RAVENNA, OHIO - At 6-feet-1-inch and 125 pounds, 16-year-old Nate Hartley practically redefines the term "beanpole." Hartley's scrawny physique may have helped land him the role of "freakishly skinny" Wade in Drillbit Taylor, the latest comedy from the Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, Superbad) hit factory, but the Ravenna native's acting chops should insure him steady employment long after he's outgrown his awkward adolescent years. Although still a bit jet-lagged the morning after the Canton premiere of his new movie, Hartley's excitement was palpable during a recent telephone interview.

"It was a great experience, and I got to see a lot of people that I hadn't seen in a long time," he enthused. "When we went into the theater there was just a light drizzle, but by the time we got out there was like an inch of snow on the ground. I hadn't seen snow in awhile, so it was kind of cool."

Ever since a fortuitous trip to the West Coast three years ago, Hartley has been dividing his time between Ravenna and Los Angeles. "We went out there for a week, and it just all started happening for me," he says. "My dad still lives in Ohio because of his job, but he visits all the time. I live in California with my mom and go to a small school in the San Fernando Valley which has maybe 50 students. It's kind of like home-schooling with a teacher. Everyone there is an actor, painter or musician, and they're really good about letting you go to auditions, competitions, whatever it is that you're doing. And they'll even send you the work from school."

After performing in a Kent State University play at age 5 as a favor to his older sister, Hartley was bitten by the acting bug. Soon, he began appearing regularly in productions at Theater 815, Weathervane Playhouse and the Player's Guild. Besides pursuing his interest in acting and musical theater, Hartley was also something of a self-taught magician and filmmaker. "I used to shoot movies with my parents' old camcorder - the kind with the big, huge tapes - and edit them on camera. And magic has always been a hobby. I'm a member of the Hollywood Magic Castle's Junior Magician Society, but I'm really focusing more on acting and directing these days."

While Hartley has toyed with the idea of studying filmmaking at UCLA, he's already learned plenty just by working on movie sets alongside people like Apatow, Seth Rogen (co-writer of Drillbit Taylor), Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd, Hartley's costar in the upcoming Universal comedy Little Big Men directed by Shaker Heights native David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer, The State). "I'm not really sure whether I need to go to college," he explains. "It costs a lot of money, and I don't need a teacher just to tell me how to point a camera at the actors."

Hartley may have a point. Woody Allen, Hartley's number one creative inspiration, never went to film school. "I dig Woody's dramatic stuff like Match Point and Cassandra's Dream, but his early, funny movies, especially Sleeper and Love and Death, are some of my all-time favorites."

"Woody's a lot like Judd [Apatow] to me," he says. "They both make movies that are funny and serious at the same time, and they both put a lot of heart into their comedy which lets them get away with some of the ruder, cruder stuff."

Besides Little Big Men, Hartley already has two other films scheduled for imminent release. The Great Buck Howard, which premiered at Sundance this January, was produced by Tom Hanks and stars John Malkovich as a down-on-his-luck magician. And Fanboys (with Rogen and Kristen Bell) tells the story of a group of Star Wars fanatics who travel to George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch to steal an early copy of The Phantom Menace. Not bad for a 16-year-old kid from Ravenna who still hasn't learned how to drive. "I'm too afraid," he confesses with a laugh. "It's a little intimidating out there in LA with all those great big Hummers." - Milan Paurich

Billy the Kid

If you didn't know going in that Billy the Kid was about an emotionally troubled teenager whose mother once got advice from the psychiatric-industrial complex that he should be locked up for good, you'd think filmmaker Jennifer Venditti had chosen the subject as a random sampling of the gawky, savvy, media-soaked, early-21st-century suburban adolescent male. The sort of roles Shia LaBeouf rode to prominence, but for real.

Which means either kids today are all insane, or this one, labeled insane and the homeroom misfit, is actually appallingly open and easy to relate to. At least he was to me. (Somewhere, a cafeteria tableful of Solon High jocks are laughing and shooting spitballs at Charles. Again.)

