Out of Sorts

A SUMMER IN GENOA (2008) (B) - Michael Winterbottom simmers in his mid-career malaise of a decade ago with this serviceable but inessential study of a father and daughters mourning abroad after the tragic death of the girls' mother. Fine performances rescue this from being merely average.

Colin Firth carries the ball here as the stunned widower looking for solace and escape during a summer in Italy with the girls, one of whom is a curious teen flirting with adulthood. Catherine Keener offers an additional layer of sorrow as his hang-dog platonic pal. The younger daughter (Perla Haney-Jardine) is traumatized not only by sudden loss but also by guilt, and Winterbottom captures that trauma well.

Winterbottom was coming off a spectacular run -- "Wonderland," "24-Hour Party People," "In This World," "9 Songs," "Tristram Shandy" and "A Mighty Heart" -- and you wonder if he needed a break. His output since has featured minor-key dramas and some disjointed narratives (with the "Trip" movies as outliers). Here he is writing with occasional collaborator Laurence Coriat, and they manage to capture the horror of the ordinariness of loss. This slow burn is the cinematic equivalent of watching a wound slowly heal, though not completely.

GAS, FOOD, LODGING (1992) (C) - This mother-daughter companion story has not aged well, if it was even good 25 years ago. Allison Anders, a wunderkind who never caught on as a film director, stomped onto the scene with this story of a single mom and her two daughters eking an existence in a fictional New Mexico town.

Little of the story and the scenery ring true. Brooke Adams is a weak lead, and Ione Skye struggles to find her voice as the slutty, bratty older daughter. A young Fairuza Balk is a revelation as the younger, brighter daughter, but she has little to work with in Anders' adaptation of a Richard Peck novel. The outfits look fussed over, reminding us that we're not really hanging out with a trailer-park mom working in a roadside diner. Even the music by J Mascis (Dinosaur Jr.) is rather uninspired.

Anders would further explore artificiality a few years later in "Grace of My Heart" before settling in with blander TV work the past two decades, her own dreams of being an auteur put in their place.