With its grainy black-and-white photography, thrummy sound and stiff acting, Magdalen (three stars out of four) practically reeks of another time and place.  Say, New York in the late ‘60s, when Warhol was panning skyscrapers and orchestrating bleak dramas with colorfully bad actors in drab little rooms.

      Written and directed by (and featuring, in a small but key role) local auteur Andrew Repasky McElhinney, Magdalen has a great premise;: a woman who makes a living perched on a barstool telling stories.  Customers sidle up beside her, and she regales them with sex stories, romantic stores, stories about ill-fated love and obsession.  She has her regulars, like a man who wants to hear the same dirty tale over and over, and she has her new ones, like a guy who says he’s a 53-year-old virgin.

      The woman, Magdalen – played by Alix D. Smith with a stony scowl and a constant supply of cigarettes – has her own problems, as it turns out.  Issues with her father.  With sex, narcissism, regret.

      Magdalen has a few wonderfully transcendent moments, one being a montage of Philadelphia street scenes shot at night accompanied buy a melancholy blues.  McElhinney, who was 17 when he began his 70-minute feature, shows definite, albeit somewhat anachronistic, talent.