The last days of a great comic duo

Stan & Ollie reveals Laurel and Hardy in a moment of decline.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were great comic movie stars who established themselves as a team during the late 1920s and remained active for almost two decades. Laurel, an Englishman, and Hardy, an American, became famous for beautifully sustained slapstick routines that revolved around the key attributes of each of their comic characters. The addled Stan played against the always exasperated Ollie.

Fortunately for my generation, Laurel and Hardy films outlasted the duo’s prime, becoming staples of 1950s television, at least where I grew up, New Jersey within reach of New York TV.

I'm not sure how the accepted wisdom evolved, but Laurel came to be recognized as the reigning genius of the comic duo, an obsessive thinker when it came to inventing routines and working out their intricacies. Laurel may have been the brains of the outfit, but for most of us, it's impossible to imagine Laurel without Hardy.

The movie Stan & Ollie pays fitting tribute to the comic duo, focusing on them mostly at the end of their careers. With their film opportunities radically diminished, Stan (Steve Coogan) and Ollie (John C. Reilly) travel to England. They hope to use stage appearances to polish their act while Stan seeks funding for a new movie.

The atmosphere surrounding the trip isn't exactly buoyant. Ollie's health is fragile and the two haven't worked together for a while.

It should come as no surprise to those familiar with any of the Trip movies starring Coogan and Rob Brydon that Coogan is an accomplished impressionist. He makes a fine Laurel, the muddled, incompetent on-screen comic whose calculations dominate his off-screen life. He always seems to be working on something.

Reilly delivers the movie's biggest surprise. Thanks to some prodigious make-up, Reilly has taken on Hardy's look and his overweight huffing. He also masters Hardy's signature moves: from fiddling with the ends of his tie to delivering some of Ollie's trademark lines about how the clueless Stan has landed him in "another fine mess."

Working from a screenplay by Jeff Pope, director John S. Baird sets most of the movie in various down-scale British theaters in 1953. It may not be the limelight, but the two carry on, and the actors make it clear that once the curtain rises, Stan and Ollie give even the smallest audiences their best.

Baird doesn't shrink from the sadness of the situation. Hardy feels the pain that he believes stems from not being loved by Stan. In this reading of the story, Stan loved the act more than he loved the man.

While waiting for news of their pending movie, Laurel and Hardy also await the arrival of their wives, played with deft comic touches by Nina Arianda and Shirley Henderson.

Despite some tension between Laurel and Hardy, the movie never develops a hard edge, perhaps because Baird tempers the film's melancholy with appropriate affection for two screen legends.

I'm fearful that younger audiences will not seek out the modestly made Stan & Ollie. That would be a shame because if they did, they'd probably hasten to YouTube, where they could discover the joys of Stan & Ollie's comedy and learn something about the fleeting nature of fame, even for those who scale the highest of movie heights.

The wild and strange west

The Sisters Brothers tells the story of hitmen siblings.

Some Westerns aim to uphold frontier mythology; others want to drag that mythology into the muddy grit of reality. And some don't necessarily want to do either. The Sisters Brothers seems to fit into that latter category; it's a strangely entertaining, slightly off-kilter take on the American West during a time of transition.

The Sisters Brothers (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly) are hitmen who work for a ruthless character known as the Commodore (Rutger Hauer). But these two gunmen are not like other gunfighters you've seen before. They're more brutal than slick and they banter and argue as only siblings can.

Based on a novel by Patrick deWitt, The Sister's Brothers takes French director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, Dheepan and The Prophet) to the northwestern US -- Oregon mostly -- to follow the twisted adventures of brothers who have developed a proud level of expertise in their chosen occupation.

Not surprisingly, the brothers aren't always on the same page. Brother Eli (Reilly) has grown weary of killing people. He longs for the tenderness of home and hearth. He wants to retire. Brother Charlie sees no reason to quit, so long as the Commodore keeps giving them lucrative assignments.

Perhaps to let us know that we're not about to take a customary Western ride, Audiard begins his movie with a gunfight that takes place in the dark. Flashes from fired weapons pop across the screen along with the deep-throated sound of firing revolvers. If you're interested in assigning meaning to this battle, it might have something to do with Charlie and Eli's aimlessness. They're acting out an old script, but they have no real vision about what they might be pursuing. They're dancing in the dark.

