Solid lead performances and sustained levels of moderate engagement mark Orphan, a slightly above average evil-tyke movie with an infusion of Electra complex and a good narrative twist only half-heartedly rendered. “Tweener” status may relegate what is in many ways an admirable effort to a shortened theatrical shelf life; Orphan is too dramatically involved and tony for gorehounds or impatient horror fans, and marketed in too base a fashion to lure the same adult crowd that made 2005’s Hide and Seek, a passably similar tale of shattered domesticity built around a little girl, into a $120 million worldwide hit.

After a miscarriage of their third child, John and Kate Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga) look to fill the void by adopting, expanding a family that already includes their 12-year-old son Danny (Jimmy Bennett) and much younger, deaf-mute daughter Max (Aryana Engineer). Visiting an orphanage, they settle on nine-year-old, artistically inclined Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman, above right), whose lilting Russian accent and proper dress and demeanor give her additional strikes of “otherness” with Danny and her new schoolmates.

As accidents and other narrowly avoided disasters with Esther at the scene mount, Kate grows panicked, and more suspicious of her new daughter’s true background. But John doubts Kate’s distrust, which in turn creates a rift that exacerbates old tensions and rekindles old arguments between the two of them. Esther picks up sign language quite readily, and uses this to manipulate Max to her advantage as she takes increasingly radical steps to seal off Kate and ingratiate herself with John. Things finally come to a head after Danny is seriously injured in a fire.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra (House of Wax) gets a lot of mileage out of the snowy Connecticut environs, but screenwriter David Johnson’s yawningly conventional, thrill-infused ending — unfolding on a frozen lake that figures prominently in Kate’s fractured, addiction-addled past — bends too much toward parallel narrative cleverness. It’s true, too, that the third act twist necessary to explain the physical extremities of some of Esther’s actions could, and should, be explored in deeper and more satisfying ways than the exposition-laden phone call that sets off the penultimate gallop of the movie’s closing reel. Yet there’s also a satisfying humanistic component to the movie, many moments of uncommon tenderness for such a genre piece, and a solid performance from especially Farmiga, who nicely sketches Kate’s pain, sadness and self-loathing. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., R, 123 minutes)

They say that after high school you can’t truly go home again, and that old expression holds especially true if you have a psycho hose beast for an ex-girlfriend, and you’re traveling with your hot new arm candy. That’s the basic re-tilled lesson learned in the moderately engaging new thriller Homecoming, a sort of junior varsity level Misery that earns some begrudging respect for embracing its streamlined agenda of entertainment, and not trying too hard to be something it has neither the scope nor nuance to be.

The story centers around jock Mike (Matt Long, of The Deep End), the star athlete/prodigal son of a small Northeastern town who’s now buried on the quarterback depth chart during his first semester at college. Returning home during a bye week to have his high school jersey honored/retired, Mike brings along Elizabeth (Jessica Stroup, above), a pretty city girl whom he’s recently started dating. Mike’s genial cousin Billy (Michael Landes), a local cop, tips him off that Mike’s ex-girlfriend Shelby (Mischa Barton), now the sole owner/operator of an inherited family restaurant, seems to think they’re still dating. Mike’s instinct is to steer clear, but Elizabeth wants to try to play nice, so they head straight to Shelby’s place for some local color and drinks. Elizabeth ends up getting a bit tipsy and, not wanting to make a poor first impression on Mike’s parents, convinces him to let her grab a hotel room for the night. One unfortunate mishap later, Elizabeth is hit by a car, and Shelby takes her into her house, under the twisted guise of nursing her back to health.

Directed by Morgan J. Freeman (no, not this Morgan Freeman), Homecoming is attractively cast, and helped immeasurably by being rooted in an honest sense of place. I suppose news of Barton’s recent involuntary psychiatric hold could color one’s opinion of the movie, or make for an easy set for of smashing critical derision, but I found her performance here to be of a piece with the rest of the film, even if weighed down somewhat by a weird, generically provincial accent. She’s certainly aided by a screenplay that doesn’t dawdle with split narrative focus, preciously over-sketched detail or coy ambiguity. The movie makes no bones about Shelby’s psychosis; she wields an axe (indoors!) and tries to needle a drugged-up Elizabeth by trying on lingerie and announcing her coital intentions for the forthcoming evening.

