This week, the most offbeat DVD to appear on release lists is:

“A Town Called Panic”

If a surreal, feature-length, stop-motion animation comedy starring a bunch of plastic toys, all speaking in French with English subtitles, sounds like your version of “Toy Story” hell, pass by “A Town Called Panic” (due out on DVD Tuesday).

But if you’re looking for a bracing counterpoint to the witty nostalgia of Pixar’s dazzling toy box, check out this inspired feature from first-time Belgian filmmakers Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar. It enjoyed a limited arthouse run under the distribution graces of Aardman Studios (“Wallace & Gromit’s” creative parents), and while the animation is studiously low-tech and rudimentary the writing is brilliant, sly and hilarious.

The tale, drawn from a cult Belgian TV series, centers on three plastic-toy pals – Cowboy, Indian and Horse – who live a rambling, rural papier-mache town called Panic. When Cowboy and Indian plan to surprise Horse with a brand new barbeque pit, they accidentally end up in possession of 50 million bricks, a bizarre online ordering glitch that sets them off on a truly weird adventure.

In the raucous events that follow, the trio trek across the frozen tundra (dodging a giant, snowball-tossing robot penguin) and end up in a parallel underwater universe where they encounter a band of pointy-headed ogres in diving suits and goggles. The visual jokes and daft cultural references come fast and furious, and (a la Pixar) the filmmakers wisely seed their tale with jokes that will appeal to children and adults alike. Animation buffs as well as families not afraid of a little subtitle reading will surely find “A Town Called Panic,” as the wacky ad blurb suggests, “zany, brainy and altogether insane-y!”

“A Town Called Panic” is not rated and runs 75 minutes. It’s being released by Zeitgeist Films.

- Dennis King

BY GENE TRIPLETT

“The Killer Inside Me” has quietly stolen onto pay-per-view television.

The controversial $13 million feature film that was shot in and around Guthrie, Oklahoma City, Enid, Tulsa and Cordell in May and June 2009 will also open Aug. 20 for a week-long run on the big screen at Tulsa’s Circle Cinema Theatre, marking the first time the movie has been shown theatrically in the state where it was filmed.

“It’s opening up that Friday, it’s going to get a full week run and maybe longer if it does good,” theater office manager Chuck Foxen said.

Meanwhile, local movie fans who can’t wait to see what all the fuss has been about can pay $5.99 to watch it on their home screens right now, if they have access to Cox Communications’ On Demand cable television service.

Bruce Berkinshaw, director of product management at Cox, said “The Killer Inside Me” began running on pay-for-view in Oklahoma City and Tulsa on July 6, and will probably be available on the service through October.

The film is still playing on 14 theater screens around the country, and had racked up a total of $146,444 in domestic ticket sales as of last Sunday. It had its official U.S. opening in New York on June 18.

“‘The Killer Inside Me’ is currently in limited theatrical release and gradually expanding its market,” said Jill Simpson, director of the Oklahoma Film and Music Office, which was instrumental in bringing the movie’s production crew to the state last year.

“It’s not uncommon for a little film to start in the major cities and they roll it out and they build screens up,” Simpson said. “I was a little bit surprised when I saw the On Demand, but I know that there’s all kinds of models now for distribution that are not like they used to be. It’s kind of the way it’s going to be in the future, where these schedules are collapsed and it’s available at home as quickly as it is in the theater.”

No theatrical run has been set for Oklahoma City. The film will be released Sept. 28 on DVD.

“The Killer Inside Me,” directed by Michael Winterbottom (“A Mighty Heart”) with Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson and Jessica Alba in the lead roles, is based on a 1952 paperback novel by Anadarko-born pulp fiction writer Jim Thompson. Set in a small west Texas town in the mid-1950s, it centers on a seemingly mild-mannered deputy sheriff (Affleck) whose repressed homicidal urges are unleashed by a beautiful and defiant prostitute (Alba) who likes to play rough.

Scenes of graphic violence in “The Killer Inside Me” reportedly shocked many audience members during its premiere screening at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and at the time some critics and industry observers predicted the film’s producers would have a hard time landing a major distributor for it.

But IFC Films stepped in during the final days of the festival and paid about $1.5 million for the North American distribution rights to the film.

Compared to the fractured timeline storytelling of “Memento,” the noir-ish comic book world of his Batman epics, the violent alchemy of “The Prestige,” and now the layered semi-realities of “Inception,” the 2002 crime thriller “Insomnia” would seem at first glance to be the most conventional film in director Christopher Nolan’s radically unorthodox body of work so far. It’s also Nolan’s only film that he didn’t have a hand in writing.

