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Sgt. Gerry Boyle, Brendan Gleeson's brilliantly sardonic Irish police officer of "The Guard," describes himself as "the last of the independents."

Like a remote Western hero, he's stationed in rural Galway. He curses forensic experts as "prima donnas," casually samples the drugs found on a fresh body and, when his partner answers "Right away, Sarge!"Doyle rolls his eyes and wonders if he's confused Ireland for Detroit.

The brothers McDonagh surely bear an independent streak, too. "The Guard" is written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, the older brother of the playwright, and "In Bruges" writer-director, Martin McDonagh.

They have their differences, of course, but both have a wry, dark sensibility and a fondness for ruthlessly unsentimental absurdity. And both have put the talented Gleeson (who starred in "In Bruges") to fine use.

The craggy-faced Boyle is oddly busy for his country outpost. There's a mysterious murder and his newly transferred partner (Rory Keenan) goes missing. A large drug shipment from the Dominican Republic is expected to land soon on Galway's shores, which brings FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle, who also produces) in hopes of interceding it.

Here, the film's buddy-cop structure takes hold, and a thoroughly entertaining dynamic between Gleeson and Cheadle sets in.

A trio of criminals (Mark Strong, Liam Cunningham, David Wilmot) are all lurking, awaiting the shipment. In between easy violence, they banter on philosophy, talking Nietzsche and Bertram Russell.

It's perhaps a bit too Tarantino-esque, but it's reflective of much of "The Guard": characters are rarely all they seem.

As a fish out of water, Cheadle cuts a sharp figure in the raw Irish countryside. He's an excellent straight man to Gleeson, contorting his face into a wide variety of disbelieving reactions to Boyle's idiosyncrasies. But gradually, he's in on the joke, too.

Gleeson, though, gets to have the real fun. The character actor ("Braveheart," "Gangs of New York," several of the Harry Potter films) has rarely been given such a chance to offend, curse and mock. (Even Goofy gets it.)

Boyle is a kind of lone gunman of veracity. The excellent Ennio Morricone-style score by the band Calexico only inflates the Western mythical tones.

In temperament, Doyle is perhaps something of a stand-in for McDonagh. He's here making his directorial debut (he wrote 2003's "Ned Kelly") and he feels like an authentic comedic voice.

Some sentiment does sneak in, particularly through the character of Boyle's dying mother (Fionnula Flanagan). But when she heckles a slow-moving resident at her retirement home, it's obvious where her son gets his extreme candor.

Such liveliness is the best quality in The Guard. In a cinema world so awash in either corporate flatness or high-art pretension, "The Guard" is a proud, foul-mouthed exception.

Review: The Guard

***

• Rated: R for pervasive language, violence drug material and some sexual content.

• Director: John Michael McDonagh.

• Cast: Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle, Finnoula Flanagan, Mark Strong.

• Running time: 96 minutes.

The possibility that there's another version of you out there - and of me, and of everyone we know - provides the mind-teasing premise of "Another Earth."

It's heady stuff, the kind of notion you'd toss around with your friends after too many beers and achieve no satisfactory answers, then go home and have strange dreams. But such philosophical fodder is contrasted with an achingly personal tale of loss and redemption.

These two conflicting dynamics comprise the feature debut from Mike Cahill, who serves as director, co-writer, producer and cinematographer. He offers an intriguing juxtaposition of melodramatic elements - highs and lows that are the stuff of Greek tragedy - with a stripped-down, low-budget aesthetic. Cahill favors dusky grays and blues that enhance the mysterious, sci-fi vibe, and grainy, hand-held camerawork that provides a feeling of intimacy as well as restlessness.

He co-wrote the script with Brit Marling, who's also the film's star. Marling has a natural beauty and an immediacy to her emotions that make her impossible to stop watching. She's young, bright and fearless, and that's an exciting thing to see.

For much of "Another Earth," though, her character isn't exactly at her best. At the start, Marling's Rhoda Williams is an aspiring astrophysicist who's just learned she's been accepted to MIT. Surely a brilliant future awaits her. But as she's driving home from a party, she's distracted by something blue looming far away in the night sky, which it turns out is a second version of our own planet. She crashes into another car, killing a little boy and his pregnant mother and leaving the father in a coma. Cahill's low-key approach makes the accident even more disturbing than if he'd amped it up with overpowering music and too many edits.

After four years in prison, Rhoda emerges with none of the vivacity or inquisitiveness that marked her youth, and all she wants is to be left alone. She returns to her family's home and takes a job as a janitor at her old high school in West Haven, Conn., but clearly still feels anxious.

