With BITCH, writer/director Marianna Palka gives Jason Ritter his most important role yet...

...and he runs with it like crazy. Mr. Ritter's is the best performance from an actor I've seen this year, and if the storied Academy members ever deigned to really look at small indie movies in the way they should, fit praise would be forthcoming around "Oscar" time. Don't get too hopeful; remember how they treated last year's best actress, Rebecca Hall in Christine. Meanwhile, take a chance on the unusual new movie entitled BITCH, written and directed by Marianna Palka, who also co-stars. Back in 2008 Ms Palka gave us the very fine Good Dick, also starring Mr. Ritter, and her new film is even better: stronger, original and hugely surprising.

Palka, above, plays a put-upon housewife named Jill Hart who is literally suicidal when we first meet her. At first we imagine this is due to her clueless and unfaithful hubby, Bill Hart (played by Ritter, below) and her four (count' em!) kids who we assume are the sort of impossible, narcissistic brats driving their mom 'round the bend. But things are not quite so simple. Note the dog outside their house who barks constantly, and with whom Jill may be identifying.

And, no, this is not a 21-Century update on that popular TV show, Hart to Hart. What happens here may be about as strange as American indie movies get, and yet on even a realistic level, Bitch never quite leaves the realm of the possible -- if the hugely unconventional and bizarrely, brazenly ugly. TrustMovies is not going to go into plot detail because viewers deserve to experience what happens here -- and then decide why it happens -- on their own. I'll just say that Ms Palka has been awfully brave and ballsy in her choices.

First off, she cedes the film's most important role to Ritter, who makes an absolute meal of it. From his early and very funny scenes as the self-involved, utterly clueless husband from hell to the movie's mid-section as his character falls screechingly apart (above) to the finale in which Bill begins to change, this is first-class movie-making in both conception and execution, as well as superior performing. Palka herself does a remarkable job as the titular bitch. This kind of performance is something you will not have previously seen, and yet it is also clearly a supporting role.

Also giving fine support are Jamie King, above, left, as Jill's sister, and Brighton Sharbino, Rio Mangini, Kingston Foster and Jayson Maybaum as her four children -- all of whom turn out to be more caring and helpful that we would have initially imagined. So what's the big problem? Sure, feminism rises to the surface here, but not at all in the manner we most often see it. The key lies in the relationship between husband and wife, and how this unfurls is near-miraculous in terms of original and surprising movie-making.

There is a speech given somewhat past the halfway mark that is so succinct and devastating in terms explaining the care and effort a woman brings to a marriage that hearing it should make many of us ex- and/or present husbands cringe in recognition and guilt.

Bitch is finally a love story, and considering what has come before, what occurs subsequently seems doubly moving, rich and profound. Yours truly was in unexpected tears toward the end. As much as anything he has seen in a long while, Palka's film raises and then gives a very possible answer to Freud's famous question, What does a woman want?

From Dark Sky Films and running 93 minutes, the movie opens this Friday, November 10, in New York City (at the Village East Cinema), in Chicago on Friday, November 17 (at the Facets Cinémathèque) and on November 24 in Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Music Hall 3), as well as in a number of other cities across the country this week and those following. Click here then scroll down to see (some of the) currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters (perhaps Dark Sky will want to update this list soon so that the Los Angeles opening is added).

More Holocaust-lite, as Niki Caro's THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE opens wide theatrically

Both like and unlike Fanny's Journey, another Holocaust-lite movie that recently opened, THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE resembles that French young-adult film in that its view of World War II and the Nazi extermination of the Jews is rendered with much less violence and horror than in many other Holocaust movies you're likely to have seen.

On the other hand, this big-budget U.S./UK/Czech Republic production is not the "family" movie some audiences may expect of this tale of the wife of the zookeeper in Warsaw, Poland, who manages, against all odds and expectations, to save quite a number of Jews during the war -- even as she fails to protect many of the zoo animals that she and her husband so love and nurture.

Children and animal lovers alike will recoil in horror as some of these beasts are slaughtered, so be warned. With a screenplay by Angela Workman, adapted from the best-selling book of the same name by Diane Ackerman, and directed by Niki Caro (shown at right), the movie does not bypass the Nazi extermination (we see an elderly mother and her daughter both executed at close range), but it keeps this to a minimum -- which actually adheres rather closely to the facts, since we told during the film's end credits that, of the hundred of people saved who passed through this zoo, only those two women were caught and killed.