The story soon focuses on the task to which Charlie and Eli currently have been assigned. They're supposed to catch up with Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed) and torture him for reasons best discovered in a theater.

For their part, the brothers are task-specific; they've been hired to torture; it's not their job to locate the fleeing Warm. That task falls into the hands of John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) a detective whose impeccable diction couldn't seem more out of place in this environment.

As it turns out, Warm has a large agenda: He wants to found a harmonious, non-violent, egalitarian society in Dallas, Texas, and damn if Morris doesn't catch a bit of utopian fever himself.

The performances are marked by idiosyncratic fervor. Phoenix portrays Charlie as a drunk with a quick temper and a taste for life without regret. Reilly gives Eli a dogged quality with hints of unexpected tenderness. A shawl Eli carries with him serves as a kind of security blanket, a reminder that the comfort of a woman might exist somewhere, although it's probably somewhere where Eli isn't.

One of my favorite moments arrives when Charlie asks Eli why he insists on carrying around a scarf he purportedly was given by a woman. It's not a scarf insists Eli; it's a shawl. To him, the distinction means everything.

Audiard sets all this against the backdrop of the still-evolving west. At one point, Morris -- who keeps a diary -- notes that he's visiting settlements that didn't exist three months ago. In another signal of change, Charlie discovers the toothbrush, a device that he uses awkwardly. Think about it. How would you approach a toothbrush if you'd never seen one before?

Audiard allows what symbolism he employs to crawl out of the natural landscape. On the trail, a sleeping Eli swallows a spider that leaves him sick and poisoned. His face becomes distorted and swollen with bloat. The natural world seems to be turning against Eli.

I won't reveal the movie's ending but I'll tell you that Audiard allows his movie to settle like a pot that has been taken off the fire and has begun to lose its boiling fury. Audiard has given us a half-real, half-fantastical portrait of the West, putting it on the shoulders of two brothers who only seem unconstrained by their torments when their horses are bounding across open terrain. As the movie suggests, the West may not be what we once thought it was, but the image of horse and rider hasn't lost its power to stir.

A ribald sex farce set in a nunnery

Inspired by Boccaccio's The Decameron, The Little Hours is an unapologetic sex farce built around a 14th Century nunnery where the sisters are anything but pious. In the hands of director Jeff Baena, Little Hours attempts to banish the shame that often surrounds repressed desire, particularly in a convent to which many of the women have been sent because their families don't know what else to do with them. Three nuns (Alison Brie, Aubrey Plaza and Kate Micucci) connive under the supervision of a mother superior (Molly Shannon), who's no saint, either. The plot kicks into a higher gear when the resident priest (John C. Reilly) introduces a hunky runaway (Dave Franco) into the mix. Franco's Massetto has taken flight because a nobleman (Nick Offerman) caught him dallying with the lady of the household (Lauren Weedman). Reilly's father Tommasso deceives the nuns, telling them that Massetto is deaf and mute, a complication that adds to the movie's cleverly calculated misunderstandings. Fred Armisen plays a bishop who shows up late in the proceedings to condemn everyone's behavior. Baena makes his intentions clear from the outset with ample use of the "F" word as he pushes (perhaps too hard) toward irreverence. Avoiding period language, the movie genially embraces the all-too-human pursuit of pleasure. Put another way, Little Hours seems to be saying that, despite admonitions to the contrary, bawdy isn't necessarily bad. Amusing when it's working, which (alas) isn't all of the time.

For Kong, it's tough being king

Kong: Skull Island introduces many monstrous sights. It's fun, even if the movie ultimately exhausts itself.

Some movies live in a world beyond ordinary standards, so much so that they liberate us from the need to parse or pick at what we were watching. Kong: Skull Island ought to have such a free-wheeling feel -- and much of the time, it does.

Deriving from the 1933 classic, Kong: Skull Island offers a new take on Hollywood's greatest ape, the thrust of which I'll leave you to discover in a theater, but know that Skull Island bursts with giddily presented carnage, much of it presented against a jukebox full of throwback rock by groups ranging from the Jefferson Airplane to Creedence Clearwater Survival.

For at least half of its 118-minute running time, Kong has some real hop to it, and director Jordan Vogt-Roberts isn't shy about putting his cards on the table. A Japanese and American solider square off in a mano-a-mano World War II prologue that dispenses with any suspense about when we'll see the towering ape. We meet Kong before the opening credits are done.

