BECAUSE I SAID SO Like nearly all of director Michael Lehmann’s post-Heathers work, Because I Said So is lazy and disinterested—a hack-for-hire job any number of film-school grads could have put through its uninspired paces. Set in L.A., the film stars Diane Keaton as Daphne Wilder, a divorced, in-demand caterer whose booming wedding business has done little to persuade her youngest daughter, Milly (Mandy Moore), to tie the knot. And so Daphne does what any concerned parent would: she places an Internet personal ad seeking her ideal son-in-law and then proceeds to screen potential candidates for the job. Cue musical montage of variously unattractive, socially graceless, allergy-addled and otherwise ill-suited applicants.

Daphne picks a dreamboat architect, but along comes hipster musician Johnny (Gabriel Macht), whose boho charms do little to endear him to Mom, but who we know is really the guy to root for because he’s chosen the artist’s life over the world of corporate conformity. Milly starts dating both, and from there, Lehmann makes some half-hearted stabs at door-slamming farce while limping toward that inevitable “gotcha” moment at which all the characters discover what’s really going on and Daphne’s whole duplicitous house of cards comes tumbling down. Among its many sins, the movie is an especially cruel betrayal of Keaton—who looks radiant in her 60s, yet keeps getting cast in roles that use her age as the foundation for cut-rate slapstick. —Scott Foundas (Opens Friday at area theaters)

THE CRANES ARE FLYING Tell people, “Oh, this is a Soviet drama about the emotional devastation of wartime,” and you’ll get nothing but dead-mackerel stares. Then mention, “By the way, this is by the director and cameraman of I Am Cuba,” and watch them snap to as if you’d sounded an airhorn. Anyone with fond memories of I Am Cuba—a denunuciation of capitalist excess so swanky and sensually overpowering it got a direct shout-out in Boogie Nights—will sit open-mouthed through this award-winning 1957 film by the team of director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky.

One of the first international successes to spark the stifled Soviet film industry after Stalin’s death, the film is an all-caps melodrama about young lovers separated by World War II. The boy (Aleksey Batalov) goes to the front and faces certain death; back home, the girl (Tatiana Samoilova, who’d be a superstar today) loses her parents, moves in with his family and fends off the advances of his service-dodging cousin. Dramatically, the movie is sometimes as overstated as a Victorian mustache-twirler—especially the scenes with the leering cousin, a soapy caricature of the duty-shirking aesthete.

Cinematically, though, this is mad hot stuff. Eager to stretch beyond the strictures of state-sanctioned propaganda pieces, Kalatozov sought to make the camera an emotionally expressive instrument; in former combat photographer Urusevsky, he found a cameraman willing to risk going over the top to capture the intensity of feeling. Like Orson Welles, an obvious inspiration, neither man seems capable of a boring shot. Never content to shoot someone head-on when they could tilt the camera from floor level up toward a Caligari maze of diagonals—stairwells, ceilings, architectural curves—Kalatozov and Urusevsky experiment with hand-held and undercranked cameras, thunderbolt lighting and vertiginous spinning to evoke the dizziness of love and loss. Two sequences in particular have the power of silent moviemaking: a hothouse maelstrom of a rape scene, and the girl’s headlong flight toward a troop train, rendered in blips of light and vivisected visuals as if by zoetrope. (At one point, Samoilova reportedly held the camera underneath her face while she ran.) It’s the kind of cinematic audacity that eventually got both men denounced by their contemporaries for bourgeois artiness. And yet here we are 50 years later, watching their work while their tastefully restrained comrades lie in film history’s equivalent of potter’s field. —Jim Ridley (Belcourt, Feb. 3-6; part of the “50 Years of Janus Films” series)

CONSTELLATION Depictions of upper-middle-class African American life are such a rare screen commodity that one wants to give a movie like Constellation every possible benefit of the doubt. Written and directed by Jordan Walker-Pearlman (whose promising 2001 debut feature, The Visit, starred several of the same actors), the film leapfrogs between present-day Huntsville, Ala., and 50 years earlier, when a beautiful young black woman (Gabrielle Union) was torn from the white soldier she loved as a result of the era’s segregation laws. Now that woman is about to be buried, and as her extended family—her emotionally withdrawn artist brother (Billy Dee Williams), his ex-wife (Lesley Ann Warren) and their two daughters (Melissa De Sousa and Zoe Saldana)—gathers for the occasion, it’s as if she is guiding them from beyond the grave to find peace, love and understanding in their own troubled relationships.

