Photo: Marco Simon Puccioni's Shelter

Western charity for third-world natives comes under fire in Shelter, yet what truly deserves scorn is director Marco Simon Puccioni's pedantic and implausible storytelling, which drops randomly behaving protagonists into preposterous situations. On their way home from a Tunisian vacation, lesbian lovers Anna (Maria de Medeiros) and Mara (Antonia Liskova) discover that they've unwittingly smuggled into Italy a teenage Moroccan boy named Anis (Mounir Ouadi). Mara, who works on the floor of the shoe-manufacturing factory run by Anna's homophobic mother (Gisella Burinato), wants nothing to do with the illegal stowaway, but Anna refuses to abandon him, inviting him into their home and convincing her brother to give him a stockboy job.  Nick Schager