Shot on digital video and transferred to film, Jonathan Nossiter's densely layered psychodrama Signs & Wonders is too tricked-up to receive Dogma certification, but it comes closer than any digital-video feature to date in marrying the format to anti-establishment ideology. Fed up with Kodak's monopoly on film stocks, which he complains is uniformly slick and commercial-ready, Nossiter integrated DV into his forceful statement against corporate America's insidious influence abroad. But Nossiter, whose ambitious debut (1997's Sunday) was notable mainly for its gorgeously textured and evocative images of Queens, pays for his politics. Even with Greek master Theo Angelopoulos' cinematographer, Yorgos Arvanitis, behind the camera, the limits of the format are apparent, smothering beautiful compositions in a blurry, indistinct haze. But if Signs & Wonders proves that DV still has a long way to go, Nossiter's sophistication and depth as a storyteller have improved substantially since Sunday, at times approaching the strange, elliptical heights of Nicolas Roeg (especially Don't Look Now) in his prime. In an Athens overrun with McDonald's, Pizza Hut, KFC, and other corporate signposts, Stellan Skarsgård plays a blustery, self-involved American commodities trader living with Charlotte Rampling, his wife of 17 years, and their two kids. Skarsgård's reckless affair with sultry co-worker Deborah Kara Unger brings him back with her to America, but his fickle nature causes him to doubt his instincts and return to Athens to mend his relationship with his wife and family. By this time, Rampling has become involved with Dimitri Katalifos, a Greek journalist who was imprisoned and tortured during Greece's military dictatorship and now seeks funding for a museum to commemorate the leftist resistance movement. Nossiter's anti-American sentiments pollute his characterization: Skarsgård, a brash, unscrupulous robber baron consumed with his own happiness at the expense of others, represents America; Katalifos, modest-living and morally principled, represents the integrity of the culture he's invading. (In the cheapest moment, a noxious American investor tells Katalifos his company is "jazzed" by his spirit of resistance and talks about selling "accessories for the committed individualist.") Though heavy-handed in his polemics—for a sharper and wittier take on logo saturation, try the embarrassingly underrated Josie And The Pussycats—Nossiter excels in atmosphere and texture, and his themes are worked in more subtly elsewhere. With its cool, ambient score by Portishead's Adrian Utley, Signs And Wonders sustains an eerie, mysterious tone that perfectly suits the elusive but undeniable impact that fast-food culture has on human relationships. Even Skarsgård's character, often seen duplicated in mirrors and windows, seems victimized by a McDonald's landscape that values homogeneity over humanity. Nossiter's righteous anger saturates every frame of Signs And Wonders, and the film is most effective when it's felt, not heard.