Cinephile.

Only nominally set in the present day and pre-empting the similar Tarantino-Rodriguez throwback Grindhouse by at least six weeks, Craig Brewer's Black Snake Moan is wannabe exploitation cinema. The premise is almost too ridiculous to be believed: In order to cure Christina Ricci of her sex addiction, bluesman Samuel L. Jackson chains her to a radiator and essentially lets her sweat it out. It's an intentionally provocative scenario, stirring elements of sex, race, and age into one bubbling stew, but Brewer isn't interested in these subjects past their ability to titillate. Halfway through, when the tenacious Ricci finally consents to her cure and goes limp, so does the movie.

Unlike Quentin Tarantino, who reinvents exploitation tropes to explore his love of women, Brewer uses them to reinforce a worldview that sanctions female sexuality only if it gets men off. Ricci's aggressive sexuality is supposed to be a "bad" thing, but when she seduces a young virgin in Jackson's care, the older man is practically ready to slap him on the back and offer him a cigar. It will also surprise no one to learn that, like so many other sexually rapacious women in the movies, Ricci's character is the victim of childhood sexual abuse. She can't simply want to get laid like the men in this film do--she has to have a dark, shameful reason for it.

Black Snake Moan had its premiere at this year's Sundance Film Festival, a heady mix of big-name movies and experimental film that last year launched Cam Archer's Wild Tigers I Have Known, only now seeing a theatrical release from IFC Films. Trimmed nearly 20 minutes since its Sundance debut then, Archer's art film is about 13-year-old Logan (Malcolm Stumpf), an androgynous boy with a familiar crush on sexy loner Rodeo (Patrick White). Encouraged by the older boy's attentions, Logan develops a female alter ego he calls Leah, one bold enough to call Rodeo in the middle of the night and come on to him in a way Logan himself could hardly muster.

Wild Tigers is a gorgeous, torpid debut, full of vivid imagery that is nevertheless entirely obvious. Only 24 when he made the film, Archer is attuned to his young characters to an almost fetishistic degree, concealing these boys with bangs and hoodies spilling over their faces until nothing seems to be left except red lips and a blushing set of pubescent cheeks. Not for nothing is Gus Van Sant an executive producer, though Archer's scope already seems decidedly more limited, if his short films on River Phoenix and Jonathan Brandis are any indication. Young, floppy-haired boys like them may never age, but Archer will have to. His eye is adult, but his heart is still stuck in junior high.

When Universal reportedly paid Borat creator Sacha Baron Cohen $42.5 million to create a film based around his fashionista character, Bruno, many other studio executives shook their heads: Are mass audiences really willing, they wondered, to sit through an unconventional improv comedy with a gay man as the lead character? We won't have to wait for Bruno to get an answer. Just out is Reno 911! Miami, a feature-length adaptation of the popular Comedy Central parody, which has a flamboyant gay front and center.

Lt. Jim Dangle (co-writer Thomas Lennon) is the head of the Reno sheriffs department and a man whose sexuality is as questionable as his police skills. That all changes when he and his squad of equally inept deputies make their way to Miami, where Dangle hopes to hop from gay bar to gay bar until his R&R is shanghaied by a local druglord (Paul Rudd, doing his best Scarface impression). With Miami's finest indisposed, it's up to the men and women from Reno to take him down.

Freed from their basic-cable restraints, Lennon and director-costar Robert Ben Garant turn their subtext into wildly outrageous text, blowing open Dangle's homosexuality and throwing all the characters into awkward, mercifully aborted assignations. Though the joke may be on these deputies, Lennon and Garant are too sweet-natured to regard with anything but affection; the result is a gay-positive comedy that even the Borat-loving masses will respond to. Let's hope that Universal and Baron Cohen take note.