But don’t blow this one off as a by-the-numbers formula cop drama. Screenwriter Hillary Seitz’s adaptation of a 1997 Norwegian film of the same name focuses on star LAPD homicide cop Will Dormer (Al Pacino) and his partner, Hap (Martin Donovan), who are sent to remote Nightmute, Alaska, to help solve the grisly murder of a teenage girl. Dormer is already losing sleep over an Internal Affairs investigation back home (the real reason his superiors have sent him away), and the endless days in the Land of the Midnight Sun are only aggravating his restless condition. When a second death occurs that he may or may not have caused deliberately, and the girl’s elusive killer begins tormenting Dormer with his own guilty conscience, the cop finds himself in a waking nightmare that can only end in an eternal nap for one or more of the people involved.

Hilary Swank is a heartbreaker as the dedicated rookie Alaskan cop who idolizes Dormer, Robin Williams raises goosebumps as the creepy antagonist and Pacino is at peak power as the deeply flawed and world-weary policeman on the edge. Meanwhile, Nolan visually manages to pull off the darkest of noir storytelling in broad, endless daylight.

DVD features: New Blu-ray edition contains four featurettes, including a conversation between Pacino and Nolan, two making-of documentaries and “Eyes Wide Open: The Insomniac’s World.”

— Gene Triplett

Jonah Hill

As Oedipal romantic comedies go, “Cyrus” is probably as close as you can come to generating charm and laughs without spilling over completely into off-putting creepiness.

Thanks to a dead-on underground sensibility and a sure hand with off-track characters by writing-directing brothers Jay and Mark Duplass – plus genuinely felt performances from a first-rank ensemble cast – “Cyrus” just manages to walk a fine line between oddly endearing and outright icky.

The Duplass boys, busy mainstays in the hip, micro-budget world of indie “mumblecore” films, are stepping up in class here after a couple of notable successes in 2005’s “The Puffy Chair” (about a cross-country trek to deliver a giant La-Z-Boy) and 2008’s “Baghead” (screenwriting buddies penning a mock horror script about being terrorized by a guy with a bag on his head and then, indeed, being terrorized by a guy with a bag on his head).

With producing juice and support from big-time bothers Ridley and Tony Scott, the Duplasses have attracted an ensemble cast that includes John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill and Catherine Keener to play out a quirky love story spiked with bile.

Reilly starts it off as 40-something schlub John, a lonely guy who clings to a friendship with his ex-wife Jamie (Keener) even as she’s preparing to wed her fiancé (Matt Walsh). Fed up with his neediness, Jamie drags the slovenly, socially awkward John to a party where he takes a shine to the very appealing Molly (Tomei).

But as John and Molly begin dating and seem to be hitting it off, a troublesome interloper threatens to come between them in the form of Molly’s snarky, clinging, live-at-home 21-year-old son Cyrus (Hill). Clearly, Momma’s boy Cyrus sees John as a threat. And soon the two men in Molly’s life are engaged in full-out psychological warfare for her affections.

It’s an interesting dynamic, but one that demands complete control and a steadfast sense of purpose to pull off. Unfortunately, while the Duplasses set things up neatly, they tend to meander unsteadily between scenes of raunchy, low-brow hilarity and eager attempts at heartfelt poignancy. The fit certainly isn’t seamless, but it does deliver moments of startling and uncomfortable wonder (as when Cyrus tells his Mom in pained honesty, “You deserve someone who can love you the way I can’t love you”).

The uneven tone is redeemed somewhat by the fine performances. Hill, a veteran of the Judd Apatow school of raunch, registers strongly as the brooding man-child who manages to be psycho and sad at once. Reilly is touching as the lonely guy bravely dealing with his awkwardness and trying for love again. Keener is spiky and funny as the caring ex-wife, and Tomei is a lovely presence even though her character is far too vaguely defined.

Give the brothers Duplass kudos for their embracing empathy for human foibles and failings, which goes a long way toward smoothing over their inconsistencies in tone and delivering a bracing comedy of discomfort. In the end, “Cyrus” is both disturbing and heartening in the way it observes its characters in their most awkward, uncertain and naked moments and gives them full credit for being human.

- Dennis King

“Cyrus”

R
1:32
2.5 stars
Starring: John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill, Catherine Keener, Matt Walsh
(Ratings criteria: sensuality and violence, etc.)

