The games men play -- with each other -- as Athina Rachel Tsangari skewers the male prerogative, Greek-style, in CHEVALIER

There is no overt mention made of Greece's ongoing and horrendous economic situation in the film, CHEVALIER, but this low-key but often quite hilarious new satire of the macho stance among Greek males does make one wonder. Was it this kind of attitude -- hubristic, resentful, lying, scheming and, unfortunately, pretty stupid, too, among the Greek government, financial players and powers-that-were -- that brought the country to its collective knees? Of course one can't draw a straight line that connects this movie to that reality, but -- boy -- as one views this enticing rondelay of really bad male behavior, one certainly cannot help but wonder.....

The product of producer, writer, director and actress, Athina Rachel Tsangari, whom you saw (but may not have realized it) in Richard Linklater's wonderful Before Midnight, Chevalier describes, among other things, a signet ring and a game devised to "test the mettle" of males to determine who is the "best at everything." What it does not describe is the actual definition of chevalier: a chivalrous man or a member of certain orders of honor or merit. Ms Tsangari, who co-wrote (with Efthymus Filippou) and directed the movie, uses her title ironically.

She allows us to meet and get acquainted with her half-dozen men who, under the "leadership" of a well-known and successful doctor, are spending a weekend deep-sea-diving off a glamorous yacht. (We also get to know a few of the crew members, who act as a kind of Greek chorus to the shenanigans taking place around them.)

The five-man fellowship the doctor has invited to join him include his son-in-law, the son-in-law's rather borderline brother (both are shown above), the doctor's hale-and-hearty assitant at work (below) and two other friends who appear to have enjoyed watching each other have sex and possibly have enjoyed each other sexually, too.

If at first it may seem difficult to tell certain characters apart (with the exception of the portly and clearly out-of-his-league brother), not to worry. Ms Tsangari and her well-chosen and talented cast soon bring these guys to life so well that there is no problem of differentiation. Character builds (or, as the case may be, disintegrates) carefully and rather quickly.

Once someone suggests the game in which each man vies for distinction in myriad ways -- they'll have to clean, they'll have to build, and yes, eventually they'll have to compare penis size (erect, yet) -- the film builds to its funniest scene involving the man who can't get it up, and when he finally and suddenly does, can't find anyone to corroborate his massive splendor (hey, it is pretty impressive).

Turns out, as we might suspect -- but the filmmaker keeps all this at bay quite nicely -- there is more going on here than initially meets the eye. What this is simply adds to the sense of nastiness and betrayal that hovers over the film.  And yet, by its troubling and thoughtful finale, surprise does await. How and why are as original/believable as all that has gone before.

Intelligent and well-paced, Chevalier is less bizarre but more pertinent than Tsangari's earlier film, Attenberg. It's a fine step onward and upward. And it's a lot of fun, too. Skewering us guys so often is.

From Strand Releasing, the movie opens this Friday in New York City at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the IFC Center; in Los Angeles it will open on Friday, June 3 at the Landmark NuArt and then on June 10 at Laemmle's Playhouse 7 in Pasadena. Here in South Florida it also opens June 10 at the Bill Cosford Cinema in Coral Gables, the Miami Beach Cinematheque in Miami and the Cinema Paradiso in Fort Lauderdale. Elsewhere? Absolutely. Click here then scroll down and click on Screenings to see all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters.

Analeine Cal y Mayor's TREADING WATER is a rom-con about the least-used of our five senses

According to TrustMovies' calculations, it's been 15 years since we've had a film -- Jeremy Podeswa's lovely, funny and moving The Five Senses -- based around the one of these senses that is least used in motion pictures. Now we have Analeine Cal y Mayor's new film (the co-writer and director is shown at right), TREADING WATER, which, among other claims to fame, is that rare Canadian/Mexican co-production -- which leaves out the very large and increasingly ungovernable country that lies in between.

This collaboration between cold and warm climes has resulted in a very odd little movie about the "other" that -- despite its toying with a tad of surrealism here, a nod to class consciousness there, and an opening that harks back to the idea of life having evolved from the sea -- is basically your standard rom-com featuring a premise that is anything but. Ms Cal y Mayor's movie begins with a charmingly animated credit sequence in which a character (who turns out to be our hero) goes through a pre-natal time in which he must shed his marine-life scales and other deep-sea permutations before being born. This immediately puts us in mind of not only of our possible marine heritage but of how fluid is that sexuality that can turn out either male or female, and often contains interesting amalgams of both.

