During the 2004 presidential campaign, Vietnam suddenly became newsworthy again. Between John Kerry campaigning as a war hero, the Swift Boat Veterans tearing him down, and John McCain campaigning for George W. Bush as an unchallenged war hero, a war more than 30 years old suddenly became more relevant than the one we were actually fighting. In 2006, we had an entirely different breed of political candidate: veterans of the Iraq War running for various seats on anti-war platforms. And now we have US generals speaking out against combat strategies that would have baffled characters in a Joseph Heller novel.

In the early 1960s, a working-class street in East London is home to two displaced families: the Wisemans, German Jews who emigrated here after WWII, and the Samuels, a Jamaican family that has just moved in next door. Most of the street has only barely accepted the Jewish family, and they’re ill disposed to welcome black faces. But the film turns on smaller connections made when young David Wiseman learns that his new neighbor (warmly played by Delroy Lindo) can teach him a thing or two about cricket, enough to get him on the school team. Writer-director Paul Morrison (Solomon and Gaenor) adds what initially seems like an odd subtext: Mrs. Wiseman, whose husband works long hours, finds herself becoming attracted to Mr. Samuels, an infatuation she briefly acts upon. But it speaks to the issues of tradition and adult responsibility, and is not finally inappropriate. Wondrous Oblivion bites off a bit more than any single movie could chew, but it’s heart is certainly in the right place; that and strong production values that vividly recreate the era compensate for the film’s overreaching ambition.

Nick Cassavetes’ film based on the case of Jesse James Hollywood, a small-time suburban Los Angeles drug dealer who spent a few years on the FBI’s most wanted list, spends much of its running time daring you to watch it, a dare I was loath to ignore. Before settling into the meat of the story (in which Hollywood’s crew kidnapped and murdered the teenaged brother of a rival), Cassavetes spends a lot of time setting up the milieu surrounding these kids. Though they’re mostly in their 20s, “kids” is the only appropriate term of them: white youth of middle-class upbringing, morally and emotionally unformed, modeling themselves after gangsta gap videos. I presume that Cassavetes’ intention was to take an objective, nonjudgmental look at their behavior; everything about them, from their gratingly incessant profanity to the way they treat each other, is irredeemably obnoxious. But what he could have established in a few scenes while moving the plot forward, Cassavetes instead wallows in for nearly an hour. And while he may argue that he’s not celebrating this lifestyle, it won’t look that way to the kids who have every line of dialogue in Oliver Stone’s Scarface committed to memory. The second half of this overlong effort works up some dramatic gravitas, and along the way there are good performances by Justin Timberlake and Ben Foster (who should be first in line to play Renfield the next time Hollywood wants to remake Dracula). But there is much more wrong than right in this poorly conceived film that seems to have no point other than Cassavetes making a film as different as possible from his last effort, the sentimental hit The Notebook.