Das Trio (The Trio)
What's most refreshing about this moody drama from Germany are the things it doesn't do with its characters, three smalltime grifters working the fringes of contemporary German society. It doesn't romanticize them, nor does it apologize for their criminal behavior or judge them for it. Best of all, it doesn't try to psychoanalyze them, which is all the more amazing given the peculiar dynamics of this trio. The two men, nicely played by Gstz George and Christian Redl, are a gay couple who have been together for an unspecified but clearly substantial period of time, and their partner in petty crime is George's grown daughter (Jeanette Hain). When Redl is hospitalized after an accident, the other two take on a new partner, an amiable young man (Felix Eitner) who, before long, is sexually involved with both father and daughter. It's not as sordid as it sounds, mainly because the performers play off one another so beautifully, making the characters and their motivations credibly complex. (Thursday, October 29, 6 p.m., Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art; Sunday, November 1, 8 p.m., Mizner Park 12; Wednesday, November 11, 10:30 p.m., Coral Ridge 10; 97 minutes; in German with English subtitles)
The General
Some people are already touting this true-story crime drama as an Irish GoodFellas, but the Martin Scorsese film it more closely resembles, in both look and feel, is Raging Bull. Like that solid but wildly overpraised 1980 picture, it's a beautifully made, emotionally detached portrait of a charismatic but repellent man. (It's also gloriously filmed in black and white.) That man is Martin Cahill, leader of a small Dublin gang that pulled off heists totaling more than $60 million in the '80s (including the theft of one of the most famous paintings in the world, Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid). Brendan Gleeson gives a powerhouse performance as the beefy redhead Cahill, also notorious for his menage a trois-style relationship with his wife and her sister. But as the details of Cahill's life accumulate, he grows more and more inscrutable, and his celebrity status is baffling. He's lionized by friends and family, but an anonymous woman sums him up succinctly: "What do you stand for? Killing and thieving and scaring people to death?" Much more comprehensible is the behavior of the cop determined to nail Cahill, played, in one of his best performances, by Jon Voight. In a directorial career that ranges from the sublime (Hope and Glory) to the dismal (Exorcist II: The Heretic), this John Boorman movie falls, like its predecessor, Beyond Rangoon, somewhere in the middle. (Sunday, November 1, 6 p.m., Mizner Park 12; Wednesday, November 11, 8:45 p.m., Coral Ridge 10; 129 minutes)
