If you value your I.Q., avoid a horror called 44 Inch Chest like V.D. This time capsule for misogyny is a dated attack on women that seems like an artifact from Screw magazine. A creepy garage owner (Ray Winstone again, with a cockney accent so lugubrious I could understand only every 10th word) learns his wife (Joanne Whalley) is leaving him for a younger man. He beats her up, trashes the house and suffers a nervous breakdown, and then, while she lies covered with blood in a ditch on the side of the highway, he enlists four vile, vicious buddies to kidnap and torture the bloke and lock him in a rotting old house until the self-pitying jerk recovers from his catatonia long enough for them to kill him. Tom Wilkinson, John Hurt, Stephen Dillane and Ian McShane—four fine actors reduced to scrap—give the worst performances of their careers as the four putrescent mates who spout filth and hatred for 95 disgusting minutes. Four old pudgepots avenging a cuckold is the worst kind of testosterone-laced male ego delusion masquerading as high drama that it has ever been my misfortune to suffer through.

Moronically written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, who scripted Sexy Beast, this dreck is the work of someone called Malcolm Venville, a first-time director with a degree in cinematic extortion. In a feeble attempt to demonstrate how loathsome women are, John Hurt even tells the entire labyrinthian plot of Samson and Delilah, replete with film clips of Hedy Lamarr wielding a pair of scissors. Claustrophobic, set entirely in one room with everyone babbling drivel but saying nothing, all in a series of ugly, exasperating close-ups. There’s a dream sequence in which the wife returns and tells them off, but nothing really ever happens. They all wallow in hatred, rage and profanity, then leave. Nobody learns anything and everybody goes away dejected and beaten—especially the audience.

rreed@observer.com

With the movie scene currently dominated by so much dismal trash like Couples Retreat, Zombieland and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, it would be a treat to welcome an artistically viable valentine to the most dynamic city in the world with a huge star-studded cast. New York, I Love You is not it.

An eclectic group of 11 directors with varying degrees of talent play global leapfrog, skipping and jumping from Chinatown to Central Park to Greenwich Village to Coney Island to helm 11 overlapping stories about the Big Apple; it was completed in eight weeks. (A 12th, Scarlett Johansson, has been eliminated, for reasons never explained. Maybe her little vignette was too boring and empty to include, but it couldn’t be less satisfying or more inconsequential than some of the others included here.) This is the second in a continuing series of movies dedicated to the unifying theme of love in big cities from producer Emmanuel Benbihy (Paris, je t’aime). Next up at bat: Rio, Shanghai and Jerusalem, in what you might seriously call a true definition of vay izmir. The New York rule: Each director had a deadline of two days to complete his segment. The result is every bit as truncated and zigzaggy as you might imagine. The whole thing looks like it was edited with pinking shears.

Horrible, streaky, dizzying camera work leads you across the bridge into the city by taxi while two passengers argue about how to get to Brooklyn. The driver throws them out of his cab. In Chinatown, actor-director Wen Jiang, who co-starred with Gong Li in Red Sorghum and is often called “the Robert De Niro of China,” tells  the tale of a scruffy slacker pickpocket (Hayden Christensen) who follows a girl into a cafe, returns her stolen cell phone and gets into an argument with her boyfriend (Andy Garcia), whose wallet he has previously pilfered. Next, India’s Mira Nair enters the diamond district to film an encounter between a Hasidic bride-to-be (Natalie Portman) and a Hindu diamond merchant (Irrfan Khan), whose cultural differences find a shared common ground as they talk about everything from food restrictions to her shaved head. On the Upper West Side, a British musician (Orlando Bloom) works intensely to finish a score for an animated film, staying in touch with the outside world through cell phone calls from the director’s assistant (Christina Ricci), who insists he read two novels by Dostoyevsky in order to understand the project. He’s confused by this strange request, but when she shows up at his dark, grungy apartment to help him with his creative task, he learns a whole new meaning of Russian literature. Directed by Japan’s Shunji Iwai, who knows how to make two minutes feel like War and Peace.

