My third afternoon at the festival finds me wandering around the premises boasting a still-expanding black eye – not, alas, from a macho fistfight with Patrick Wilson over yesterday’s evaluation of “Barry Munday,” but from an accidental collision with a handrail after sneaking late into a pitch-dark screening theater this morning. The more I try to explain it, the stupider it sounds; perhaps it’s better to let people think I’m a critic who is truly prepared to fight for his darlings.
Not that such darlings are thick on the ground: yesterday’s slate of five films, each one slightly better than the last, nonetheless turned up no true gems.
“THE EXTRA MAN” (*)
It’s a sign of deep-seated trouble in a film when, in spite of an ensemble that includes Kevin Kline, Paul Dano, John. C. Reilly and Celia Weston, it’s Katie Holmes’s appearances that you start looking forward to most. Not that hers is an especially remarkable performance, mind: but playing the kooky, environmentally-obsessed dreamgirl to Paul Dano’s perma-geek protagonist, she’s the only recognizably human element in this insufferably affected society comedy.