It was a film that forever altered the nation’s collective sense of fashion, film and sexual mores – not to mention the brittle, squeaky clean image of actress Audrey Hepburn. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” drawn from Truman Capote’s translucent novella that most Hollywood producers deemed “unadaptable,” became a film that defined a profound sea change in Hollywood and in America at the dawning of the 1960s.

Just how this wispy tale of a spirited Manhattan good-time girl came to be such a potent cinematic emblem of glamour, sexual politics and the new morality is told in Sam Wasson’s delightful book, “Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.” (HarperStudio, $19.99), a pithy behind-the-scenes look at the messy making of an era-defining classic.

Wasson, who previously surveyed the works of Tulsa-born director Blake Edwards in the witty, wide-ranging “A Splurch on the Kisser,” sharply pulls his focus here to chronicle Edwards’ trials and tribulations in bringing Capote’s light-as-a-bubble story to the screen. The challenge was considerable: the book lacked a second act and forceful dramatic motivations, it featured a nameless gay protagonist and an unhappy ending. Not exactly the stuff of feel-good Hollywood fantasy.

One early producer’s coverage report cited by Wasson predicted dim prospects for the book’s adaptation to the screen. “In any event this is more of a character sketch than a story,” the reader noted. “NOT RECOMMENDED.”

Wasson lays out the disagreements, stumbling blocks, misjudgments, on-set feuds and near disasters in the making of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” with a novelist’s eye for telling detail and narrative tension and a refreshing irreverence. In fact, the story reads like gripping fiction yet falls neatly into the factual confines of the “nonfiction novel” that Capote so brazenly claimed to invent with “In Cold Blood.”

“Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.” is packed with juicy tidbits that will surprise even avid film buffs. For instance:

- Capote was against casting Hepburn – who was defined in the American mind by wholesome roles in “Roman Holiday” and “Sabrina” – as Holly Golightly and instead lobbied vigorously for Marilyn Monroe.

- Hepburn herself was reluctant to take a role that played so starkly against her lily-white screen image. Yet, as Wasson lays out the story, Hepburn emerges as a smart, thoroughly modern woman, more cunning and complex than her ingénue image would imply.

- Producers resisted having Henry Mancini contribute a song for the film, and Johnny Mercer’s original lyric for the eventual signature tune was “Blue River.” One unimpressed Paramount exec famously remarked on “Moon River” that “the song should go.”

- Two endings for the film were shot – one romantic, the other melancholy.

- George Peppard, as Holly’s heterosexual soulmate Paul Varjak, was widely disliked on the set and almost got into a fistfight with Edwards.

- The guest list for the post-premiere party was a hodge-podge of who’s whos and has-beens, including Dennis Hopper, Jane Mansfield, Buster Keaton and Charles Laughton.

- Capote himself was dismissive of the finished film, archly characterizing it as “a mawkish valentine to New York City.”

All this and more is fit into Wasson’s slim volume, as trim and neatly tailored as Givenchy’s little black dress. “Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.” is sparkling storytelling, as bubbly and bracing as the film it chronicles and also as filled with deep and timeless cultural resonance.

- Dennis King

This week, the most interesting DVD to appear on release lists is:

“Neil Young Archives, Vol. 1 (1963-1972)”

Neil Young, that iconic singer-songwriter with the distinctive rough-warbly voice, has enjoyed an amazing and durable career that has spanned several eras of American music. So it’s entirely fitting that his works be collected in archival form, and the recently released Vol. 1 contains a treasure trove of musical and cultural touchstones from the years 1963-1972.

“Neil Young Archives, Vol. 1” begins a chronological survey of his entire body of work, covering the period from his earliest recordings with the Squires in Winnipeg, 1963, through to his classic 1972 album, “Harvest,” including studio and live tracks with the legendary Buffalo Springfield, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Neil Young with Crazy Horse.

This 10-disc collection offers a total of 128 musical tracks, including 60 previously unreleased songs, versions, mixes or rare tracks. The multimedia discs also offer special feature videos, film clips and film trailers, along with audio tracks of rare interviews, radio spots and concert raps. There is also a comprehensive array of archival photos, copies of press releases, lyric manuscripts and documents containing biographies, tour dates and a timeline detailing Young’s career path.