There is one sea-life feature that our hero Mica (Douglas Smith, above) has not managed to shed, however. This is apparent from birth onwards, and it directs the course of Mica's entire life. That life includes parents -- a soon-to-become absentee dad (Don McKellar) and a mom (Spanish actress Ariadna Gil) whose time is dedicated to running a home/museum in honor of famed crooner Guillermo Garabai (Gonzalo Vega). This makes poor Mica's life doubly, even triply odd. So odd, in fact, that he is soon seeing a shrink (Carrie-Anne Moss, below) with whom he continues throughout his young manhood.

The scenes depicting our boy's elementary school days are charming and relatively swift; once he hits young adulthood, the movie begins to approximate the more typical rom-com (but with a hero who is anything but run-of-the-mill). He reconnects (but is too obtuse to realize this) with a young woman (the quite adorable Zoë Kravitz, below) who had shown interest in him as a child, and suddenly love is in the air.

Where all this goes and why is relatively predictable from there on,  which is too bad, because, given the set-up we've been fed, we very much want something more from this bubbly but finally too flavorless film. The movie closed with a nod to "magic," and the end credits whisk us to the land of musical comedy, somewhat in the manner of the recent and much darker film, The Voices. That film handled both its rom-com and musical elements in a much stronger manner, however. 

After its intriguing set-up and early follow-through, we 're expecting something if not profound at least thoughtful and worth parsing. Instead the film opts for cute and easy over all else, and so Treading Water becomes a little too close to the very action that its title describes.

Distributed by The Orchard and running 92 minutes, the movie opens this Friday, March 13, in New York City, where it will play the Cinema Village and in the Los Angeles area at Laemmle's Music Hall 3. On Friday, March 20, the film will open at the Sundance Cinema (Seattle, WA), the Sundance Cinema (Houston, TX), the Plaza Theatre (Atlanta, GA) and the Harkins Shea 14 (Phoenix, AZ). As of yesterday, March 10, it also made its VOD debut via VOD via iTunes, Amazon, Youtube, Sony Network, XBOX, VUDU, Vubiquity and DirectTV. 

Brawny boys brave bottom of the BLACK SEA in Kevin Macdonalds' new submarine-set thriller

We haven't seen a good submarine epic (or near-epic) in some time (David Twohy's marvelous WWII genre-jumper, Below, is the last I can recall), so getting a new one via the worthwhile filmmaker Kevin Macdonald (How I Live Now and My Enemy's Enemy) is a welcome addition to the small pack. Mr. Macdonald, shown below, is a professional, versatile journeyman director and occasional writer whose work is usually a pleasure to view. He does not disappoint here, either, although his latest effort, BLACK SEA, proves a little too long (at a nearly two-hour length), while offering up a few too many cliches (the nut-case crew member who should never have been allowed on this voyage, but well, there he is, anyway) for maximum impact.

Yet, if Black Sea stays a tad this side of maximum, it still proves mightily enjoyable: smartly fast-paced, well-cast and -acted, and burnished with a number of first-class special effects that should often keep you, as they say, glued to the screen. Screenwriter Dennis Kelly has set up situation and character introductions with speed and efficiency, and in Macdonald's strong hands, the well-chosen cast brings it all to sharp and immediate life. The movie's capable lead actor Jude Law, below, plays a seaman who is downsized from his job in the first scene, then soon finds himself involved in a plot to find some gold long buried at sea via the sinking of a Russian ship during World War II. If the story seems a tad "manufactured," well, we're in thriller territory: Best to not ask too many questions and simply "get on with it."

While Mr. Law (shown above and below) has lost some (but not nearly all) of his pretty-boy looks as age has overtaken his face with lines and growths, he has lost none of the particular magnetism he's long possessed. Here, he helps to hold not simply the crew of his submarine together but the movie itself.

"Getting on with it" is something Macdonald handles in spades, as we're thrust into a crew made up of half Brits and half Russians, with one odd and claustrophobic American (Scoot McNairy, below) tossed in for good measure (and plot mechanics).

The wild card in the bunch is played by Aussie actor Ben Mendelsohn (below), who is always good and often quite scary. Here, he seems initially more subdued than usual (but every bit as creepy), though it is not long before he explodes, nearly taking the entire ship along with him.

Though it was made clear early on that this kind of guy should not be part of the mission, Law's Captain takes him anyway (one of those nonsensical decisions/cliches that lessens the strength of the film), and some of his crew then lives -- or dies -- to regret it.

The Russian side of the equation gets less of our attention due to the language barrier but is brought to intelligent and gruff life by actors the likes of Grigory Dobrygin (above) and Sergey Puskepalis (below).