Perhaps it’s the fact that Homecoming is written by a female (Method screenwriter Katie Fettig), or maybe it’s just the basic gender-based inversion of the narrative, in which both captor and captive sport extra X chromosomes, but there seems to be at least an attempt to keep the film from going too over the top in its violence — to make it tilt more toward realism than fancifulness. Well, until Shelby takes a ceramic toilet bowl tank top to the head, and then covers up the gash with some remarkably quick-concealing pancake make-up.

The other strikes against Homecoming, though, are for the most part only mid-grade irritants (Mike agreeing to see Shelby for a private lunch even though Elizabeth is missing and he hasn’t heard from her, for instance, or one character refusing to act definitively in self-defense once they finally gain advantage in a brawl), contrivances that come with the genre. These story problems aren’t ever expected to be solved, though, because the core audience for whom Homecoming was made has absolutely no interest in an extra 15 or 20 minutes in which conflict is more diffuse and parceled out, less physical. Much like its real life namesake, Homecoming isn’t age-appropriate for everyone, then — maybe just those in high school, or barely removed. Others will likely find the familiarity more humdrum than effectively nostalgic. To visit the film’s web site, click here. (Paper Street/Animus Films, R, 88 minutes)

Mike Myers notably likes to meticulously workshop his characters in live, improvisatory settings, but then retreat to craft a story and script out of material that’s been vetted through laughter. For Sacha Baron Cohen, however, deep-in-character comedy is its own special type of high-wire act, in which often unsuspecting members of the public at large are lured into loosely worked-up scenarios, and then submitted to the warped worldviews, invasions of personal space and/or socio-cultural manglings of his outlandish characters. That was certainly the case with 2006’s wild, subversive Borat, and it remains true — if to a slightly less shocking degree — of Cohen’s new globe-trotting road film Brüno, a very funny mockumentary that yet again wrings laughter from much of what collectively unnerves us.

The film is built around Cohen’s title character (above), the gay, self-absorbed, and more than a bit deluded host of an Austrian TV fashion show. After he causes a scene on a runway, is air-quote fired and dumped, and then barred from other fashion events, Brüno decides that he needs to head to America to achieve the celebrity he so richly covets. With lovestruck second assistant Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten) in tow, Brüno hits Los Angeles, improbably lands an agent and, between anal bleaching appointments, manages to score small screen work as an extra on Medium. After a disastrous focus group session for his own show in which the subjects recoil at his dancing, full frontal nudity and talking urethra, Brüno strikes out in attempting to craft a sex tape with Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. It’s only then that Brüno comes to the conclusion that he needs to become famous by “solving a world problem,” and thus turns his attention to brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace. If your head is spinning from the mere comedic potential of these set-ups, all this isn’t even mentioning Brüno’s mock-fellating of one of the members of Milli Vanilli at a seance, Paula Abdul using a Mexican day laborer as a chair, or footage from a real swingers’ party which ends with Brüno getting repeatedly belt-whipped by an angry, plastic-boobed dominatrix.

Owing to the fact that his modus operandi has effectively been outed on a much grander stage than his HBO work on Da Ali G Show ever afforded, Brüno isn’t quite as brilliantly transgressive as Borat, in sum; we more clearly sense the track upon which we’re traveling, in other words. Still, Cohen and director Larry Charles, also his collaborator on the aforementioned film, are masters in picking at the scabs of societal discomfort, whether it’s in the form of African-Americans confronting a gay (and admittedly wildly irresponsible) white man adopting a black baby, or gay conversion advisors being told they have “nice blowjob lips.” These bits are wild and funny, but also striking because they ask us to reflect on exactly why the unwitting participants feel so strongly the way they do, and whether we agree with their views.

While there are laughs to be had at the (good-natured, if raunchily delivered) expense of actual gay couplings, Cohen is mostly interested in using his character’s flamboyance to push buttons about reactions to homosexual men. Some of the movie’s humor is less sophisticated than this mission, though, revolving as it does around the breaking of rules or the breaching of simple interpersonal boundaries that have nothing to do with gay or straight. For all its emphasis on shock, however (and early on, Brüno pushes the envelope with respect to mainstream frames of flapping penis, only further underlining the gulf between studio fare and what independent movies can realistically get away within respect to nudity and sex), the movie also isn’t afraid to indulge in a couple moments of glorious slow burn, as when Brüno goes camping with a trio of good-ol’-boy hunters and remarks that “all the stars in the sky make one think of all the hot guys in the world.” The long uncomfortable silence that follows is hilarious, and speaks volumes.