Impulsively, Rhoda seeks out the man who survived the crash, someone who was at the height of his power in his own field: John Burroughs (William Mapother), a former composer and professor at Yale. He now spends his post-coma days self-medicating and barely functioning in his dilapidated house, and Mapother's quiet, lost presence makes this man's pain palpable.

Rhoda knocks on the door to apologize, express her feelings of shame, remorse, something - but she panics when he answers and instead pretends to work for a maid service with an offer of a free trial cleaning. Yes, you may begin groaning now - the metaphor that she's cleaning up his life is just too literal and clunky. And indeed, the relationship that develops between the two becomes too structured and easily defined, when it was far more intriguing in its ambiguity. After several visits, Rhoda and John are obviously improving each other's lives in small, steady ways rather than with obvious gestures. "Another Earth" should have left it that way.

A pervasive feeling of the unknown is what provides the film with its gripping suspense. As Rhoda and John forge their unlikely bond, "Earth 2," continues hovering above our own, inching ever closer. It may contain alternate versions of all of us, ones that offer the promise of a second chance, and a scene in which a scientist makes this determination on live television is chilling.

Cahill achieves a mixture of thrills and dread with passing glimpses at this blue orb; that it looks low-tech and has no glossy sheen adds to its allure. The fact that the performances, too, are a little raw and rough around the edges is fitting. Marling and Mapother are so good together in their understated way, they make you wish "Another Earth" had trusted itself enough to leave more unspoken.

Review

Another Earth

***

• Rated: PG-13 for disturbing images, some sexuality, nudity and brief drug use.

• Director: Mike Cahill.

• Cast: Brit Marling, William Mapother.

• Running time: 92 minutes.

Classy, solid and well-acted, "The Debt" is a rare bit of meaty, intelligent filmmaking during the ordinarily dreary final days of summer.

With a cast that includes Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and a tremendous Jessica Chastain, led by "Shakespeare in Love" director John Madden, it seems it would be hard to go wrong.

Matthew Vaughn, the director of "Layer Cake" and "Kick-Ass," co-wrote the script. It's smart and tense but also frustrating; it almost feels too safe, too conservative and reserved in the way it hits its notes. Still, everything about it is so respectable, you may feel engrossed in the moment, yet forget about it soon afterward.

A remake of a 2007 Israeli film of the same name. "The Debt" begins in 1997 with three former Mossad agents being heralded at the launch of a new book that details their most important mission from 30 years earlier. They are Rachel (Mirren), her ex-husband, Stephan (Wilkinson), and their former colleague and friend, David (Ciaran Hinds). The former husband and wife are parents of the author, and the glances they exchange signals that they're not too comfortable with being celebrated as heroes all these years later. The startling fate that befalls David also provides an early moment of foreboding.

Flashback to 1965. The exceedingly capable Rachel (Chastain) and the strong, stoic David (Sam Worthington) are pretending to be a young married couple trying to have a baby in order to get close to an East Berlin doctor named Dieter Vogel (a chilling Jesper Christensen), a Nazi war criminal known during World War II as the Surgeon of Birkenau. Under the leadership of the swaggering Stephan (Marton Csokas), the team is to kidnap Vogel and bring him back to Israel to stand trial.

Despite their training and focus, this does not exactly go as planned, and the ways in which the agents fail are more interesting than the buildup of watching them function in high gear. Madden proves himself adept at crafting this kind of brainy, brawny action thriller with a mixture of well-placed silences and visceral camerawork.

As it jumps back and forth in time, "The Debt" explores the conflict between expectations and reality, intellect and emotions, truth and regret. The film's gray areas are so intriguing that you'll wish it didn't rely on a facile love triangle to create further tension - and add yet another layer of history - between these three characters. The needless romance further bogs down the third act, which grows unfortunately messy as it tries to tie up various loose ends and satisfy the audience's need for justice.

Still, the performances are consistently strong, especially from Chastain in a far more grounded, muscular role than we've seen from her this year in "The Tree of Life" and "The Help." Meanwhile, Mirren can do tough-but-vulnerable in her sleep; these two are the most plausible duo of the three. As exciting and confident as Csokas is, it's hard to believe he'll morph into Wilkinson eventually, and Worthington-to-Hinds is the most baffling of all.

Unless maybe we're supposed to believe that all those years of secrets and lies have really taken a toll.

