A father/daughter journey into the past

 I wish I could give a ringing endorsement to Treasure, director Julia von Heinz's story about a Jewish woman who travels with her father to Poland during the 1990s. Unfortunately, the movie's obvious sincerity is tempered by too many notes of sentimentality. Sentiment seems out-of-place in a story about a widowed Holocaust survivor (Stephen Fry) and his daughter (Lena Dunham), a journalist who wants to learn about her family's past. In adapting a 2001 novel by Lily Brett, von Heinz evokes the pain of the Holocaust but the movie winds up scratching the surface -- which is not to say that some of those scratches don't sting. Fry's Edek Rothwax and Dunham's Ruth Rothwax visit Poland soon after the Russian grasp of its former satellite countries has faded. Dad, who insisted on accompanying his daughter, hires a driver (Zbignew Zamachowski) because Polish trains elicit too many memories of the German transports that took his relatives to death camps. Von Heinz draws the movie's father/ daughter conflict in less than tempestuous terms. Fry's portrayal of Edek borders on the folksy, and Dunham's playing a character who doesn't have a firm grasp on her identity. A meeting with the Poles who occupy the apartment where Edek grew up can't quite embody the difficulties some Poles have with Jewish visitors. It needed more development.  I can't say that I wasn't moved by Treasure. But as someone who has traveled to Poland and visited some of the same places as this father/daughter duo, I expected more from a film that's tackling the pained relationship of a parent who wants to protect himself and his daughter from an indigestible and horrific past. 

She's needy -- and she's a stalker

Isabelle Huppert goes over the top and so does director Neil Jordan's Greta.

If you were looking for someone to play a woman able to shift from maternal to menacing without missing a beat, someone who knows how to sell weird and creepy, you'd have to look no further than Isabelle Huppert, the French actress who -- no matter what roles she plays -- refuses to yield all her secrets.

In a performance that builds toward over-the-top madness, Huppert dominates director Neil Jordan's Greta, a thriller with horror movie flourishes that increasingly sacrifices sense for emphatically expressed shocks.

Jordan (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy) knows how to engineer a movie's jolts, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's always able to get beyond them. Put another way, Greta becomes increasingly insubstantial and incredible as it unfolds.

The story hinges on a promising conceit. Chloe Grace Moretz's portrays Frances, a young New Yorker who discovers an abandoned purse on the subway. A recent college grad who works as a waitress, Frances insists on returning the purse despite the objections of the well-heeled roommate (Maika Monroe) with whom she shares a SoHo apartment.

Frances' mission takes her to Brooklyn where Huppert's Greta lives in an apartment that's tucked behind an archway that isolates it from the rest of the street.

Jordan has no interest in making a movie about a good Samaritan so it's only a matter of time until the apparently grateful Greta turns into a stalker -- and worse. Greta claims to be like gum; i.e., she sticks to things -- or more accurately to people.

Having recently lost her mother, Frances proves vulnerable to Frances' initial proffer of friendship, but Greta already has gone off the rails and her runaway personality soon threatens to crush Frances. As Greta's stalks Frances, a nuisance morphs into a nightmare.

At times, Jordan suggests the movie might make interesting use of its New York surroundings, but he's more committed to narrowing his focus to concentrate on the ways in which Greta terrifies an increasingly rattled Frances.

I'm guessing that Jordan was trying for a movie in which cruel developments offer twisted fun; i.e., entertainment through scares, outlandishness and at least one bloody gross-out.

But the absence of deeper mystery pushes everything onto Greta's slick surface, where it slides into territory that's not only farfetched, but implausible and, in a few instances, laughable.

Poor Stephen Rae: He's stuck in the role of a private investigator hired to search for Frances. You needn't have seen Hitchcock's Psycho (although who hasn't?) to know that Rae's screen time will be limited. His character's fate is as obvious as just about everything else in an overamped thriller that not even the always-intriguing Huppert can save.