The movie turns the rest of those credits into a flickering newsreel, leaping through successive decades before landing in 1973.

Quickly, and without much time for reflection (a mercy, I think), the story swings into action. John Goodman plays a man who obtains government funding so that he can map an uncharted island.

From Washington, we're off the Vietnam to round up a crew. A disaffected Lt. Col. Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) takes charge; he's looking for a mission that offers compensation for a war that he believes should have been won. Packard and his subordinate (Toby Kebbell) gather other disaffected troopers, and join the trip to Skull Island.

Tom Hiddleston plays a tracker who's also recruited for the mission, along with a war-hardened photographer (Brie Larson).

With echoes of Apocalypse Now ringing in our ears, we're headed for Skull Island, which happens to be surrounded by a ferocious and possibly impenetrable storm system. If the movie's adventurers were even mildly sane, they would have abandoned any effort to penetrate the storm with helicopters. But sanity isn't the point here. Instead, unbridled mania prevails, which perhaps explains the presence of a jiggling Nixon bobblehead on one of the helicopters.

After the screening, someone pointed out to me that the number of helicopters inexplicably increased once the choppers took off from the ship that's carrying them to Skull Island.

Continuity aside, the helicopters make it through the storm only to be confronted by Kong, who has little interest in allowing them into his kingdom. He begins swatting choppers out of the sky as if they were pesky mosquitos.

If you're looking for proof that we live in an age of overload, you'll find ample evidence in the rest of the movie. As it turns out, Kong isn't the only dangerous creature on the island. The worst foes are reptilian monsters with forked tongues, hearty appetites and the ability to reawaken any tremors still lingering in audiences from Jurassic Park.

In IMAX 3D, Kong oozes the tropical density of an island where just about every living thing is over-sized and predatory, and the human characters, if these stick figures can be called that, are simply prey.

Did I mention that our adventurers have three days to accomplish their mission and reach the rendezvous point at which they'll be rescued? Yes, the proverbial clock ticks as loudly as the gunfire on the soundtrack.

To further spice the proceedings, the story introduces us to a World War II vet (John C. Reilly) from the movie's prologue. Reilly's character has been stranded on the island for almost 30 years. He's gone a bit whacky after living among a group of locals with a preference for heavily applied mud make-up.

In addition to battling the beasts -- a task that produces enough gore to slime the entire state of Maine -- the adventurers must decide whether to follow the vengeance-hungry approach of Jackson's character or just get the hell off the island.

For his part, Jackson glowers with so much furious conviction you half expect he might be reading one of Skull Island's more negative reviews.

Burdened by bloat, Kong: Skull Island can't help but generate some battle fatigue -- not only for its human and creature combatants, but for an audience. That's another way of saying that if you over-inflate a B-movie, it just might blow up in your face.

And in a digitally enhanced world, you'll notice that the actors are asked to spend a lot of time gaping at sights that had to be filled in long after they'd left the scene, not many dinosaurs being available via calls to central casting.

Minimal acting opportunities not withstanding, it might have been nice to care a little about whether any of these characters were destined to become something more than monster food.

Oh well, perhaps there's justice after all. At one point, a beast throws up the head of a man it has devoured. These creatures may be difficult to kill, but take heart: It's evidently easy to give them indigestion.

When the absurd becomes normal

The Lobster takes us to a strange hotel where the guests search for mates.

If you're looking for the kind of movie that dutifully works its way toward a conclusion you can see coming from several multiplexes away, you may want to skip The Lobster, a film from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos. Lanthimos marches -- or in the case of The Lobster -- crawls to a different drummer, immersing us in worlds that slowly reveal their secrets.

The movie takes place in what looks like the near future. Newly divorced David (Colin Farrell) has taken his dog to a hotel that imposes strange rules on its guests. The main rule allots each guest 45 days to find a mate or be turned into an animal -- of his or her choosing, of course.

The pressure on hotel guests can be felt from the start because in this society, being single has been classified as a crime.

As near, as we can tell, the transformations from human to animal aren't meant to be taken on a strictly metaphorical level. At various times, we see animals wandering the hotel grounds. We, of course, realize that we're looking at former guests who didn't make the cut.

Somewhere near the hotel, there's a city, which Lanthimos later will visit. Life there proceeds in reasonably normal fashion, but only married people are allowed to live in the city.

