Co-directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, the absorbing, low-fi Catfish is a very generational cinematic offering, a digital-age mystery about identity, human frailty and social connection. Less is truly more when heading into the film, but in the broadest strokes the movie centers on a 24-year-old New York City photographer, Nev Schulman (Ariel’s brother), who is contacted on Facebook by an eight-year-old Michigan girl who asks permission to paint one of his pictures, and then falls headlong into a complex online relationship with the girl and her family.

A documentary pieced together like a thriller, Catfish highlights, in ways funny as well as squirmy and uncomfortable, the parasitic nature of parasocial relationships, and how technology can feed intimacy in ways both new and exciting and also inherently false. (For all the shrugging ease that the use of the Internet provides in terms of facilitating lies or mistruths, the film also shows the flipside — that the Internet makes it that much easier to investigate people, and their claims.)

Catfish hums along and works on several levels, not the least of which because Nev (above) is both engaging and vulnerable. Its few missteps are less outright failings, and more sins of omission. For all the ghastly ruminations summoned forth by what Nev and his filmmaker friends uncover when they finally trip to Michigan to uncover the truth, it would be equally legitimate to more deeply assay the need for connection that drove Nev in the first place. Of course, that’s something that resides in all of us, which perhaps cuts a bit deeper to the bone than is comfortable for both those involved as well as an audience, who naturally like to retain the right to pass judgment. For more information, click here; for an interview with the directors, meanwhile, click here. (Universal/Rogue, PG-13, 86 minutes)

Actor Adrian Grenier is most famous for playing a young, famous actor on HBO’s Entourage, so that gives him a somewhat unique perch from which to assay the curious nature of celebrity and the often aggressive shutterbugs that, in symbiotic if frequently somewhat diseased fashion, make their living off of snapping as many pictures as possible of actors, athletes and other figures in the public eye. And it’s just that high-ground perspective that informs and elevates his entertaining and thought-provoking new documentary Teenage Paparazzo.

The movie, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and makes its bow this week on HBO, jointly documents
the actor’s well-mannered exasperation and irritation with paparazzi, and his burgeoning personal relationship with 14-year-old Austin
Visschedyk, a home-schooled shutterbug whose parents routinely let him troll around Hollywood streets until midnight and beyond, stalking dining and partying celebrities like Grenier. Further contextualizing this vivid, unusual relationship are interviews Grenier conducts with other celebs (Paris Hilton, Eva Longoria, Alec Baldwin, Whoopi Goldberg and Matt Damon) as well as psychologists and historians, who weigh in on the changing nature of fame, notoriety and gossip in the New Media age.

Young Austin is precocious, characteristically self-centered, and possessing of the same type of moppy-haired bangs that Justin Bieber has recently made all the rage, but he’s also a more complex figure than on the surface he might seem. The title conjures up very specific (and not at all positive) notions of parental neglect and failure, but in the beginning Austin seems less obsessed with celebrities than merely excited by the thrill of a chase — in getting a picture of a personal moment. He’s something of a snob (“Hell no, I’m not following anyone from Dancing with the Stars!”), but more because of the monetary value of his work. Yes, while not yet able to drive, Austin rakes in hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for his photos.

The inherently navel-gazing nature of Teenage Paparazzo sort of cuts both ways. While on the surface it seems like it could come off as little more than a well-funded incursion into woe-is-me self-analysis — and it very occasionally tilts in this direction — Grenier’s film doesn’t merely spotlight the antagonism between paparazzi and their subjects, it also digs into the mutual-use nature of their relationships. (Hilton is an especially interesting and enlightening interview subject on this front, even if a segment in which Grenier explains the story of Narcissus to her comes off as unintentionally hilarious.) If Grenier is a bit hands-off with Austin’s parents — wanting to retain their participation and cooperation, and so approaching their son with a bit of a clinical, “hey-that’s-cool” alien distance — his subject eventually obliges him, exhibiting increasingly bratty behavior, and morphing into a miniaturized version of some of the same prissy, entitled rich folks he spends his time shooting. (A proposed E! reality show centered around Austin helps fuel this fire, and provide an ironic production-crew-pileup that Christopher Guest would surely appreciate.)

Grenier has a certain laconic charm, and so his movie is incredibly spry and facile, and thus entertaining in a base-level, empty-caloric sort of way. But it’s also at its best when really, substantively trying to dig into the nature of falsely intimate, one-way connections between massively marketed celebrities and their fans, or “parasocial” relationships — as it does in a conversation between the filmmaker and a social scientist at Fenway Park that is interrupted by a (slightly inebriated) fan who tells Grenier, “I’m not trying to be gay, but I love you,” and, “This’ll get me so much ass on Facebook, you have no idea!”

