A lively take on the undead genre

Grace Lee’s faux documentary “American Zombie” takes one of horror cinema’s enduring subjects -- the undead -- and crafts an amusing media satire on our fascination with/fear of marginalized cultures.

Lee, whose last film “The Grace Lee Project” was a straight doc that explored the struggles of Asian American women who shared her name, plays her camera-toting self as she sets out to humanize Los Angeles-area zombies who have average jobs, hopes and desires, including a mini-mart worker, a lonely florist and a zombie-rights activist.

She’s teamed with a gore-oriented filmmaker (John Solomon, playing himself as well) who can’t wait to grill their subjects on whether they’re eating human flesh or not.

Lee is appalled at his insensitivity, but John fires back, “No one wants to see ‘The Grace Lee Project 2.’ ”

Of course, Lee’s smart meta-lampooning doesn’t preclude the story from edging into more traditional horror territory when the crew sets out to film an isolated zombies-only festival. As expected, inhuman nature rears its head.

-- Robert Abele

“American Zombie.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes. Exclusively at Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500.

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‘Flawless’ has little sparkle

In the 1960-set heist movie “Flawless,” Michael Caine’s Cockney accent slices through the crisp London environs just as it did 40-plus years ago when the actor rocketed to stardom as a hipster icon. Here, he plays a janitor who enlists an executive (Demi Moore) at an English diamond corporation to swipe a Thermos of the precious gems in order to stick it to their employers.

Despite director Michael Radford’s affection for the period’s brittle elegance, the movie feels as pilfered as the shiny rocks that inspire the title. Caper aficionados will yawn at the plot mechanics, while screenwriter Edward Anderson squanders the early politically tinged promise of a corrupt organization undone by an empowered woman (diamonds being able to cut through that glass ceiling, you know).

Caine makes a hearty lunch out of his role, but Moore’s stiff, colorless portrayal strips all the dramatic zest out of their odd-couple partnership.

-- Robert Abele

“Flawless.” MPAA rating: PG-13 for brief strong language. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes. In limited release.

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‘Just Add Water’ won’t slake thirst

An uneasy mixture of sweet strangeness and irksome condescension, “Just Add Water” is a white-trash western that feels manipulated rather than massaged into being. Set in an H20-parched California town tyrannized by a meth-dealing punk who now owns everything, it stars Dylan Walsh as a mild-mannered parking lot attendant named Ray who immediately seems foreign to us for sticking around a place so eccentrically hellish.

Writer-director Hart Bochner is obviously tickled in a Coen brothers-style, point-and-laugh way by the kind of bruised Americana where family recipes inspire murder, an agoraphobic wife can keep an affair secret for 18 years and the opening of a gas station mini-mart is an event. But he also wants us to feel something for Ray’s deferred dreams. By the time our hero has set his mind to cleaning up his town, the rousing empathy feels like too little, too late for all the forced oddity beforehand.

-- Robert Abele

“Just Add Water.” MPAA rating: R for language, some sexual content and drug material. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes. Exclusively at Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500.

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It’s OK to look over ‘Partition’

“Partition” inadvertently asks whether it is possible to be too close to a story, if feeling too strong a personal connection can cause a filmmaker to lose sight of the bigger picture.

Director and co-writer Vic Sarin based “Partition,” about a Pakistani Muslim woman and an Indian Sikh man who fall in love after the declaration of independence from Great Britain in the 1940s, in part on events from his own family’s lore. The film never wants for sincerity, though it does lack in dramatic effect, coming across as well-intentioned but limp. To the extent that it works, it is thanks to a surprisingly resourceful cast, which includes Jimi Mistry, Neve Campbell, Irfan Khan and “Smallville”’s Kristin Kreuk.

Despite its desire to be a paean to tolerance and the redemptive powers of love (that again), the biggest lesson to actually be drawn from “Partition,” and this it also shares partly with the recent “Paranoid Park,” is never fight near a moving train.

