Impostors

Five chameleon New York characters (twin magicians/assassins, two enigmatic women, a rich wimp), their passions masked by aggressive cool, wend their absurdly entertaining way through Rappaport's customary comic-opera catalogue of melodramatic disparities: a series of tableau visuals bursting with allusive emotional movement, sense of skeletal slapstick, a superabundance of inconsequential plot trails. There's enough for anyone half-familiar with out-of- the-rut New York independent film-making to latch onto; and in terms of the wide audience Rappaport deserves, reservations about this film based on higher enthusiasm for the earlier, underexposed Local Color and The Scenic Route begin to seem pretty irrelevant.