Butler's Cinema Scene

Tilda Swinton

“WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN” My rating: B (Opening March 23 at the Tivoli, Glenwood Arts and Glenwood at Red Bridge)

112 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Psychopathology runs rampant on our movie screens (and, if recent surveys are to be believed, in the ranks of Wall Street types), but usually the focus is on the psychopath, not the people he leaves behind.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” is a sort of “Bad Seed” for the era of Columbine, one that focuses not so much on a bad kid as on the mother who produced him.

When we first meet Eva (the ever excellent Tilda Swinton) she’s living in a modest house in a borderline neighborhood. She works in a travel agency. Apart from her loner tendencies, there’s nothing too unusual about her.

But clearly there’s something in her past. Why else would she emerge from her front door every morning to find vile threats spray painted on her front porch and car?

Lynne Ramsay’s film alternates between the present, in which a largely stoic (shell-shocked?) Eva tries to get on, and the past, which reveals her life as a wife and mother.

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“JOHN CARTER” My rating: C- (Opening wide on March 9)
132 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Well, that’s two hours I’m not getting back.

For fans of sword-and-sorcery fiction, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter series of pulp novels set on Mars have long been a sort of cinematic Holy Grail.

Filled with bizarre creatures, massive alien cities and unearthly (well, duh) landscapes, the books have for a century defied big-screen treatment in large part because Burroughs (who was also the creator of Tarzan) had an imagination too fevered to be realized through conventional movie technology.

Now that we’re in a digital age where whatever you can think of can be made flesh (figuratively speaking), “John Carter” has finally come to your local multiplex courtesy of the folks at Walt Disney.

It’s got eye candy out the wazoo, but under the direction of Andrew Stanton (the director of Pixar’s “WALL-E” and “Finding Nemo” here making his live-action debut) this hugely expensive (reportedly north of $200 million) production is a remarkably leaden thing, marked by an embarrassingly inadequate lead performance and an utter absence of anything resembling a directorial style.

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Leila Hatami and Peyman Moaadi in “A Separation”

“A SEPARATION”  My rating: A- (Opening March 2 at the Glenwood at Red Bridge and the Leawood)

123 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

There’s no small irony in the fact that Iran has one of today’s most aesthetically developed film scenes precisely because it is a repressive society.

Like American filmmakers during the days of the Hollywood Production Code, Irani directors must find subtle, artistic ways to make their points without incurring the wrath of the theocracy. In a conservative society where the government’s will is enforced by the “morality police,” you’d best cloak your incendiary sentiments in something that looks like obedience.

“A Separation” isn’t incendiary, exactly, but writer/director Asghar Farhadi paints an unforgettable picture of a world where men and women must couch their behavior within socially accepted limits, and where the necessity of appearing pious often pushes them to do things that are anything but.

Farhadi’s film — this year’s winner of the Oscar for foreign language film — begins in a nondescript government office where Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and his wife Simin (Leila Hatami) have come to air their marital disputes before a magistrate.

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Fabrice Luchini and lady friends

“THE WOMEN ON THE 6th FLOOR”  My rating: B  (Opens March 2 at the Glenwood Arts)

104 minutes | No MPAA rating

The premise of “The Women on the 6th Floor” is so unoriginal it practically creaks.

It’s about an uptight bourgeoise character learning the real meaning of life from the decent, hard-working proletariat.

But the delivery, especially the acting, is so deftly executed that rather than grousing at its predictability you’ll find yourself sighing with pleasure at this souffle from writer/director Philippe Le Guay.

Fabrice Luchini (last seen as Catharine Daneuve’s philandering hubby in “Potiche”) is Jean-Louis,  owner of a brokerage firm who still lives in the apartment building where he was born.

He’s got a brittle blonde wife (Sandrine Kiberlain) who does little save indulge her neuroses, and a couple of spoiled, arrogant sons off at boarding school.

And now that his aged mother has finally died and her grumpy maid retreated to the provincial burg that spawned her, Jean-Louis is in the market for a new domestic.

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