Writer-director-actor Eric Schaeffer has made a career out of more or less channeling his offscreen insecurities, foibles and sexual appetites into what could loosely be categorized as slices of desperate-plea entertainment. His filmography behind the camera — which includes If Lucy Fell, Wirey Spindell and 1997's critically lambasted Fall, to which his latest film is a quasi-sequel — is littered with movies in which he plays articulate, misunderstood, down-on-their-luck guys (often cabbies or writers, sometimes both) who bag chicks consistently out of their league and then get wound up about the impending implosion of said relationships.

Bittersweet, Paris-set romance After Fall, Winter (or just Winter, as it was at one point known) finds Schaeffer again trying to navigate a miasma of commingled narcissism and human frailties, with a pinch of the unlikely and wounded romance on display in Never Again, which was both his most streamlined and mature, well-observed work. Characteristically dawdling and certainly a bit implausible, the film invites a certain low-fi connection for a stretch before fumbling it away with phony details and ham-fisted sexual theatrics. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For video on demand from its distributor, click here. (FilmBuff, R, 131 minutes)