As clammily claustrophobic, intimate, and muckraking as a first-wave noir, yet as epic as a three-parter can be, Red Riding Trilogy dares to mix an almost mystical tone with its hard-boiled mystery, a straight-faced sense of outrage with its well-chilled, gloomy cynicism.

Leaves Of Grass sounds far worse on paper than it is on screen: estranged identical twins — one an Ivy League philosophy professor, the other an Oklahoma pot farmer — are reunited when the latter is shaken down by a Jewish mobster played by Richard Dreyfuss (he’s back!). To top it off, this comic parable about the value of one’s kin was written and directed by the dopiest of O Brother’s Soggy Bottom Boys, last behind the camera for a holocaust drama and a high school adaptation of Othello.

Intermittently throughout Gianni di Gregorio’s debut feature Mid-August Lunch (of which he is the writer, director, and lead actor), I couldn’t help but ask myself: “What would Woody Allen do?” Gregorio The Writer/Director culled his screenplay from a would-have-been scenario: in mid-August, just before the Italian summer holiday Ferragosta, his landlord drops in to remind him of his mounting debt. The landlord gives Gregorio the option of wiping the slate clean by watching after his aging mother for a few days.

Carmine Famiglietti watched the world premiere of his film, Lbs., at Sundance in 2004, but it took six years before it saw a theatrical release. After viewing the film (which actually aged well considering principal photography began in 2001), one wonders if his labor of love sat in production limbo simply because it couldn’t decide which story it wanted to tell. Call it genre confusion: Lbs. is a simple film with great ambition but a lack of focus.

As fascists go, Benito Mussolini, credited by most textbooks as coining the ignoble f-word and laying the philosophical foundations of national socialism, has been designated by historical memory to the comic sidekick of the far more malevolent Adolf Hitler. Anyone who has seen archival film of the bald, melodramatic dictator can perhaps understand this reputation.

Ben Stiller takes a turn for the somewhat serious in Greenberg, director Noah Baumbach’s fifth film. Recently released from inpatient psychiatric care, Roger Greenberg (Stiller) goes to LA to house-sit for his successful brother Phillip (Chris Messina), despite the fact that he doesn’t quite have his bearings back. Phillip’s personal assistant, Florence (Greta Gerwig), ends up helping him with his day-to-day items like grocery shopping, taking care of the dog, and driving Roger around.

The marketing of Hot Tub Time Machine flatly pushes the high-concept nature of its premise like it was going out of style, although it apparently endures with some success; consider the case of Snakes on a Plane (2006) and its great-grandfathers, Jaws and Star Wars. And here it seems to have worked too. At the preview screening I attended, only half a row of seats was filled by members of the press in a full theater.