Since film noir's shadowy dread reflected a genuine post-World War II existential unease, it makes some sense that a movie about post-9/11 conspiracy theorists would boast a faux-noir style, as if the term had quotation marks around it.
But "Able Danger" -- a convoluted "Maltese Falcon" redux about a paranoid coffee shop owner named Thomas (Adam Nee) whose radical writings attract a European femme fatale (Elina Lowensohn), a body pileup and a rash of hokey German-accented characters -- wants to be both a filmic put-on and a politically aware put-off, and winds up neither.
What everyone's after in screenwriter Paul Krik's scenario is an encrypted hard drive pertaining to the titular program, a real-life Pentagon data-mining project that fervid dot-connectors believe links the CIA to 9/11. Whether Krik believes as Thomas does that Mohammed Atta was a government patsy feels beside the point, yet there's little oomph in turning a Holy Grail of conspiracy mongers into just another movie MacGuffin.
Lowensohn's deadpan retro allure brings chiaroscuro authenticity to this exercise in monochrome digital video, but "Able Danger" is too removed from either parodic flair or activist intensity to be the stuff of which nightmares are made.
-- Robert Abele
"Able Danger." MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 22 minutes. Exclusively at the Laemmle's Grande 4-plex, 345 S. Figueroa St., (213) 617-0268.
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A most unsettling 'Dark' anthology
Under the stewardship of artistic director Etienne Robial, the French-made anthology "Fear(s) of the Dark," a collection of animated black-and-white shorts with only suspense and the fantastic as connectors, handily avoids most of the usual pitfalls of the anthology film and makes for a series of chilling, unsettling experiences in miniature.
In the short by cartoonist Charles Burns, a shy young man with an interest in science, lands a girlfriend and unleashes the underlying fear of every lonely boy, that the only thing more unsettling than not having a girl just might be having one.
The Burns section is perhaps the most accessible simply because it has the most straightforward narrative. In the film's final segment, it is remarkable how often the screen is simply black and blank, and yet writer-director Richard McGuire is able to hold a feeling of heightened anxiety until images of graphic white flare across the frame.
