Ethan Hawke’s résumé just keeps growing: First, he was a limited actor. Then, a mediocre novelist. And now, a pretentious director. Go, boy, go! Adapted from the play by Nicole Burdette, Chelsea Walls is set within New York’s famed Chelsea Hotel, which is already a bad sign, since the building has become a potent symbol to sophomoric artheads in love with the myth of the doomed artist. You know things are bad when, during an opening flurry that shows many of the movie’s characters, Hawke includes shots of the plaques memorializing the residencies of Dylan Thomas and so on. It all but ensures the movie will be a tendentious meditation on the life of the artist, as if that were any more possible to generalize about than the life of the carpenter. Sure enough, as the camera jackrabbits about through multiple storylines -- all shot in grayed-out digital video which only enhances the Chelsea’s grunginess -- we’re treated to snatches of miserably bad pseudo-beat poetry on the soundtrack. The movie stacks the deck with unwashed artists, from Kris Kristofferson’s rummy novelist to Robert Sean Leonard’s vagabond folkie, but doesn’t approach anything like a coherent statement, let alone a profound one. --Sam Adams (Ritz Bourse)

If you’ve ever listened for the first time to a song you thought you’d fondly know for years, and been horrified by what you heard, Cherish might get under your skin, for good or for ill. When the stalker in Finn Taylor’s Cherish starts dancing manically to Hall and Oates’ “Private Eyes,” the song’s pop veneer is stripped instantly away -- but then, that’s nothing the ear-slicing scene in Reservoir Dogs didn’t tell you. Taylor (Dream With the Fishes) wants to get at something about pop obsession, about the way songs on the radio work themselves into the dark crevices in our heads, but Cherish lack focus, and it’s too visually bland and static to invoke much of the ecstasy it means to undermine. (You’d love to see Baz Luhrmann take a crack at the same topic.) Robin Tunney plays a woman who’s placed under a house arrest after she runs over a police officer while fending off a stalker (who disappears before she makes her drunken explanations to the cops). Locked up with little more than a radio, she submerges herself in “the greatest love songs of all time,” but prolonged exposure is as unhealthy as you might imagine. As the technician assigned to maintain her ankle bracelet, Tim Blake Nelson (O Brother, Where Art Thou?) is so predictably repressed you want to grab him by the ankles and shake him until he buys some colored clothing. The film’s grim conclusion reeks of a desperate attempt to instill depth. Personally, I’d rather listen to AM Gold.--S.A. (Ritz Bourse)

So realistic you half-expect a second camera crew to accidentally walk into frame at any moment, Dover Kosashvili’s feature debut is a clear-eyed look at the high cost of arranged marriages. Zaza (Lior Ashkenazi) dresses like the Israeli equivalent of a 31-year-old indie rocker; a philosophy doctoral student who still buys groceries with his parents’ credit card, he’s only unhappy when his parents, or anyone else, is pushing him. Unfortunately, that’s most of the time. Playing out with elegant thoroughness, near-real-time scenes followed by sudden jumps in the action, Late Marriage is pitched at the crisis point, where Zaza can no longer continue the life he’s been leading -- gamely going on marriage interviews with his parents, while carrying on a lengthy affair with a divorced single mother (Ronit Elkabetz). Based on the fact that there’s not a happy couple in the movie, the results don’t seem promising, but Kosashvili so respects the moment that nothing ever seems like a foregone conclusion. Late Marriage doesn’t have the self-importance to be called a tragedy -- it’s more like watching a prized heirloom fall off the shelf. Time slows down, and if everything doesn’t make sense, you’ve at least got time to ponder your own powerlessness. --S.A.(Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

The first single off the Scooby-Doo soundtrack is OutKast’s “Land of a Million Drums,” a brilliant, sinuous, fast-beat delight. The video for the song includes a few scenes from Raja Gosnell’s movie, mostly having to do with the (implicit) stoner identities of Shaggy (Matthew Lillard) and digital Scooby (voiced by Neil Fanning). The movie doesn’t spend much time on this beloved in-joke, left over from the TV series, instead offering a blander Scooby gang, constituted by Scooby-snack-munching Shaggy, perpetual damsel Daphne (Sarah Michelle Gellar), self-loving Ken doll Fred (Freddie Prinze, Jr.), and smarty-pants Velma (Linda Cardellini), who remains un-outed, despite pre-release rumors that she and Daphne would be kissing in the film. Badly plotted (something to do with teens being turned into zombie-ish “human-suits” for monsters who need cover during the daylight) and badly digitized (Scooby never quite looks like he’s in the same realm as the “live” actors), the film drags. Called to solve the zombie mystery by island theme park owner Rowan Atkinson, the gang encounters a series of disjointed, frightening specters, including the aforementioned monsters, plus a few humans -- a tribal priest, a voodoo man, and worst of all, Sugar Ray and Mark McGrath, who play themselves as zombies. --Cindy Fuchs ( AMC Andorra; AMC Orleans; Baederwood; Narberth; UA Cheltenham; UA Riverview)

THIRTEEN CONVERSATIONS ABOUT ONE THING

Jill Sprecher’s low-budget, closely plotted, philosophically bent film is a function of fate. Not only is it inspired by the director/co-writer’s (with her sister Karen) own NYC experience of being mugged and hit in the head (twice), it also considers the ways that chance, as much as ambition or desire, shapes the experiences of various characters’ intersecting experiences (organized into four general stories). Physics professor John Turturro leaves his wife (Amy Irving), to escape what he sees as “entropy” (the subject of a class lecture), pursuing an affair with colleague Barbara Sukowa; Clea DuVall and Tia Texada are maids with conveniently opposite outlooks (optimistic and pessimistic), until Duvall is hit by a car (suffering head damage), driven by attorney Matthew McConaughey, who in turn feels debilitating guilt about leaving the scene; this accident happens just after McConaughey, excited because he’s just won a case, meets gloomy insurance company claims examiner Alan Arkin at a bar. Arkin, in his own turn, painfully compares himself to his ever blissful employees (William Wise), and eventually plots his downfall, which doesn’t quite work out the way he expects, because, well, fate and desire interfere. At times, the pieces fit too neatly, but the actors’ precision, in their fragmented, tightly configured roles, within stylized, compressed sets, is often breathtaking. --C.F. (Ritz Bourse; Ritz 16)