Curtis's Charm

Small but beguiling movie, based on a story by Jim Carroll. A recovering heroin addict runs into an old comrade-in-arms in the park, but Curtis is crawling the bench with fright: he thinks he's being followed by a squirrel. His voodoo juju mother-in-law has put a spell on him, he explains. The man needs a talisman to protect him. Even at 75 minutes this feels over-extended, and the budget evidently didn't stretch to New York locations, but it's a cool, off-the-wall conversation piece, snappily put together with a darkly humorous sense of the metaphysical.