BY GENE TRIPLETT

TORONTO — Ben Affleck wanted to pull a job in his hometown of Boston. To get away with it, he imported a string of pros who he knew could fake convincing Beantown accents and

Ben Affleck

provide solid backup when the shooting started.

His accomplices were Jon Hamm (“Mad Men”), hailing from St. Louis; Jeremy Renner (“The Hurt Locker”), out of Modesto, Calif.; London native Rebecca Hall (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”); Blake Lively (upcoming “Green Lantern”), from out L.A. way; Pete Postlethwaite (“Inception”), another limey from Warrington, Cheshire, England; and Chris Cooper (“Adaptation”), of Kansas City, Mo.

Affleck’s plan was to knock over box offices nationwide with “The Town,” a heist thriller he co-wrote and directed, based on the Chuck Hogan novel “Prince of Thieves.” It opens today in theaters.

Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner

“I think the accents are a big issue because if you don’t do them well … they can really upend your movie,” Affleck said during a news conference last week at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“You have to hire really good actors to do it. I didn’t even have to know they can do it. So, when Blake came in and read the scenes, I asked her which part of Boston she was from. So, that was handled. And then with Renner — who I knew was a good actor, a great actor — I wasn’t worried about his ability to do it, I was just worried would he do it. … And so I sent him a lot of recordings.

“But more than the recordings, I found out that it’s about the people you stand next to. So, I put the right people around Jeremy without saying anything, and Jeremy’s so smart, and you could immediately see him sort of like radiating towards the people. … It was really fun to watch. And he’d show up at the set, and he had it dead to rights.”

“The Town” is about people who grew up in a one-square-mile neighborhood of Boston called Charlestown, which has produced more bank and armored car robbers than anywhere in

Jon Hamm

 the U.S., according to the authors of the film and the book.

Affleck directs himself for the first time as Doug MacRay, leader of a crew of ruthless bank robbers that always gets out clean. The only family Doug has is his partners in crime, especially Jem (Renner), a dangerous dude with a hair-trigger temper: the loose cannon of the bunch.

“I had the hardest time, I think (with the accent),” Renner said. “It’s difficult. I’m not from the region, and I thought it was one of the most important things I had to overcome. It doesn’t matter how good Ben is or how good any actor is. (If the accent sounds phony) it’s going to pop out, and it’s gonna pull people out of the movie, I think.

“So, Ben didn’t help me at all, initially. I kept calling and saying, ‘When do I get that accent coach?’ He says, ‘We’re not doing those.’ I’m like, ‘OK, great.’ ‘But I got this little tape for ya. It’s, like, some criminals talking.’ I’m like, ‘OK.’ So, yeah, he gave me a lot of actual resources. Actually, when I got to Boston, there were resources out the wazoo. So, it became easier. But the ultimate challenge is to improv on the dialect.”

Hamm, who plays the FBI agent in pursuit of Doug’s gang, said, “I had a pretty easy time with my accent on the film. It was nonexistent. No, but what Jeremy was saying is totally true. Walking around Boston is a pretty good accent coach. There are various and sundry versions of the Boston patois that you can pick out and find, and I think Renner and I had a blast exploring those particular vocal coaches.”

Affleck said Hamm didn’t really need to learn Bostonian speech patterns, since his federal agent character wasn’t really supposed to seem like a homeboy.

“We talked about it,” Affleck said, “and he and I both had the same instinct, that being from whatever it is — Illinois, Missouri, Rochester or something — being an outsider kind of said more for him than somebody who had an accent.”

Hamm did, however, take some pointers from Boston area law enforcement officers at the local, state and federal levels.

“It’s a collaborative effort between all three levels of law enforcement, and they do amazing work,” Hamm said. “There are a lot of robberies in Boston, and a lot of them get solved because of these guys’ hard work. So, it was nice to see from the inside how clear their objective is. Their job is to stop bad people from doing bad things. They’re very clear on that, so that was very helpful to me.”

But assistance from the local law was limited and unofficial. After all, the film is about a smart gang of thieves who keep giving the cops the slip.

“There were various levels of cooperation, as you astutely point out,” Affleck said in response to a question from The Oklahoman. “We were not officially embraced by the FBI, for example. We don’t use their actual logos; we’re not sanctioned by the Department of Justice. For one thing, that’s a long process, and for another thing, you end up in an editorial situation when you have to really subject your film to creative concerns that you might not want governing what you want to do.”

