Suspending disbelief is a part of watching most any action film, where bullets fly like birds and mayhem explodes as easily as a shaken soda can. But even in such a contrived movie world, it’s asking far too much for us to accept that Noomi Rapace would be hounded as a “monster” for a little scaring around her left eye.
It’s just one of the many silly leaps of logic taken in the lifeless “Dead Man Down,” a film that brings together two lost souls bent on vengeance. Colin Farrell stars as a brooding gangster, Victor, who’s infiltrated the brutal gang of Alphonse (Terrence Howard) to avenge the deaths of his wife and daughter. He’s joined in revenge by Rapace’s Beatrice, who spies him across from a neighboring high-rise, and blackmails him into killing the drunk driver that crashed into her.
I’ve had pimples worse than the marks left on Beatrice’s face, but she’s mad with murderous fury at the blemish and  —  despite her obvious, unmarred beauty  —  is chased by rock-throwing kids for her supposed disfigurement. “Dead Man Down” either can’t stomach having its star actress appear actually maimed, or it’s simply too lazy to make Beatrice’s motivations plausible.

Vacant
It’s the first Hollywood film for Danish director Niels Arden Oplev, who made the original “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” starring Rapace. “Dead Man Down” starts with vacant sidewalk musings by Victor’s friend and cohort Darcy (Dominic Cooper), who, while holding his newborn, reflects on how “we’re not meant to be alone.” Deep stuff, indeed. Alphonse, played with typical velvety suavity by Howard, is receiving mysterious messages that read “you will realize” with fragments of a photograph. He’s starting to panic by lashing out at his best guesses of the source.

Victor is drawn to Beatrice, who lives alone with her mother (Isabelle Huppert). The fine French actress is bizarrely out of place, and her small role is a bit of awkward farce about her hearing aid and Tupperware.
The screenplay by J. H. Wyman (“Fringe”) is squirm-inducing in its preposterous dialogue and haphazard plotting. When Victor and Beatrice go out for dinner (shortly before she corners him about killing her assailant, a scene in which she extravagantly spins Victor’s car out of control), they describe themselves as if on a Match.com date. They each admit drinking causes them to swear, and then flatly trade two four-letter expletives. The words would be better groaned from the audience.

Victor carefully plots the final, bloody flourish of his revenge. But Darcy is closing in on his real identity, and his growing intimacy with Beatrice is making Victor, with increasingly furrowed brows, silently question his mission. There is some solid noir atmosphere, courtesy of cinematographer Paul Cameron, but the tension finally bursts as inelegantly (with a pick-up ramming into a mansion) as it was it manufactured.
The film was partially financed by the WWE, so perhaps it’s fitting that “Dead Man Down” should climax with the automotive equivalent of a body slam.
“Dead Man Down,” a Film District release, is rated R for violence, language throughout and a scene of sexuality. Running time: 118 minutes. One star out of four.
 

 Growing up is hard to do, as countless coming-of-age movies have shown, some more affectingly than others.
With “Ginger & Rosa,” British avant-garde filmmaker Sally Potter (“Orlando”), offers up a strong entry into the field with what is by far her most appealingly mainstream film to date.
An intimate character study, “Ginger & Rosa” is set in England in 1962. It’s told mainly from the viewpoint of Ginger (Elle Fanning, younger sister of Dakota), a 16-year old budding poet growing up in post-WWII England alongside her best friend, Rosa (Alice Englert, the daughter of director Jane Campion). The two were born on the same day, in the same hospital, and have been BFFs ever since.
Now, though, they’re 16 and their paths are beginning to diverge. Ginger is hyper-aware of growing up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. She constantly frets over the possibility of imminent, worldwide nuclear destruction; she joins the Ban the Bomb movement and marches for disarmament. Rosa marches alongside Ginger at first, but her interests are fast heading towards boys, mascara and smoking. She is adopting a live-for-today philosophy.

Unbridgeable
The two reach a seemingly unbridgeable divide when Rosa becomes romantically involved with Ginger’s father (Alessandro Nivola), a pacifist and academic. He has always lived outside of society’s rules and it seems a no-brainer to him that his love life should follow suit.
“Ginger & Rosa” has several things going for it, most notably an achingly intense performance from Fanning, who was 13 when the movie was shot. She nails, in the most naturalistic way possible, the acute feelings and emotional whiplash that are the daily, nay, minute-to-minute reality of adolescence. In the slightly smaller role of Rosa, newcomer Englert is equally effective. From the lost look in her black, heavily eyeliner-etched eyes, it’s clear that her fatherless Rosa - the girl’s dad walked out when she was small - is going to seek masculine affection and answers where ever she can.

Potter, who both wrote and directed the film, surrounds her adolescent protagonist with a handful of adults, some of whom are more helpful to Ginger than others. These include her mother (“Mad Men’s” Christina Hendricks, in a strong turn), her father (Nivola, in an marvelously ambivalent performance), her seemingly gay godfathers (Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt, an amusingly improbable pairing) and an American feminist poet friend (Annette Bening, who makes the most of her few scenes).
“Ginger & Rosa” offers a nuanced portrait of a girl uneasily on the verge. Adolescence is always scary; Ginger’s apprehension about the future - the Cuban missile crisis occurs near the end of the movie - makes hers even scarier, at least to her. In one scene, after she vehemently expresses her anxiety over everyone getting nuked, one of her godfathers pleads, “Can’t you be a girl for a moment or two longer?”
It’s a marker of the film’s success that we wish the same for her even as we know that she’s indeed going to grow up and get past all this.
If we’re lucky, we all do. (Agencies)

By Jake Coyle