Ty's weekend movie picks for Friday, 4/1/11

Bike Porn at the Brattle! And, no, it's apparently not a metaphor. No bicycles under the age of 18 will be admitted unless escorted by a rider.

If staying up until midnight is too much for you, you can always show up earlier and catch Aaron Katz's poky but wonderful "Cold Weather," a film noir mystery for twentysomethings who have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. Nor is that the only movie opening this weekend that's sure to have multiplex-fed moviegoers raging against the ambiguity.

"Certified Copy" is the latest from Abbas Kiarostami, the great Iranian filmmaker who's now a world filmmaker, and it's a head-scratcher that expands in infinite directions, all of them intensely pleasing if you're in the right playful frame of mind. At times the movie feels like surreal variant on "Before Sunset," as the luminous Juliet Binoche (in photo above) and the heretofore little-known (to me) William Shimell tour the back-country of Italy and flirt like the couple they want to be, then bicker like the couple they may actually have been. Did they just meet or have they been married for over a decade? Are they at the beginning of the road or the end? The film doesn't resolve the issue -- on the contrary, it plays hay with our not-knowing, and if you have a problem with that, stay the hell away. But this is one of those movies you give into or not, and if you do, there are rewards aplenty, not least of which is Binoche in another portrayal of womanly sensibility on the knife-edge of feeling. Personally, I don't care if the movie makes sense or not, as long as I get to watch this actress ring infinite changes on the pleasures and terrors of romantic longing.

"Super" is not ambiguous at all. It just wants to give you a superhero story that ruins all your fanboy expectations of how a caped crusader should behave. Given how besotted the culture is with all things spandex and Spidey, I'd say this was a welcome development, even without Rainn Wilson as a psychotic costumed avenger and Ellen Page screeching like a demented spider-monkey as his sidekick. As directed by James Gunn ("Slither"), it's cheaper and nastier than "Kick-Ass," and a whole lot smarter.

"The Music Never Stopped" at first looks like a minor "Awakenings," since it's based on an Oliver Sacks case history and involves a man (Lou Taylor Pucci) coming back to the land of the living from a place synaptically very far away. The drama and, unexpectedly, the comedy comes from the character's father (an uncharacteristically low-key J.K. Simmons) realizing that if he's ever going to connect with his brain-damaged son he has to embrace the classic rock and roll the kid loves and he hates. As the title indicates, there's a lot here for aging Deadheads to twirl around to, but this is an honest, sentimental crowd-pleaser no matter how you feel about 40-minute renditions of "Dark Star." The filmmaking is fairly crummy but the story is unkillable.

I guess you could say the opposite for "Source Code," a gimmicky time-travel storyline that gets its strength from committed performances by Jake Gyllenhaal and Vera Farmiga and smart, unfussy direction by Duncan Jones ("Moon"). It's the latest in a mini-genre of high-concept dramas (with a dash of romance) that include the recent "Limitless" and last year's "Inception," and it mostly plays fair with the audience, even when it trips on its own internal logic. If you had to place one multiplex bet this weekend, this is the one.

Elsewhere, the Boston Turkish Film Festival continues at the MFA, and while the gore kiddies care that a new film from the "Saw" masterminds has arrived, they'll probably be seriously ticked that there's not a lot of bloodletting. And there's this week's computer-animated family film, but Wesley says it's the pits, and I believe him.