However, local authorities were not only cooperative but generously tolerant of the film crew when it came to shooting several spectacularly destructive car chases through Boston’s North End.

“It was difficult for us,” Affleck said of the constricted area. “We had to be very judicious about how we worked in the North End, where we parked or put the things, how much we smashed, how much we burned the cars. It just got very, very hard for us to do. And to make matters worse, it rained, so we kept postponing and postponing. We’d close all the streets, and then we wouldn’t be shooting. … The North End is now a great tourist destination, so they’re makin’ a lot of money, so we’re taking money out of people’s wallets.

“The movie is nothing if not one long apology to the people of the North End. So, I hope they like it. I wish there was a way you could bring your phone bill and get in free. But anyway, I’m sorry.”

Although “The Town” is the fourth movie Affleck has made in his hometown (the first was “Good Will Hunting” in 1997, for which he and Matt Damon won writing Oscars, and the second was his directorial debut “Gone Baby Gone” in 2007; the third was the upcoming “The Company Men”), he insists he’s not making a career out of filming movies about Boston.

“I just happened to find … stories set in Boston, and probably being from there helped me a little bit,” he said.

In fact, Affleck’s next project is far from Boston. He’ll be shooting a film with director Terrence Malick (“Days of Heaven”) in Oklahoma, in and around Bartlesville where Malick grew up, with production to begin at the end of September, according to the Oklahoma Film and Music Office. As yet, no official announcement about that film has been made.

In the 1996 biopic “Basquiat” by artist-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel we were given a sympathetic but limited perspective on the ’80s Soho supernova Jean-Michel Basquiat that was rich in pop-psyche revelations and insider art-scene poop but short on images of the artist’s work itself.

That was perhaps due to copyright issues, but the end result was a craftily dramatized portrait of the artist as a wild child (with a marvelous Jeffrey Wright in the title role) that seemed so intent on codifying Basquiat’s tragic mythology that it neglected to let us fully see the paintings on which it rests.

In her fine, affectionate and clear-eyed documentary “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child,” director Tamra Davis gives us a fitting bookend to Schnabel’s film that goes a long way toward balancing the picture.

Not only does she give further insight into Basquiat’s cryptic lyricism, his junk-yard collage style and the canny knack for self-promotion that made him – before his death by heroin overdose at 27 – the first African-American darling of New York’s ultra-chic, ultra-white downtown gallery scene. She also provides ample samples of his artwork, some of which are rarely seen, that more fully illustrate the gifts of this enigmatic painter who rose to prominence in 1981 as the verbally inventive graffiti tagger called SAMO.

Davis, whose previous directing credits lean toward anti-hipster stuff like TV series and “Billy Madison,” was in her youth a confidante of Basquiat and a habitué of New York’s insular, hyper-sophisticated, downtown club-and-gallery scene.

The foundation of her documentary is built on footage she shot of Basquiat at 25 (including a rare, lengthy interview), as he was both indulging in and struggling with his meteoric rise to the rarefied heights of Manhattan’s snooty art world.

While she treads lightly on biographical information, her focus mainly falls on the artist’s state of mind after his sudden success (his conflicts over talent versus race, his free-spirited ways and tireless work ethic, his playful calculation of public image, his frustrations). She beefs up her portrait with canny interviews with art-world players, such as Schnabel and scene-maker Glenn O’Brien, early backers Kenny Scharf and Diego Cortez, famed Warhol dealer Bruno Bischofberger and Basquiat’s longtime girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk (still smarting over his dalliance with a pre-fame Madonna).

Occasionally, Davis seems on the verge of giving in to her own obvious affection for her subject and surrendering to the glam allure of his larger-than-life myth. But by and large she keeps her eyes on the prize and delivers a clear, lively, unromanticized interpretation of Basquiat’s place in the art-world firmament of his era.

While “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child,” as the title suggests, is not marked by skeptical, rigorous probing of its subject, it is notable for its intimacy and insight and its gentle admiration for an incandescent talent that brightened a rather nutty and self-important art scene in the mid-1980s and then took his enigmatic place in the brilliant sphere of tortured, tragic, dead-too-soon artists – perhaps somewhere alongside Rimbaud and van Gogh, or perhaps not.