Ms Caro, a New Zealander with an up-and-down record, so far as directing and box-office are concerned -- Whale Rider is probably her most critically lauded film and McFarland, USA her most successful at the U.S. box-office -- remains a favorite of TrustMovies, if only for her majestic (and majestically crazy) film, A Heavenly Vintage -- which, if you have not seen, you simply must.

I would guess that The Zookeeper's Wife might be her biggest-budget effort so far, and the film's look and production values are stellar. So's her star, Jessica Chastain (above), who's always good and here acquits herself here with the usual talent and beauty this actress possesses in spades. (Her Eastern-European-inflected accent's pretty good, as well.)

Her zoo-keeping hubby is played by Belgian actor Johan Heldenbergh (above, of the Oscar-nominated Broken Circle Breakdown), while her antagonist is portrayed with lip-smacking relish by the talented German actor, Daniel Brühl (below).

The screenplay adheres closely to the paint-by-numbers, this-happened-and-then-that-happened mode, yet the story told grabs us from the outset -- as we meet the main characters and the zoo animals -- and then carries us along through plenty of thrills, suspense and Hollywood movie moments that are obvious and predictable.

Yet along the way, Ms Caro, provides some wonderful stuff -- the most memorable of which is a scene in which the Polish Jews are finally to be deported to the concentration camps. Here, a group of children, so far saved from obliteration, are now to be placed in the rail cars that will take them to their death. Unknowing of this, they look to the two men who have provided their safety and caring and outstretch their arms with loving, smiling faces to be lifted up onto the train. This is a scene that I shall never forget.

While I wish the film were better, I am still grateful that it has reached the screen, as its tale is one worth telling, especially amidst our current times with Holocaust denial on the rise internationally, and here in the USA, the Trump administration telling ever bigger and bolder lies.

So see the movie, take the kids (the older ones, at least), and then talk about the whole experience afterward. From Focus Features and running a lengthy but full-of-incident 124 minutes, The Zookeeper's Wife opened nationwide this week. Click here to find the theater nearest you.

A guy and his ox: OLD PARTNER, from Chung-Ryoul Lee, opens at Film Forum

Chung-Ryoul Lee's OLD PARTNER (Wonangsori) brings you up close to -- not just death and dying but -- lives lived in the senior years without much vari-
ation, little hope and what appears to be a zero degree of joy. Despite some truly lovely photography, with compositions that are breathtak-
ingly beautiful, all the more so because of their simplicity, the lives we see are full of drudgery, and the film Lee has made from these lives threatens to descend into that same kind of hell. That is does not (though for me it comes awfully close) is to the credit of the director, who in this, his first docu-
mentary, captures an elderly Korean farming couple and their ox -- the old partner of the title -- with as much tact as feeling. The two humans seem barely to be surviving, and the local veteranarian has diagnosed a soon-to-happen death for their ox, who looks more than ready for it.

Director Lee provides no narration and but a few super-titles of explanation, along with the subtitles for the spoken words (there are not that many), so we don't know what kind of life these people led in their younger years. All we see is a single photograph, though mention is made by the wife of children who would not want to be burdened with these parents. So we watch and wait, as their tiresome and constant work goes on, and the husband in particular, tries to find a way out of their problems. When he takes the ox to market, no one is buying, and the old farmer seems to be the butt of many jokes.

He picks and then feeds a passel of dandelions to the creature, much to the consternation of his wife -- who notes that he wouldn't do the same for her. This woman is a complainer -- first, last and always -- and while she certainly seems to have every right to do this and much to complain about, she does grow tiresome. Her husband is going deaf, though from time to time this deafness seems to be by choice. Who can blame him, considering what he is constantly forced to hear.

The ox, a symbol if ever there was one, is as much an object of derision by the wife and the locals as of love from the farmer. This is the animal's movie in a major way, and I doubt you'll be able to erase the image of those big brown eyes -- sad and enduring -- from your mind.

Old Partner opens at Film Forum tomorrow, Wednesday December 30, for a one-week-only run.