Review

The Debt

***

• Rated: R for some violence and language.

• Director: John Madden.

• Cast: Helen Mirren, Jessica Chastain, Ciaran Hinds, Sam Worthington, Tom Wilkinson, Marton Csokas.

• Running time: 111 minutes.

"A Good Old Fashioned Orgy" is a sex romp that flops around more than it romps.

But at least there's plenty of sex, right?

Well, yeah - a bit of full frontal nudity and a heaping helping of copulation, but there aren't a lot of laughs from some not very interesting or empathetic characters in this comedy about eight friends who plan and carry out a party that is to be a '70s throwback, a partner-switching soiree to commemorate all the good times they've had at their weekend house in the Hamptons.

Jason Sudeikis is often the over-the-top wingman of comedies like this ("Horrible Bosses," "Hall Pass"). He's a bland "lead wolf" in this pack. Eric is the 30ish office worker whose weekend escapes to his dad's getaway in Sag Harbor include epic parties that he plans and throws. One such epic - "The White Trash Bash," complete with mullet haircuts, lawnmower races, livestock and "pregnant" women getting plastered.

Then Dad (Don Johnson) decides to sell this spacious weekend getaway. More cash to play around with his latest trophy girlfriend.

Eric and seven of his closest friends ponder ways to sabotage the Realtors - Lin Shaye (You KNOW there's going to be inappropriate little-old-lady sex if the "Something About Mary" granny is on board) and Leslie Bibb. And resigned to losing the place, they ponder ways to send it out with a bang.

"An orgy!"

"People don't HAVE orgies!"

"They USED to!"

This comes in the context of an unfunny conversation about how AIDS robbed their generation of the free-sex '70s, and how "kids today" have their own brand of promiscuity.

Eric has most of these conversations with his pal, McCrudden, played by Tyler Labine in a faint imitation of the early Jack Black.

Orgies were most famous for being amongst strangers - coke and booze-addled strangers. But these folks don't know that. Will the women in their circle go for it?

"Insane, idiotic and self-destructive," complains relationship counselor Alison (Lake Bell). But when Laura (Lindsay Sloane) and Sue (Michelle Borth) see it as a way to finally sleep with Eric or Adam (Nick Kroll), it's game-on.

The TV writers turned writer-directors for the film, Peter Huyck and Alex Gregory, concoct a few scenes of "research" (Eric and McCrudden drop in on a "swingers" club that meets in a mattress warehouse, after hours) which have a laugh or two. The writers try to make relationship-phobic Eric have second thoughts as he takes up with the lovely real estate agent played by Bibb.

But none of the stuff supposed to give this "heart" works. The indecisive would-be rocker (Martin Starr) and his anything-to-make-you-happy girlfriend (Angela Sarafyan) are undeveloped; the girlfriend bonding moments have an unreality to them; the inevitable girl-on-girl scene is just frat-boy fantasizing.

And Sudeikis, forced to hold all this together and render it plausible, loses his "wingman" swagger. He's usually the guy who riffs with the leading man.

I did like David Koechner, who shows up as a bearded sage of the swinger scene - pervy, nervy and leadership savvy.

The sex sequences are revealingly awkward with their "Don't try this at home" message. But without characters we can invest in, this "Hangover"-meets-"Zack & Miri Make a Porno" is just the "porno," and entirely too tame for that, too.

Review

A Good Old Fashioned Orgy

* 1/2

• Rated: R for pervasive strong sexual content, graphic nudity and language.

• Directors: Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck.

• Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Leslie Bibb, Lake Bell, Lucy Punch, Tyler Labine, Will Forte.

• Running time: 101 minutes.

There are three sides to most love stories: his, hers and the truth. But on London's Fleet Street, the three sides are his, hers and the tabloids'.

Director Errol Morris, a former private investigator, has been circling around the definition of truth since his 1988 documentary "The Thin Blue Line" helped free an innocent man from death row.

"Tabloid," the true-ish story of a beauty queen who was charged with sexually assaulting a Mormon missionary and became a sensation in the British media, is missing the critical "he said" component of the equation - but the "she said" is a doozy.

Joyce McKinney was a baton twirler from North Carolina when she met Mormon lad Kirk Anderson in Salt Lake City in the mid-'70s.

In an unpublished memoir, old interview footage and the Morris film, she describes Anderson as a dreamboat, even while photos and recollections from reporters suggest he was a portly putz.

