I’m always taken aback when unequivocally bad movies like Ceremony somehow pass the same art-house muster as films by renowned artists.

A snarky, misogynistic and intellectually vapid Indiewood feature, Ceremony belongs in Blockbuster’s direct-to-video dustbin, not sharing real estate with the likes of Certified Copy and Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

In his feature debut, writer-director Max Winkler offers a flat imitation of what Noah Baumbach’s Wedding Crashers might look like -- an oppositional clash of subtle and broad comic textures, neither of which Winkler conveys with any degree of success. It stars Michael Angarano as Sam, a floundering, 23-year-old children’s book author who reunites with his meek friend Marshall (Reece Thompson, looking like a chalky character in a Smiths video) for a weekend retreat.

The vacation is ostensibly an opportunity for the estranged buddies to bond and bromanticize, but Sam has designs for the excursion: Their squalid hotel happens to be situated next to a palatial beachside estate owned by affluent documentary filmmaker Whit Coutell (Lee Pace) who, over the next two days, will be marrying the love of Sam’s life: Uma Thurman’s Zoe.

Aside from Marshall, who gets the short end of all of the film’s sticks, Ceremony provides us with a dearth of sympathetic characters. Sam is supposedly our relatable conduit into the world of high society, but he’s essentially a shameless ass.

Whit is a self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing and remarkably transparent blowhard who makes movies about starving children in Africa that feature his bulbous ego more than his subjects – a character seemingly crafted, with Xeroxed inspiration, after Winkler saw Russell Brand in Get Him to the Greek. Zoe appears fidgety and embarrassed by Whit’s every utterance; watching the interactions of the soon-to-be-betrothed, their nuptials are inexplicable.

Only in Movieland do artificial straw characters like Whit – in this case, the callous jerk we’re supposed to scorn while the working-class hero steals back the damsel’s trapped heart – get to bed and wed Uma Thurman.

Not that Zoe, as scripted by Winkler, is necessarily a catch worth desiring. She’s too underwritten to feel anything about her. She’s little more than a trophy fiancée who apparently selects suitors with the indiscriminate direction of a broken GPS. For a star of Thurman’s stature, it’s a thankless role, and one obviously written by a man (Thurman has also, to my knowledge, never been photographed as unflatteringly as she comes across under Winkler’s camera).

If this ensemble of archetypes only exists in the movies, it’s only appropriate that their actions are ones that only occur on celluloid – particularly celluloid from 20 years ago. Modern technology is entirely absent from this picture: Zoe, who is a good 15 years older than Sam, apparently met him when the two became pen pals. How quaint.

And there’s actually a scene where Sam takes a break from the road trip to call Zoe from a pay phone. One antique cliché begets another in this scene, as Sam clutches the receiver and rehearses different conversational points of entry, only to slam the phone back into its cradle and exit the booth. Sam is quite the mercurial misanthrope, and in a better movie, he might come off as mysterious.

Here, the overwhelming stench of déjà vu trumps everything.

CEREMONY. Director: Max Winkler; Cast: Michael Angarano, Uma Thurman, Lee Pace, Jake M. Johnson, Reece Thompson; Distributor: Magnolia; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at Living Room Theaters, Florida Atlantic University

Heartless (IFC)

Release date: April 12

Standard list price: $17.99

A visionary director whose visions are all too infrequent, Britian’s Philip Ridley has made just three films in 21 years, making Robert Bresson look like a workaholic. His audience is tiny and seems unlikely to grow: His outstanding debut, The Reflecting Skin, has never been released on DVD in the United States, and his sophomore effort, The Passion of Darkly Noon, is long out-of-print.

Ridley’s third and latest picture, Heartless, may revive nominal interest in the director’s scant resume, if only because it has the advantage of being available. Unlike his previous forays into humanity’s dark chasms, this gonzo horror comedy resides in a clearly identifiable genre hybrid that has, for years, been growing in popularity. But a Ridley film wouldn’t be a Ridley film if it was accessible to a mainstream audience; simultaneously loud and quiet, blunt and subtle, art-house and grind-house, gruesome and sentimental, Heartless exists within these dichotomies, ping-ponging between tones and textures with the abandon of a director who doesn’t care if the midnight-movie masses like, or even get, his psychotic ramblings.

