A film about the art of burlesque would seem to offer up plenty of titillation for the pre-teen set (once they figured out the word’s definition, naturally), but this academically-minded documentary is far from prurient. Instead, A Wink and a Smile, as its title suggests, is an artful, intellectually probative and lightheartedly humorous look at the act of artful undressing. Directed by Deirdre Timmons, the movie plays, for better and for worse, as an affirming, exactingly reasoned piece of feminist agitprop — a women’s studies graduate student film project.

The tension between private yearnings and our seemingly innate desire for and appreciation of public spectacle are at the heart of A Wink and a Smile, which follows 10 “ordinary” women who each for their own reasons decide to do something extraordinary — learn the art of burlesque dancing and striptease. A 51-year-old homemaker, a 35-year-old opera singer, a 23-year-old college student, a 33-year-old taxidermist/bartender and a half dozen other women join the American revival of burlesque, where performance art and showgirl spectacle crash head-over-heels into a on-stage display of glamour and sensuality. Noted performer and instructor Indigo Blue serves as the chief narrator and guide for A Wink and a Smile, and her knowledge of burlesque’s history — from Lydia Thompson and the “British Blonde” invasion of the late 1800s, which typically mocked current stageplays with their routines, to the lavishly costumed sets of burlesque’s so-called Golden Era, in the 1940s and ’50s — roots this title in a very interesting way, and easily delineates the substantive differences between striptease and, well, the sort of working-the-pole ethos of much of modern-day stripping.

In addition to Blue, the other interview subjects are actually almost all articulate as well, and offer a variety of reasons for their interest in learning burlesque. But there’s still a bit of a cloying distance to the entire affair, an emphasis on reason rather than libidinal impulse — a trait most heartily associated with masculinity, granted, but something which I’m told females actually possess as well. Timmons also wastes far too much time on performance pieces by burlesque “professionals” with names like The Shanghai Pearl and Waxy Moon, the latter being a bearded female impersonator. This tack comes across as a desperate attempt to gin up the intellectual bona fides of the film, and takes away from what could be a much more interesting and full-bodied (no pun intended) look at its amateur participant subjects.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, A Wink and a Smile comes to DVD presented in anamorphic widescreen, with an English language 2.0 stereo audio track that more than adequately handles the relatively straightforward aural demands of the title. Special features include an interview clip with Timmons, a burlesque photo gallery and several bonus scenes. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase it directly via First Run’s web site, click here. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Brittany Murphy typically gives good crazy, in Don’t Say a Word, Just Married and, well, her offscreen life. But she can’t give true lift to the waterlogged Deadline, a mopey mood piece that is irredeemably caught halfway between being a “haunted place” flick and a single-character study of unraveling sanity. Recalling various other moody genre efforts both successful (The Others, Session 9) and less so (Dark Water, fellow straight-to-video flick Asylum), Deadline is unappealingly photographed and stitched together without a truly compelling sense of downhill momentum.

With her violent ex-boyfriend about to be released from prison, Alice (Murphy) hitches a ride to a remote Victorian house from her friend Rebecca (Tammy Blanchard), in order to veg out and focus on finishing her screenplay in time for an impending deadline. When she begins hearing strange sounds and seeing apparitions, Alice searches for the source and comes across some disturbing videotapes in the attic. Fascinated by her discovery, Alice digs deeper into mysterious story of the couple on the tapes, newlyweds Lucy and David (Thora Birch and Marc Blucas), a story that involves just the sort of paranoia, jealousy and violence to which she is already accustomed from her own personal life.

Without necessarily giving away the rather sigh-inducing twists within the movie, notions of unwinding artistic sanity have previously been tackled in gripping fashion, in everything from The Shining to David Koepp’s underrated Secret Window. So there is the kernel of an interesting idea here. Deadline, however, is muddled, and most characterized by a forced bleakness that substitutes for interesting characters or story development. Writer-director Sean McConville trades in all the sort of stylistic touches an audience that would most inclined to rent or purchase Deadline has seen before — various drones, affectedly howling winds, dripping faucets, creaky doors and self-consciously eerie whooshes — and the structure of his script, which awkwardly intercuts these temporal flashbacks with Alice watching the videos on her laptop computer, comes across as problematically boring almost from the get-go.

Blucas and Birch play types (the silver-tongued abusive lout who comes to believe his wife is cheating, and the pregnant, increasingly terrorized wife who plots to escape his clutches), so the movie is left to sink or sail on its look and manipulation of tone, as well as Murphy’s performance. The former is dreary and unexciting, not nearly darkly seductive enough; poor, puffy-lipped Murphy, meanwhile, captures some of the “hot mess” qualities of Alice, but does not come across as nearly enough of an artistic soul to realistically propel Deadline‘s narrative.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Deadline comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English language 5.1 Dolby digital and 2.0 stereo tracks, to better capture all the discrete, prodding aural cues. Optional English and Spanish subtitles are also included. Apart from five preview trailers, the only supplemental feature is a 10-minute making-of clip which intercuts behind-the-scenes footage and interview clips with cast and crew, who talk up both the story and producer Roger Betterton’s moxie. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) D+ (Disc)