Resident of a converted trailer home in Brunswick, Maine, Billy - whom the filmmaker met while recruiting high-school extras for an indie project - defines himself as "different in the brain," necessitating he take classes with the "special kids." He scorns drugs, mourns his deceased pets, wears an unfashionable mini-mullet, studies martial arts and body-building, and has typical-teen career dreams to be a rock star. He reads avidly about serial killers and quotes poetry and deep thoughts about life and what it is to be a man. The latter philosophies are mostly borrowed from The Terminator, The Karate Kid and the slasher-horror he adores.

Billy's biological father was a druggie and thieving trucker who beat Billy's mother. Now, Billy has an ostensibly better relationship with a stepdad who works at a radio station, and the kid comes across as one of Leonard Cohen's cracked ones who let the-light come in. Billy wishes he were a superhero who could defend the helpless, and he shows a chivalrous streak borne of naivete and his mother's ordeal. While playing a Terminator video game he avoids shooting digitalized females. "I think it's a sin to hurt women, real or fake." Love and raging hormones, however, have made roadkill out of better-grounded guys. When Billy gets a serious and rather one-sided crush on a friendly girl named Heather (he seems to decide her twitchy eye condition and bronchitis brand her a kindred outcast), the protagonist's obsession, anger and emotion-management issues are tested.

You do wonder how the camera crew following this painful little drama around have affected events. Clearly Billy (and townspeople) are playing to it to a degree. And then there's the dark shadow of Stevie, documentarian Steve James' foreboding look at a once-cheerful little boy and the scary convict he would grow up to be. It was grim, but it had a sense of completeness to the narrative, and was more up-front about the filmmaker's role (getting midnight phone calls about bailouts from jail, for instance). Still, one hopes adulthood holds better for Billy. When the hero comments, "My adrenaline's pumping," and a roomful of female classmates seems a little stunned someone Used a Big Word, you do wish this boy well. Like Napoleon Dynamite, maybe he'll do okay and show the whole world his sweet! moves and skills. - Charles Cassady Jr.

5:15 p.m. Saturday, March 29 at Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque.

Married Life

Before raving about the wry, beautifully modulated performances of Pierce Brosnan, Patricia Clarkson, Chris Cooper and Rachel McAdams in Married Life, director Ira Sachs' (Forty Shades of Blue) delectably Hitchcockian, darkly comic romp, let me first praise a few behind-the-scenes contributors who normally get slighted in film reviews. Production and art designers Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski and Gwendolyn Margetson do such a smashing job of recreating Sachs' alluring 1949 settings (the home furnishings, the cafes, gin joints, movie theaters and restaurants) that you'll be tempted to hop into Rocky and Bullwinkle's Wayback Machine and move right in. And it would be remiss of me to overlook the invaluable contributions of costume designer Michael Dennison, too. Married Life gets all of the surface trappings and period details so unerringly, spookily right that it's easy to dismiss the whole gorgeous shebang as pure artifice. But that would be to discount Sachs' altogether remarkable achievement here.

The story of Harry and Pat Allen (Cooper and Clarkson), a long and happily married couple whose loving, if somewhat monotonous, existence changes dramatically when Harry falls head over heels for a fetching bottle-blonde war widow (McAdams' Kay), the film mercilessly skewers male-female relationships to a fare-thee-well. In discussing his feelings for Kay to rakish best buddy Richard (Brosnan), Harry describes discovering romantic love in midlife as "a mild kind of illness like chicken pox or the flu ... I thought I was immune." Deciding that Pat wouldn't be able to survive without him when he (inevitably) leaves her, Harry decides that the kindest way to ease his wife's pain is to, uh, kill her. As might be expected, nothing quite turns out as planned or expected. Richard winds up falling for Kay himself, and Pat turns out to be having a clandestine affair of her own. Soon, Harry's foolproof plan comes tumbling down like a house of cards in a Kansas twister. The Coen Brothers have attempted this kind of screwball noir before, but never with as much feeling or heart. Sachs' pitch-perfect movie is less ironic, archly mannered and emotionally detached than a Coen pastiche like Intolerable Cruelty and The Man Who Wasn't There. It's also a lot more fun. - MP

Opens Friday at the Cedar-Lee Theatre

Run, Fatboy, Run

This movie doesn't seem to have the confidence of its studio, Picturehouse, which let it languish on the shelf for the better part of a year. Happily, they decided to blow the dust off this amiable romantic comedy starring and co-written by British standup comic Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) and directed by Pegg's pal, former Friends star David Schwimmer, who makes his directing debut here. The fatboy in question is Dennis Doyle (Pegg), a slightly potbellied (but not really fat) London ladies'-store security guard who five years ago ran out - literally, and at top speed - on his pregnant fiancée Libby (Thandie Newton) on their wedding day. Now Dennis lives a messy, irresponsible life, falling behind in his rent and screwing up at his job and on his visits with his young son, Jake.

