By Rob Nelson Robinson Devor’s Zoo—written, like his Police Beat (2005), with Seattle alt-weekly critic and columnist Charles Mudede—achieves the seemingly impossible: It tells the luridly reported tale of a Pacific Northwest businessman’s fatal sexual encounter with a horse in a way that’s haunting rather than shocking, and tender beyond reason. So, too, it’s hard…

Baghead (Jay Duplass and Mark Duplass, US) and Frownland (Ronald Bronstein, US) By Rob Nelson Both Baghead and Frownland offer early proof of their post-postmod, pre-apocalyptic place in American life with opening scenes of their characters watching variably scary movies. But of course there’s no one way to watch a movie these days, and whatever…

By Rob Nelson Subtitled A Film About James Toback, The Outsider (2005) is a somewhat odd name for an admiring portrait of a guy who hangs out at Brett Ratner’s house, who graduated magnum cum laude from Harvard University, whose grandfather was a tycoon, and whose mother was president of the League of Women Voters.…