When Anderson left for a mission to England, McKinney followed, with a slavish admirer, a bodyguard and a pilot to help free Anderson from what McKinney calls a cult. This much is agreed: She drove Anderson to a remote cottage, plied him with comfort food and seduced him. But then Anderson returned to the Mormon elders and cried rape.

McKinney was arrested. While she was out on bail, her story and image captivated disco-era London. She was the toast of the town, with ardent admirers and dogged reporters following her every move.

Some of those reporters used bribes to uncover McKinney's prurient past. "Tabloid" keeps feeding us juicy new information, wrapped in yellowed newsprint, even as McKinney continues to describe "a very special love story."

Anderson did not participate in the documentary, but the feisty McKinney is such a captivating subject we wish this film were longer (especially when Morris adds a third-act footnote about her love for a pit bull named Booger).

"Tabloid" is tantalizing, but like yesterday's headlines, it's a fleeting flirtation.

Review

Tabloid

***

• Not rated: contains nudity and sexual themes.

• Director: Errol Morris.

• Running time: 87 minutes.

In "Seven Days in Utopia," a mild-mannered young golfer has a mild meltdown in the middle of a tournament. That's followed by seven days of perspective-patching among mild-mannered God-fearing folk in rural Texas. Faith and "fore" walk hand in hand - sort of - in this soft-centered faith-based drama starring Lucas Black of "Friday Night Lights," "Get Low" and "Jarhead."

Based on David L. Cook's self-help novel, "Golf's Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia," first-time director Matt Russell's film follows aspiring pro Luke Chisholm (Black) as he explodes in a contained fury in a televised tourney where he had hoped to earn his pro tour card.

We've met the somewhat domineering dad (Joseph Lyle Taylor) who still caddies for his son and caused Luke to snap. We then follow Luke as he flees the spotlight and the embarrassment of his worst day on the course, turning up at a ranch in a small town where he figures nobody will know who he is.

Robert Duvall is the sage old rancher, Johnny Crawford, a fellow who enters Luke's life on horseback. He takes the golfer in (Luke has dinged his car) and makes him ponder the great questions of golf - "How could a game have such an affect on a man's soul?"

Luke takes life lessons from Johnny, lessons that can be applied on the course. He swaps wisecracks with the locals. And he meets the fetching Sarah (Deborah Ann Woll), who is "trainin' to be a horse whisperer."

Oscar winner Melissa Leo and wonderful character actress Kathy Baker are here to lend, well, character. But mostly, this is about Johnny playing golf guru to Luke - making him visualize and "paint" (literally) the shot he visualizes, ordering him to learn balance by standing up in a canoe, patience by fly fishing.

"I need to know why you do the things you do," Johnny says. "Find some CONVICTION."

If golf is "a good walk, spoiled," then "Seven Days" is a potentially good golf movie stuck in a water hazard - as in "watered down." It goes in the rough with the staging of Luke's infamous "meltdown." Yeah, it's a game about decorum and self-control, and yes, this blow-up happens on TV. But ask 40 golfers about their worst tantrum on the course, and 35 of them will top this milder-than-mild one. In flashbacks, we see the (mildly) domineering dad who set the stage for Luke's bad day and get a sense of the (mild, again) pressures the kid is under. Perhaps that explains the lack of heat in the meltdown.

The movie opens with a Bible quotation - Isaiah 30:21, "Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, 'This is the way; walk in it.'" But the film seems to lose its nerve about this, too, soft-selling religion as it rubs rough edges off the characters.

"Seven Days" is beautifully shot - all rosy-hued back-lit back-swings. And Black, an avid golfer, makes a very convincing pro. The film's charm comes from its lighter moments. Duvall and Black have a warm mentor-student rapport.

But "Seven Days in Utopia" (Cook co-wrote the script with Russell and Central Florida screenwriter Sandra Thrift, among others) lacks surprises, from Johnny's "dark" past to his own life altering mistakes. And it lacks much in the line of tension, as we work our way right down the middle of the fairway toward the predictable "big game" (tournament) finish.

It's not a sport that lends itself to great filmmaking, but as we saw with "Tin Cup" and "The Greatest Game Ever Played," there are ways to finesse that - with color, with humor, with creative shot-making. This one treats its subject as if it's a tap-in for par, and thus, most of the best clubs were left in the bag.

Review

Seven Days in Utopia

**

• Rated: G.

• Director: Matt Russell.

• Cast: Lucas Black, Robert Duvall, Melissa Leo, Kathy Baker, Deborah Ann Woll.

• Running time: 109 minutes.