Last night, I watched Cold Souls at the Harvard Exit. Unfortunately, The Stranger didn't get a screener of the movie before the festival, so here's what our guide says about the movie, sight unseen:

Paul Giamatti, Emily Watson, and David Strathairn star in a movie written and directed by Sophie Barthes. Giamatti stars as himself, an actor preparing to play Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya on Broadway. Science fiction-style soul-swapping is involved. Reviewers from Variety to Cinematical can’t seem to mention this film without evoking Charlie Kaufman’s name—the early, promising, Being John Malkovich-era Kaufman, not the more difficult Synecdoche, New York Kaufman.

I can understand the Kaufman references, but they're really kind of lazy. To be sure, the central plot point of the movie—Paul Giamatti (played by Paul Giamatti) decides to have his soul extracted to ease the emotional stress of acting in Chekhov, and he eventually gets caught up in a web of international intrigue—is superficially reminiscent of Malkovich, but if you go in expecting a clever farce of a movie, you'll be disappointed. First-time feature director Sophie Barthes isn't interested in special effects (although the sets in general and the soul-sucking machine in particular are beautiful). It's a thoughtful, Gogol-esque consideration of what it means to have a soul (as we learned in the Q&A with Barthes after the film, the fact that the title evokes Dead Souls is not a mistake), and the pacing is positively Russian, which is to say: slow.

So forget about Kaufman before you go in, but you should definitely see this movie. It's a real pleasure to see some thoughtful, satirical low-budget science fiction in American film, especially one with such a European sensibility. Cold Souls screens again tomorrow at Harvard Exit at 4:30 pm. You can buy tickets here.

(If you're looking for something to see tonight, I heartily recommend the twisty Romanian psychological thriller Hooked, which screens at the Admiral at 4:30.)