Apt Pupil

(Columbia Tristar)

Adapted from a Stephen King tale, Bryan Singer's genuinely creepy film turns on the relationship between 16-year-old Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro) and a local recluse, Kurt Dussander (Ian McKellen), whom Todd recognizes as a fugitive Nazi war criminal and blackmails into relating unvarnished accounts of his crimes. Nazism may be a reality more powerful than this movie can handle: the word "Jews" is never spoken. But Apt Pupil does serve to remind us that evil is more opaque and insuperable than in the stories we tell to comfort ourselves.