The film’s two most jaw-dropping and completely anxiety-inducing moments are counterbalancing examples of Brüno‘s mixture of styles. The first, an evisceration of stage parents who will do anything to see their kids succeed as child models, has nothing whatsoever to do with Brüno’s sexuality. Auditioning babies for a photo shoot with O.J., his own adopted child, Brüno keeps upping the ante to see if the moms and dads will object to anything (mock crucifixions, Nazi uniforms, heavy equipment with a lack of safety harnesses, or just “working around lit phosphorus”). Errr… they don’t.

The movie’s amazing penultimate sequence — in this case a stain on the state of Arkansas specifically, but more tellingly and lastingly a statement on the short fuse of mob mentality — finds Cohen portraying the mustachioed ringmaster at “Straight Dave’s Man-Slammin’ Cage-Wrestling Event.” Whipping the crowd into a furor, and leading a chant of “Straight pride!” before the evening’s festivities are set to kick off, things take a turn for the worse when someone shouts an anti-gay slur at Dave. He challenges them to a fight, and then… Well, with Brüno, Cohen has again delivered a comedy with the capacity to both make you think and genuinely recoil. (Universal, R, 82 minutes)

There’s an unfortunate disconnect, or chasm, between art and those that are removed — in either geographical distance or, more often, income bracket and social standing — from its creation and most readily accessible exhibition. Megumi Sasaki’s Herb & Dorothy, though, shows that gap to be largely an artificial construct, telling the fascinating true story of a New York City couple who amassed an impressive private art collection despite their modest means.

In the early 1960s, Herb and Dorothy Vogel threw themselves into minimalist and conceptual art, at least partly because abstract expressionism and pop art — two other on-the-rise sub-genres of the time — were too expensive for their budget. She was a librarian and he a postal clerk, and their collecting — funded by his salary, since they lived in spartan fashion off hers alone — was guided by only two rules: the piece had to be affordable, and it had to be small enough to fit in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, which they also shared over the years with a couple cats.

Within these simple limitations, they proved themselves curatorial visionaries. Now married for 45 years, the Vogels managed to accumulate over 2,000 pieces, and in 1992 decided to bequeath their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Weaving back and forward in time, and judiciously mixing archival footage with loads of new material, Herb & Dorothy tells the story of the pair’s unlikely rise to prominence in the art world, and how they came to be the most important benefactors of their era for many young artists who were at the time not receiving any other sort of attention elsewhere.

The movie’s roster of industry interviewees is a long and impressive one, including artists like Richard Tuttle, Chuck Close — who deems them “mascots of the art world” — James Siena, Lynda Benglis, Will Barnet and Robert and Sylvia Mangold. Their reminiscences are candid and most frequently warm; Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the married couple responsible for the breathtaking 2005 exhibition of The Gates in New York City’s Central Park, recall exchanging a piece of prep work art for several weeks of cat-sitting services. Most artists seem to regard the Vogels in an avuncular light, though there is some discussion of whether some of their lowball offers amounted to exploitation.

If there’s a big knock on Herb & Dorothy, though, it’s that Sasaki’s film lacks a stabilizing leg of sustained familial exploration; while some time is spent sketching Herb’s childhood and the couple’s meeting, it’s almost half an hour into the movie before Dorothy’s brother and sister-in-law are introduced, and their too-brief comments — which hint at a sort of understandable bafflement and separation that serves as a suitable stand-in for the confusion a lot of folks feel with respect to the endeavors, occupational and avocational alike, of their loved ones — about the couple’s wildly different lifestyle is never given full due. This is a naturally sweet story, but there should still be more of a pinch of friction, either in exploring how Herb and Dorothy’s collecting ostracized them from friends and family, or, honestly, how their pack-rat collecting extended far beyond critical mass, and fire safety regulations. This wouldn’t unduly demean the subjects, or diminish their collection, but it would further humanize them, and only to serve to underscore the passion for art that has shaped and driven their lives. (Arthouse, unrated, 87 minutes)