-- Mark Olsen

“Partition.” MPAA rating: R for some violent and disturbing images. Running time: 1 hour, 56 minutes. Exclusively at Laemmle’s Fallbrook 7, 6731 Fallbrook Ave., West Hills, (818) 340-8710.

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‘Lior’ is a picture of devotion

Watching a film about the life of a speech-impaired young Yeshiva student afflicted with Down syndrome sounds like a bleak way to spend 90 minutes, but producer-director Ilana Trachtman has created a captivating documentary with “Praying With Lior” -- one of the more uplifting true-life tales you’re likely to see.

Punctuated by touching family videos, the movie tells the story of Lior Liebling, the disabled son of a pair of suburban Philadelphia rabbis whose mother died when he was 6.

Trachtman primarily covers the period leading up to his bar mitzvah, a watershed event for this passionately religious boy who “davens” (prays) with infectious gusto. There is something so pure and disarming about Lior, he makes believers of us all.

-- Gary Goldstein

“Praying With Lior.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes. At Laemmle’s Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869, and Town Center 5, 17200 Ventura Blvd., Encino, (818) 981-9811.

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Finding ‘Shelter’ in a hard life

Set in picturesque San Pedro, writer-director Jonah Markowitz’s affecting “Shelter” stars Trevor Wright as Zach, an aspiring artist working as a short-order cook who must choose between professional ambition and family responsibility, while coming to terms with his sexual attraction to a childhood friend (Brad Rowe).

On one level, this graceful film is a classic coming-of-age story; on another it explores the challenges of sorting out priorities and making life choices.

Markowitz’s people are well-drawn, viewed with both clarity and compassion, and they are very well-played by a cast that includes Tina Holmes as Zach’s sister Jeanne, a single mother who chronically neglects her young son (Jackson Wurth).

-- Kevin Thomas

“Shelter.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes. Exclusively at Laemmle’s Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500.

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Just look at what Negret can do

Mixing “Lost” and “24” with a dash of “Law & Order,” “Towards Darkness” plays more like a demo reel than a feature. Centered on a Colombian banking scion’s kidnapping by a guerrilla group, first-timer Jose Antonio Negret’s thriller shifts characters and time frames with no real purpose except to show that he can.

From the victim (Roberto Urbina) and his childhood sweetheart (America Ferrera) to a disgraced FBI agent, no one is spared his or her own flashback, but the multifaceted perspective only adds breadth, not depth.

-- Sam Adams

“Towards Darkness.” MPAA rating: R for some strong violence, language, and a scene of sexuality. Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes. In Spanish and English with English subtitles. In limited release.

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A heady look at a rock club

If you never twirled barefoot in the funky old club, “Wetlands Preserved” may be of limited interest, but it’s a loving and thorough document of a small slice of rock history.

Earthy, crunchy and proudly activist in a city that was increasingly wealthy and self-concerned, the TriBeCa nightclub Wetlands Preserve fought the good fight for more than a decade, opening in 1989 -- just in time to completely ignore the grunge movement -- and finally closing in 2001, crushed by Rudy Giuliani’s clean-up efforts, NIMBY neighbors and Sept. 11.

Director Dean Budnick, an editor at the classic-rock magazine Relix, paints a glowing picture of the bong-fogged club and its idealist founder, Larry Bloch, crediting them with kick-starting the jam-band movement and supporting his argument via interviews with Dave Matthews, Spin Doctors, Blues Traveler and other latter-day groovers.

It’s important to note, though, this tie-dyed hagiography is far from impartial: The club’s final owner, Peter Shapiro, is not only an executive producer of the annual Jammy awards (sponsored by Relix) but also helped produce.

-- Rafer Guzman

“Wetlands Preserved.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes. Exclusively at Laemmle’s Grande 4-Plex, 345 S. Figueroa St., Los Angeles, (213) 617-0268.