THE SIGN OF 'CORE

The best thing that can be said about Cris Lankenau, an actor with a Hulot-like leaning-tower posture who portrays the amateur-detective protagonist of Aaron Katz's Cold Weather, is that he plays exasperation more convincingly than expected. The movie puts Mr. Lankenau through a series of vividly soggy, bric-a-brac-evacuated tableaux, boxing him into awkward improvisations with other people his age. Cold Weather has a cleverly side-armed genre delivery, and a few eye-popping shots, but all the personality of a rain slicker. The verbal exchanges in this movie are so devoid of meaning and nuance and so glacially paced that it begins to seem like a vital component of this on-screen version of Portland, Oregon, is that everyone there is slow on the uptake, and that if you move there from Chicago to inhabit but refrain from furnishing a perfectly nice apartment, you will also very quickly become slow on the uptake — and perform a job as featureless as possible, either at an exceedingly normal office or an ice factory. How anyone can sit through this movie and afterward declare "I doubt there will be a better American film this year" is beyond me.