Choke

Review in a Hurry: A gleefully profane adaptation of a Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) novel, Choke suffers from some uneven performances but still might have you doing spit takes in your popcorn.

The Bigger Picture: Here's a family film that's definitely not for families. Sam Rockwell stars as a sex-addicted ne'er-do-well with some complicated mommy issues (Anjelica Huston, playing a deceptively lucid lunatic), a dead-end job in a colonial-America reenactment fair and a series of low-rent scams in which he cons strangers into saving his life and then somehow extracts money from them after.

Writer-director Clark Gregg takes a matter-of-fact approach to Choke's cockeyed shenanigans, which turns out to be more blessing than curse:

The twisted story has a way of sneaking up on you, generating both charming surprises and moments of incredulous disbelief. The whole thing is constantly in danger of collapsing and comes perilously close due to some oddly mannered performances: Huston's nuances only become clear after a while, and some others (Gregg's own, and quasi-romantic lead Kelly Macdonald's) never really gel.

Thankfully it's as much Rockwell's film as Gregg's. There's a fine line between the bold and the silly here, the kind that Rockwell walks so ably—it's hard to imagine any other actor in the role, for better or worse. His tortured loser, wandering a world where crazy is just a matter of degrees, is watchable even when it's not likable. And it's unlikable a lot, so whether or not you can tolerate Choke may simply come down to how much you can swallow.

The 180—a Second Opinion: Choke sets an unlikely to be broken record for Number of Sexual Acts Simulated by Sam Rockwell. Even if you're in the minority that thinks this couldn't possibly get old in the span of 90 minutes, well, you're wrong.