Capsule Movie Reviews: ‘The Concert’ and ‘Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel’

“The Concert” moves from rowdy, broad comedy to shameless heart-tugging, but Romanian writer-director Radu Mihaileanu keeps this French production flowing buoyantly, skittering past all manner of improbabilities.

Aleksei Guskov stars as Andrei Filipov, celebrated conductor of the Bolshoi Orchestra, who in 1980 defies an order to dismiss all his Jewish musicians and as a result is demoted to janitor. Three decades later, he’s still working as a custodian when he intercepts an e-mail to the Bolshoi director inviting the orchestra to perform at Paris’ Theatre du Châtelet. Sensing an opportunity for a comeback, Filipov gathers former colleagues and other musicians — and heads for Paris with his makeshift symphony.

Mihaileanu contrasts the indulgent lives of the nouveau riche with the hard-scrabble existence of ordinary Muscovites and plays affectionately with ethnic stereotypes, while also driving home the virulence of Brezhnev-era anti-Semitism.

Once at the Châtelet, Filipov insists that the director (François Berléand) engage top young French violinist Anne-Marie Jacques (“ Inglourious Basterds’” Mélanie Laurent). More shenanigans in Paris give way to an unexpected and highly emotional subplot.

The film’s stars rise to the occasion admirably, and among the supporting players, Dmitri Nazarov as Filipov’s big, beefy sidekick is especially endearing.

— Kevin Thomas

“The Concert.” MPAA rating: PG-13 for brief strong language and some sexual content. In French and Russian with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes. At the Landmark, West Los Angeles.

Soldier’s tale feels familiar

A soldier’s uneasy readjustment to civilian life is both ages-old reality and well-worn film subject. In this story of an Iraq veteran’s return to Texas, debuting writer-director Ryan Piers Williams draws upon countless earlier dramas without adding anything fresh or memorable to the discussion.

Shaped more for message than for convincing narrative impact, “The Dry Land” ends up feeling like a PSA to raise awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder.

As the war-stunned James, Ryan O’Nan carries an aura of psychic injury and displacement. Thrashing between reticence and violent flashbacks, James tries the patience of his adoring wife ( America Ferrera) and the sympathetic friend ( Jason Ritter) who increasingly looks like a rival.

The unstable vet, determined to uncover the truth about the devastating event that eludes his memory but nonetheless haunts him, points his pickup toward Washington. Joined by an Army buddy ( Wilmer Valderrama), he aims to visit a recovering member of their unit in Walter Reed.

Despite the bleak working-class milieu, the narrative strains to transcend a sense of artifice. The foreboding of an early, unblinkingly graphic scene at the slaughterhouse where James works gives way to lackluster melodrama.

In his brief screen time as the maimed soldier, Diego Klattenhoff delivers the film’s most affecting performance. He and Melissa Leo, as James’ ailing mother, are less hampered than other cast members by the script’s heavy-handed exposition, and truly hold the screen.

— Sheri Linden

“The Dry Land.” MPAA rating: R. Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes. At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, West Hollywood, and AMC Broadway Santa Monica.

The man behind the playboy

Nowadays, the name Hugh Hefner likely evokes the image of an elderly man in silk pajamas, flanked by a bevy of ridiculously young beauties partying at his Beverly Hills mansion. But, as the entertaining documentary “Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel” proves, the founder of the Playboy empire has been not only a wildly successful purveyor of hedonism but also an influential defender of human rights and moral freedoms.

Writer-director Brigitte Berman presents a treasure trove of archival footage here along with an enjoyably eclectic array of interviews with Hefner supporters (including Dick Gregory, Jesse Jackson, George Lucas and Joan Baez), several detractors ( Pat Boone, author-feminist Susan Brownmiller) and, of course, “Hef” himself.

The film is at its most enlightening, though, when it revisits Hefner’s groundbreaking TV ventures “Playboy’s Penthouse” and “Playboy After Dark” (cozy variety shows with a socially conscious bent) and recounts Playboy magazine’s landmark literary and editorial achievements.

Unfortunately, Berman skips past the darker implications of Hefner’s sexual universe and omits discussion of how the periodical business — and access to erotic imagery — has changed in the Internet age. Still, the movie remains an involving look at an American icon as well as an adept snapshot of our national zeitgeist from the McCarthy era through the Reagan years.

— Gary Goldstein

“Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel.” MPAA Rating: R for graphic nudity and sexual content. Running time: 2 hours, 4 minutes. At Landmark’s Nuart Theatre, West Los Angeles.

Not enough left unspoken

With the patiently assembled ‘90s films “Ruby in Paradise” and “Ulee’s Gold,” director Victor Nuñez gave independent film a quiet luster of hand-craftsmanship sorely lacking in his dreary new effort, “Spoken Word.”

The story of a successful San Francisco performance poet named Cruz (Kuno Becker) who hesitantly returns to his provincial New Mexico home upon news of his father (Ruben Blades) dying of cancer, it’s a prodigal-son greatest hits tour driven at paddleboat speed.

In this case, Nunez’s slowdown style merely emphasizes the yarn’s leaden predictability — taciturn dad chastising absentee son, old vices (drinking, drugs) resurfacing, artist losing his voice, wounds eventually healing — without any new shadings or reimagining.

Even Cruz’s occasional poetic narration over collaged imagery — “Unspoken words, the cement this house was built on” — feel like statements of the obvious rather than lyrical interludes, while the recessive, stilted Becker simply lacks the actorly gravitas to draw a one-dimensional story into truly messy emotional waters.

The only real attention-grabber is Blades, whose wise eyes and wiser line readings find unexpected pockets of vulnerability and humor in a stubbornly proud patriarch’s approach toward the final bend in life’s road. But elsewhere, “Spoken Word” is maddeningly ruled by signposts spotted from miles away.

— Robert Abele

“Spoken Word.” MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes. At Laemmle’s Sunset 5, West Hollywood, and Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Pasadena.