Austen, manners and much amusement

Director Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Damsels in Distress) has taken Jane Austen's early, epistolary novel Lady Susan and turned it into an amusing trifle. I don't use the word "trifle" to demean Stillman's efforts, but to describe its level of amusement in a fair and, I hope, appealing way. Kate Beckinsale plays Lady Susan, a flirtatious widow with a reputation that challenges English notions of propriety. Among other things, Lady Susan preoccupies herself with finding a husband for her daughter (Morfydd Clark), a young woman who has been dismissed from a private school that Lady Susan can't afford. Lady Susan pushes her daughter toward a doltish, giggling fool of a man, Sir James Martin (a very amusing Tom Bennett). Smart and attractive, Lady Susan proves alluring to the men she encounters, notably young Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel) and older Lord Manwaring (Lochlainn O'Mearain), who happens to be married. The American Alicia Johnson (Chloe Sevigny) is Lady Susan's best friend. Stephen Fry has a tasty turn as Alicia's aging husband. Stillman is particularly good at allowing some of his characters to reveal their fatuousness. An example: When the giddy Sir James confronts a plate of peas for the first time, he can't resist describing them as "tiny green balls." Beckinsale's feisty, razor sharp turn holds everything together, and gives the movie its sting. Well-appointed and true to its period, the movie is nonetheless bouncy and amusing. Besides, what are Eighteenth Century drawing rooms for -- if not characters such as these.

'Sherlock Holmes,' the Franchise Continues

As a version of Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows doesn't cut it. As a big movie action contraption, it's passable.

Forget the Sherlock Holmes once known as a detective with a keen and unforgiving intelligence. That Holmes -- a creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- has vanished inside a much more contemporary creation: a kick-ass movie franchise.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows -- the second movie starring Robert Downey Jr. (as Holmes) and Jude Law (as Dr. Watson) - seems less interested in celebrating Holmes' legendary powers of deduction than in flexing as much action-movie muscle as possible.

So it should come as no surprise that the plot doesn't much matter, except to say that it pits Holmes against arch rival James Moriarty, played here by a bearded, confidently evil Jared Harris.

In the early going, Holmes frets over Watson's impending marriage. Few other renderings of Sherlock have flirted so openly with Holmes and Watson's infatuation with each another, and this one goes so far as give them an improbable comic scene in which they waltz together. If I remember correctly, Holmes leads.

If you saw the first installment, you pretty much know director Guy Ritchie's game. Ritchie sees Holmes as a disheveled detective who's as quick with his fists as he is with his wits. For his part, Downey lives up to this image of Holmes, seldom looking as if he's not in need of a bath.

The banter between Holmes and Watson doesn't exactly reach Noel Coward levels, and there's no enjoying Game of Shadows if you don't revel in amped-up action, including the firing of some very heavy artillery.

Even taken on its own terms, the movie is not without miscalculation: Noomi Rapace, the brilliant Swedish actress who created the role of Lizbeth Salander in the Swedish version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is entirely wasted as gypsy woman who's shoehorned into the movie for plot reasons.

Surely, Rapace could have made larger contribution; her role is the dramatic equivalent of a guy who holds another guy's coat during a fistfight.

Stephen Fry fares better in a genuinely amusing role as Holmes' diplomat brother, Mycroft Holmes. Fry's comic talents are used to best effect in a scene in which he appears nude. (No, we don't see enough of Fry to challenge the movie's PG-13 rating.)

When not busy changing costumes, Holmes' tries to get to the bottom of a mystery that has something to do with arms sales and with setting various European countries at one another's throats. But let's be honest: There's nothing much at stake here aside from getting to the next action set piece and maintaining the scaffolding of characters and effects that keeps the series from toppling.

Game of Shadows does that - and so it probably should be regarded as a passable addition to a successful franchise. I didn't love Game of Shadows, but I didn't mind Ritchie's latest action contraption, either. Perhaps because nothing about this helping of Sherlock Holmes needs to be taken seriously - and Ritchie seems to know it.