The basic elements of effective drama, if stripped down to the core essentials, are shockingly simple. It isn’t particularly difficult to create, say, strong romantic or erotic pull in a love scene, or to generate adequate tension in a chase sequence, and when a film accomplishes one or more of those goals, it might hook us and pull us in for a brief time. That’s perhaps the most that can be said of David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s experimental, nonlinear drama Uncertainty; it has a handful of scenes with real dramatic force, but if one steps back to consider the whole equation, the movie disappoints. It leaves us with precious little to take away — sacrificing elements like character depth, thematic resonance, profundity, and visual bravura for the sake of a been-there-before narrative conceit that seems to exist merely for the sake of its own cleverness.

Something of a low-rent variation on Peter Howitt’s 1998 Sliding Doors, Uncertainty opens on Independence Day, with a young couple, Bobby Thompson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and girlfriend Kate Montero (Lynn Collins), standing in New York City and pondering which direction to choose for that afternoon’s adventure. They opt to settle that decision with a coin toss, at which point the film forks off into two potential narratives — one, “Green,” dramatizes what happens when the couple high-tails it to lower Manhattan; the other, “Yellow,” finds the couple venturing to Brooklyn for a July 4th celebration with Kate’s sprawling Hispanic family.

To the directors’ credit, the film never grows confusing, despite the intertwined stories with the same two leads playing out two separate narratives at the same time. McGehee and Siegel create a distinct set of stylistic elements for each tale; each has its own wardrobe, cinematographic style, tone, and pace, so that we know exactly where we are, and what is happening, at any given point in the movie. Unfortunately, the movie lacks narrative balance — not in terms of screen time but in terms of raw audience interest. The tension and suspense of the “Yellow” story — which finds Bobby and Kate relentlessly pursued through lower Manhattan by suited thugs, and attempting to extort a ransom from the owner of a cell phone found in a taxicab — grow so strong and overwhelming that they detract from the “Green” story. The “Yellow” tale is no more than a cheap, tacky, two-bit melodrama (and it more than strains plausibility), so that we might even feel embarrassed to care, but on some rudimentary level, the cliffhangers in that story really do work, though the ending feels like a complete cop-out. The “Green” story is not only less eventful, but quasi-anemic; its dramatic highlights consist of the couple finding a stray dog, and Kate waffling over whether or not to open up to her domineering mother.

In neither case do the stories succeed at creating genuinely interesting, multilayered characters that earn our empathy and fascination — and in neither case do the stories contribute to some larger thematic basis that the movie desperately needs to justify its parallel narrative conceit and avoid the trap of film-school-level pretentiousness. In Sliding Doors, writer-director Howitt fell back on the obvious but endlessly intriguing idea of chance versus fate — how the entire course of one’s life can be altered permanently by a split-second decision — so that the divergent paths of the central character (Gwyneth Paltrow) wound up at two wildly different destinations. But here, Siegel and McGehee essentially bring the central couple to an identical emotional and spiritual place at the end of each story, so that we’re still questioning what each “journey” really demonstrates to the audience, and why it was necessary to even observe multiple outcomes. In the end, the film’s chase sequences through Manhattan are incredibly thrilling, and the scenes of physical and emotional intimacy between the central lovers genuinely touching, but the movie seems to lack an overarching purpose.

One would be hard-pressed to identify a more fascinating subject for a documentary than attorney William Kunstler (1919-1995), the love-him-or-hate-him, longhaired civil rights crusader at the center of the nonfiction film William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe. As written, shot, edited, and directed by two of the subject’s daughters, 33-year-old Sarah and 31-year-old Emily Kunstler, this opus wisely undertakes a straightforward, linear approach to the litigator’s complicated life. It begins with his childhood and chronicles his most publicized legal battles (for the trial of the Chicago 7, the Attica prison rioters, the Native Americans at Wounded Knee, and others) before moving, during its final third, into the phase of Kunstler’s career that alienated just about everyone, including his family — the years that found him defending accused terrorists, rapists, murderers, and anyone else generally cast out of mainstream America and buckling beneath the weight of social ignominy.

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At its core, Adam Elliot’s stop-motion animated opus Mary & Max may well be one of the most despairing mainstream features ever made. That isn’t intended as a criticism of the film, but as an observation; despair is integral to the film’s worldview. In Elliot’s universe – a godless, a-humanist universe of chaos, random violence and meaningless, tragic absurdities – humans create their only real significance via intimate personal connections with one another. The earnestness of one such connection – a marvelous friendship at the center of this story – also gives the movie resounding levels of heart, soul, and hope, that effectively offset the maelstrom of suffering it perceives.

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Sandra Laing, the real-life figure at the center of Anthony Fabian’s social issue drama Skin, made international headlines with an unusual and achingly sad personal story, which Fabian uses as a testament to the emotional, psychological, and sociological fallout of apartheid. The child of white Afrikaner parents, Sandra (portrayed as an adult by Sophie Okonedo) was nevertheless born with brown skin, attributable to some unusual genetic quirk, and thus fell uneasily between the white and black communities of racially segregated South Africa. For Sandra, life became a tumultuous struggle over personal identity and a decades-long quest for belonging. And much of the conflict initially surfaced when Sandra’s parents (played here by Alice Krige and Sam Neill) attempted to buck the color bar by sending their daughter to an all-Afrikaner primary school –- to the horror of racist instructors and administrators.

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Ben Gazzara remains one of the most amiable actors in American movies (to say nothing of his formidable dramatic chops), and he spends the better part of Andrzej Krakowski’s seriocomedy Looking for Palladin proving it. Despite well-publicized health issues (including severe throat cancer) that have robbed the 79-year-old actor of over 40 pounds and severely ravaged his voice, he continues to command the screen with his presence as few of his contemporaries could. His Jack Palladin is a genial and witty ex-Hollywood A-list actor self-exiled to a Guatemalan backwater, and an individual in laid-back command of his own little corner of the world (vaguely recalling one of Gazzara’s prior characterizations, pimp Jack Flowers in Peter Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack).

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Beneath all of its thematic and stylistic variegation, Francis Ford Coppola’s work has generally alternated between two major threads since the outset of his career: tightly knit, intimately observed character studies that enable the writer-director to masterfully peel back layers of ordinary human lives and expose emotional complexities beneath (exemplified by The Rain People, The Conversation, and Rumble Fish, among others) and the director’s epic tendencies that play out broad human conflicts sweepingly, operatically, and to varying degrees of success — think the Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, The Cotton Club.

The most fascinating and impressive quality of the director’s Argentine-set drama Tetro is its willingness to bridge the two forms. This accomplishment merges with thinly veiled autobiographical elements that run throughout the picture, and the film thus suggests both an apotheotic summation of Coppola’s entire oeuvre and a creative renaissance for the filmmaker.

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Some movies declare their sources openly. Director Cédric Klapisch’s seriocomedy Paris falls squarely into this category, aspiring to establish itself as the definitive French version of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. The similarities are innumerable: multiple crisscrossed substories in an urban landscape that each receive a scant amount of screen time; quirky existential reflections on fate, chance, and the degree to which a broad patchwork of intersecting lives can yield a ripple effect and impact individuals in startling ways; a central despair and sadness about the pitfalls of the human race, offset by flashes of dark humor.

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As a modestly scaled yet masterfully crafted chamber drama from Gallic director Claire Denis, 35 Shots of Rum observes a group of working-class Afro-Europeans living in an unspecified arrondissement of Paris. At its core, the film meditates on the difficulty of transitions in a tightly knit familial unit.

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