The best story in the film comes from Yvan Attal, the Israeli-born French director and husband of gruesome-looking actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. It focuses on a fast-talking Soho pickup artist (Ethan Hawke) who puts the make on a sexy married woman (Maggie Q), without knowing she’s a professional hooker. Mr. Hawke’s seduction techniques are both charming and hilarious, giving the lie to the theory that Manhattan hustlers, from Times Square to the meatpacking district, have all the answers before you can even ask the questions. Moving uptown to Central Park, on the day of his senior prom, a heartbroken, lovesick 17-year-old kid (Anton Yelchin) goes to a pharmacist (James Caan) to buy condoms. The old man proposes the boy do a good deed for humanity by taking his crippled daughter (Olivia Thirlby) to the prom in her wheelchair. The dour mood shifts like a lightning strike after the dance, when they are forced to walk home through the park. The kid gets the romantic surprise of his life when the pitiful girl unexpectedly trains him in the nuances of handicapped sex. Little does he know she’s an actress, preparing for a role. In the most pretentious and incomprehensible vignette of all, written by Anthony Minghella, interrupted by his death and finished by Bollywood success Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth), the great Julie Christie plays a retired opera singer who checks into a posh hotel on the Upper East Side and shares a glass of Champagne with a crippled bellhop who brings her violets (Shia LaBeouf). He throws himself out of the window to his death, but when she reports it to the hotel manager (John Hurt), the body has disappeared. Before the weirdness ends, the suggestion is apparent that everything has either happened in the woman’s past or been a figment of her imagination. Pure twaddle.

There’s more, in a seemingly inexhaustible stream of pointless brushes with destiny. Two distraught lovers (Drea De Matteo and Bradley Cooper) speed toward one another across Manhattan, one by subway, the other on foot, as they try to figure out if their one-night stand might produce the same sparks the second time around. Cult director Allen Hughes and writer Xan Cassavetes, daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, collaborated on this one, which pants with energy and pace, if not content. Actress Natalie Portman returns, in the role of debut director, to frame the story of a black baby sitter who raises eyebrows as he escorts his charge, a pink and pretty all-American little girl, through Central Park on a sunny afternoon. Two housewives praise him for being a great male nanny, but when he returns the moppet to her mother at the end of the day, he turns out to be a ballet dancer—and the child’s real father.

And so it goes, with characters from one episode sometimes rubbing elbows with participants from another. The hooker who left Ethan Hawke on the curb in Soho drops off her lingerie in a Chinese laundry and is shocked when the next customer (Chris Cooper) speaks perfect Cantonese. On the boardwalk at Brighton Beach, Abe (Eli Wallach), an old man recovering from a broken hip, is doomed to endure the nagging of his annoying, mean-spirited wife of 63 years, Mitzie (Cloris Leachman). She’s the worst, but she’s all he’s got. The movie bounces back and forth between these characters like a game of table tennis. The vignettes are like a collection of New Yorker short stories, too often with little or no literary or cinematic trajectory, and almost always too fragmented to add up to anything substantial. There isn’t one that I would call involving enough to engage the emotions. The goal is to paint a colorful canvas of a sprawling metropolis with an ever-changing scenario thanks to a constantly fluctuating population. Unfortunately, it’s a portrait of “the city that never sleeps” that often needs a NoDoz. The very nature of New York’s vastness as a melting pot of contrasts makes it a natural for a movie like this, but it’s the movie’s downfall, too. So many stories to choose from, but hard to connect the dots.

The only thing New York, I Love You really proves is how difficult it is, in today’s culturally bankrupt film industry, for good actors to find jobs.

rreed@observer.com

As bad movies go, a nightmare called The Limits of Control can’t go fast enough to suit me. This is an empty, boring sedative by Jim Jarmusch, a writer-director with not enough talent to be either. He’s been getting away with murder for years, serving scraps of gibberish like Ghost Dog, Dead Man and Mystery Train that nobody except the fools who finance them actually sees.

A mysterious black man with a briefcase (Isaach De Bankolé) glides across the Spanish landscape without a compass in a dead narrative that resembles a canoe without a paddle. To demonstrate the kind of deadly, narcoleptic pacing Mr. Jarmusch enjoys, the man travels from the airport to his hotel. You see all the blurry scenery along the way through the windows of the car. Upon arrival, you see his finger press the elevator button. You watch him stroll catatonically down the corridor, insert his key in the door of the room. Then you endure the rain falling on the street below, like a wartime torture inflicted by an enemy nation that ignores the rules of the Geneva Convention. A man carrying a violin gives him a matchbox containing a secret note, which he swallows with an espresso.

