Jim Carrey’s first movie since the Butterfinger-in-the-swimming-pool that was Fun with Dick and Jane is a scary movie for people who don’t like being scared. He plays Walter Sparrow, California dog catcher and family man. Aside from being sexually harassed by his dispatcher and an unfortunate Moe Howard haircut, he lives a happy if sloppy life with his young son and wife Agatha (and when was the last time you encountered a character under the age of 73 with that name?) Life takes a turn for the worse when Agatha (Virginia Madsen) buys him an odd-looking volume she finds while waiting for him at a used bookstore. Written by one “Topsy Krets” (yes, it seems obvious, but I didn’t get it until halfway through the movie), the book details the writer’s obsession with the number 23, which seems to dominate his life in deadly ways. Before you know it, Walter is seeing 23s everywhere he turns, and wondering why the book has so much in common with his own life—and what happens in the missing final chapter. Influenced by the seemingly endless wave of Japanese horror films of the past decade, The Number 23 at its best is moodily spooky, with a growing sense of dread as Walter seems to be finding infinite evidence of a fate dominating his life. And director Joel Schumacher gives the proceedings an appealingly lived-in look, balanced by dream (or are they?) sequences that look like Italian fashion commercials. But by the midpoint the endless findings of the number 23 become more irritating than involving—you get the feeling that you could play this game with any two-digit number. The script by debuting screenwriter Fernley Phillips (apparently a real name, unlike that of Mr. Krets) has an interesting place to go, but falters in getting there: He holds our interest mildly, but never grips it. And Carrey is not the ideal performer for the role. For better or worse, the one thing he has difficulty playing is ordinariness.

“Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy,” according to a key line in this much-lauded independent film shot in the forests outside of Portland, Oregon. A hot springs deep in these woods is the destination of two out-of-touch old friends on a hiking trip. Mark (Daniel London), already reeling from overwork, is about to become a father, something that he realizes will change his and his wife’s lives in unthinkable ways, though he has no idea how they will adapt. Kurt (indie musician Will Oldham) is less settled: Though he has substantially more hair on his chin than his crown, he maintains his youthful ideals of freedom, which involve the regular inhalation of burning substances. Fans of Old Joy, which include most of the reputable critics who have seen and reviewed it, respond to the subtlety with which it depicts this moment of loss in the lives of two men responding to the passage of time in different ways. Director Kelly Reichardt places the pair as a part of their environment, spending more time on the details of woodland life than on conversations that seem to lack connection. The film’s visual aspects may be more affecting on a large screen: Watching it on a screener DVD, I was struck more by the fact that the film is so ambiguous as to support any reading you want to bring to it (including a sexual interpretation that I doubt was intentional). It plays through Tuesday at the Emerging Cinema screen at the Market Arcade Film and Arts Center.

At one point in Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace, the 18th-century anti-slavery agitator William Wilberforce rises in England’s House of Commons to answer whether he favors surrender or appeasement regarding the American Colonies’ fight for independence. “The difference between appeasement and surrender is a matter of time,” Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) says, “and the waste of another 10,000 young men.” Ring a bell?