At the hotel, David meets two additional male guests, equally miserable fellows played by Ben Whishaw and John C. Reilly.

When not thinking about finding a mate, the guests hunt with tranquilizer guns. Their prey: loners who live in the woods beyond the hotel, people who -- if shot -- give the successful hunter an important extra day to continue searching for a spouse. And, oh yes, mates must share at least one common trait, like being short-sighted, for example.

It may occur to you that The Lobster wants to be a weird commentary on mating and dating, which transpires in near-mechanistic fashion at the hotel; everything feels depersonalized.

There's more to the plot, but I won't reveal it here, except to say that at one point, David joins the loners who are led by a woman of severe temperament (Lea Seydoux). She tells them that loners may masturbate at will, but aren't allowed to touch one another. With awful punishments looming, no one wants to get crosswise with the leader.

Among the loners, short-sighted David meets a short-sighted woman played by Rachel Weisz; a romance begins to take shape.

Now, it may not sound like it, but deadpan humor runs through the movie; Lanthimos wrings emotion out of human interaction in ways that are both bizarre and funny.

When Reilly's character is caught masturbating, he's punished by being forced to insert his hand into a toaster. It's so weird that we chuckle, even as we wince. People actually submit to this?

Farrell does a fine job as David, going soft around the middle and maintaining an even -- if morose -- keel. If David doesn't find a mate and must be turned into an animal, he selects a lobster. He says they live long and remain fertile throughout their existence. Thus, the movie's title.

If you check the credits, you'll see that some of the characters have been named for their defining characteristics, as in Reilly's Lisping Man and Whishaw's Limping Man. Angelika Papouila raises the movie's fright level as one of the hotel's most successful hunters, a woman with no feelings. Her name: The Heartless One.

Olivia Colman shows up as the hotel's manager, a host whose crisp efficiencies suggest a cross between a school principal and a prison warden.

It's impossible to predict whether you'll enjoy The Lobster or be driven crazy by it. Lanthimos (Dogtooth) may not care into which group you fall.

The movie's insistent strangeness throws human relationships into a Kafaesque stew and stirs, letting us know what happens when humans (both the hotel guests and the rebel loners) are jammed into a world governed by absurd rules.

Comparisons to known realities probably are encouraged.

Fairy tales with adult spin

Tale of Tales takes director Matteo Garrone, best known to American audiences for his Naples-based mob drama Gomorrah, in a new direction.

Lavish in its design and lush in its sensuality, Tale of Tales presents three fairy tales from Giambattista Basile, a Neapolitan courtier who wrote in the 1600s.

Garrone tries, with varying degrees of success, to make three tales cohere, but the movie contains too many amazing sights to ignore, and each of the tales offers stern cautionary elements to balance a visual abundance that borders on decadence.

In the first of these tales, Selma Hayek plays a childless queen who's promised by a hooded sorcerer that she'll conceive if her husband (John C. Reilly) slays a sea monster and carves out its heart for later boiling by (what else?) a certified virgin.

For his efforts, the king is mortally wounded, but the sorcerer's promise comes true -- only with a catch. The virgin who boils the monster's heart also becomes pregnant, and gives birth to a carbon copy of the queen's son, a white-haired kid who introduces a Prince and The Pauper dimension to the story.

In the second tale, another king (Toby Jones in an unlikely bit of casting) takes a flea as a beloved pet. By nourishing the flea with an ample supply of blood, the insect grows to an ungodly size and then expires.

The king then decides that he'll marry off his daughter (Bebe Cave) to any suitor who can identify the skin of the recently departed creature, which he has stretched for display in the throne room.

As bad luck would have it, the winner is a hideous looking ogre who carts the princess off to his bone-littered mountain lair.

In the third tale, yet another king (Vincent Cassel) lives a live of unashamed debauchery, bedding as many women as possible.

One day, the king hears the siren call of a beautiful voice coming from a peasant cottage. The king assumes that the voice only can belong to an irresistibly beautiful woman.

The twist: The woman (Hayley Carmichael) is an elderly crone, who lives with her sister. The crone concocts a scheme to sleep with the king. I suppose I needn't tell you that things don't work out as well as she or anyone else might have hoped.

I wouldn't say that each tale is profound, but in sum, the movie dishes out its visual pleasures in such unstintingly large portions that it's almost impossible not to feel sated.