In addition, the set includes a full-length DVD of Young’s celebrated first film, “Journey Through The Past,” available for the first time since its theatrical release in 1973. The whole thing comes packaged in a custom display box that includes a glossy, 236-page hardbound booklet and a fold-out poster.

“Neil Young Archives, Vol. 1” runs a total of 1,200 minutes on 10 audio-video discs. It is being released by Reprise Records.

- Dennis King

No multigifted performer could have wished for a more perfect showcase than Judy Garland was given in “A Star Is Born,” the music-filled romantic drama from 1954 that displayed her singing, acting and dancing talents to fuller advantage than any other film in her stellar career.

This remake of William Wellman’s 1937 tale of Hollywood success, love, self-destruction and studio-system cruelty might well have been re-titled “A Star Is Re-born,” as it revived 32-year-old Garland’s flagging real-life film career, playing struggling young singer Esther Blodgett, who blossoms into screen sensation “Vicki Lester” under the tutelage of husband Norman Maine (a brilliantly heartbreaking James Mason), a once-great film actor spiraling downward into alcoholic doom.

Under the direction of George Cukor, working from a script by Moss Hart, Garland is at the top of her game, belting such Harold Arlen-Ira Gershwin torchers as “The Man That Got Away” with her distinctively genuine powerhouse emotion  in state-of-the-art stereo.

In the Blu-ray edition, the colors are as rich as the first day they were printed, the images are crisp, and the 5.1 Dolby Digital sound puts the viewer in the midst of it all. This is film historian Ronald Haver’s restored version, containing 170 minutes of the original 181-minute premiere, with sepia-toned stills filling in the visual gaps, while the completely restored soundtrack keeps up the narrative continuity.

The package also contains a bonus DVD of alternate takes, deleted scenes, excerpts from Garland’s recording sessions, newsreel and television footage from the 1954 premiere and a collectible book of rare photos, press materials and a fascinating essay by film historian John Fricke.

For fans of the ’54 version of “A Star Is Born” — one of the most inspired and inspiring musical dramas ever filmed, and Garland’s crowning achievement — this special edition is a must-own.

— Gene Triplett

Adrien Brody and Alice Braga

While John McTiernan and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 “Predator” spawned one official sequel and two ill-conceived spinoffs, it is only now that a truly worthy follow-up to the original has arrived on screens with the swift and deadly “Predators.”

Disregard 1990’s muddled “Predator 2” and two forgettable “Alien vs. Predator” knockoffs and step up instead to the cunning vision of Hungarian director Nimrod Antal (“Kontroll”) and maverick producer Robert Rodriguez and his Austin-based Troublemaker Studios. They’ve concocted a hard-charging summer B-movie that slyly hits most of the mythological cues of the original film and even makes room for a few intriguing shades of character depth here and there.

Rodriguez, the one-time boy wonder of “El mariachi” fame, provided the blueprint for this new film with his 1994 screenplay that went unproduced. Intriguingly, it pays fitting homage to 1932’s classic “The Most Dangerous Game,” in which the insane and insanely wealthy Russian Count Zaroff conspires, for sheer sport, to hunt down a luckless group of people who’ve been shipwrecked on his remote private island.

“Predators” sets its action on the jungle hunting preserve of a remote alien planet, and Adrien Brody assumes the Joel McCrea lead as the alpha hunter who ironically finds himself being hunted. And multiplying Leslie Banks’ role as the monstrous, amoral predator count is a snarling trio of armored, bullet-headed, dreadlocked reptilian beasties familiar to all from past films.

Employing sophisticated camouflaging technology, infra-red vision and switchblade cufflinks, the hulking Predators apparently took a page from Count Zaroff ‘s playbook and imported a butched-up band of human mercenaries and murderers – this most dangerous game – for their own hunting amusement and blood sport.

The story opens in literal freefall, with a breathless sequence in which the mercenary Royce (a very buff Brody) awakens from unconsciousness to find himself plummeting from the sky toward a jungle canopy, his parachute opening at the last minute to deposit him roughly on the floor of an eerie alien rainforest.

He soon discovers himself in the befuddled company of others similarly shanghaied – a dirty half dozen that includes a lithe Israeli sniper (Brazilian beauty Alice Braga), an inscrutable Yakuza hitman (Louis Ozawa Changchien), a Mexican drug cartel enforcer (Rodriquez mainstay Danny Trejo), an African soldier-warlord (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), a tough Russian soldier (Oleg Tartakov) and a chatty death-row serial killer armed with a shive (Walton Goggins).