- Dennis King

“Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child”

Not rated
1:28
3 stars
(Language)

With the glitzy doings of Fall Fashion Week just winding down in New York City, it seems appropriate that Tuesday should feature the DVD release of the newest movie by that most plastic-fantastic of girlie fashion icons – Barbie.

“Barbie: A Fashion Fairytale” is a computer-animated fantasy in which Barbie gets fired from her latest Hollywood movie, breaks up with Ken and jets off to Paris to save her Aunt Millie’s faltering fashion house. Along the way, this pencil-thin fashion diva encounters three enchanting “Flairies” (Shim’r, Glim’r and Shyn’r) with stylish sparkle-magic powers, a cut-throat fashion shark named Jacqueline and a shy aspiring fashion designer named Marie-Alecia that she inspires to new creations.

And, as ever, the animal-loving Barbie is surrounded by personality-plus pets – including Sequin, her ultra-glam French poodle; Jacques, a spunky Jack Russell Terrier with a crush on Sequin, and Jilliana, a snooty, pampered French kitty who snickers at the puppy love displayed by Jacques.

Those uninitiated in Barbiemaia might be surprised to know that Barbie is a veteran of the silver screen with 16 previous feature films and a number of shorts to her credit. Her filmography features roles as varied as “Swan Lake,” “Rapunzel,” “The Nutcracker,” “Thumbelina” and “A Christmas Carol.” Plus, she’s made some high-profile cameo appearances in the “Toy Story” films. Not bad for an actress with just one facial expression.

“Barbie: A Fashion Fairytale” is not rated and runs 73 minutes. It’s being released by Universal Studios.

- Dennis King

For renowned Iranian-born feminist Shirin Neshat, being a gifted photographer and visual artist does not necessarily equate to being a talented storyteller.

That becomes apparent in watching her freshman feature film, “Women Without Men,” an artful, ambitious work that’s visually stunning and politically impassioned yet narratively inert.

Strident, didactic and relentlessly morose, Neshat’s story – drawn from Shahrnush Parsipur’s banned-in-Iran feminist novel of the same name – is clearly a work of forceful political intent more than sheer artistic motive. Nashat and her husband and co-director-writer Shoja Azari employ starkly telling imagery and many brilliantly inventive compositions in service of an earnest but abstract treatise on Middle Eastern feminist politics.

The result, from a storytelling perspective, is oddly clumsy, incoherent and uninvolving.

“Women Without Men” (in Persian with subtitles) is set in a volatile Iran, circa 1953, as the CIA-engineered ouster of the country’s elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh leads to installation of the shah as the nation’s dictator.

Tumultuous events revolve around the travails of four loosely connected women of vastly different social strata, each pushing back against the brutal tyranny of religion-dictated male oppression.

The story opens with the suicide of Munis (Shabnam Tolouei), a fiercely intelligent, politically aware 30-year-old woman buckling under the furious taunts of her bullying, religiously zealous brother.

As this tragedy unfolds, we also meet Fakhri (Arita Shahrzad), the cultured upper-class wife of a general (Tahmoures Tehrani) who is supporting the shah. Rebuked by her husband for her waning sexual allure, Fakhri runs away and purchases an idyllic orchard on the outskirts of Tehran – a mystical site of sylvan gardens and mist-shrouded ponds – and sets it up as a refuge and place of healing for troubled women.

It’s here that we also encounter Faezeh (Pegah Ferydoni), a meek young acquaintance of Munis whose infatuation with her late friend’s hateful brother propels her to her own crisis of conscience.

Also, in the film’s most naked metaphor on male brutality, comes Zarin (Orsolya Toth), an emaciated prostitute fleeing to the orchard after a mental breakdown. Her appearance, in a sequence at a public bath in which she scrubs herself bloody to cleanse away the taint of men, represents filmmaker Nashat at both her most scrupulously artful and heavily dogmatic.

Dodging between harsh, queasy scenes of realism and a dreamy, symbolic state of magical realism (in which the suicidal Munis haunts the tale like Marley’s ghost), Nashat works to invest her film with human-scale drama. Yet her characters never really catch the full breath of life and feel more like emblems of injustice rather than flesh-and-blood human beings.

That’s perhaps the greatest flaw in this gifted artist’s debut as a big-screen storyteller. Her work is rich in imaginative imagery, is freighted with fiery passion, but is far too coolly academic to incite potent emotional engagement. “Women Without Men” is noble and beautiful but too distantly formal to truly move us.