Tilda Swinton appears in a cafe sipping another espresso, wearing a white wig and white cowboy hat, babbling incoherently about bad films like The Lady From Shanghai, which obviously shaped Mr. Jarmusch’s cinematic sensibility. The mystery man remains mute. She confesses it was  a “film that makes no sense.” Like this one. He eats another note. On a train, he meets a Japanese woman who says each one of us is a set of molecules, spinning in ecstasy. In another town, in another cafe, a ragged bum (John Hurt) arrives with another matchbox, carrying a violin. Each matchbox contains another secret note, which the man chews and washes down with yet another espresso. In a hotel, a gun-wielding woman played by Paz De La Huerta strips naked and climbs into the man’s bed. He remains silent, fully clothed and staring at the ceiling, registering no emotion even when the woman aims the gun at his head. At this point, I understood his catatonia completely. I was catatonic myself. But there are more trains, more cafes, more notes, more espresso. Droves of people were walking out, but duty demanded that I stick around and find out what was going on, what was in the notes, and if the man had a missing tongue.

O.K., I’ll bite. Is it surrealism? Existentialism? An avant-garde throwback to the experimental films of Stan Brakhage? How about plain old pretentiousness? The Limits of Control stinks of it. Filled with asinine observations like “Reality is arbitrary, everything is imagined, there is no such thing as reality” and “A reflection is more interesting than the thing that is being reflected,” it’s a non-film filled with a bland, blank-faced emptiness that desperately needs to be parsed with some flash and vigor. Not to mention insight. At no time are we given the faintest glimpse of what anyone is up to. By the time Bill Murray shows up to deliver less than a dozen lines and get shot to death, we don’t even know why. We are, however, grateful he doesn’t drink espresso.

Pure, undiluted crap, this is the worst movie since Synecdoche, New York.

rreed@observer.com

“Before he died, Quentin used to say to me: ‘Ms. Arcade, I’m going, you’re staying. I feel sorry for you,’” she said in a raspy English accent, to bursts of laughter from the audience at Joe’s. “But he also said to me, ‘Not to worry, Ms. Arcade. Time is kind to the nonconformist.’”

The film, An Englishman in New York, which was shot almost entirely in New York this past September, is a follow-up to the acclaimed 1975 TV movie The Naked Civil Servant, so named for the autobiography that catapulted the flamboyant, openly gay and sometimes controversial Crisp—he once infamously dismissed AIDS as a “fad”—to fame in 1968 at the age of 59. It picks up in the late ’70s when Crisp moved from London to the Lower East Side, where he was embraced by the arty downtown luminaries of the day, not least of all by Ms. Arcade, who became one of his closest friends toward the end of his life. Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon plays Ms. Arcade in the movie.

Ms. Arcade, whose real name is Susana Carmen Ventura, has had a long and accomplished (if under-noted) career—or, to use the word Ms. Arcade might prefer, “vocation.” She was a teenage superstar in Andy Warhol’s Factory; has written and directed 10 original performance pieces, including her landmark 1990 sex and censorship communiqué, BITCH!DYKE!FAGHAG!WHORE!, and 2002’s anti-Giuliani rant, New York Values; and she’s performed in more than 30 cities worldwide, from Rio to Sydney to Vienna. Upcoming projects include a three-week run of a revitalized BITCH!DYKE!FAGHAG!WHORE! in San Francisco, and a new full-length show called Longing Lasts Longer, which will premiere in Frankfurt on Dec. 5. Needless to say, age hasn’t slowed her down.

Still, after four decades working in New York as a full-time artist, she still doesn’t earn a living here, hence her frequent jaunts to perform in other time zones. (What sounds ideal to us is work for others, apparently!) It seems like all the local bookings are going to people 30 years her junior fresh out of art school, she said, and also noted that no mainstream publication in this city has ever published a proper profile of her. (Indeed, Ms. Arcade claims this one is the first, although several shorter articles about her have appeared in the pages of this newspaper over the years.) What gives?

“America is obsessed with potential and dismissive of accomplishment,” said Ms. Arcade, smoking an American Spirit in her Stanton Street apartment about a week before the Joe’s Pub gig. “I fought that fight for a really long time in New York, and it’s quite sad, but the truth is, there’s no work here, even though the audience really clamors to see me and other people like me. There’s no longer an artistic community. It’s been decimated by real estate interests and the suburbanization of the city. I don’t think you can say that too many times.”

WHICH ISN'T TO SAY that Ms. Arcade is contemplating packing up for a Florida condo. In fact, she’d probably tell you her best days are ahead, that getting older means getting smarter and wiser and better. “People have actually bought into the idea that you have this point of view by the time you’re 22 to 30, which is impossible,” she said, incredulously. “How can that be? Wisdom is accrued over time, and there are no shortcuts in self-development.” 