Constellation (which was filmed in 2004 and played festivals in 2005) wants to be a sweeping multigenerational tear-jerker à la The Notebook, complete with endless shots of two characters staring meaningfully at one another while gloppy sentimental music wells on the soundtrack. Only Williams, however, makes any real emotional connection. I’m not sure I’d call it a good performance, but there’s something intrinsically fascinating about seeing the man once heralded as “the black Clark Gable” three decades removed from heartthrob status, heavy and sullen-looking, weighed down by the burdens of time and age. —Scott Foundas (Opens Friday at area theaters)

EPIC MOVIE The speeds of sound and light remain constants, but the speed of crap accelerates like a rocket luge careening down Crisco Mountain. Seriously, the daddy of the (blank)-movie genre, 1980’s Airplane!, stocked its pop-culture arsenal with references to 1957’s Zero Hour, 1970’s Airport and 1975’s Jaws. By contrast, this ostensible parody of big-budget adventures (specifically The Chronicles of Narnia) reaches all the way back to last May’s The Da Vinci Code, July’s Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and October’s Borat. (Borat?!) Just like the filmmakers’ previous Date Movie, this feeble fast-buck shitbomb is an amateur-hour game of Spot That Reference, intended for people who crack up simply at the mention of anything topical—sudoku, “Lazy Sunday,” Cribs. Which means that by the time this dud drops on NetFlix, it’ll be as obsolete as a Chia Pet jokebook. The only bright spot: Darrell Hammond’s spot-on demolition of Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, uncanny right down to the swishy swashbuckling of his dying gesture. —Jim Ridley (Now playing at area theaters)

BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE By the standards of January’s dumping ground for major-studio misfires, this werewolf yarn isn’t bad—which is to say, rarely as good as you’d hope. Anyone expecting a horror movie will feel his palms getting itchy, but as a gloomy romantic fantasy it’s diverting enough to make you lament how much better it could have been. Agnes Bruckner, miscast in a role that calls for Nastassja Kinski’s exotic brooding, plays an American werewolf in Bucharest who falls for a graphic artist (Hugh Dancy) drawn to the history of the loup garou. Too bad she’s been promised to her clan’s leader (Olivier Martinez), who has his hands full restraining her hot-to-hunt cousin (Bryan Dick).

The script, by Ehren Kruger and Christopher Landon from a novel by Annette Curtis Klause, doesn’t do much with the wolves’ powers: they can leap from rooftops and stalk prey with their heightened senses, but they fail to detect the hero climbing up their hideout with a buttload of silver bullets. That leaves the German director, Katja von Garnier (Iron Jawed Angels), to downplay gory killings in favor of a mood of lightly eroticized mystery. At the movie’s best, as the interspecies lovers prowl Bucharest by night to the throb of a Giorgio Moroder-esque score, it gives off a whiff of the feral kinkiness of Paul Schrader’s underrated Cat People. Shots of the clan bounding through the woods, leaping as humans and landing as wolves, are a lyrical alternative to the usual makeup-heavy transformation scenes.

But what should be a humid adult fairy tale gets watered down to PG-13 pablum, and juicy ideas about the lure of the Other and lycanthropy as predatory sexuality end up casualties of the tween-friendly rating. (There’s no way Fat Girl director Catherine Breillat would’ve been allowed near this major-studio widget, perhaps with good reason, but the movie could use a stiff dose of her fearless transgression.) There’s evidently no middle ground at the moment between toothless all-ages horror and torture porn, but not even kids would want to see this movie made for kids. Still, compared to The Hitcher and Epic Movie, Blood and Chocolate manages to raise the bar for January’s traditionally lousy wide-release offerings—if only from toe-stubbing level to mid-calf. —Jim Ridley (Now playing at area theaters)

CATCH AND RELEASE In the small pantheon of successful women screenwriters, Susannah Grant is aristocracy. But the muscular dialogue that fed so many great lines to Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and Cameron Diaz in In Her Shoes goes AWOL in Grant’s directing debut, a slack dramedy about a young woman (Jennifer Garner) whose grief for her dead fiancé is assuaged not by the usual band of earth mothers, but by his three buddies, each of whom suffers in his own strenuously odd way. This mildly fresh premise never takes off, in part because Grant flashes most of her emotional cards in the first half-hour, leaving all the characters to rot in underdeveloped eccentricity.

Garner is no more than serviceable as the tightly wound Gray, unwinding in the arms of her fiancé’s lothario friend Fritz, very badly played by Timothy Olyphant (a disconcerting cross between Billy Zane and Sir Cliff Richard with a lot invested in grating raffish charm). Kevin Smith is the good-hearted Fat Friend who stops gabbing only when he’s scarfing down leftover pizza, while Juliette Lewis salvages what scraps she can from her role as a new-age L.A. ditz. Revelations pile up, followed by insight and maturity, and pretty soon there’s nothing left to do but go fishing in scenic Colorado and be really, really nice to your friends. —Ella Taylor (Now playing at area theaters)