- Dennis King

“Women Without Men”

Not rated
1:37
2.5 stars
Starring: Shabnam Tolouei, Orsolya Toth, Arita Shahrzad, Pegah Ferydoni
(Contains nudity, violence and disturbing imagery)

NEW YORK – Among Alfred Hitchcock’s pre-Hollywood films, “The 39 Steps” from 1935 is widely considered to be among his best and the one in which the director perfected his famed “Macguffin” (the largely undefined plot device around which the story seems to revolve).

While Hitchcock’s works from his British filmmaking days – ranging from “Blackmail” to “The Lodger” and from “The Man Who Knew Too Much” to “The Lady Vanishes” – amply attest to man’s budding genius, “The 39 Steps” has uniquely expanded Hitch’s reach and taken on a life of its own in venues beyond the silver screen.

In 2006 on London’s West End, playwright Patrick Barlow unveiled an inspired stage version of the old spy tale (it and Hitchcock’s film were adapted from a 1915 novel by John Buchan) in which the thrills were played for laughs and all roles were frantically preformed by a cast of four actors.

“The 39 Steps” on stage essentially follows Hitchcock’s film story verbatim. One actor plays the hero, Richard Hannay, one actress plays the three women with whom he has romantic entanglements, and two other actors perform as every other character in the story – good guys, villains, men, women, children and even the odd inanimate object. This generally requires quick costume changes, ingenious staging and sleight-of-hand acting in which one performer occupies two or more roles at once. The script is packed with puns and clever allusions to other Hitchcock films, including “Rear Window,” “Psycho” and “North By Northwest.”

The zany play was a quick hit in London, and in 2008 a version crossed the Atlantic and opened in Boston at the Huntington Theatre Company. Soon after, it moved to Broadway, where it enjoyed a successful run, first at the Roundabout Theater, then at the Cort and finally at the Helen Hayes. In London, the play won the Olivier Award for Best Comedy of 2007, and in New York it received the 2008 Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience.

“The 39 Steps” is still running in London, and it has enjoyed road productions in far-flung locations such as Melbourne, Tel Aviv, Madrid, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Seattle, Houston and other cities.

Last March, the play transferred from Broadway to the off-Broadway venue New World Stages, where it appears to have settled in for a long run.

As Richard Hannay is falsely accused of murder and goes on the run to prove his innocence and track down a nasty cabal of foreign spies, the play makes great sport of the film’s familiar conventions and touchstones – the Mr. Memory music-hall act, the Hitchcock standard of an innocent man wrongly accused, the Macguffin (the 39 Steps vaguely denotes a stolen set of design plans), the rigorous foot chase through the heathered highlands (hilariously accomplished with backlit shadow puppets) and even Hitchcock’s signature cameo appearance (also done via shadow puppet).

Although it’s hard to top Hitchcock on film for thrills and clever twists, this stage homage does the master proud, with tongue firmly in cheek. Any film fan traveling to New York would do well to check out “The 39 Steps” on stage. Failing that, you can’t go wrong falling back on the original and revisiting Hitchcock’s clever spy romp on DVD.

- Dennis King

Kevin Kline

In gentler, more genteel times, Kevin Kline’s shabby but dapper character in the pixilated, New York-centric social comedy “The Extra Man” would have been referred to as a gigolo.

A spiffy dresser with a dry wit, elegant tastes on a threadbare budget and a wry, world-weary aspect on the opposite sex (and sex in general), Kline’s foppish Henry Harrison is a throwback to a simpler era – when Manhattan boulevards harbored scads of eccentric characters who seemed to step full-blown out of short pieces in the New Yorker magazine. Indeed, you can easily imagine Henry hobnobbing with the magazine’s iconic, top hat and monocle-wearing man-about-town Eustace Tilley.

“The Extra Man” is an overly earnest exercise in whimsy drawn from a quirky coming-of-age novel by Jonathan Ames and adapted to the screen by co-directors-writers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, makers of the splendid “American Splendor.” But where that 2003 film fairly bristled with sharp, trenchant flourishes of humor and drama, this one merely feels gratuitously offbeat and vaudevillian.

