One-Liners: Drama

THE GERMAN DOCTOR (B) - A surprisingly effective little drama about a family that crosses paths with Josef Mengele in Argentina around 1960.

Buenos Aires director Lucia Puenzo ("XXY," about an intersexed 15-year-old) lights a long fuse for this slow burn of a movie. A couple -- Eva (Natalia Oreiro) and Enzo (Diego Peretti) -- and their three children welcome the mild-mannered doctor into their home.  Their 12-year-old daughter, Lilith (the adorable Florencia Bado), is tiny for his age, and the family's guest offers his experimental hormone therapy to help her grow. Meanwhile, Eva is pregnant with twins, and Mengele takes a keen interest in her impending offspring.

Puenzo creates low-grade thriller without resorting to the cheap tricks of throwaway horror flicks. (Though a quick shot of Mengele marking little Lilith's height in a doorway with a switchblade is downright chilling.) Instead, she revels in the fine print of Mengele's medical sketches and notebook scribblings; the attention to detail is riveting. The director also crafts a side story about Enzo creating prototypes for a doll that has a little mechanical beating heart. The parallels between the earnest father and the sadistic psychopath are engaging.

The film gets dragged down by a rather pedantic winding narrative involving a Mossad agent seeking to bag the big fish. "The German Doctor" nags long after its economical runtime.

LOVE IS STRANGE (C+) -  This enjoyable wry comic drama stokes warms feelings and admiration during its run time, but its charms fizzle not long after viewing. Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina) are an aging couple who are forced to sell their Manhattan apartment after they get married and George loses his job as a music teacher at a religious school. Short on cash, they are forced to crash -- separately -- with friends and relatives.

Ira Sachs ("Keep the Lights On") knows how to craft a story, but this one is a little too tidy. Lithgow and Molina are strong, but not so much the rest of the cast, including Marisa Tomei looking distracted as the niece-in-law who takes Ben in with her husband and son. (Ben and the teen sleep in bunk beds.) That domestic set-up is perpetually flat; it is intended to convey the tedium of merging households, but it mostly comes off as tedious, with a side story involving the teen and his pal that goes nowhere. George, meantime, chafes at the constant social buzz at the apartment where he has landed, taken in by two gay cop pals.

The biggest flaw here is the initial set-up. Why can't Ben and George find a small place together? Even if they do have to sleep in separate places, why can't they spend every day together at either place? If it's only temporary, why not go to the place that can accommodate both of them -- an invitation from Mindy to hang out with her in suburban Poughkeepsie? In fact, Christina Kirk's Mindy is one of the few supporting characters with any true energy. But she mostly disappears after the first 20 minutes.

After that, we get a sweet love story about separation and longing. It's technically fine but its significance fades in the end.