Bold Visions Incompletely Realized in Films at Nuart

Hiroyuki Yamaga’s animated “The Wings of Honneamise” (Nuart, today for one week) is as great-looking as it is overly long--at slightly more than two hours--and too often tedious, a boldly sketched vision of the future in a realistic style. A young man, relegated to a disrespected area of his country’s space program because of bad grades, undergoes spiritual redemption, emerging determined to become an astronaut just as his government decides to convert its space exploration program to military armaments.

Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s “Calendar” (Nuart, Saturdays and Sundays at noon through March 19), a study of nationality, the filmmaking process and a troubled romance, is so personal as to be elusive, although it clearly involves Egoyan’s usual concern with dealing with emotions while, as a filmmaker, being removed from them directly. Segments of him, off-camera, filming his lover, Arsinee Khanjian, translating into English the remarks of guide Ashot Adamian on a magnificent 13th-Century church in Armenia are intercut with the filmmaker entertaining in his apartment a series of beautiful women who all ask to use his phone to speak passionately in a foreign language, presumably to another man. Egoyan has explained what all this means, but that’s no help to the moviegoer with no access to his film’s press kit.

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