Along the way, we get a few surprises (one very big one), some undersea exploration in diving suits, explosions, betrayals, and the usual -- suspenseful and also surprising -- question, typical of this kind of movie: Who will survive?

It all adds up to propulsive, if somewhat been-there-done-that, fun and games, with men just being men, in all their raging alpha-dog vs kindly mentor-type array, so we can take our pick of whom to root for and/or denounce.

Black Sea -- from Focus Features and running 115 minutes -- opens this Friday, January 23, on both U.S. coasts and across the U.S. the following Friday, January 30.

Bon voyage! Robert Redford captains J.C. Chandor's fine sailing saga -- ALL IS LOST

Get ready. But for what? Is this, as it appears, a kind of classy, arthouse version of the oh, no, no, no! mini-budget-but-grueling experience of Open Water? Best not to know any more going into ALL IS LOST, the new film from J.C. Chandor, that very talented writer/director of Margin Call, who is here dealing with a primal, man-against-the-elements theme, instead of the perhaps slightly-less-primal struggle of man-against-fellow-man (or woman) of the earlier film. But is today's audience ready for a movie about an aging sailor for whom, as the title proclaims, all is lost? Or is it prepared, rather, for a "movie," in which we know from vast experience, that hope springs eternal? We shall see.

In any case, the filmmaker, shown at left, has given us for the most part something we seldom see at the movies: A kind of you-are-there, moment-to-moment, often suspenseful, sometimes scare-the-wits-out-of-you experience in which we give up much of what we expect and demand from motion pictures -- dialog, back-story and characterization for starters -- and instead plunge into things head-first. I suspect most intelligent audiences won't mind the trade-off one little bit. So very well has Mr. Chandor filled his screenplay with incident, small and large, then paced his 107-minute movie like a continually cresting and waning wave, and so hugely effective is his star, the 77-year-old Robert Redford, who though showing every one of those years in his face, still commands a remarkably strong-looking and agile body, this one-of-a-kind film appears to be an instant classic.

Come on: Am I telling you that a movie featuring but one character, has almost zero dialog, and promises a set that is either inside the yacht or out on the ocean will rivet you for the total of its running time? I am. That Mr. Chandor has not even given Redford a cat to accompany him on the voyage and to whom he could chat now and then (and get us all sentimental in the process) speaks volumes about the kind of movie he wanted to make.

If only he had completely achieved this, All Is Lost might have been among the greatest films ever made. But there's that pesky thing about, well, the movie's music (credited to Alex Ebert), for one thing. If ever an endeavor could have managed nicely without any music, it's this one. Just the sound of the sea and wind and storm and occasional silence would have been fine -- and sometime Chandor gives us this. But then, in all those key dramatic moments, we get the musical "hype," which just adds to the "movie-ness" of it all. To be fair, I must say that the friend who attended the screening with me never even noticed the music. He did, however, thoroughly object to the barely-there shot of an appendage at the conclusion, which I found wonderfully swift and smart. To each his own, I suppose.

Story-wise, there is also the problem of something that occurs more often than it might. The first time, we're pinned to our seats with hope and despair, the second seems a bit like rubbing it in, and then.... On the plus side is the object that starts the whole story moving, simultaneously putting us in touch with globalization and the world in which we live.

Then there's the terrific character played by Redford. We know nothing about the man -- except, through his "goodbye" note, the words of which we hear read at film's beginning, in which he tells whomever that he is sorry. Yet in his moment-to-moment intelligence, actions and thought this guy becomes indelible. We are he and he us. And we don't need to know a lick about sailing per se to stay with the movie. This speaks volumes about Chandor's (and his editor Pete Beaudreau's) ability to get us to follow so easily what is happening and why, and further, to connect so strongly with our sailor's character and humanity.

While the photography is everything it ought to be (up top by Frank G. DeMarco, underwater by Peter Zuccarini), I do question the need for the underwater stuff, gorgeous as it is (that school of fish is memorable indeed), because it takes us away from our guy and further, it's something that our hero himself can't see, so why are we seeing it? I guess, simply to give us a little relief from the expected impending doom.

While these are not necessarily niggling problems, they still do not detract in any major way from the film's overall worth. Despite its faults, All Is Lost remains the kind of movie you rarely encounter. It's an achievement and -- more so, I think, than the also-at-sea Captain Phillips -- an absolute must-see for film buffs and maybe even for that quirky and fickle populace known as the "mainstream."

The movie -- from Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions -- opens today in Los Angeles at the AMC Century 15, Arclight Hollywood and The Landmark in West L.A.; in New York catch it at the Angelika Film Center, City Cinema 123 and AMC Lincoln Square. Next Friday, October 25, it breaks out nationwide.