Tetro (2009)

FAMILY AFFAIR Vincent Gallo in Tetro

Like Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola has gone from being the filmmaker of his time to becoming a make-it-up-as-you-go-along indie free-shooter. In this scrappy, elegant-looking family saga, Vincent Gallo, with his serpent-eyed hostility, plays a tormented blocked writer living in Buenos Aires who has cut himself off from his domineering musician father (Klaus Maria Brandauer) — and pretty much everyone else. Gallo's brother shows up (he's played by Alden Ehrenreich, who's like the teen Leonardo DiCaprio crossed with Emile Hirsch), and what follows in Tetro fuses the awkward and the ripely operatic. B–