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.

Things go topsy turvy in this asylum

A great cast tackles melodrama in Stonehearst Asylum.

Taking its cue from an Edgar Allan Poe story, Stonehearst Asylum makes literal use of an oft-posed question: What might happen if the inmates took over the asylum?

Although the movie's answer hardly qualifies as profound, its high-grade cast -- particularly Ben Kingsley, Michael Caine and David Thewlis -- seems to be having a good time with a Gothic tale set at the dawn of the 20th Century.

The movie wastes no time establishing a creepy atmosphere. Dr. Edward Newgate (Jim Sturgess) arrives at spooky Stonehearst Asylum to serve a residency as a staff psychiatrist, known in this movie as an "alienist."

Thrown off guard by caretaker Mickey Finn (Thewlis), Newgate is further flummoxed by the asylum's weirdly imperious superintendent, Dr. Silas Lamb (Kingsley).

Dr. Lamb believes that it's better to allow patients to follow their madness than to treat them abusively.

I doubt you'll be surprised when Dr. Newgate discovers that the patients have revolted and thrown the real staff into the asylum's dungeon.

The point: 19th century methods for treating the insane constituted a cruel and inhuman form of punishment. The staff, led by Caine's character, deserves to be punished.

That message plays second fiddle to the mixture of melodrama and macabre comedy that director Brad Anderson serves up -- with particular help from an acerbic and slightly unhinged Kingsley.

Also clear from the outset is Northgate's infatuation with a supposedly dangerous but beautiful patient (Kate Beckinsale), a hysteric who freezes when touched.

The movie's over-the-top and self-consciously melodramatic approach (cue the thunder!) works well enough, until final scenes engulf the screen in flames.

Warning: Caine's role is small. Same goes for Brendan Gleeson, who appears at the movie's beginning and at its end.

If you're looking for horror, look elsewhere: Stonehearst Asylum isn't particularly scary, but its production values are strong, and there's something to be said for watching a grade A cast take a bumpy journey through B-movie terrain.

Action makes hash out of 'Total Recall'

This remake of a 1990 movie is more muddled than mind-bending.

The remake of 1990's >Total Recall is a cluttered, unsatisfying attempt at dystopian sci-fi that ultimately loses itself in a blur of action, much of it presented in a visually confused jumbles.

Like the original, this revamp is based on a Philip K. Dick short story (We Can Remember It For You Wholesale), but the 2012 edition tends to brood more, partly because it replaces Arnold Schwarzenegger with Colin Farrell. Farrell plays Douglas Quaid, a factory worker who's part of the great lumpenproletariat that serves the wealthy in what's left of humanity after a series of devastating wars at the end of the 21st Century.

Farrell's Douglas Quaid lives in The Colony, a futuristic slum that's located in Australia. The Colony is home to legions of drones who staff assembly lines in the affluent United Federation of Britain. Workers from The Colony commute to the United Federation via a kind of super-subway called The Fall, which travels through the Earth at breathtaking speeds.

After missing out on a promotion, Quaid decides to spice up his humdrum life by visiting Rekall, a facility that enables its customers to live out any fantasy they choose -- and to retain a memory of it. With Rekall, illusions become indistinguishable from real experience.

Quaid opts for a spy fantasy, but before his illusory journey gets rolling, he learns that he's not really a worker bee, but a highly trained real spy who's being pursued by the Chancellor of the Federation (Bryan Cranston), one of the least ominous villains in quite some time.

The rest of the story puts a confused Quaid into a situation in which his certainty about everything -- including his identity -- is undermined. His wife (Kate Beckinsale) may not be his wife. If a young woman Quaid meets as he flees his pursuers (Jessica Biel) seems familiar, maybe it's because he's had dreams about her.

Of course, there's also a resistance, led by a character named Mathias, played by Bill Nighy, who demonstrates -- with very little screen time -- that an interesting actor can survive in the middle of a movie full of futuristic bric-a-brac. Aside from Nighy, I wouldn't call any of the performances distinctive.

The best thing about the movie are its CGI enhanced settings, which -- at their best -- are reminiscent of the dystopian sleaze of Blade Runner, another movie inspired by a Dick story. Neither The Colony nor The United Federation look entirely real, but they're interestingly realized, as are various forms of futuristic transportation, notably hover cars.

But when it comes to overall impact, Total Recall's mixture of turgid exposition and frantic chases miss the mark, and if memory serves me, the original movie was better directed by Paul Verhoeven than this one is by Len Wiseman, who previously wrote and directed a couple of Underworld movies.

Look, you know a movie's misfiring when you half wish the actors and story would get out of the way so you could better explore the worlds that the filmmakers have created. Wiseman avoids the kind of mind-bending wooziness that would have made the movie more challenging, subordinating Dick's heady themes to a ton of brain-numbing action that tends to make us indifferent about the movie's outcome.

An FYI: The original was rated R and included a trip to Mars; the remake is earthbound and rated PG-13.