Caramel, the first feature by Lebanese director and actress Nadine Labaki, is set in Beirut, but doesn't reference bombs, war or political strife. For this alone it is remarkable, because the beleaguered capital city, which has been called the "Paris of the East," should be known for its interesting cosmopolitan culture.

Labaki captures the city in all its messy, contradictory beauty in this modest comedy about several women who work at or are customers of a neighborhood beauty salon. The exotically pretty beautician Layale (Labaki) is involved with a married man. She eagerly awaits his phone calls, dropping everything to meet with her lover, who is never seen on screen. She worries about what her parents, who wonder why she is still unmarried, would think if they knew. Athletic-looking Rima (Joanna Moukarzel) is attracted to women, particularly a mysterious customer (Fatmeh Safa) with long, Cher-like hair. The ritual of shampooing becomes a sensual act between Rima and the mystery woman.

Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri) is engaged to marry Bassam (Ismail Antar), a Muslim from a traditional family. Nisrine panics because she's not a virgin, a circumstance that could jeopardize her marriage. Nisrine decides to have her hymen surgically repaired, a controversial practice known as "re-virgin surgery."

One of the salon's regular customers is Jamale (Gisèle Aouad), a divorced actress who is so desperate to avoid growing old she affixes Scotch tape to her face for auditions. Rose (Sihame Haddad), a tailor who owns the shop next door, is burdened with the care of her mentally ill older sister, Lili (Aziza Semaan), who has a penchant for collecting pieces of waste paper from the streets, believing they are love letters.

The preview trailer for Caramel makes it look like a colorful, zany farce in the mode of Pedro Almodóvar, but it really is a rather melancholy work. The stories are laced with sadness and punctuated by the conflicts and contradictions of Lebanon's culture: between Muslim and Christian faiths, Arabic and French languages, and modern and traditional values. Nisrine and her fiancé sit talking in a car, where a soldier questions them because it is an "indecent activity" for unmarried people to sit in a car together. When Layale searches for a hotel where she can have a private anniversary celebration with her lover, each desk clerk demands identification to prove she is married.

The caramel of the title refers to a hair-removal method popular in the Middle East employing a mixture of melted sugar, water and lemon juice. Layale performs a caramel bikini wax on her lover's wife (Fadia Stella), who comes to the salon in search of the treatment which, for the record, looks as painful as any Western technique.

The movie is at its best when depicting the gentle ballet of missed romantic opportunity. In one poetic scene, Layale talks on the phone to her lover, while Youssef (Adel Karam), the shy policeman who admires her, watches from his window and pretends he's the man Layale is talking with.

There is visual poetry, too, in the bittersweet story of Rose. One afternoon a dapper older gentleman, Charles (Dimitri Stancofski), walks into her shop requesting alterations to an old suit. He eccentrically insists that she make the trousers too short. A nascent romance develops between them, and Rose finally consents to having her hair colored at the salon. Her hair dyed a garish red, Rose sits excitedly before the mirror, applying makeup in preparation for meeting Charles. Lili, locked in her room, whines and berates her, and Rose sadly realizes that romance cannot be hers. Labaki's direction is lyrical, crosscutting Rose preparing for the date with Charles, waiting patiently at the café. Rose wipes off her makeup, and Charles picks up his hat and leaves.

Nabaki is a promising director with evident talent, so it's no great pleasure to report that this gentle movie is somewhat underwhelming. With more character and story development, and some more laughs, it would be a great success. As it is, Caramel is a sweet movie that can be admired for raising a window on daily life in Lebanon beyond the familiar grim headlines. - Pamela Zoslov

Caramel: Opens Friday at the Cedar Lee Theater, 2163 Lee Rd., Cleveland Heights, 440-564-2034, [url=http://www.clevelandcinemas.com] clevelandcinemas.com [/url].

Doomsday

If it were possible for movies to reproduce, then writer/director Neil Marshall's post-apocalyptic, sci-fi/action flick Doomsday would be the mentally challenged love child of The Road Warrior and Escape From New York. Sounds appealing, I know. And considering Marshall had impressed me with his first two films, Dog Soldiers and The Descent, I was really looking forward to Doomsday. In April 2008, Scotland is sealed up behind a giant metal wall in order to contain the spread of the deadly reaper virus. By 2035 the only survivors are the sort of punk-rock motorcycle gang that only exists in violent action movies from the '80s, and a renaissance fair that takes its medieval re-enactments a little too seriously. When the reaper virus rears its ugly head once again, one-eyed anti-heroine Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) is sent to lead a crack unit into the quarantine zone to find the cure Kane (Malcom McDowell) had been working on before the wall went up.