Tagging along as a seeming sacrificial lamb is Topher Grace’s wimpy medical doctor, and showing up midway for a great scenery-chewing cameo is Laurence Fishburne, an unhinged survivor of past Predator hunts who seems to be channeling Colonel Kurtz from Fishburne’s youthful outing in “Apocalypse Now.”

As Royce takes charge, quotes Hemingway and tries to outsmart his hunters, “Predators” leads us on a merry, sweat-soaked expedition that offers few surprises – disposable characters are disposed of with ample gore, irony is piled upon irony and a final, brutal showdown shapes up with a predictable but satisfying sense of inevitability.

Antal directs with quick dispatch and witty attention to detail and the cast performs both grittily and nimbly – especially the surprisingly muscular Brody (Oscar winner for “The Pianist”) and the doe-eyed Braga.
While this hard-to-kill sci-fi monster epic might not be in the same league as “Alien”/”Aliens,” “Predator” and “Predators” indeed show a killer instinct when it comes to satisfying the popcorn blood lust of summer cinema goers.

- Dennis King

“Predators”

R
1:47
3 stars
Starring: Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Laurence Fishburne, Danny Trejo
(Ratings criteria: sensuality and violence, etc.)

Dave Roberts

After watching their taut, insidious and very clever neo-noir, “The Square,” you might be inclined to think of the filmmaking siblings Nash and Joel Edgerton as the Down Under Coen brothers.

Shades of the Coens’ “Blood Simple” nihilism – along with dark doses of James M. Cain’s hardboiled ethic – run through their perverse little tale of a regular guy undone by adultery, blackmail, arson, murder and best-laid plans gone terribly, disastrously wrong.

Set in a sunny Sydney suburb, the Edgertons’ story (Nash directed; Joel co-wrote, produced and co-stars) is a darkly funny Aussie noir complete with old-school conventions: hapless, regular-guy dupe; femme fatale; deadly thugs; spiraling bad fortune. But the brothers spin those time-worn conventions with such cheeky bravado that their film seems startlingly fresh.

As per formula, the thing starts with two unhappily married lovers locked in an adulterous affair. Raymond (Dave Roberts) is a 40-something construction supervisor trapped in an aggressively loveless marriage. His much younger hairdresser neighbor Carla (Claire van der Boom) is wed to mullet-headed, small-time crook Smithy (Anthony Hayes), who treats her like a scullery maid.

Raymond and Carla, during their no-tell motel trysts, dream of running away together. And the seemingly perfect opportunity arises when Carla finds a hidden attic stash of loot, apparently the proceeds from one of Smithy’s larger criminal enterprises. Applying her most vampish wiles, Carla urges a reluctant Raymond to seize the day – and the illicit cash – and make their move.

But Raymond hesitates, and in that slight hesitation delicious, dastardly complications begin to pile up, and up, and up.

Among those bleakly comic and cringe-inducing complications is an encounter with a thuggish arsonist (played with silky, psychotic menace by Joel Edgerton), a florid array of blue-collar criminal henchmen, a nasty blackmail scheme, an escalating body count and an unfortunate incident involving Carla’s dog, Raymond’s frisky pup and a river.

Joel and Nash Edgerton

Nash Edgerton, a veteran stuntman with nearly 100 film credits, proves himself a crafty director with a nice ear for hard-bitten genre dialogue, a good feel for subtle character coloration and a dead-on sense for ratcheting up tension and dread. He plays the noir game like a sly, world-weary card dealer.

His deck, however, seems a little shy of true sexual heat. Roberts, while neatly playing Raymond as an unassuming everyman in way over his head and nagged by a guilty conscience, is no Fred “Double Indemnity” MacMurray. There’s no propulsive star power in Roberts’ performance, nor is there Barbara Stanwyck’s devilish dazzle in van der Boom’s portrayal of the desperately conniving Carla.

But the very ordinariness of their characters and their shabby immorality oddly adds up to a very compelling dimension to this classically rooted tale. A bad decision here, a moral lapse there, a temptation entertained and life could go terribly awry for any of us everyday blokes.

“The Square” puts us squarely in the shoes of one poor ordinary dupe and spins out a timeless morality tale that leaves us cringing and exhilarated at the same time.

Playing with “The Square” in most theatrical runs is Edgerton’s celebrated nine-minute short film, “Spider,” in which the director spins another dark-tinged tale about a guy trying to make up with his girlfriend and getting himself deeper and deeper into trouble every step of the way.