Lovely Libby, who runs a bakery cheekily called Libby's Nice Buns, has a new boyfriend, a wealthy, Type-A American investment banker named Whit (Hank Azaria), who seems to have it all. When Dennis, who wants to earn his way back into Libby's life, learns that his rival Whit plans to run the London Marathon, he decides to train for the event, with funny and rather touching results. Given this predictable storyline, the movie is fresher and funnier than you might expect, with amusing supporting performances by Irish comedian Dylan Moran as Dennis' disreputable cousin and Harish Patel as his Indian landlord, who takes a paternal interest in his tenant and appoints himself his coach. There are some moments of gratuitous gross-out humor, but generally the movie, like its hapless hero, is an unlikely winner. - Pamela Zoslov

Opens Friday areawide

Shutter

If The Ring, The Grudge, the films they were remakes of, and their countless sequels and imitations haven't satisfied your appetite for ghostly Asian girls with long black hair, then Shutter is the film for you. Shutter is an American remake of a Thai film directed by Japanese horror specialist Masayuki Ochiai. The image of a snake swallowing its own tail comes to mind. In this version, fashion photographer Benjamin Shaw (Joshua Jackson) has only just tied the knot with his pretty blonde wife Jane (Rachael Taylor) when his job takes them to Japan. It's bad enough they don't get a honeymoon, but the first thing they do when they arrive is run over a girl and smash their car into a tree. The thing is, when Ben and Jane get out of their car to look, they can't find a body or even a drop of blood.

Jane remains unnerved by the incident, but eventually the couple settles into its new home. However, when strange anomalies begin appearing in all of their photos and Jane sees an apparition of the girl she hit, it appears something supernatural might be afoot. Ben reacts to Jane telling him about these strange occurrences by yelling, "I'm not your father!" This subtly clues the audience in on the fact that he's kind of a dick. But as the terror escalates and the circle of vengeance expands, even Ben has to admit that there may be something to this ghost thing after all. The spirit photography angle is kind of a fun gimmick, and at least it isn't the usual "phone calls from Hell" typical of the genre. Director Ochiai does a nice job staging Ben's fashion shoots, and he shows some flair for creepy imagery. In the end, though, the results are mediocre at best. Shutter delivers a couple of shivers and a jump or two, but the script is so predictable and derivative that the audience is always several steps ahead of the film. And either Ochiai had trouble communicating with his lead actors, or Jackson and Taylor are just bad. Whatever the case, while Shutter is by no means the worst American remake of an Asian horror film, it's definitely one shot you can afford to miss. - Bob Ignizio

Snow Angels

David Gordon Green's mournful adaptation of Stewart O'Nan's 1995 novel has the disadvantage of most books-into-film: Translating a 305-page novel into a movie means sacrificing depth, shading and characterization. The story concerns two unraveling families in a small town in Pennsylvania, that of teenager Arthur Parkinson, whose parents are breaking up, and his former babysitter, Annie Marchand (Kate Beckinsale), who's separated from husband Glenn (Sam Rockwell) and raising their little daughter. Annie, once the object of Arthur's childhood crush, waits tables in the restaurant where Arthur has a part-time job and is having an affair with Nate (Nicky Katt), husband of Annie's friend and co-worker Barb (Amy Sedaris). An aura of menace surrounds Glenn, who tried to commit suicide after the marriage failed, and is now a born-again Christian making a shaky recovery and nursing hopes of reconciling with Annie.

