Answers to Nothing’ review: ‘Crash’-lite

The title of the ensemble drama “Answers to Nothing” is certainly truth in advertising. Though this “Crash”-lite intersection of L.A. stories, directed by Matthew Leutwyler from a script he co-wrote with Gillian Vigman, effectively portrays human loneliness and alienation, there’s a lack of real conclusiveness to many of the film’s characters and situations.

The crisscross of Angelenos includes Ryan (Dane Cook), a moody shrink cheating on his fertility-challenged, lawyer wife (Elizabeth Mitchell) with an earthy rocker chick (Aja Volkman); a former police cadet (Erik Palladino) still grieving for his late wife; an anxious schoolteacher (Mark Kelly) hiding in a world of video games; a curiously self-hating TV writer (Kali Hawk) who starts dating a gentle music engineer (Zach Gilford); a pretty cop (Julie Benz) investigating a child abduction case; and a recovering alcoholic (Miranda Bailey) fighting to keep custody of her paralyzed brother.

The connections among these various folks — seemingly the film’s raison d’être — although not illogical, feel more random than intriguing.

Fortunately, the strong cast (which also includes Barbara Hershey as Ryan’s idealistic mother and Greg Germann as a kidnapping suspect) helps keep things watchable. But it can never fully surmount an overlong, largely underwhelming script that often swaps forced personality quirks and symbolic gestures for honest dimension.

— Gary Goldstein

“Answers to Nothing.” MPAA rating: R for some strong sexual content, nudity, violence and language. Running time: 2 hours, 3 minutes. At AMC’s Century City 15, Century City; Regency’s South Coast Village, Santa Ana.

The deliberately paced, quietly immersive “Kinyarwanda” tells a tangle of stories set in and around 1994’s Rwandan genocide, a roughly 100-day nightmare that pit that country’s Hutu majority against its Tutsi minority, resulting in as many as a million violent deaths. This ambitious first feature film about the period made entirely by Rwandans (shot in a remarkable 16 days), while hardly an all-inclusive look at this complex conflict, paints a heartfelt, fairly restrained picture of a nation under siege.

Writer-director Alrick Brown crafted the film from true accounts of genocide survivors as well as from the movie’s Rwandan cast and crew members. Six interwoven tales essentially lead up to — or back to — the point that, thanks to Rwanda’s most respected Muslim mufti (scholar), the country’s mosques became a refuge for the Tutsis as well as those Hutus who chose not to kill. Islam emerges here as a critical and — some viewers may think, given later world events — unexpected instrument of peace.

The people-over-politics story lines include the intermarriage of a Hutu and a Tutsi, a teen girl who survives her murdered parents, and a repentant Hutu soldier recounting his heinous actions.

“Kinyarwanda,” whose title is the name of Rwanda’s official language, is haunting stuff.

— Gary Goldstein

“Kinyarwanda.” No MPAA rating. In English and Kinyarwandan with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes. At Laemmle’s Music Hall 3, Beverly Hills; Laemmle’s Town Center 5, Encino; Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Pasadena.

“Outrage,” the latest offering from prolific Japanese filmmaker and actor Takeshi Kitano, marks his return to the pure, visceral gangster picture, so low-key and offhanded in its mastery that it becomes something like a pulp sleight-of-hand trick.

Kitano plays a middle manager of sorts in the Japanese yakuza gangster underworld, destined never to rise to the heights of the true bosses even as promotions are constantly dangled before him. Against a complex web of deal-making, promises made and broken and alliances well above his paygrade, he finds himself simply fighting for survival.

With an undercurrent of dark humor, like the severed thumb that lands in someone’s veggie noodle soup, Kitano abstracts the contemporary struggle, apparently an international one, to just hold a once-visible career path in view as industries crumble and realign.

Though it may at times seem like just another Japanese gangster picture, in “Outrage,” Kitano’s sense of pacing is so precise, at once restrained and relentless, that the film becomes a vortex, pulling audiences in deeper and deeper.

— Mark Olsen

“Outrage.” MPAA rating: R for strong brutal bloody violence throughout, language, a scene of sexuality and some nudity. In Japanese with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes. At the Nuart, West Los Angeles.

“Twi”-guy Kellan Lutz’s ab-tastic body is about the only thing shown to its best advantage in “A Warrior’s Heart,” a ho-hum drama whose many moving parts feel decidedly recycled.

Lutz plays Conor Sullivan, a cocky, inexplicably hotheaded California high school lacrosse star, who must move east when his career-soldier father (Chris Potter) again uproots the family. But Conor’s bullish ways on — and off — his tony new school’s lacrosse field intensify when his dad’s redeployment to Iraq has tragic consequences.

A subsequent brawl with a team nemesis (“Glee’s” Chord Overstreet) leads Conor to a week of often-shirtless hard labor in a wilderness camp run by his father’s Iroquois military pal (Adam Beach), whose many lessons and maxims confound as much as enlighten.

A contrived third act finds Conor playing in the national championship against his old school. But, by then, the unlikable lug has so worn out his welcome it’s hard to care about his angsty journey, which also includes falling for his coach’s (William Mapother) defiant daughter (Ashley Greene, another “Twilight” series alum).

Perhaps most egregiously, director Mike Sears, working from Martin Dugard’s awkwardly structured, subtext-free script, builds little excitement for the game of lacrosse, which comes off here as all sticks and legs and bad camera angles.

— Gary Goldstein

“A Warrior’s Heart.” MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements, language and rough sports action. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes. At Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex, Santa Monica.

Anyone feeling let down by this past summer’s action selections for their false-start franchises, comic-book over-reliance or crutch-use of unworldly CGI will be well served by finding their way to “The Yellow Sea.” The second feature from South Korean writer-director Na Hong-Jin, the film is a breakneck mix of bone-crunching freneticism and bloody close-quarters knife-fighting with a strand of romantic melancholy.

In the somewhat lawless territory where North Korea, China and Russia border one another, a cab driver is given an offer to work off a gambling debt by traveling to Seoul to kill a man. While he’s there, the cab driver also looks for his wife, who has likely left him. All this sets off a storm of violence, double-crosses and layered subterfuges that puts the cabby in well over his head but also brings out a streak of capable savvy that even he is surprised to find within himself.

As the cabby, actor Ha Jung-Woo conveys fear, confusion and emergent cool in equal measure, while as the sly small-town hoodlum with a vicious streak — he beats a guy with a half-gnawed bone, giving new meaning to raw brutality — Kim Yun-Seok portrays a bad guy oddly worth rooting for.

Na captures at once the fragility of the human body and the deep-rooted darkness of the human soul. “The Yellow Sea” is easily one of the films of the year for underserved action-heads.

— Mark Olsen

“The Yellow Sea.” MPAA rating: R for brutal bloody violence, some strong sexuality, nudity and language. In Korean with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 37 minutes. At the Regal Cinemas L.A. Live, Los Angeles, and AMC Del Toro 18, Torrance.