Auto Focus

Michael Gerbosi's script might have reduced Crane to a clueless cliche were it not for the bruised humanity that Greg Kinnear brings to the role. Kinnear is dynamite.

Schrader's strongest movie since "Affliction," is another meditation on American masculinity powerfully told with great wit and style.

Is Auto Focus a cautionary tale or just a morbid, voyeuristic foray into kitsch and kink? Whatever it is, it's not pretty - it's the cinematic equivalent of soiled, stained sheets. You'll want to run out of the theater straight to a Laundromat.

The inventive performances -- keep this story interesting in spite of its puritanical framework.

Uplifting? Not bloody likely. Mesmerizing? Very, thanks to Greg Kinnear's eerie performance as Crane and director Paul Schrader's lucid depiction of the character's happy-go-lucky descent into hell.

Auto Focus doesn't really go anywhere, but then neither does any form of obsessive-compulsive behavior -- which may be Schrader's point.

Perhaps it is a shame that no one thought of digitally restoring and theatrically releasing the sex videos that Crane made with the many women he pleasured...that would have been far more entertaining than anything found in Auto Focus.