So many enticements

WITH almost seven years since his last feature, Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven has seemingly tried to pack the equivalent of three or four movies into his latest, the 2 1/2 -hour World War II thriller “Black Book,” which is being given the “Netherlands Gala” treatment Friday night at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. (It’s the country’s entry for the foreign-language Oscar.)

Verhoeven’s first home-based movie since 1983’s kinky drama “The 4th Man” gave way to a big-budget studio career (“Total Recall,” “Basic Instinct”), it shows that the director has clearly retained a Hollywood-ized penchant for propulsive, hard-edged, big-moment storytelling, but also his even longer-ingrained cynicism regarding humans in extreme circumstances. Set in Nazi-occupied Holland, it’s ostensibly the story of a redheaded Jewish Dutchwoman (Carice van Houten) seeking revenge on the slaughter of her family by joining the Resistance, dying her hair blond, shedding propriety (and clothes) and romancing a Nazi (Sebastian Koch). But then she has to untangle a dizzying snarl of hidden allegiances -- material and sexual -- amid a barrage of flying bullets, chases, escapes and betrayals.

Although a tale of deception usually requires a defter touch, this is punching-bag entertainment -- while graceful in its streamlined assaultiveness, its pleasures are nearly all guilty -- so don’t expect anything too ruminative about wartime survival. But that’s not to say there aren’t a few chewy moral twists about postwar’s cruel ironies. They unfortunately just whiz by in the serialized-peril approach.

In director Steven Sawalich’s indie biopic “Music Within,” getting its world premiere at the festival, deafness from a Vietnam explosion is the incident that gives wayward youth Richard Pimentel (Ron Livingston) his motivation in life: to improve the lot of war veterans and, eventually, all disabled. Inspired by the man who was a principal agitator for the Americans With Disabilities Act, this earnest, fast-paced trek through a marginalized, then empowered social activist’s life is eloquent about its civic cause and long on heart. But it’s too diffuse and cliched as a one-man’s-journey drama (era-specific but emotionally redundant song cues, Cliffs Notes-style family psychology, the lover neglected by his success) to ever feel like more than a better-than-average TV movie.

BIOLOGIST and underwater photographer Rob Stewart, meanwhile, isn’t waiting around for legal protections pertaining to his cause -- stopping shark killing -- before taking his passion to theaters. “Sharkwater” is Stewart’s first-person documentary about the legendarily demonized sea predators (who, we’re told, don’t come anywhere near the human-killing statistics of, say, elephants) and the mass slaughter that threatens the world’s ecological balance.

A little too often, Stewart, whose narration has a Spicoli-surfer tinge, indulges in embarrassing codependent confessions about the beauty of sharks’ ocean-dominating Darwinian perfection: You half-expect his description of hammerhead sharks as “incredibly sensitive” to mean they live with crippling self-consciousness about their looks. But for the most part, this is an eye-opening account of one 400-million-old species’ recklessly hyped image as a killing machine, and how that perception may be influencing its absence from the rolls of protected sea creatures. Stewart is no mere spectator, either, in the fight, documenting his time with dedicated Greenpeace activists who boldly, dangerously confront renegade fishing boats and the countries benefiting from illegal shark fin trade.

The calmer sequences of Stewart’s quality time underwater with sharks are beautifully captured and make for rapturous nature-flick idylls in between the talking-head, pro-shark lobbying and stop-the-killers adventures above water. “Sharkwater” may not go so far as to convince you that your enjoyment of “Jaws” is shameful, but it has an invigorating determination about its warning, one decidedly at odds with the beach-horror TV news coverage we get in summer.

IRELAND-based filmmaker John Boorman has a message to deliver too with his new film “The Tiger’s Tail” -- about the new class divisions resulting from the Emerald Isle’s surge in prosperity -- and he’s found a slyly enjoyable frame around which to hang his darkly comic and ultimately emotional plea.

The great Brendan Gleeson (“The General”), an actor seemingly incapable of a false note, stars as a corrupt nouveau riche real estate developer who can’t seem to convince anyone -- his bitter wife (Kim Cattrall), his Communist son, his sister (Sinead Cusack), his associates or the police -- that he’s discovered a brutish doppelganger trying to take over his life. Boorman has some initial fun with the comic desperation of this premise, from jokey references to identity crisis classics “8 1/2 “ and “Persona” to some delicious cracks at the new Ireland, such as beautiful young inebriates vomiting in the streets of a brightly colored, hustle-and-bustle Dublin. But as the truth is uncovered and fortunes are reversed, the film ultimately settles into a thoughtful, warmly funny and unexpected take on the delicate balance of need and want in a long-embattled economy just coming to grips with big money and status.

It’s a dance, a brawl and a negotiation, Boorman seems to suggest with his many fine visual metaphors, but most important it requires reflection and a desire to connect. It’s always a distinct pleasure when a smart, imaginative filmmaker stops to take the pulse of the real world through a fanciful premise, and it makes “The Tiger’s Tail” a highly gratifying closing night for what promises to be an eclectic, expansive festival.

weekend@latimes.com

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Palm Springs fest

* “Black Book”: 7:30 p.m. Friday, Palm Springs High School; 10 a.m. Monday, Camelot Theatres

* “Music Within”: 7:30 p.m. Friday, 11:30 a.m. Sunday, Palm Springs Regal 9

* “Sharkwater”: 5 p.m. Jan. 13, 1 p.m. Jan. 14, Camelot Theatres

* “The Tiger’s Tail”: 5 p.m. Jan. 14, Palm Springs High School

Where: Palm Springs High School, 2248 E. Ramon Road; Camelot Theatres, 2300 E. Baristo Road; Palm Springs Regal 9, 789 E. Tahquitz Canyon Way

Info: (760) 322-2930, (800) 898-7256, www.psfilmfest.org