Like Ridley’s other films, Heartless is a pre-apocalyptic thriller depicting a world crumbling at the seams, physically and morally. Photographer Jamie (Jim Sturgess), forever tainted by a large red birthmark over his left eye and part of his body, prowls the decrepit streets of East London for material. It’s the kind of place that would makes the Fleet Street of Sweeney Todd look like a stroll down Sesame Street. Sharp-toothed demons and rival gangs patrol the metropolis, graffiti plasters every public space and Molotov cocktails erupt on a daily basis. The world is going to Hell, literally it seems: A paranoid, gun-toting shopkeeper rails against society’s descent into Hades, and Ridley similarly alludes to the Devil by having Jamie read Dante’s Inferno and order a drink called the Faust at a nightclub.

When most everyone close to Jamie begins to systematically die, he confronts the source of the terror: A gaunt, scarred Mephistopheles by the name of Papa B (Joseph Mawle), the self-proclaimed “patron saint of random violence.” He agrees to remove Jamie’s debilitating birthmark in return for Jamie’s spray-painting of blasphemous messages on the street – or so he thinks. Devils, obviously, cannot be trusted; the bargain actually forces Jamie to murder someone in cold blood, remove his heart and feed it to Papa B.

Within this grisly, B-movie scenario is the kind of scabrous humor, artistic expressionism and thematic density of a more serious-minded picture. Ridley controls the film’s color palette with painterly exactitude, bathing one scene in darkroom reds, the next in spiritual yellows, the next in placid greens. Everything is propped and set-designed in service to Ridley’s atmospheric rigor, where everyone’s tattoos and birthmarks suggest the branding of otherworldly beasts, and where Christian iconography battles spatially with Satanic forces.

For the comedy, the scenes between Jamie and Papa B are a dry-witted interlude to the best scene in the film: a cameo by Eddie Marsan – the driving instructor from Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky – as the devil’s on-site “weapons man,” impatiently issuing mission directives to the flustered Jamie.

Arguably, Heartless falls apart at the end, plunging too deeply into the dubious waters of flashback-induced sentimentalism. But it doesn’t negate the powerhouse of uninhibited emotion that preceded it. The film’s thematic cauldron examines religion, man’s free will, schizophrenia, youth violence and the perennial anxiety over inner vs. outer beauty. The film’s minions of trench-coated, leathery lizards are just the means Ridley is using to touch on life’s most monumental, and unanswerable, questions.

Rabbit Hole (Lionsgate)

Release date: April 19

SLP: $15.49

Hedwig and the Angry Inch director John Cameron Mitchell might seem an unusual choice to helm a film adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s terrific play Rabbit Hole. But the camp-master handles the material – a survey of the emotional wreckage left on a middle-aged couple after their young son is killed in a traffic accident – better than you might expect, directing this chamber piece with appropriate sensitivity and realism. Better yet, screenwriter Lindsay-Abaire clearly recognizes the difference between film and theater, expanding his spartan story with added characters, locations and storylines. The movie isn’t perfect: The Oscar-nominated Nicole Kidman was justly praised as the grieving mother, but costar Aaron Eckhart shoots over the top in the film’s most dramatic scenes, hoping in vain that sheer volume will convey everything. But the only major flaw here is the image itself. Mitchell shot the film on the dreaded but ever-popular Red One digital camera, giving the movie a distractingly ruddy complexion. Judging it purely on its visual aesthetic, Rabbit Hole is one of the great casualties of the digital conversion.

Ingrid Bergman in Sweden (Kino)

Release date: April 19

SLP: $27.49

Though she starred in an impressive canon of Hollywood movies, Ingrid Bergman was always an actress of the world, working for everyone from Hitchcock to Rossellini to Renoir. No nationality escaped her. But before her late ‘30s discovery by David O. Selznick that started her A-list ascent, she was a humble actress in Sweden, making some 11 movies in her native tongue that, today, are barely remembered. Kino’s three-disc box set hopes to change that, bringing two of those films back in print and another to DVD for the first time. The collection includes the original, 1936 version of the romance Intermezzo – whose Hollywood remake a few years later introduced Bergman to American audiences – as well as the facial-disfigurement drama A Woman’s Face and Per Lindberg’s crime thriller June Night.

A Summer in Genoa (Entertainment One)

Release date: April 12

SLP: $11.99

Five months after the fatal car crash of his wife, a college professor (Colin Firth) and his two daughters (Willa Holland and Perla Haney-Jardine) spend the titular summer in Italy to assuage their still-palpable grief. Not much happens until Mary, the youngest daughter, begins to see visions of her dead mother (Hope Davis), whose appearances put Mary in danger. Despite its A-list cast – including Catherine Keener as Firth’s ex-flame, who accompanies him on the excursion – and top director (Michael Winterbottom has helmed A Mighty Heart and 24 Hour Party People, among several masterpieces), A Summer in Genoa petered into obscurity after a dismal festival run, and it never picked up theatrical distribution in the United States. From a commercial standpoint, it’s easy to see why – there’s nothing gangbusters about it, and Winterbottom’s meandering, restless camera never gains anything resembling a narrative thrust. But perhaps that’s the point: He wants us, like the characters, to gradually unravel as we lose ourselves in a foreign land. A good effort from a great filmmaker.

