Rotterdam 2009: Carlos Reygadas and Guy Maddin

The 38th International Film Festival in Rotterdam has streamlined its program into three sections, but...

Back inside the theater, the biggest publicity buzz at this laid-back fest surrounded Michael Imperioli’s disappointing opening night feature “The Hungry Ghosts.” Starring fellow “Sopranos” alum Steve Schirripa, it uses an intersecting narrative à la “Crash.” Schirripa is a late-night radio host with a coke habit and a penchant for ignoring his son, who promptly bolts into the wilds of Manhattan. Twinned with the stories of Buddhist ex-lovers and their sadomasochistic past, the film’s got a lot of theatrical monologues and improbable coincidences to muddle through, and Imperioli has yet to develop much of a visual sense. There are too many static shots in which characters simply stand and deliver their lines, but there’s no doubt he has a gift for language, and the performances are strong all around, especially Nick Sandow’s splenetic alcoholic Gus.

Another intersecting narrative is utilized in the more successful “Unmade Beds,” directed by Alexis dos Santos, which also played at Sundance. A shaggy hipster romance set in London’s East End, it follows the loves lost and gained by two doe-eyed twenty-something squatters. Set in a kind of bohemian paradise in a building occupied by young dreamers of all kinds, the film starts with the Belgian Vera (Déborah François), just getting over her ex when a sensitive crooner initiates a tryst with one big rule: they’re not allowed to know each other’s names. The competing story is of the Spaniard Axl (Fernando Tielve) searching for his wayward dad while working out the kinks in his sexuality. Dos Santos clearly has a great feel for the milieu, from the slapdash fashions all the way down to the vibrant local indie soundtrack, and he’s pulled every trick from the French New Wave playbook (from jump cuts to photo montages) to pump the pace ahead. It ultimately fails to sustain its initial inventive promise, however, suffering from a meandering plot that strains to connect the two stories, but it’s clearly the work of a promising talent.

After an exhausting day of art films, it’s refreshing to dip into Rotterdam’s vast trove of genre movies and activate the more sophomoric parts of the brain. The best so far is Glenn McQuaid’s “I Sell the Dead,” a horror comedy closer in tone to “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” than, say, “Scream.” So it’s a knockabout buddy comedy except the knocks come from vampires, zombies and deranged Irish ghouls. Dominic Monaghan (“Lost”) plays the straight man grave robber to Larry Fessenden’s cockney simpleton, and Ron Perlman is along in flashback to add an extra dollop of menace. A cult hit in the making.

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