There's some more convoluted backstory, but honestly, not much of it matters. Once Sinclair and her team get inside the quarantine zone, it's nonstop action with little concern for plot or characterization. We get multiple amputations and decapitations, cannibalism, sword fights, gun fights, explosions and a recreation of the big car chase sequence from The Road Warrior. Normally, I'm all for this kind of cinematic carnage, but without a decent story or compelling characters it doesn't add up to much.

It's obvious Marshall wanted Rhona Mitra's Eden to be cool and detached like Kurt Russell's Snake Plisken. Instead she comes across as bland and wooden. At least Craig Conway as mohawked bad guy Sol is an enjoyable scenery-chewing villain. But it's not enough to salvage this post-apocalyptic turd, a haphazard patchwork of scenes from other movies. - Bob Ignizio

Horton Hears a Who!

A more successful big-screen Dr. Seuss adaptation than such previous live-action Seuss stinkers as How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat, Blue Sky Studios' CGI-animated Horton Hears a Who! is the most visually striking feature to date by the company who brought us the wildly popular, if artistically underwhelming Ice Age 'toons. Where this Horton trips up is by diluting the Seussian magic with a whole lot of extraneous clutter (e.g., the climactic Reo Speedwagon karaoke number). Since the average Seuss tome weighs in at 70-odd, heavily illustrated pages, it must be a daunting task for any screenwriter to turn one of the good doc's literary works into a 90-minute film. That's probably why the most successful Seuss, er, conversion to date remains Chuck Jones' 1966 made-for-television Grinch. And even that needed substantial padding to soak up 26 minutes of tube time.

The added stuff in Horton - courtesy of scenarists Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio of Disney's blah College Road Trip - is mostly the kind of slapsticky action/violence and punning/punting pop-culture referencing that's become de rigueur in "all-ages-friendly" entertainment. (Blame Shrek.) And casting instantly recognizable celebrity voices like Jim Carrey (Horton), Steve Carrell (Whoville's Mayor) and Carol Burnett (a disagreeable kangaroo) basically contradicts the book's message that "a person's a person, no matter how small." In the increasingly big-bucks world of contemporary animation, "small" is always trumped by star-fucking. Directors Steve Martino and Pixar vet Jimmy Hayward manage to do a lot of things right here, including finding a just-right visual correlative for the original Seuss illustrations. - Milan Paurich

Outsourced

When Seattle call-center manager Todd (Josh Hamilton) learns that he's being sent to India to train his replacement, he thinks it's some kind of corporate hazing ritual cooked up by his asshole boss (Matt Smith). If only. Western Novelty, the company Todd works for, plans to outsource all of its jobs to India. Hapless corporate cog Todd is left with two choices. He can either resign - thereby losing his stock options and benefit package - or fly to Mumbai (formerly Bombay) to help the transition. Since he doesn't have any real ties to Seattle (he recently broke up with his girlfriend and is estranged from his parents), Todd decides to give it a try. Does he really have a choice in today's Darwinian economy?

Upon arriving in Mumbai, Todd has the expected culture-clash run-ins with employees like nerdy heir-apparent Puro (Asif Basra) who doesn't understand the meaning of words like "tacky" (i.e., the kitschy trinkets that are Western Novelty's bread and butter) or "schmuck." He soon develops a (reciprocal) crush on Asha (Aysha Dharker), the beautiful young Hindu woman whose call-success rate marks her as a force to be reckoned with. It's all predictable and pleasant, as formulaic as a focus-grouped-to-death sitcom. But what makes Outsourced - directed and cowritten by John Jeffcoat - so appealing is its gentle tweaking of the genre's fish-out-of-water cliches, and the fact that so much of the class/culture comedy is genuinely well-observed and surprisingly fresh and witty. - MP

Outsourced: 7 p.m. Thursday, March 27 and 9:25 p.m. Saturday, March 29, at Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Blvd., Cleveland, 216-421-7450.