Less than two years after The September Issue probed the life and work of fashion kingmaker Anna Wintour, a new documentary offers a look at another figure residing in the nexus of fashion and print journalism.

In Bill Cunningham New York, which opens Friday in South Florida, the subject is New York Times fashion photographer Cunningham, a man just as iconoclastic – and more enigmatic -- than Vogue’s Wintour. Even Wintour herself manages to descend from her haute perch to say in the documentary, with surprising humility, that “we all get dressed up for Bill.”

The film argues that Cunningham, through his columns and photo spreads in everything from Details to Women’s Wear Daily to the Times, has been the most important chronicler-turned-trendmaker in the past half-century of fashion. Cunningham is 82 years young, a spry workaholic in a functional blue jacket whose daily routine sees him ubiquitously cruising Manhattan streets on his Schwinn, snapping candid shots of outfits that catch his learned eye. At night, he attends the metropolitan area’s signature social soirees, photographing luminaries.

As someone who knows less than nothing about fashion, I found Cunningham an inspiring artist – a counterintuitive, countercultural working man in a world of materialistic elites. We assume he collects a paycheck from the Times, but Cunningham vocalizes contempt for money, ceremoniously tearing up paychecks for some of his early freelance assignments. “If you don’t touch money, they can’t tell you what to do,” he says. He washes his clothes at a Laundromat, eats TV dinners and never takes a drop of food or alcohol at the glitzy galas he covers.

Cunningham is a charming, self-deprecating figure full of contrarian wit: He had no interest in photographing Marilyn Monroe, he says, because she “wasn’t stylish.” He takes an egalitarian approach to fashion photography, where movie stars, visiting dignitaries and bag ladies on the street share equal weight. The person doesn’t matter; only the clothes do.

As in The September Issue, Bill Cunningham New York feels the need to address the supposed frivolity of fashion, becoming unnecessarily defensive of a culture that, at this point, needs little justification of its merits. After all, the fashion-industry staples who are interviewed for the film – including Wintour, designer Iris Apfel, fashionistas Patrick McDonald and Kenny Kenny, and Shail Upadhya, a retired U.N. official from Nepal who makes eccentric clothing out of used furniture – come across as intelligent, witty and down to earth, not as the vapid celebutantes Tom Wolfe (who is also interviewed for the film) and others diagnose them. Only once does one of the film’s subjects offer an insulting, out-of-touch soundbite, when she compares the work Cunningham does on the city streets to that of a war photographer.

The film dips into its murkiest, and most interesting, waters when trying to extract a personal life out of the notoriously secretive Cunningham. For Bill, it seems that everything is work, and work is everything. He’s never had a serious romantic relationship, he says, and the question of his sexuality remains unknown all the way to the credits. He’s also a privately religious man, attending church every Sunday – a revelation that clearly shocks director Richard Press.

When asked later about his faith, Cunningham hangs his head for an epic silence – watching it, you may think the film is stuck in the projector – before offering a meditative answer. It’s just one of the many ways this film, and the man it documents, confound our expectations.

BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK. Director: Richard Press; not rated; distributor: Zeitgeist Films; opens Friday; venues: Living Room Theaters at FAU in Boca Raton, Lake Worth Playhouse, Mos’ Art Theatre in Lake Park, Gateway Theatre 4 in Fort Lauderdale, the Miami Beach Cinematheque and the Cosford Cinema in Coral Gables.

The Father of My Children (IFC)

Release date: March 29

Standard list price: $18.99

At just 28, French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love has shown an Orson Welles-like prodigiousness, already with a short and two features completed and one more in post-production. Given that she’s engaged to established French director Olivier Assayas, has acted in a number of art-house films and is a contributor to the esteemed film journal Cahiers du Cinema, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at her talent.

But her age is remarkable in light of her breakthrough feature Father of My Children, a film that explores delicate subjects best approached by directors twice her age -- parenthood, coping, midlife crises and workaday struggles – all with unvarnished, lived-in verisimilitude.

