Frank & Lola: Michael Shannon in Vegas and Paris

Surely, Paris is a more romantic city than Las Vegas, right? Believe it or not, a damaged couple will meet and fall in love in Sin City, despite both having history in the City of Light. At least it feels like love for a while. Their relationship will take a dark turn in Matthew Ross’s Frank & Lola (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

Of all the struggling restaurants in Las Vegas, Lola walks into Frank’s on Halloween night. They immediately feel a kinship between lost, lonely souls. What starts as a likely one-night stand blossoms against the odds into the romance of a lifetime. Even though Frank is somewhat prone to jealousy and understandably bitter about the failure of his restaurant, things are good between them, until one fateful day.

There will be no getting around the fact that she cheated on him. However, once Frank settles down, he discovers more of the surrounding context. Apparently, Lola once again succumbed to the Svengali-like power her mother’s Parisian friend Alan holds over her. Although he is a celebrated memoirist in Europe, Alan is really a sexual predator, who raped Lola at a point when she was highly malleable emotionally and psychologically. Or so she tells Frank. He will start to have his doubts when he confronts the smooth-talking playboy in Paris.

Frankly, Frank & Lola feels like two entirely different films depending on which city Frank finds himself in. The Las Vegas scenes he shares with Lola are darkly seductive and potently redolent of lust and jealousy. Every development of their fraught relationship rings true. In contrast, the pseudo-noir revenge sequences in Paris largely feel forced and excessively lurid. They are just off compared to the moody but grounded Vegas passages.

Regardless, Michael Shannon just puts on a masterclass as Frank. He raises brooding to a high art form and forges some believably flawed but viscerally charged chemistry with Imogen Poots’ Lola. Unfortunately, she remains largely passive throughout the film, which is problematic. Likewise, Michael Nyqvist more-or-less hits the replay button on his portrayal of the literary cradle-robber in The Girl in the Book.

Arguably, the biggest star of F&L after Shannon is cinematographer Eric Koretz, who gives the proceedings a sheen that evokes classic 1970s hothouse dramas. He also captures the alien vibe of Las Vegas, especially for those who are not interested in gambling. Ross goes for the sort of genre ambiguity you often find in the films of André Téchiné, which is laudably ambitious, but the smarminess of some of the Parisian scenes pulls him up a bit short. It is flawed, but its adult sensibility probably makes it worth catching up with on DVD or VOD streaming. For Shannon’s diehard partisans, it opens tomorrow (12/9) in New York, at the Village East—and releases on iTunes.

I.T.: Pierce Brosnan’s Life Gets Hacked

Someone should warn Mike Regan the women you meet through online chats sometimes turn out to be men. The corporate jet magnate just isn’t very computer savvy. He is about to reveal his smart home passwords to his company’s new systems temp. In doing so, he will learn a perennial management lesson. Good help is definitely hard to find in John Moore’s I.T. (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Regan is about to take his firm public to raise capital for his uber-for-private-jets app. Rather embarrassingly his launch event is nearly sabotaged by technical glitches, but Ed Porter, the new socially awkward temp saves the day. Impressed by his resourcefulness and full of his own fake egalitarianism, Regan invites him over to the house to speed up the wifi and do other computer stuff. At this point, he should be writing his own ticket to full time employment and quick promotion, but his horrendous misunderstanding of boundaries ruins all his good credit. Since he continues to do creepy stuff, like showing up to cheer on the Regan’s prep school daughter in her field hockey game, his almost-mentor cans him. Feeling betrayed, Porter uses all his backdoors and Trojans to makes the Regans’ lives absolutely miserable.

For about ten minutes, I.T. gets smart when Michael Nyqvist blows into town as Henrik, the mysterious “cleaner,” who specializes in shutting down cyber menaces like Porter. Unfortunately, it soon reverts back to its previous dumb self. When it comes to stupidity in Don Kay & William Wisher’s screenplay, nobody can touch the moronic cops, who bizarrely identify immediately with the twitchy computer nerd rather than the wealthy airplane dude. At one point, Regan’s real I.T. department suggests Porter might be able to crash their planes out of the sky, but they never follow up on this potentially catastrophic plot point.

As Regan, Pierce Brosnan sort of plays his age without giving up on playing good guy-leading mean. Nyqvist is slyly droll as the Cleaner, while James Frecheville does some of his best work yet (certainly compared to Adore and Animal Kingdom, in which everyone else just overwhelmed him) as the staggeringly inappropriate Porter. However, they are just working with a screenplay that is dumber than a bag full of hammers.

Seriously, the logic of I.T.’s narrative collapses faster than Hillary Clinton on a day in the mid-eighties. In feels like a throwback to mid-1990s films like The Net that were just discovering the shenanigans that sometimes happen online. It might have gotten more benefit of the doubt then, but it just feels shopworn now. Therefore, I.T. just isn’t recommendable when it opens this Friday (9/23) in New York, at the Cinema Village.