Intrigue

FAY GRIM (2006) (B+) - Maybe waiting more than a decade to finally get around to Hal Hartley's sequel to '90s favorite "Henry Fool" helped manage expectations for this follow-up featuring Henry's love, Fay Grim, played perfectly awkwardly by Parker Posey. Hartley moves from chatty indie to international intrigue, albeit just as deadpan as the original.

Posey holds it all together with her offbeat line-reading and patented blank stares. As Hartley perverts the idea of noir, Posey comes off as Pee-Wee Herman doing Barbara Stanwyck. Hartley's script starts slow (a lot of exposition to catch up on the nine-year gap between films) but finds a groove after the first reel, as Fay gets roped into an international mission by the CIA to track down Henry via his cryptic notebooks that date back to his apparent decades-long spook activities from Pinochet's Chile to Afghanistan battled against the Russian invasion, right up to the post-9/11 positioning of strange bedfellows among the terrorist networks.

Jeff Goldblum is a natural as the dry-witted CIA agent. James Urbaniak returns as Fay's brother (and Henry's pal) Simon. Elina Lowensohn and Saffron Burrows sink their teeth into femme fatale turns. Meantime, Thomas Jay Ryan towers over everything as the specter that is Henry Fool, and his powerful two-man scene in the final reel (I won't say if it's a flashback or not) is well worth the wait. (This clocks in around two hours.) Hartley balances the silly with the profound and his stellar cast pulls it all off. 

GOOD TIME (2017) (C+) - This is mostly macho bunk, about 24 hours in the life of a bungling would-be thug trying to spring his brother from jail. For some reason, a cheesy '80s-style synthesizer soundtrack plays like a siren throughout this thriller.

Robert Pattinson dirties up to play Connie Nikas, who interferes with his younger brother Nick's mental health counseling and drags Nick (Benny Safdie) to a bank robbery. When the heist blows up in their face, Nick is caught, jailed, beat up, and hospitalized. Connie, navigating the seedy underworld of New York, hustles to find and free Nick.

Both Benny and Josh Safdie directed this gritty, messy street tale. But their style is a color-faded mash-up of Scorsese and Tarantino, with Pattinson perpetually mugging as if in a De Niro/Pacino contest. The women here, including Jennifer Jason Leigh and Taliah Webster, are wasted as props. The brothers have a confident visual style, but their storytelling here barely rises above that of a police procedural. Their upcoming movie "Uncut Gems" shows promise -- and perhaps a leap of maturity -- so we'll keep them on the radar.