The father of the film’s title is Gregoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), a high-powered, chain-smoking producer of auteurist, adventurous art films (not unlike Father of My Children) who is raising three girls, two young ones of his own and a teenager from his wife’s previous marriage. Gregoire is a workaholic -- his cellphone is practically an extension of his body -- who runs a harried, threadbare production company beset by mounting fiscal calamities, from projects that are tanking at the box office to a perfectionist Swedish director who has gone wildly over-budget.

Gregoire finally takes out his financial frustrations in an excruciating, unpredictable act of violence, which, like everything else in Father of My Children, is presented to us with stone-cold, unsentimental matter-of-factness.

This travesty occurs no more than 50 minutes into a nearly two-hour feature, and everything that follows is predicated on this mid-film stunner. In light of spoiling the surprise, I must discontinue the plot description here. Suffice it to say that the moment in question is a monumental example of storytelling subversion on par with L’Avventura and Psycho, and, just as in those classics, we are deprived of preparation for it.

This one action shifts the film’s entire tone and texture; a story that appears to be moving in an elliptical fashion derails itself, careening into a new direction -- a kind of post-mortem of the previous narrative. The film’s violent turning point is usually the kind that ends films, not divides them into halves, but Father of My Children isn’t most films.

There is, refreshingly, not an ounce of studio-film sugar-coating in Hansen-Love’s style. Yes, it is a movie about transcending family hardships, but not with melodramatic platitudes, a weeping string section and an unearned happy ending. In fact, the ambiguous ending is anything but happy. It’s less like a pleasurable Hollywood conclusion than one of the melancholy, meandering climaxes from one of Gregoire’s art films.

At the movie’s core is an acute understanding that things don’t always work out, and sometimes we just have to deal with that. It sounds simple, but for a 28-year-old maverick upstart, it’s a sensitive, unusually profound observation.

The Times of Harvey Milk (Criterion)

Release date: March 29

SLP: $21.99

Rob Epstein’s Academy Award-winning 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk doesn’t have any pomp, circumstance or stylistic flash, but when the material is this compelling, there’s no need for any of it: Epstein just lets the extraordinary stock footage speak for itself. Charting assassinated civil-rights leader Milk’s ascent through the San Francisco political establishment, his constant battles against a regressive conservative regime and the details surrounding his murder, The Times of Harvey Milk is an emotionally gripping clip show, aided by interviews with Milk’s closest associates and Harvey Fierstein’s sober narration. Funny, incisive, infuriating and ultimately heartbreaking, it does a far better job than the fictionalized biopic Milk at deconstructing the dog-and-pony show that was supervisor Dan White’s murder trial. The second disc on this exemplary collection includes even more on the White trial, via a reflective panel discussion, plus a rare collection of audio and video recordings of Milk, excerpts from Epstein’s research tapes and several new documentaries. Essential stuff.

Rope of Sand (VCI Entertainment)

Release date: April 5

SLP: $22.49

Journeyman director William Dieterle directed this fine Saharan adventure story from 1947, notable as the American debut of French bombshell Corinne Calvet. She plays a primitive variation on the hooker with the heart of gold – a sex kitten with a nondescript European accent who is lured into the scheme of a diamond syndicate chairman played by Claude Rains. Calvet becomes the bait for two men – Paul Henreid’s sadistic police commander and Burt Lancaster’s laconic hunter – who had a famous brawl two years prior and now seek a batch of diamonds whose location only Lancaster knows. It’s a lean, occasionally talky story that harbors some fun surprises over the course of its 104 minutes. Mostly, the movie is an opportunity to see great actors honing their personae: Rains is effortlessly dapper and sophisticated, Lancaster memorably brooding but secretly wily and Henreid casually ruthless. And it never hurts when you throw in Peter Lorre playing Peter Lorre.

Thunder in the City (VCI)

Release date: March 29

SLP: $13.49

The noirish title of this 1937 feature is a misnomer: Thunder in the City is actually a romantic dramedy set in the burgeoning, pre-Madison Avenue advertising culture. Edward G. Robinson is a roguish ad executive for a G.E. style industrial manufacturer who, in the film’s unintentionally hilarious opening, is chided by his corporation for his grandstanding ways – including, God forbid, bruiting the company’s name on blimps. His employers seek a more “dignified” approach to advertising, so they banish him to Great Britain, an apparent bastion of classy salesmanship. While weekending in the labyrinthine estate of an affluent dupe, Robinson comes upon a nifty business scheme surrounding an untapped “magnalite” mine. He soon uses his New York-honed showboating acumen to create a national sensation out of the precious metal, while falling for his investor’s daughter. Once you get past the paradoxical concept of dignity in advertising, you can appreciate the movie’s satire, one predicated on glaring cultural and class differences between Yanks and Brits. Robinson is great as a primitive, smarmy antihero, keeping this post-Depression parable alive even as it progresses inevitably into uninspired convention.

