Steve

STEVE is a short film starring the radiant Keira Knightley, whose been gaining momentum for a bid at the Oscars this year with ANNA KARANINA, and Colin Firth, whose established himself as one of those A-list actors who is just about as charming as George Clooney. Neither of these talent actors, however, find anything much to work with in the nicely shot, but pretentiously understated and uneven short film. Instead there's just a lot of uneven tonality, and a couple of scenes with dialogue that's too vague to mean anything.
But like another film reviewed on here recently (ANOTHER EARTH), STEVE is just too timid to delve into anything that it suggests might be happening. Steve (Firth), a jittery downstairs neighbor comes up to bother a warring couple (Knightley and Tom Mison), and increasingly his complaints become more ridiculous or unhinged. But whatever is actually wrong with Steve, or how everyone chooses to deal with it is evidently up to the audience, which is a pretty poor cop-out device.

★ out of Five