The story is constructed as a light mentor piece in which Henry, a sometime college literature professor, Christmas ball collector and raconteur, takes a boarder into his crummy New York apartment. The new roomie is young Louis Ives (Paul Dano), an aspiring novelist from New Jersey who was recently cashiered from a tony prep-school teaching post due to his predilection for cross-dressing.

Henry, who moonlights as an “extra man” (a male escort for wealthy society dames who need a suave gent at their sides for operas, Russian Tea Room luncheons, gallery openings, etc.), grudgingly takes this fey young novice under his wing and determines to show him the ins and outs of living a luxe New York life on a pauper’s budget.

As Louis follows Henry through the rarefied corridors of high society and recites a running commentary on his life in his head, the filmmakers trot out a rogue’s gallery of oddballs and eccentrics to color their way. Along with Henry’s strange downstairs neighbor, Gershon (John C. Reilly), who speaks in falsetto and sports a rats-nest beard, the duo crosses paths with a dominatrix (Patti D’Arbanville), who teaches Louis the finer points of drag dressing, a hunchback Swiss con man (Jason Butler Harner) and various other weirdoes.

Katie Holmes makes an appearance as virtually the only “normal person” in the story. She’s the vegan Mary, Louis’ dogmatic co-worker at an environmental magazine, and she certainly doesn’t appreciate his off-kilter view of life.

Louis’s sentimental education loses some steam in Dano’s pale, insubstantial performance. But it might be that the young actor is simply overwhelmed and overshadowed by Kline’s zestful, grandiose turn as the larger-than-life Henry. It’s a winking, mannered performance, thoroughly enjoyable and reminiscent of Kline’s Oscar-winning comic work in 1988’s “A Fish Called Wanda.”

While, generally speaking, “The Extra Man” is far too cute and self-consciously glib for its own good, it is often hard to resist its goofy, madcap charms. If you imagine a round table of Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker and the like, Henry Harrison might just squeeze a chair in on the fringes and seem right at home amid the worldly wits.

- Dennis King

“The Extra Man”

R
1:45
2.5 stars
Starring: Kevin Kline, Paul Dano, Katie Holmes, John C. Reilly
(Some sexual content)

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

“Charles Bukowski: The Last Straw”

Poet, short story writer, novelist, raconteur, barfly, beatnik, postal worker and legendary literary renegade Charles Bukowski hated giving poetry readings. So when he did he usually antagonized his audiences, and raucous arguments and occasional fistfights broke out.

“Charles Bukowski: The Last Straw,” due out on DVD Tuesday, chronicles the profane literary lion’s final reading – a March 1980 event at the Sweetwater Inn in Redondo Beach, Calif., that typically cultivated anarchy and ended with the author’s scornful huff.

Only a few of Bukowski’s poetry readings were ever caught on film, and “The Last Straw” – shot by fan and record company exec Jon Monday with consumer-grade video equipment – is most rare because it was the last public reading the poet ever gave. Although Bukowski lived and wrote prolifically for 14 more years, book royalties allowed him to avoid the public performances he so clearly loathed.

Monday’s, raw video, which remained in storage for more than 25 years, captures that final sold-out performance in full, with Bukowski in a floridly sour mood, hurling insults and threats at his audience (who responded in kind). The whole thing – poems and in-between banter – plays out like anti-social performance art and barely controlled mayhem. Yet it stands as a fitting emblem of Bukowski’s uncensored, often crude, starkly insightful, always combative place in the 20th century American literary scene.

Almost prophetically, as the final reading builds to a raw, rowdy conclusion, Bukowski abruptly cuts off his overheated audience with the terse words, “The reading is over.”

“Charles Bukowski: The Last Straw” is unrated and runs 78 minutes. It’s being released by Infinity Entertainment/Hepcat.

- Dennis King

Jessica Alba

As chopped-off noggins roll around like careening bowling balls and as blood spews in ghoulish crimson fountains, “Machete” pushes the boundaries of on-screen action violence to the limits of ridiculousness and beyond.

To say writer-director Robert Rodriguez’s comic-book vigilante saga is madly, gleefully over the top is a gross understatement. In fact, it’s a vigorously in-your-face, gloriously gory, politically incorrect romp through B-movie exploitation territory, all gussied up with a campy Hollywood cast of stars, starlets and has-beens.