Last year, when Kathryn Bigelow won for The Hurt Locker, that marked the first Oscar to go to a woman for Best Director. Women have made strides in the film industry, however slowly, but to see the range of movies -- from deadly serious to downright frivolous -- that female directors and screenwriters are generating, there is now the Palm Beach Women’s International Film Festival, opening tonight and running through Sunday.

Director and writer Larysa Kondracki appears tonight at the Muvico complex in West Palm Beach’s CityPlace with her film, The Whistleblower. It is a somber, terribly well-meaning movie about conditions in Bosnia, human trafficking and the dangers of calling attention to government involvement in a corrupt system. It has an impressive cast, including Academy Award winners Rachel Weisz and Vanessa Redgrave, as well as such reliable performers as David Strathairn and Monica Bellucci, not bad at all on an independent budget.

The dour tone suggests the high road artistic director Karen Davis is taking with this festival, even if the opener feels too heavy-handed with the delivery of its message.

Opening night tickets, which include the film, a post-screening Q&A session with Kondracki and a rooftop party afterwards at Roxy’s 329, cost $50, and are still available at www.PBWIFF.com.

In addition to the Muvico, films will be shown at Lake Worth Playhouse’s Stonzek Theatre and the PGA Cinamax in Palm Beach Gardens. By the time this inaugural festival ends Sunday, 12 feature films, eight documentaries, 24 shorts and 16 entries in a young women’s film competition will have screened.

Here is a brief look at a few of the features:

LEADING LADIES, Muvico Parisian CityPlace, Sunday, April 10, 7 p.m. (Grade A) -- A cross between all those dance competition reality TV shows (but without the reality), the Broadway musical Gypsy, and any lesbian coming-out fable you’d care to mention. There is plenty to like about Daniel and Erika Randall Beahm’s first feature film, including an involving story line and several high-energy dance turns.

Stage mother Shari Campari dotes on her prettier daughter Tasi (Shannon Lea Smith), grooming her to be the next ballroom queen. But when Tasi gets pregnant, Shari then focuses on her other, plain-looking daughter, Toni (Laurel Vail), for the first time. Toni blossoms from the attention, and from her acceptance of her sexual orientation, indoctrinated by more experienced club regular Mona (Nicole Dionne). All that plus an explosive 11 o’clock supermarket dance number.

STARRING MAJA, PGA Gardens Cinamax, Friday, April 8, 5 p.m., Lake Worth Playhouse Stonzek Theatre, Saturday, April 9, 6 p.m. (B) -- Ever seen a Swedish Afternoon Special before? Starring Maja, the tale of a clumsy, overweight teenager with aspirations of becoming an actress, is very reminiscent of that lesson-laden televison genre. Of course Maja is socially inept and the butt of jokes from her insensitive fellow students, but deep inside she knows there is a talented girl waiting to be discovered and perhaps loved.

To reaching those goals, Maja allows a untrustworthy wedding videographer-filmmaker wannabe to follow her around, recording her life. Improbably, Maja gets cast on a Stockholm sitcom, but only because the show needs a “hideously obese creature” to ridicule. The film, written and directed by Teresa Fabik, has a few other predictable twists, but it is saved by an endearing performance by Zandra Andersson, a plus-sized beauty who really can act. Check her out in a brief excerpt from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night -- with Maja as Malvolio, no less -- and you too will probably come under her spell.

WOMEN WITHOUT MEN, PGA Gardens Cinamax, Friday, April 8, 7 p.m., Muvico Parisian CityPlace, Saturday, April 9, 3 p.m. (B+) -- An adaptation of Shahrnush Parsipur’s feminist political novel, Women Without Men, concerns four women of diverse social stations caught in the struggles of 1953 Iran. First-time director Shirin Neshat invokes the past with this material to illuminate the current situation in her native country. The film is brutal, by necessity, yet acclaimed photographer Neshat contrasts the violence with visuals of striking monochromatic beauty.

The women range from a general’s wife to a lowly, painfully thin prostitute, each taking refuge in a rural orchard, a magic realism safe zone. Much of the time the film seems more interested in the cumulative effect of its imagery than its loose narrative, but if manages to effectively pay tribute to those who have fought in the ongoing struggle for democracy in Iran.