A powerful look inside a mother's torment

We Need to Talk About Kevin isn't for everyone, but this look at a reluctant mother is provocative and haunting.

Director Lynne Ramsey’s We Need to Talk About Kevin had a run on last fall’s film festival circuit, opened commercially in New York and Los Angeles in December of 2011, but only now is beginning to circulate around the country. In conjunction with November's Starz Denver Film Festival, Ramsey and screenwriter Rory Kinnear visited Denver to talk about a movie that involves a killing rampage at a high school. Gifted and unapologetic about her choices, Ramsey made it clear that she understood that some people might reject her movie on its face.

It’s important to take note of the words “on its face” because We Need to Talk About Kevin is not really about a young man who kills fellow students at his high school, although that horrific event does reverberate throughout the story, giving it an extremely disturbing edge.

Unsettling, yes, but I can't agree with a woman who at a festival screening of the movie said We Need to Talk About Kevin never should have been made. There are very few "shoulds" when it comes to art. Many artists like to explore the extremes of human behavior because they know that such extremes often push toward difficult truths. If nothing else, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a movie of extremes.

Based on a novel by Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin has no interest in explaining school murders, which may be unexplainable anyway. What distinguishes both the novel and Ramsey’s movie is a willingness to take a highly subjective look at the main character Eva (Tilda Swinton in the film), a mother who can’t accept her son. Eva probably never wanted to be a wife and mother, and she's forced to re-evaluate her life after her son (Ezra Miller) commits a horrible crime.

Courageously, Ramsey has done what few filmmakers who adapt novels for the screen are willing to do: She has taken only what most intrigued her about Shriver’s dense fiction and discarded the rest. This approach probably was essential because Shriver told the story through a series of letters written by Eva. What remains is a riveting account in which past and present mingle as the movie works its way toward the climax we know is coming.

Ramsey and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey create powerful imagery -- and if you pay attention -- you’ll soon become aware that you are not receiving a rounded, clear-eyed portrait of a troubled family: You’re getting the view from inside of Eva’s head -- and it’s not a pleasant one.

Swinton makes a perfect Eva, a woman who has stepped into a life in which she feels like a stranger. Eva gave up a career as a travel agent to become a wife and mother, but We Need to Talk About Kevin is not a feminist tract that decries Eva’s loss of independence; it’s a mesmerizing, intimate examination Eva’s life as a mother who deals with a child who (for reasons that movie never fully explains) is a handful from day one.

Roll a ball to little Kevin, and he refuses to return it. He just sits there. Long after most kids are toilet trained, Kevin continues to poop in his pants, an act of willful disobedience.

On some level, Kevin knows that he is not a wanted child. He perceives his mother’s rejection and misses no opportunity to punish her for it. Like many a misguided child, Kevin's also smart enough to see through the facade of suburban life that’s supposed to shield people from their demons.

Only Kevin and his mother share this twisted intimacy. Kevin’s dad Franklin (John C. Reilly) takes a boys-will-be-boys attitude toward Kevin, insisting (even when the evidence is overwhelming) that things are OK. Eva and Franklin’s second child (Ursula Parker) somehow seems to have escaped from the family’s loop of rage, denial, frustration and lack of fulfillment: It’s as if she’s been dropped into this nightmare from a more much more pleasant dream.

Swinton’s masterful performance turns Eva into a witness as much as a participant in her life. Eva’s encountering an awful truth, so it’s not surprising that Swinton often looks stunned and shattered. Try as she may, Eva can’t change what seems to be an indestructible part of her nature, a resistance to being Kevin’s mother.

Ramsey’s casting is spot-on: Reilly’s perfect as a deluded dad. The actors who play Kevin as a boy (Rock Duer and Jasper Newell) are equally good, as is Miller, who takes over when Kevin becomes an adolescent.

Ramsey, whose last movie was the equally difficult Morvern Collar (2002), is alert to the satirical possibilities in even the darkest material. She doesn't approach her characters with soggy sympathy but with a cool - even cruel -- eye.

Ramsey made We Need To Talk About Kevin for very little money. She and her crew had to work fast. I think the haste served the material, which also boasts provocatively fragmented storytelling, remarkable sound design and a haunting score by Jonny Greenwood.

