In theaters

“Fight Club”

In “Fight Club,” David Fincher’s darkly comic, visually arresting and violent exercise in new-age masculinity, the director of “Se7en” and “The Game” asks audiences to consider what it means to be a man in a post-feminist society — one that Fincher finds absolutely emasculating and worth rising up against.

His film, which has strong Buddhist, fascist, nihilistic and totalitarian undertones, feels like “A Clockwork Orange” for the late 1990s: It features a band of men liberated by violence.

Initially, the film’s much-publicized violence is almost comic, flirtatious, a giddy way of initiation into a world that eventually turns brutal in its orgiastic scenes of fist throwing and bare-chested muscle matches, and then strangely sensual as the film nears its climax.

Sexualizing the film is intentional. Since “Fight Club” is about the reawakening of man’s primitive instincts, Fincher blurs the line between sex and violence while plunging his cast into a homoerotic atmosphere — a decision that reflects Fincher’s primary focus: This is first and foremost a film about men celebrating men for who they are and what they were.

The film stars Edward Norton as a corporate slave with no name — we only know that he’s the narrator, that he’s bored with his life, that he suffers from acute insomnia, that he’s addicted to 12-step programs, and that he defines himself by what he owns. He’s in desperate need of a spark that will ignite his dull life and give it some sort of structure and meaning.

At first, that spark seems to come in the disturbing form of Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), a wild, filthy, chain-smoking bit of bacteria he meets at his testicular cancer support group. But no — the narrator’s life truly changes with Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a hip piece of work he meets on an airplane.

Confident, instinctive, fiercely sexual and commanding, Durden is everything the narrator is not. Together, they start Fight Club, an underground movement of men who just want to be primitive men that eventually takes over their lives while also affecting the world.

“Fight Club” is 30 minutes too long and loses its focus three-quarters of the way through, but the performances are terrific, the direction is slick, and the twist at the end is almost as good as the twist at the end of “The Sixth Sense.”

Grade: B

On video

“Life”

In “Life,” two things are uncertain: Ted Demme’s direction and the film’s script, which isn’t sure if it wants to be a comedy, a drama, a melodrama or a film about racism in Mississippi during the 1930s.

The film never chooses, but it certainly reaches; throughout, there’s the sense that Demme wanted more from this film, which is about two strangers framed for a murder they didn’t commit while hauling moonshine in the backwoods of Mississippi.

As one would expect from the inspired pairing of Murphy and Lawrence, there are high moments of comedy here, but those moments are too frequently lodged between Demme’s light brand of social commentary.

“Life” does mirror life in that it isn’t what it seems — it’s not the bawdy comedy Universal Pictures suggested it was in its bawdy ads. If its only aspirations were comedy, we could overlook Demme’s wrongful depiction of prison life for blacks in the South of the 1930s. According to this film, it was a country club of barbecues, baseball games, conjugal visits — and the occasional moment of hard labor tossed in to spark the action with a funny bit of dialogue.

But when Demme brings down the room with the unexpected suicide of a likable character, or switches gears to reflect seriously upon the injustice done to Gibson and Banks because of the color of their skin, he’s asking audiences to consider something altogether different from comedy — which would have been fine had he only followed through with a few concrete answers.

As for Murphy and Lawrence, they are good here (the makeup that ages them is rotten), but the film’s script puts most of their talents on death row. And that, in a jail cell, is the film’s true crime.

Grade: C+

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, each Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “News Center 5:30 Today” and “News Center Tonight,” and each Saturday and Sunday on WCSH-TV’s statewide “Morning Report.”