Serving as an unlikely star vehicle for Rodriguez regular Danny Trejo, whose pocked face and lumbering countenance scream anti-leading man, “Machete” realizes a long-held scheme by the Austin-based filmmaker to create a franchise that casts Trejo as a sort of Mexican Charles Bronson.

Machete, a renegade Mexican federale who dispatches bad guys with vicious sweeps of his broad blade, first showed up on movie screens in a garish “fake trailer” inserted into Rodriguez’s and Quentin Tarantino’s tandem 2007 B-movie tribute, “Grindhouse.”

And true to Rodriguez’s penchant for wasting nothing, the filmmaker responded to the wild popularity of that tongue-in-cheek trailer by dusting off a mothballed 1993 script and giving us a full-out Machete, a sort of brutish but decent modern-day Zorro who wields not a whippet-like rapier but instead swings a mean, meat-cleaving machete.

The story is mainly boilerplate stuff (with some sly satirical digs at so-called immigration reform and U.S. schizophrenia toward migrant workers from south of the border).

Machete is hired by a shady political hack (an oily Jeff Fahey) to assassinate the bloviating Texas state Senator McLaughlin (Robert De Niro in a wink-wink performance), who’s advocating an electric fence all along the U.S.-Mexican border.

But quickly Machete finds himself double-crossed and on the run, accused of the failed assassination attempt. Soon he’s caught up amid the sexy wiles of a pursuing ICE agent (Jessica Alba), the underground schemes of a fiery Hispanic revolutionary (Michelle Rodriguez), the dastardly conniving of a cruel Mexican drug lord (Steven Seagal in the blackest hair-dye job imaginable) and the political chicanery of the crooked McLaughlin and his murderous border vigilante cohort (Don Johnson sporting prison-warden shades).

Another Rodriguez regular, Cheech Marin, shows up to earthy comic effect as Machete’s ally and brother, a profane, shotgun-slinging Catholic priest. Also, Lindsey Lohan turns in a good-sport appearance as the pampered, petulant daughter of wealth who goes from stark naked to a nun’s habit in the wink of eye.

Throughout, Rodriguez (along with co-director Ethan Maniquis and co-writer-cousin Alvaro Rodriguez) keeps the camera focused on the hulkish but oddly likable Trejo. And he paints the whole thing in garish, comic-book hues, packs it with pithy-campy dialogue and punctuates it with ultra-violent set pieces featuring shootouts, gang rumbles and grisly killing effects (how about those multiple decapitations or a zinging machete blade through a skull?).

It’s all offered up with the darkest, most mocking fanboy brio. “Machete,” with its cynical humor and zestful urge to shock, might not find a mainstream following. But among comic-book fans, youthful hipsters and admirers of Rodriguez’s maverick methods, this will certainly be cutting-edge stuff. Characteristically, Rodriguez ends the film with teasers for two supposed sequels – “Machete Kills” and “Machete Kills Again.”

- Dennis King

“Machete”

R
1:45
2.5 stars
Starring: Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Don Johnson.
(Strong bloody violence throughout, language, some sexual content and nudity)

Danny Trejo

Austin-based Robert Rodriguez has earned his reputation as a maverick, do-it-all filmmaker who makes the most of every resource at his disposal. Give him left-over chicken gizzards, he’ll make a tasty chicken soup.

He was, after all, the guy whose first breakout hit, 1992’s “El mariachi,” was made for the Mexican video market for a paltry $7,000, part of which he reportedly earned by working as a test subject in medical science tests.

Since establishing his Troublemaker Studios in his Texas hometown, Rodriguez has gone on to much bigger things, but always with that hand-made ethic that often sees him serving on his films as director, producer, writer, editor, musical composer, cinematographer, sound technician, visual-effects artist, electrician, actor, production designer, miscellaneous crew and more.

So it’s not surprising that this style of using everything but the kitchen sink to make his movies comes to the fore in his newest picture – the over-the-top actioner “Machete,” an amazing amalgam of low-budget, B-movie panache and big-time Hollywood star power.

The overarching gag about “Machete” is that it’s the classic example of the tail wagging the dog; it’s a feature-length movie drawn from one of several “fake trailers” included in Rodriguez’s and Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 exploitation double feature, “Grindhouse.”