In a community that lives with the memory of Columbine, some may wish to avoid the provocations and occasional horror of We Need To Talk About Kevin. I wouldn’t try to argue anyone out of such a position.

But those who see We Need to Talk About Kevin will find a fevered nightmare with humor nipping at its edges. For me, We Need To Talk About Kevin stands as a small masterpiece of subjective cinema; its febrile tremors infiltrate, challenge and ultimately haunt the mind. And know this: We Need to Talk About Kevin is not an exercise in social realism; it's an exercise in emotional realism: rampant, dark and unafraid.

'Carnage' draws blood, but only a trickle

What happens when the parents are not all right?

Carnage, a big-screen adaptation of a play by Yasmina Reza, struck me as Edward Albee light, 79 minutes of burgeoning sarcasm and spewed venom that's supposed to deprive its characters of all their civilized pretexts.

But instead of feeling like a scathing revelation, this semi-satirical drama seems only to be putting its characters through a lot of pre-determined motions. The game feels rigged, and it's not all that interesting anyway.

The story is simple. Two sets of New York parents meet after the son of one has attacked the son of the other with a stick, knocking out a couple of teeth. One set of parents seems determined to use the incident as a teaching moment; the other seems vaguely conciliatory, but we know from the outset that the initially hopeful mood will give way to something far less polite.

The acting, alas, struck me as variable. Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz portray Alan and Nancy Cowan. She's an investment adviser; he's an attorney. The Cowans visit the apartment of Michael and Penelope Longstreet (John C. Reilly and Jodi Foster), parents of the boy who was clobbered.

To some degree, Carnage aims at satirizing middle-class pretensions. Only Waltz's Alan Cowan, a lawyer who's representing a pharmaceutical company in the midst of a crisis, seems reluctant to play the role of deeply concerned parent. He's too busy taking calls on his cell phone, much to the annoyance of his wife and also, I'm afraid, the audience.

Of all the actors, Winslet struck me as most convincing -- with Reilly bringing up a reasonable second. Foster, on the other hand, seems miscast as a mother who carries her liberal values with stiff determination and self-righteous fury. Foster's performance vacilates between brittle and shrill and, at times, she seemed so overwrought I feared her head might explode.

Credit director Roman Polanski for keeping the proceedings fleet and for preventing the movie -- set almost entirely in one Brooklyn apartment -- from feeling boxed in.

Reza's play, first staged in France, came to Broadway starring James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis. I can imagine that being in the company of the actors would give this material a considerable boost. But on film, Carnage comes across as not terribly insightful and only fitfully amusing.

A troubled kid breaks the movie mold

A quietly funny teen drama that's capable of surprise.

I've come to dislike almost every quality the movie Terri promises to exude. A staunchly independent spirit makes Terri immediately recognizable as a Sundance entry. Moreover, the movie's not beyond indulging in moments of off-kilter quirkiness. On top of all that, Terri takes us into the world of another troubled adolescent, a young man whose obesity makes him a target of derision for his schoolmates. *** Yes, I'm suspicious of all such trappings, but I found myself wrapped up in Terri, a movie full of unexpected soul, quiet humor and an unassuming sense of itself. *** Credit director Azazel Jacobs (Momma's Man) for finding precisely the right teen-ager to play Terri. Jacob Wysocki portrays Terri, a kid who wears pajamas to school, and lives with his uncle (Creed Batton), a man who seems to be suffering from a dementia that allows him only limited periods of lucidity. *** John C. Reilly brilliantly complements Wysocki's performance as a kid on the verge of self-discovery. Reilly's Mr. Fitzgerald -- the assistant principal at Terri's school -- tries to develop relationships with all the school's misfit kids. Fitzgerald seems to care about his charges, youngsters with whom he's inappropriately but refreshingly honest. Reilly is developing into a kind of comic treasure, and he gives tremendous credibility to a slightly implausible character. *** In a late scene, Terri almost discovers the mysteries of sex with Heather (Olivia Crocicchia), a girl who has earned the scorn of her classmates for precocious sexual behavior and who Terri chooses to defend. The scene is terribly awkward, which perhaps fits the situation: Terri, Heather and a much-less appealing misfit buddy (Bridger Zadina) get drunk together. *** Terri distinguishes itself and its director by rising above almost all the cliches suggested by its overly familiar subject matter. Terri is the kind of movie about a teen-ager that probably will mean more to adults than to kids. That's a good thing.