New Movie Shorts

Fantastic Four
As Marvel comics fans already know, being zapped by a radioactive cloud in outer space alters your DNA according to your sense of self. Just so, romantically wishy-washy Reed (Ioan Gruffudd) turns elastic, his feeling-ignored girlfriend Susan (Jessica Alba) turns invisible, her hothead brother Johnny (Chris Evans) becomes the "human torch," and Reed's best friend and enforcer, Ben (Michael Chiklis), gets stony. And oh yes, fatefully named Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon) turns all metallic and plots to kill them all. Simple enough. But from here, Tim Story's movie turns incoherent, illogical and downright strange. A sampling of the silliness: Johnny takes up extreme sports (accompanied by riffy guitar, as if to console forlorn XXX fans); Susan's clothes remain visible when she fades out, while Reed's clothes stretch to accommodate any move he makes; when monsterized Ben calls his wife (Laurie Holden) onto the street in her ridiculous nightie, she runs away in horror, but when he meets a blind girl (Kerry Washington), she takes one feel of his rocky body and falls immediately in love. When they're not pursuing such personal "issues," the FF wrestle with celebrity. Feared as freaks, cheered as heroes, they face nosy press and frantic fans, all because they have what may be a genetic "disease." If such themes are familiar (see The X-Men, The Incredibles), they are hardly developed here. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

5x2
At once François Ozon's most formalistic and formulaic movie, 5x2 was conceived as Scenes from a Marriage in reverse. Beginning as a married couple (Valeria Bruni-Tedsechi and Stéphane Freiss) sign their divorce and proceed to a farewell fuck which becomes a rape, Ozon moves backwards by steps, tracing their relationship's gradual un-dissolution. The net effect is that the happier they seem, the worse you feel, with the movie's picture-postcard final frame being the stake through the heart. Although the French DVD apparently allows you to watch the scenes in chronological order, the movie's inverted timeflow is more than a gimmick (which is to say it's not Memento much less Irréversible): It's a pungent, if not particularly profound, statement on the transience of love which implies that you wind up in the same place no matter which way you go. Bruni-Tedeschi gives the best of her many great performances, and Freiss (Le Grand Rôle) leavens his initial froideur with a dash of bruised romanticism. --Sam Adams (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

March of the Penguins
This beautifully filmed account of the annual trek made by Emperor penguins focuses on what seem like unspeakably grueling conditions. With temperatures reaching over 80 degrees below zero, the penguins trundle across the tundra, some 70 miles from the Antarctic shore to an inland plain, where females gestate and lay eggs, after which the males take over to protect the eggs from predators and blizzard conditions while their partners return to the sea to eat fish and avoid hungry sea lions. The females then head back to the plain where reunited couples nurture adorable fuzzy little hatchlings until they are able to walk back to shore — again, 70 miles. The French-language version of Luc Jacquet's documentary reportedly featured voices for individual penguins, articulating joy and sadness. The U.S. release has Morgan Freeman reading from a script that strangely anthropomorphizes its subjects: "It's a story of survival, a story of life over death. It's a story about love." Shots of the penguins emphasize their stoic-seeming endurance (waddling along the ice, they look at once comic and determined). At other moments, they look remarkably graceful when they crane their necks over one another or exchange gentle, seemingly loving beak taps. And at still others, they look almost sad as Freeman describes the loss of an egg as "almost too much to bear." Parents might note, too, that some predator attacks are alarmingly violent. --C.F. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)