Late entry today, as lack of sleep made it pretty well impossible for me to say anything coherent last night. As it stands, I have to run to a movie in a minute or two, so these reviews’ll be particularly brief.

$5 A DAY (dir. Nigel Cole)

Christopher Walken and Alessandro Nivola play a con man father and his trying-to-go-straight son. One particularly crappy day, Nivola loses his job and his girlfriend, and gets a letter informing him that his dad is dying and wants to see him. A quick trip east later, and Nivola is convinced to spend a week driving his not-so-sick-looking father around, reflecting on their past and finding ways to avoid paying for anything. Walken is great as the penny-pinching, smooth talking con – it’s nice to see him toning down the Walken-ness a bit, but he’s still as loopy and wonderful as ever. At its heart, $5 a Day is a straightforward family reunion flick, but it’s a charming one, at least.

JCVD (dir. Mabrouk El Mechri)

First, a confession – even though I was really enjoying this one, I nodded off for a few minutes in the middle, so don’t take this as an official review (not that any of these blog entries are). With that out of the way, I can still confidently say that JCVD is the best thing Jean Claude Van Damme has done in years. Van Damme plays himself, a washed-up action star stuck in straight-to-DVD purgatory. When he stumbles into a robbery-in-progress, cops and news alike think he’s to blame, the pressures of his child custody battle having finally gotten to him. Van Damme’s performance is surprisingly good, all deadpan exasperation, although much of the credit probably goes to a script that knows exactly how to treat him. Given the uniqueness of this anti-vanity-project vanity project, it’s unlikely to kick-start the muscles from Brussels’ career, but it is surprisingly good.

PARC (dir. Arnaud des Pallieres)

Sad rich people delivering monologues for what felt like far longer than 100 minutes. Des Pallieres tries to establish a mood of slow-moving, inevitable dread. Instead, he just bores audiences with a moribund, tension-free “thriller” that values pretentious philosophizing above logic or entertainment.

TEARS FOR SALE (dir. Uros Stojanovic)

According to this bizarre fairy tale of a movie, Serbia lost nearly all of its men after the great war, leading to some seriously gender-unbalanced towns. A pair of professional mourners are sent to find a man when their town’s last remaining male, a mostly impotent, bed-ridden grandpa, finally croaks. Imaginative visuals and an unpredictable plot make for an absolutely delightful flick for fans of ghosts, witches, ancient curses and the Charleston.

ADAM RESURRECTED (dir. Paul Schrader)

Jeff Goldblum plays Adam Stein, a holocaust survivor and messiah-like figure living in a hospital for folks made crazy by the war. Before the war, he was Germany’s top entertainer, and he still maintains an ability to captivate a crowd, which earns him free reign over the hospital – the head nurse is in love with him, and the doctor half expects him to cure the patients himself. There are a lot of interesting elements absent from most holocaust flicks – a reliance on symbolism and humour, the magic realism of Stein’s “sixth and seventh senses,” say – but it doesn’t quite come together. Goldblum’s performance is inspired, but his flimsy accent is distracting at the best of times.

 Tomorrow: anime, martial arts and Orson Welles.