Perhaps that explains why Ms. Arcade quotes Quentin Crisp so often. “Quentin was a phenomenal role model,” she said. “When other people his age were ready to go into the nursing home, he came to New York and created a brand-new life for himself. So everything he said to me becomes of great value on a daily basis.”

She first met Crisp (real name: Denis Charles Pratt) on the corner of Second Avenue and Seventh Street one February afternoon in 1982 when he was 72 years old. A few years later, she saw him sitting by himself at a going-away party for Holly Woodlawn—the transgender actress with whom Ms. Arcade shared the screen in the 1971 Paul Morrissey-Andy Warhol film, Women in Revolt—and went over to say hello. A few weeks after that, Ms. Arcade was at the Limelight (oh the ’80s!), and once again, there was Crisp, sitting by his lonesome at the bar. She decided to strike up a conversation, and they hit it off immediately. Later that evening, Michael Musto, the Village Voice gossip columnist, stopped Ms. Arcade on her way to the ladies room and told her she was the only person he’d ever heard Crisp, known for his curt, Oscar Wilde-like one-liners, “have a real conversation with.”

“She brought something out in Quentin,” Mr. Musto said. “He really responded to her.”

After that, Penny Arcade and Quentin Crisp were inseparable. “It was each of our last big fag/fag hag relationships,” she said. They started performing together in 1992, when they began working on what would become a performance piece called The Last Will and Testament of Quentin Crisp, footage of which Ms. Arcade and one of her longtime collaborators, Steve Zehentner, are currently editing for a DVD that will be released by Christmas, Crisp’s birthday. (He would have been 100 this year.)

On Nov. 21, 1999, Crisp died in Manchester, England, at the age of 90. It was the same day An Evening With Quentin Crisp, a new one-man show that had temporarily lured him back to England, was to have opened. He and Ms. Arcade, who thought he was in no condition to travel (she said he had congestive heart failure, prostate cancer and a major hernia), had argued about his accepting the booking, a scene Richard Laxton, the director of An Englishman in New York, re-creates when John Hurt, reprising his role as Crisp, which he played in The Naked Civil Servant, tells Cynthia Nixon about an offer he’s had to tour the U.K.

“She looks absolutely devastated,” Mr. Laxton said of Ms. Nixon’s performance as Penny Arcade, “because he’s quite old and fragile and she doesn’t want him to go, and in that scene you really get a sense of how much she cares for him and how much he means to her. It’s very moving.”

As Ms. Arcade tells it, she called Crisp the day he left for England. “I want to say goodbye to you forever now in case you die in Manchester. I have been very fond of you over these many years. Would you send me a sign?” she recalled saying to him. The next night, Ms. Arcade was at a wedding reception at the loft of “dermatologist to the stars” David Colbert when, spookily enough, his enormous TV suddenly turned on, and there on the screen was an episode of Charlie Rose featuring Quentin Crisp. Two days later, Ms. Arcade returned to her apartment following Sunday brunch to find a message on her answering machine from a New York Times reporter.

“Don’t you know?” the reporter asked when Ms. Arcade, unaware that Crisp had passed, called him back. “He died last night.”

“I’ve always taken that as a concession from Quentin, who argued that death ends everything, to let me know that there is something beyond ordinary existence,” she said.

Asked how she felt about the film, which Mr. Laxton said would be screened in New York following its U.K. debut on ITV, Ms. Arcade said she’s optimistic. “It will certainly make more people curious about what it is I do,” she said.

In the meantime, she’s focused on preparing her new one-woman show, on which she’s collaborating with Mr. Zehentner and visual artist Jasmine Hirst, for its German premiere in a few weeks. Inspired by Jean Cocteau’s play The Human Voice, it explores “forlornness and loss and longing,” she said. One of the characters is a woman alone in a hotel room in Turkey, “losing her mind because her husband’s left her”; another’s a cabaret singer who’s “kind of a Giulietta Messina character that’s a little bit of a sad clown and a little bit of an off-kilter Marlene Dietrich.”

Like Crisp before her, Ms. Arcade said she expects to be performing until the end of her days.

“In Quentin, I could see what the possibilities for aging were,” she said, looking at a picture taped to her kitchen wall of her and Crisp from a 1993 issue of London’s Sunday Telegraph Magazine. “Also through Quentin,” she continued, “I could really understand that as you get older, things become clearer. When biology loses its stranglehold on you and sort of tosses you to the side, if you have a rigorous inquiry into what it is to be alive, you can really examine the world, you know? It’s really fun.”

jpompeo@observer.com