A lot of otherwise quite avid moviegoers avoid horror films outright because of an aversion to gore or violence, but if you dig deeper in conversation you’ll find an equal or greater number that are more turned off by the violence’s lack of connection to tangible motivating factors. They want to know and be able to identify with — albeit sometimes in only exclusionary fashion — a killer if they’re going to take a trip to a nasty and brutish place, in other words.

Red White & Blue is a film that invests wholeheartedly in the foreboding set-up of its characters and their predicaments on its slow, winding road trip toward Very Bad Things; it’s one of those stunning, gem-find indie movies that creeps up on you like a dark, sudden storm cloud in the middle of a summer afternoon. Marked by stellar performances and sophisticated storytelling, the film is a powerful, visceral and surprisingly emotionally tangible dramatic thriller — an edgy, psychologically charged tale, unfolding in triptych structure, that grounds itself in real-world problems before veering off into darker territory.

Austinite Erica (Amanda Fuller) is a troubled nymphomaniac whose tough veneer and sexual acting out masks deep and private wounds. She lives rent-free in a small co-op as a trade-off for housework, but when her living situation changes she gets a job at a nearby hardware store. Despite getting off on the wrong foot with Nate (Noah Taylor, above), a mysterious Iraq War vet who claims to be mulling over a job offer from the CIA, Erica forms a hesitant bond with her neighbor, in part informed by the fact that he’s the only guy who doesn’t seemingly immediately want to sleep with her.

Old actions can have terrible lingering consequences, however. Though his mother Ellie (Sally Jackson) is suffering from a terminal illness, things seem to be on the occupational upswing for musician Franki (Marc Senter). Until, that is, his previous one-night fling with Erica — part of a boozy orgy with a pair of his rocker pals — comes back to haunt him, bringing to bear unforeseen costs for a whole host of people.

Red White & Blue is British writer-director Simon Rumley’s follow up to the acclaimed and oddly personal horror film The Living and The Dead, and his deft touch with multiple tonalities is again in evidence. The first three-quarters or more of the film doesn’t touch the rails of horror at all; it’s a gritty little drama about fringe-dwelling characters in pain, and Rumley trades in woozy montages and still frames that convey a sense of depressed place with startling economy and clarity. Once the discrete narratives coalesce, though, the movie picks up a certain doomed downhill momentum, wringing tension from violence lurking around the story’s edges, and then, finally, bursting forth in ugly fashion.

A couple of the narrative pivots or reactions may at first blush seem odd (Franki’s behavior toward Erica, for one), but they stem from recognizably human places. There’s an almost subliminal electric energy attached to all the characters, and Rumley doesn’t overwrite his story, stuffing it to the seams with explanatory dialogue pitched at highlighting action for a lowest-common-denominator audience. Instead, he invests time and energy in establishing an audience connection to the largely unarticulated but nonetheless engaging, parallel inner dialogues and lives of these characters, and then foisting terrible choices and situations upon them. What happens is not pleasant, but it’s darkly understandable, in its own way, and perhaps that’s the most effectively unsettling element of Red White & Blue. For more information on the film, and its special theatrical engagements and VOD listings, click here. (IFC Midnight, R, 103 minutes)

An adaptation of University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and New York-based journalist Stephen Dubner’s 2005 book about hidden and surprising causality, Freakonomics represents an unusual cinematic experiment, bringing together as collaborative directors the documentary filmmakers behind Super Size Me, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Jesus Camp, Why We Fight and The King of Kong.

The title of the book stems from Levitt’s coined term about social science research and other empirical data shattering common (but untrue) assumptions about human behavior, and society. Breaking from the convention of more structured, formal review, it’s just easier to flat-out say what doesn’t really work about Freakonomics, especially since its partitioned structure and insistent flitting to and fro makes the movie come off as a hit-and-miss collection of appetizers. I’m generally a sucker for these sorts of documentaries — movies that take big, meaty swings at matters political, anthropological and/or behavioral — but this movie is wildly uneven, and doesn’t really coalesce in a meaningful way.

There are basically two segments in Freakonomics that connect. The first is helmed by Morgan Spurlock, and looks at whether there is such a thing as a financial value in a baby’s name — whether it’s a predictive or determining factor in adult happiness, opportunity or wealth. Given its focus on the unique nature of certain predominantly African-American names, this is a fascinating inquiry, whatever one’s previously staked out position or lack thereof, precisely because it’s something recognized in perceptive circles but wildly underdiscussed. In the other engaging portion, Eugene Jarecki investigates Levitt’s original research which postulates that the national drop in crime rates in the 1990s stemmed chiefly not from new law enforcement measures enacted by politicians (sorry, Rudy Giuliani and Bill Clinton), but instead the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, which allowed for choice in pregnancy

The rest of Freakonomics is a collection of sputters and half-measures, however, weaved together by interstitial
interludes from Seth Gordon, which provide a bit of context and sit-down commentary from the authors. Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s look at attempts to incentivize high school learning with cold hard cash provides moments of engagement courtesy of some of its teenage subjects, but only scratches the surface of their relationship to continued education, and fails to really give a voice to those conducting the research program. Alex Gibney’s look at the crumbling façade of sumo wrestling’s honor
system, meanwhile, weighs Freakonomics down (no pun intended) mightily. Stretching on for far too long in the film’s middle, it’s so self-satisfied with its uncovering of Japanese corruption and bribery that it fails to acknowledge its insights or revelations are far less about any sociocultural specificity than they are about… money. As in: where people can make large amounts of money betting, corruption and gaming will follow. For more information on the movie, click here. (Magnolia, PG-13, 93 minutes)

When mysterious, 12-year-old Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz) and her dad (Richard Jenkins) move next door to Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a social outcast who’s being bullied at school as his parents undergo a divorce, Owen forms a profound bond with his new neighbor, who he can’t help noticing is like no one he’s met before. As a string of strange, grisly murders grips his small town, though, Owen must confront the reality that his new friend is actually a vampire.

Writer-director Matt Reeves, working from John Ajvide Lindqvist’s bestselling novel Let the Right One In, ups the gore quotient a bit, but retains the artfully deliberate pacing and wintry desolation of the original Swedish film that it spawned. His experience on Cloverfield with chaotic, jumbled, yet still involving cinematography is richly evident here, and Reeves also recognizes that, current commercial appetites notwithstanding, this isn’t a vampire movie in any typical sense, it’s a movie about loneliness. Let Me In pegs the lingering, character-molding anxiety of adolescent humiliation and degradation, and in doing so breaks one’s heart while simultaneously quickening one’s pulse. At once tender and brutal, Let Me In is a transfixing elegy the likes of which the supernatural horror genre rarely produces.