- Dennis King

“The Square”

R
1:45
3 stars
Starring: David Roberts, Claire van der Boom, Joel Edgerton, Anthony Hayes
(Ratings criteria: sensuality and violence, etc.)

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Welsh actor Rhys Ifans exuded an appealingly shaggy, Scooby Doo quality as he strolled into a room full of reporters last spring to chat about his movie, “Greenberg,” and his role as an erstwhile rock guitarist turned regular, middle-aged family guy.

With a weeks-old growth of scraggly beard and a beaten black leather jacket worthy of any rock road warrior, the lanky, long-haired actor confidently spanned the gap between his two lifelong passions – acting and rock ’n’ roll.

In “Greenberg,” Ifans (whose name, absent its tongue-tying Welsh inflections, is pronounced Reese Ee-vans) is cannily cast in the part of Ivan, a one-time guitar god who hung up his axe years ago when his temperamental pal and bandmate Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) scuttled their group’s chance at a big-time record deal.

In the film’s story, Ivan and Greenberg are reunited after years of separation and silent resentment over their glancing flirtation with fame and fortune.

“Greenberg” is due out on DVD on July 13. In addition, Ifans plays a key role as narrator in the graffiti-hipster documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” which comes to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s Noble Theater July 23-25. He’ll also appear in this summer’s “Nanny McPhee Returns” and in the hotly anticipated “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 1” later this year.

Ifans, 41, who in his own younger days had a serious brush with rock fame in a Welsh band known as the Super Furry Animals, declared during press interviews hosted by Focus Features that he was uniquely suited to play Ivan.

“I’m in a band now, you know. I’ve been in and out of bands for years, so music is always around me,” he said. “There’s a special bond with that whole band thing, and also with the halcyon days of youth. Ivan and Greenberg hadn’t seen each other in 10 years. So the breakdown in their relationship happens because the language or vernacular they have is one of a student. They don’t have the grammar to talk about these big adult issues, such as divorce or not seeing your son again. They can only resort to, ‘hey, man, how you doin’.’ That’s a testament to (filmmaker) Noah Baumbach’s writing that these guys keep hitting the brick walls of communication because they might have grown up as people but the language they use hasn’t changed. And they hit that stumbling block every time.

“I think you can see them both struggling throughout the entire film trying to address the unspeakable,” he said. “That is often comedic but essentially it’s very sad. That’s the poetry I drew from this film – the pathos of the great unspoken.”

Ifans, whose breakout role came in 1999’s “Notting Hill,” in which he played Hugh Grant’s wacky, slovenly flatmate, Spike, is a classically trained theater actor who also considers himself a serious working musician. And he believes that each artistic discipline informs the other.

“You’ve gotta work on the factory floor before you sit around the big table,” he said. “I think my theater work informs my music work more than my film work, in terms of mechanics of performance. But, of course, they’re each completely different animals. I’d rather perform in a play, but I’d rather watch a film.”

But working on a Noah Baumbach film, he said, was an especially challenging experience even for a traditionally trained actor.

“It’s impossible to act in a Noah Baumbach film, you know, to ‘act,’” he said. “But no matter how improvised or free it seems, it actually isn’t. It really is a precision endeavor. It’s really finite work, which I found thrilling, because often I’m asked, ‘OK, you’re the funny guy, run with the ball, let’s improve,’ more often than not, a badly written script. ‘Let’s get Rhys to make it funnier.’ In this case that wasn’t true at all.

“That’s why it’s such a pleasure to work with such loving attention to language,” he said. “Every single utterance in this film has gravitas or weight or informs the audience further as to the emotional life of these people. There’s no waste and I just found that very, very rewarding.”

Luckily, Ifans said, he’s never been forced to choose between acting and music.

“Oddly enough, they coincide beautifully in my life,” he said. “I just make them both work. I don’t go on holiday. When I’m not acting, I do rock ‘n’ roll. Yeah, I guess with the Super Furry Animals early on there was a point where we were going to be signed by Creation Records and I had to decide, and it took me a year to – and, of course, my acting career wasn’t what it is now, so the future was an unknown entity. I made the right decision for me by not signing. But now we’ve kind of come back together with elements of the Super Furry Animals, and we’re on our second album.”

(His current band is a psychedelic group called The Peth – Welsh for “The Thing” – which is led the Super Furry Animal’s drummer Dafydd Ieuan. Its debut album, “The Golden Mile,” was released in 2008.)