Triple Bogey on a Par Five Hole

The Levys, a glamorous couple, used to make their living robbing golfers, until they met their fatal handicap. Years later, scriptwriter Remy Gravelle (Mitchell), investigating their death, decides to observe the Levy progeny as they sail endlessly round Manhattan in their luxury yacht. It's a hothouse atmosphere, brat-generation neurosis taken to its limits: Satch (McBride) is a macho punk; dreadlocked kid sister (Goethals) is precociously insightful; and ice queen Amanda (Hall) walks like Madonna and talks like Truman Capote. Remy isn't likely to get the answers from them, their lawyer (Coltrane), or his niece (Clemente). Here is a Manhattan you won't have seen before, viewed strictly from the outside in sweeping vistas shot in glacial black-and-white, and starkly contrasting with the claustrophobic stillness below deck, as the Levys' cat-and-mouse dialogues with Remy are interspersed with Poe's own home-movie footage of family memories. A detective story with no real mystery and no solution, this is a stimulating, occasionally magical exercise in stylistic and intellectual tail-chasing, and that rare thing these days - a film that dares to go nowhere.