious improvisations, mostly his inimitable habit of muttering further incriminating outbursts during an already embarrassing situation. Leoni is much less obnoxious than usual, and on the rare occasions Koepp leaves well enough alone, the two are able to relax into an unforced chemistry that's rare in romantic comedies. But dumb plot demands don't leave much time for character work, and Ghost Town charges full speed ahead to its maudlin New Age finale.

It's hard not to leave the theater humming Bowie's tune about the "sad, little fat man."

With his scraggly hair, nose ring and penchant for shooting movies on stolen film stock, indie filmmaker Azazel Jacobs hardly resembles Matt Boren, the pudgy, sweet-looking star of his third feature Momma's Man. This wouldn't be an issue if the film didn't scream autobiography.

For one thing, Jacobs cast his own parents, Flo and Ken, as Boren's parents. For another, if the premise isn't a classic case of writing what one knows, I don't know what is. After crashing at the parental units' impossibly cramped Tribeca loft during a business trip, thirtysomething Boren returns after a purported flight delay and stays. And stays. And keeps on staying, long after his self-imposed internment has ceased being in any way healthy.

Jacobs, very wisely, never makes whatever's ailing him explicit; we see that he's a recent father, thanks to cutaways to his California abode and his harried and confused wife. But even those few cutaways--the film's only major missteps--feel too much like overexplanation. Whatever's eating Boren is so deep it would be cheapened by tearful monologues or Intro to Psych analyses.

It's clear, though, that it has something to do with shirking his responsibilities as an adult and hiding away in his childhood home, immersing himself in Garbage Pail Kid cards, comic books and angry songs he wrote in high school. He routinely tells his parents that everything is fine while fending off his aggressively caring mother, whose voice radiates pure worry.

Momma's Man traps us right alongside Boren and his increasingly agoraphobic existence at his parents. It's not clear how much Jacobs drew from his own life, but Momma's Man feels weirdly universal, and it deftly sustains a tone that's both hilarious and disturbing, particularly when Boren meets up with a crush he hasn't seen since sophomore year of high school.