Apparently, audience buzz for the “Machete” trailer was so strong that Rodriguez decided make a “Machete” movie for real. So he dusted off an unproduced script he’d written in 1993, after he’d first cast Danny Trejo in “Desperado.” Then, recycling footage from the fake trailer, casting Trejo in the lead and adding star power with a surprisingly potent cast that includes Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Don Johnson and Lindsey Lohan, Rodriguez gradually built a “Machete” that 20th Century Fox elected to release as a late-summer theatrical feature.

“Machete” will screen at the 67th Venice International Film Festival on Wednesday (Sept. 1) and open nationwide in the U.S. on Friday.

Oddly enough, this is not the first time a trailer has created a sensation that turned the fate of the movie it was previewing.

When Warner Bros. was prepping Kevin Costner’s “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” for its 1991 theatrical release, a preview trailer was released months in advance to whet audiences’ appetites. The trailer featured a cutting-edge, digital arrow-cam shot that followed an arrow from the archer’s bow as it zipped through the forest and thudded into the trunk of a tree. The shot was not originally included in the film. But the buzz created by that remarkable digital sequence persuaded director Kevin Reynolds and the producers to include a similar arrow-cam shot in the finished film. It became the movie’s signature image.

See? The tail wagging the dog.

- Dennis King

Jennifer Lawrence

There is true grit in the stoical countenance of Ree Dolly, the dirt-poor, 17-year-old heroine of “Winter’s Bone,” director Debra Granik’s austere, plain-spoken saga of destitution and faith set in the hardscrabble hills and hollows of Missouri’s Ozarks.

Like a distant cousin to the willful Mattie Ross, the determined teen whose quest enlivened the 1969 Arkansas-Indian Territory film “True Grit” (recently remade by the Coen Brothers), Ree is a reluctant detective determined to hunt down her man and to stand firm in the face of danger. Except where Mattie’s adventure was picturesque and chipper, Ree’s is largely squalid and harrowing.

Granik, in just her second picture after 2004’s similarly stark “Down to the Bone,” has adapted Daniel Woodrell’s flinty novel with a stripped-down aesthetic that brings home the abject poverty, the lowdown Southern gothic creepiness, the meth-addled horrors of life in the deepest depths of the Ozarks’ insular hill country.

Everywhere, there are trash-gutted yards, ramshackle hovels, foreclosed lives and the barren faces of people made crazy and old before their time. Where once, moonshining was the region’s going illegal concern, crystal-meth cooking as taken its place and left a scourge of misery, hatefulness and waste in its wake.

It’s in this grim setting that Ree (Jennifer Lawrence, heartbreakingly brilliant) barely survives with her invalid, spirit-broken mother and younger brother and sister. One wintry day, the sheriff arrives to inform Ree that her father is due in court on drug-dealing charges and has put their property up as bond collateral. So, if he doesn’t show up, this good ‘ol boy drawls, “well, ya’ll gonna lose this place.”

So Ree stiffens her spine and sets out, with the reluctant aid of her volatile uncle, a crankhead named Teardrop (John Hawkes), to track down her father. And a dire trek it is, through a fearsome countryside populated by wily kin who are suspicious of all, who are unwilling to help and recoil, often violently, at her inquiries.

The brilliance of Granik’s way with this harsh material is in the abiding empathy she brings to the telling, in the quasi-documentary realism she applies (she filmed in actual locations and mingled many locals in among the actors) and in her obsessively detailed, ethnographer’s sense of place and local culture.

Cinematographer Michael McDonough’s gritty, unvarnished camera work and several spare, well-placed grace notes of haunting bluegrass music overlay the film with a bedrock air of backwoods authenticity.

But it’s mainly in young Lawrence’s performance (she was a teen at the time of filming) that “Winter’s Bone” achieves a stirring quality of honor and dignity amid the human squalor. It’s a verbally spare performance, but one heightened with steely undercurrents of determination, inner strength and desperate bravery. Certainly, she’s an acting force to watch out for during awards season.

“Winter’s Bone” is much easier to admire than it is to love. The breathtaking, Dante-esque depravity that Ree Dolly encounters on her journey is often hard to endure, but the compassion and tenderness of this endearing heroine make the trek well worth taking. At the risk of falling prey to awards-season hyperbole, this is undoubtedly one of the year’s best movies.

- Dennis King

“Winter’s Bone”

R
1:40
4 stars
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Lauren Sweetser, Kevin Breznaha, Isaiah Stone
(Some drug material, language and violent content)