Arthur, who plays trombone in the school marching band, develops a relationship with Olive (Carroll Godsman), a new girl in town who wears kooky vintage cat-eye glasses. When Annie's daughter goes missing, Arthur and his classmates are sent to search the snowy hills, and Arthur makes a terrible discovery. Green directs with a sure hand and a keen eye for working-class settings, and gets excellent performances from the actors, especially Rockwell as the emotionally fragile Glenn. He is less successful, however, at connecting the two stories: Arthur's pedestrian coming-of-age tale belongs in another movie altogether from Annie's dark, working-class melodrama. Truncating the book means that the characters are sketchy and their motivations murky. The horrifying violence that climaxes the film shocks on a basic level, but doesn't move you emotionally. Other elements of the novel are absent, such as alcoholism, poverty and the snow-angel symbolism from which the title comes. Also missing is the novel's poetic grace that gave the story a larger meaning. - PZ

Opens Friday at the Cedar-Lee Theatre

The Rape of Europa

After 1989's docu-epic The Architecture of Doom, one might be forgiven for imagining there isn't much left to say about the Third Reich's fascination with art and aesthetics and the systematic plunder of painting and sculpture as key parts of military invasion and cultural extermination. But The Rape of Europa does tell quite a story. It's a sprawling adaptation of the nonfiction book by Lynn Nicholas about the fate of European art treasures, both on the Eastern and Western fronts, after the Wermacht was unleashed on Poland in 1939. The movie (narrated by actress Joan Allen) is, if anything, overstuffed with detail that a thick book can more gracefully contain; you can suffer a veritable Stendahl syndrome (mental overload after overexposure to art) here from the sights, sounds, themes and shifting vistas and battlefields.

Hitler, as we know, was a painter of traditional watercolors whose career might have been very different had he not been turned down by art school. Rising to power as a megalomaniac conqueror/messiah of the Aryan race, he planned in meticulous detail a mighty museum in Linz that would display all the great art treasure of the ages that the Thousand-Year Reich would capture from its enemies. German soldiers in special units marched into battle in Poland with shopping lists. Heroic efforts by common citizens and comrades in Paris and Leningrad strove to hide most of the artwork in the south of France and Siberia before the Nazi marauders could strip/destroy as they had in Warsaw and Cracow.

Hitler was still insanely planning the Linz museum right up until his final days in a Berlin bunker. Governments and galleries are still fighting it out in court over who has proper ownership of some of the countless paintings, sculptures and relics recovered after V-E Day, and many pieces remain lost. From time to time the documentary cuts to one of those ongoing imbroglios with the surviving witnesses, lawyers, and arts and culture ministers on both sides, and that really brings the saga home. It's a great proud-to-be-an-American moment (infrequent in documentary films lately) when a museum in Utah finds out its prized Bouchet canvas was looted and returns it to original gallery-owner's descendents without argument.

Still, as US troops drove into combat, it became a dilemma for Gen. Eisenhower how to bomb the Axis powers without obliterating the priceless artifacts. Some treasures were saved by pure luck, others by tight-focused surgical strikes that sought to drop the bombs while purposefully avoid the hoardings, museums, galleries and monuments. Even with art historians embedded with the troops to ensure the cultural heritage of Europe survived, many a GI and officer bristled at the idea of putting antique paintings ahead of men's lives. The Rape of Europa never mentions it, but a couple of Hollywood war pictures later dramatized this theme, John Frankenheimer's The Train and Sydney Pollack's Castle Keep.

We learn that Luftwaffe Field Marshall Hermann Goering was an unintended savior figure. Undiscriminating in his desire to accumulate and build his own collection, he took in and ended up preserving a trove of works that Hitler and his cronies would have considered too "degenerate." And, as the vengeful Red Army pushed into German territory, the Russians gave as good as they got in terms of carting Teutonic treasures back to the Motherland, where many now remain. It might have been fair (but widened film's already wide net still further) to mention that strategic art plunder was also carried out by Napoleon, by the British Empire, by imperialists all the way back to ancient Rome, and probably before that. "Art is what makes us human," says one of the interviewees. So does stealing it. - Charles Cassady Jr.

6:45 p.m. Friday, March 28 and 1:30 p.m. Sunday, March 30 at Cleveland Museum of Art Lecture Hall.