And you thought Napoleon Dynamite was strange.

Retirement day has finally arrived for Schultze (Horst Krause) and his two buddies, Jurgen (Harald Warmbrunn) and Manfred (Karl-Fred Muller), who have been working for decades in a German salt mine. (Their retirement “party” has a distinctly funereal air about it: their parting gift from management is a lamp fashioned out of – you guessed it – rock salt.) The low-key, butterball-shaped Schultze (a scary sight in a bathing suit), truly a creature of habit, has but one thing to fall back on: his love of the accordion.

Under pressure from his pals to enter an upcoming music festival in the U.S. (each finalist will be chosen by locals), Schultze decides his audition piece will be a non-traditional polka inspired by some zippy zydeco music he hears one evening on the radio. Since he gets a chilly reception from his audience, and the price of a plane ticket to Texas zooms up, he figures his chances of attending the festival are next to nil. He’s thrown a curve when, for his birthday, his friends collect the money to send him to Texas. (But didn’t the film say that each contestant had to win his local competition before advancing to the next level?) Once there, Schultze blows off the festival (cold feet?) and heads out to Louisiana, renowned for its zydeco and spicy Jambalaya. And thus begins Schultze’s final, off-the-beaten-path journey of self-discovery.

The poker-faced Schultze Gets the Blues is intended, I suppose, to be a story about the value of challenging our patterns, no matter what our station in life. The movie has cleaned up at the German box office and captured a slew of film festival awards – including Best Picture at the Stockholm Film Festival and a Special Director’s Award at the Venice Film Festival – so obviously someone “got” it. Even though Schultze is a surprisingly likable fellow, there’s an off-putting deadness about this film, and an astonishing lack of laughs for a prize-winning comedy. (Landmark’s Hillcrest Cinemas)

***

It’s been 17 years since Japanese animator Katsuhiro Otomo made the animated classic Akira. Ten years in production, at a cost of $22 million (making it the most expensive Japanese animated film ever made to date), Steamboy is Otomo’s visually dazzling return to the big screen, nearly ruined (in this, the shorter, English-dubbed American version) by a deafening score and a noisy, repetitive climax that seems to go on forever.

Otomo and co-writer Katsuhiro Otomo’s action-adventure science-fiction epic is set in 19th century Victorian England. Young Ray Steam (voice of Anna Paquin) is an exceptionally bright inventor living at the time of the Industrial Revolution, circa 1866. One day a crate arrives from his grandfather (Patrick Stewart) containing an unusual metal ball (a “Steam Ball”) that has the ability to power an entire country. Naturally, enemy agents from the ominous-sounding Ohara Foundation want to get their hands on it for use as a dastardly weapon of mass destruction. In a breathtaking, fast-paced chase sequence, Ray attempts to escape with the ball on a homemade unicycle as the agents close in on him from all sides with steam machines. He’s got to elude his pursuers and find a scientist named Robert Stephenson (Oliver Cotton), who may be the key to the Steam Ball’s many mysteries. For so-called comic relief, there’s spoiled brat Scarlett (Kari Wahlgren), though she comes off as more obnoxious than amusing.

Otomo’s crack team of designers have done a meticulous job in recreating the artifacts and structures of the era, going so far as to take a 10-day field trip to America so as to more authentically reproduce Steamboy’s period setting. Their efforts have paid off handsomely: this is a rich, imaginatively realized retro sci-fi film (even with 20 – some minutes missing from the Japanese cut-not nearly enough, in my opinion) that puts every penny on the screen. Scrappy 13-year-old Steam witnesses the near-destruction of London (this is where the movie becomes ear-splittingly loud and redundant – how many buildings can we watch tumble to the ground?), which surely will have to be rebuilt once this adventure comes to a close. Otomo is already at work on a sequel, though hopefully it won’t take a decade to see the light of day. (Landmark’s Ken Cinema, March 18-24)

Long but well worth your time, Downfall (deservedly nominated for this year’s Best Foreign Language film) details the final, sad days, hours really, of Adolf Hitler’s life as the deposed political leader tries to salvage his crumbling empire. German director Oliver Hirshbiegel has made a thoroughly fascinating hybrid of two non-fiction books: Inside Hitler’s Bunker by Joaquim Fest, and Until the Final Hour by Traudi Junge and Melissa Muller. A runaway box-office hit in its native country (who doesn’t find Hitler a gripping subject?), Hirshbiegel takes an up-close look at the last 12 days of the deranged political leader, who refused to give up hope for a new Germany even as his enemies were closing in on him from all sides.

It’s April 1945, and the fuehrer has just celebrated his 56th birthday inside an underground bunker situated 15 feet below the surface and stuffed with gourmet foods and fine wines (hey, you gotta eat), though such delicacies are reserved for his family (including Eva Braun, played by Juliane Kohler) and most loyal staff. At this stage in his life, Hitler’s empire is but a shadow of its former self, but still the increasingly pathetic leader presses on, convinced a return to glory is still possible for Germany, even though his troops are nearly wiped out. (“He’ll bring the whole Third Reich down with him,” mutters one aide to another.) When he starts to pass out cyanide pills one day, it looks as if he has finally come to terms with the fact that this is a war he has no chance of winning.

Anchoring this compelling enterprise is the outstanding performance of Bruno Ganz, long a respected actor (Wings of Desire, The American Friend) with offbeat choices in film projects. As Hitler, his fiery exchanges with his staff are startling in their sheer, raw power – you can almost see him losing his grip on reality, even when he is doing something as seemingly innocuous as petting his precious dog. Thankfully, there is nothing even remotely innocuous about Downfall. (Landmark’s Village Cinemas)

Kyle Counts is the film critic for the Gay & Lesbian Times .