• Cache (Sony Pictures Classics, 2005). Provocateur Michael Haneke's meditation on guilt and the subjectivity of truth witnesses the unseaming of a bourgeois Parisian family threatened by videos that suggest they're being watched. Why, it turns out, is incidental -- and a drag. It's a page ascetically reimagined from Lynch's Lost Highway, desaturated of dread and ironically less engrossing for the intellective effort. Haneke prefers examining our pores to getting under our skin, and while such scrutiny traditionally bears fruit for adherents to the filmmaker's often more harrowing oeuvre (see: The Seventh Continent), the lot it yields here is the nettled conscience of its blame-reproving principal and this infrequent Luddite's distress at such calculatedly enigmatic navel-gazing. The knockout finale suggests a deeper experience.
• Krakatoa, East of Java (ABC/Cinerama, 1969). A certifiable script overyoked with plot navigates a "B" list through the Sudan Strait as Krakatoa menaces ad nauseum. Of interest chiefly to those entranced by erector set visuals that somehow managed to flourish post-Kubrick and pre-Dykstra.