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An Education: early '60s nostalgia, with expertly imagined emotional lives

An Education ****
Directed by Lone Scherfig. Written by Nick Hornby, adapted from a memoir by Lynn Barber. With Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard and Alfred Molina. (PG-13)

The most grievous epithet in the British lexicon is "boring," and Jenny, a 16-year-old middle-class schoolgirl who dreams of Paris while studying her Latin, is bored indeed. Then one day an older gentleman offers her a ride and soon she's picnicking on the banks of the Seine and gadding about racetracks and auction houses with his wealthy friends. It really happened to journalist Lynn Barber, and Nick Hornby (High Fidelity) has fleshed out her dozen pages in Granta into An Education, a marvelous coming-of-age drama set in 1961 and perceptively directed by former Dogme filmmaker Lone Scherfig.

The apple-cheeked Carey Mulligan, who Sony would like you to know was 22 when this was filmed although she looks about 14, plays Jenny, the headstrong and brutally articulate only child on whom her parents, products of the deprivations of WWII, have pinned their hopes. Her father (Alfred Molina), a civil servant so scared of the world he's spooked at the prospect of a drive downtown, has pared anything that will not help his daughter get into Oxford from her life. But then David (Peter Sarsgaard) charms the socks off her parents, even though he's Jewish, much older than their daughter, and a bit vague about the source of his income.

Soon David is fulfilling Jenny's Camus- and Juliette Greco-fed fantasies, living the sweet life with David's business partner (Dominic Cooper) and his girlfriend (Rosamund Pike), who gives her an Audrey Hepburn makeover. This is the education Jenny has longed for, while the one her parents have been struggling to pay for suffers. Her English teacher (Olivia Williams), in particular, is concerned about her prize pupil's extracurricular activities. But it is the teacher's fate that Jenny wants to avoid. "It's not enough to educate us, Miss Walters," she says. "You have to tell us why we're doing it."

An Education dovetails nicely with the current rage for early '60s nostalgia, from "Mad Men" to the big-haired croakers dominating the British charts, while Hornby turns out to have the same knack for delineating the emotional lives of women that he has for men, Jenny easily takes her place in the smart girl pantheon next to Jo March and Lisa Simpson.

Antichrist **
Written and directed by Lars Von Trier. With Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe. (NR)

What to make of Antichrist, the latest provocation from Danish bad boy Lars Von Trier? It boasts what must be the single most revolting image ever depicted onscreen, while its animatronic animals are self-consciously goofy. Similarly, the filmmaker undercuts his screenplay's portentous mythological mumbo jumbo with jokey winks at the audience, and then expects his film to be taken seriously — as it has at festivals where provocations equal artistry, particularly if they are couched in such visual splendor. But what do we call something that is visually splendid but morally bankrupt?

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, assisted by porn actors and prosthetics, play a couple whose baby falls out a window while they're having sex. She (the characters are unnamed) has a nervous breakdown. After months in the hospital, her husband, a therapist, brings her home, and soon she is off her meds and so is Von Trier. The husband takes the wife to their isolated cabin in the woods, which is never a good idea in a horror movie, so that she can face her fears, although that's the least of her problems. All hell breaks loose, literally.

Unlike previous Von Trier victims, Gainsbourg is no D.W. Griffith girl-woman, but she is similarly infantilized by her husband, whose patronizing therapeutic exercises make you wish she'd just get on with it already. Their relationship is less that of an actual couple than the one between the director and his leading ladies, and Von Trier further infantilizes this pushing-40 actress by casting her as a student. Her thesis is about witches, whom she believes were not wrongly persecuted, which is a neat way for Von Trier to pass the buck on the usual charge of misogyny — she's a self-hating woman, you see. But to dwell on Von Trier's peculiar brand of sadistic misogyny (he hired a "researcher on misogyny" for this one, as if to protest he knows nothing about it) is to miss the larger point. Of course Von Trier hates women — he also hates black people, Jews, Americans and even donkeys. Really, he hates audiences, and while such talented folks as the gung-ho Gainsbourg and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle are enabling this asshole, there's no reason you have to.

Beeswax ***
Written and directed by Andrew Bujalski. With Tilly and Maggie Hatcher and Alex Karpovsky. (NR)

Andrew Bujalski, whose low-budget films Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation unwittingly inaugurated the mumblecore movement, is growing up. He is now in his thirties, along with his audience and his nonprofessional actors, and it's time for his characters to get their slacker lives together. They are running businesses, studying for the bar and having babies. They are old enough to say "I love you," but not too old to respond with a playful pillow in the face.

Real-life twins Tilly and Maggie Hatcher play twins Jeannie and Lauren. Jeannie co-owns a vintage clothing store in Austin, while Lauren, who is at loose ends, is contemplating taking a teaching job in Nairobi. Jeannie, fearing a lawsuit from her business partner, consults her ex-boyfriend Merrill (Alex Karpovsky), who has just graduated from law school. The cash register tape gets jammed, Lauren misplaces her wallet, and that's about it for a plot in a movie that seems to be so much about nothing it makes "Seinfeld" look like Tolstoy — until it turns out to be about something after all.

The astonishingly persuasive cast seems to be making it up as they go along (it probably doesn't hurt that most of the male actors are filmmakers) but almost all of the dialogue is scripted, sometimes to the point of self-parody. ("I kinda sorta definitely think that she's going to sue you," says Merrill.) And while there's more emotional truth in a minute of Beeswax than in all of Antichrist, the main attraction is Tilly Hatcher, who is in a wheelchair. As she navigates the store, strains to close her car's trunk and matter-of-factly asks Merrill to straighten her legs out in bed, she easily upstages the diurnal dramas around her. Bujalski even uses Tilly's gouache collages as backdrops during the closing credits, ceding to her the last word.