Like the murders and the double-jeopardy scheme devised to profit from them (the culprits will plead insanity, turn sane, and get a movie deal), the sanctimonious caricature of compulsive autobio filmmaking is glibly ludicrous. But in Herzfeld's world, the psychos' dreams come true, and scum-lawyer Bruce Cutler (as himself) shows up to broker the Hollywood deals. Starting out with a nice New Yawk snap (De Niro gets a scene talking to a mirror, again; arson investigator Edward Burns folds his sandpaper larynx around a few badda-bings), 15 Minutes settles into Richard Donner-style goulash. Of course, Grammer's soulless TV barnacle is the gravest bad guy of them all, deserving of the climactic jawbreaker.

Kieron Walsh's When Brendan Met Trudy, based as it is upon a Roddy Doyle screenplay, also treats plausibility like a doormat, but not in the service of a greater social statement. The movie could've used one, bouncing arbitrarily through the romance between a buttoned-down schoolteacher (Peter McDonald) and an extroverted trollop (Flora Montgomery) who turns out to be a cat burglar. Irony is a casualty here too; Brendan is a movie junkie who watches The Quiet Man with earnest respect and hangs Godard posters everywhere, but he could be obsessing on orchids or model trains for all it'd matter to the film. (Walsh's one liberating moment—in which the couple nonsensically live out a shot from Breathless—goes nowhere.) Doyle loves bad jokes (movie marquee: The Usual Shite) and his story has no rhyme or reason, dissolving in its last third into a bungled heist and jailhouse face-off. McDonald and Montgomery are likable, but they struggle for footing like cats on a pool cover.