'The Blue Tooth Virgin'

Russell Brown's hilarious, acutely knowing "The Blue Tooth Virgin" takes its title from a screenplay an aspiring screenwriter, Sam (Austin Peck), has given to his friend David (Bryce Johnson), a successful magazine editor, to read. David finds the script terrible, a murky business about a troubled young woman with an urge to morph. David tries to let Sam down easy, but Sam, who did write a well-received TV series that ran one season, can't take criticism. Returning to his apartment, Sam is further dismayed to discover that his wife (Lauren Stamile) not only has a low opinion of the script but also of him, saying that he's interested only in praise and she is seriously considering leaving him.

Brown, whose 2007 debut feature was the engaging contemporary romance "Race You to the Bottom," clearly knows the ways of Hollywood inside and out. Beyond this, he understands that it is possible to make a movie that has lots -- and lots -- of talk and is still cinematic and smartly paced. "Smart" sums up this movie, with its amusing line-drawing credits featuring an apt myth of Sisyphus image and its inserts of observations on writing from the likes of Samuel Johnson and Albert Camus.

Led by a bravura performance from Karen Black as Sam's expensive script consultant, Brown's people are laughably overly analytical. Yet comedy enables Brown to dig into the art-industry equation that is the eternal Hollywood challenge, as well as questions about values, priorities, standards, goals -- all leading to what is all-important: self-knowledge. It's not too much to hazard that Billy Wilder would have enjoyed "The Blue Tooth Virgin."

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Kevin Thomas --

"The Blue Tooth Virgin." MPAA rating: R for language and brief drug use. Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes. At the Music Hall, Beverly Hills.

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Tokyo terrorized by alien invaders

Writer-director Hideaki Anno's dazzling anime "Evangelion: 1.0" will be best understood by those familiar with Anno's 1995 TV series "Neon Genesis Evangelion," which culminated in the 1997 feature film "The End of Evangelion." This new film, a huge hit in Japan, is the first installment of a three-part series, and is said to be a reworking of the TV show rather than a remake of the feature. In any event, "Evangelion: 1.0" is a showcase of superb graphics, technical bravura in its design and operation of weaponry of mass destruction and its use of rich and varied color.