This candid, unplanned interaction, and other moments in the film, seems to lend credence to the idea that unlike past generations, or milennia ago — when we would each achieve some measure of notoriety and recognition within our smaller social structures — fame for fame’s sake is in the digital age, with connected societies and worldwide economies, now its own surging currency, and something to be valued over more tangible personal qualities, like talent or intelligence. (Italian import Videocracy, another documentary, also has some interesting insights in this regard.) It’s an unsettling thought, perhaps, but ultimately also a humanizing one; as Teenage Paparazzo shows us, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but it ultimately cannot capture a human being in all their complexity. For more information on the film, click here. (HBO/Reckless Productions, unrated, 100 minutes)

Years before the infamous obscenity trial of comedian Lenny Bruce,
counter-cultural icon and Beat poet Allen Ginsberg also stood trial — or,
more accurately, the publisher of his long-form poem that gives this
film its title did — for deigning to hold up a mirror to American
hypocrisy. Co-written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman,
Howl isn’t a commercial work, or satisfying on any predictably plotted
dramatic level. But, like a great song one surrenders to, its
tangential, multi-varied approach captures the urgency and dread of
Ginsberg’s groundbreaking, semi-autobiographical work, which recounts in
searing detail various underbelly road trips, love affairs and his
search for personal liberation.

Starring James Franco as
Ginsberg, Howl unfolds in a fractured and cerebral style, interweaving
four stories: a Socratic courtroom drama that follows the aforementioned
landmark 1957 obscenity trial, with Jon Hamm’s prosecutor and David Strathairn’s defense attorney squaring off against one another; an imaginative, feverish animated ride
through some of the text’s stories; a chat between Ginsberg and an
unseen interviewer; and a slightly more conventional,
black-and-white-lensed biographical portrait of a man who strove for
new ways to express himself and capture the aching ambivalence of those
he encountered.

There’s a quite contradictory nature, a fiery
reticence, at the soul of Ginsberg and his confessional writing, and in
his virtuoso performance Franco captures that quite well, especially in
his vocal timbre, which swells and recedes like an ocean tide. The
inclusion of animation — another potentially tricky thing — connects in a
certain roundabout way like similar footage from Ari Folman’s Waltz
with Bashir. Neither flat-out surreal nor entirely subjective, it
instead aims for (and captures) the heat of feeling, for those
unfamiliar with and/or resistant to the text. We all have to howl, from
time to time. For more information on the movie, click here. (Oscilloscope, unrated, 90 minutes)

Yet another contrived, manically pitched romantic comedy centered on forcedly farcical nuptial hijinks, the wearyingly unfunny You Again — in which Kristen Bell discovers her older brother is marrying the same girl, Odette Yustman, who made her life completely miserable in high school — is the cinematic equivalent of a loud, sugar-fueled kid desperately
calling for his or her parent’s attention from a pool. There’s an interesting and even quite possibly very funny movie to be made about the manner in which women filter their competitiveness with one another through men, but You Again is so divorced from the real world as to immediately negate the possibility that this is it. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney, PG, 105 minutes)

A $25 billion idea began with something to which almost everyone can relate: a sense of drunken aggrievement. One night in October of 2003, having just been dumped by his girlfriend, status-obsessed, socially maladjusted Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg hacked into the university’s computers to create a site that featured a database of all the women on campus. An instant viral hit, the stunt crashed Harvard’s servers, but provided the underpinnings for Facebook, which today has over 400 million users.

All this is chronicled in director David Fincher’s wildly involving The Social Network, which deftly intercuts the story of this creation with depositions from two separate lawsuits that would spring up — one by a pair of blonde, preppy, upper-crust rowers, the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer, pulling double duty), who argue that Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) stole their idea, and one from Zuckerberg’s friend and business partner, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), eventually forced out of the company via the gamesmanship of interloper Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), Napster’s co-founder.

The accelerated trajectory of these characters — brilliant, brash and soon to be flush with cash — underscores the bullet train of progress represented by the collision of their imaginations with the immediacy of the Internet, where desire gets out ahead of reason, and sets moral compasses spinning. The natural inclination on the part of many filmmakers would be to ladle on artifice, in an effort to play up the movie’s zeitgeist quotient, but Fincher keeps the movie’s tech-y elements at the periphery, focusing instead on the time-honored dramatic elements of isolation, determination, avarice and betrayal.

Eschewing the sort of more naked play for emotionalism that marked his last work, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fincher instead — with great assistance from Aaron Sorkin’s bristling screenplay, adapted from Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires — presents a consortium of tricky narrators, playing a delightful and engaging game of ping-pong with audience sympathies. The result is undeniably one of the year’s best films — an absorbing thriller for both Luddites and the plugged-in alike. (Sony/Columbia, PG-13, 120 minutes)