Shared Darkness

A slight but amiable prison-set satire that mines the thawing relationship between a hardened Ku Klux Klansman and a Mexican farmhand, festival-minted Cellmates, starring Tom Sizemore and Hector Jimenez (above), surfs along mostly on the good fortune of its casting and sly peculiarity of its forced-odd-couple premise. If writer-director Jesse Baget’s movie ultimately doesn’t seem to burrow down and fully comedically exploit its conceit, it’s at least pleasant to see Sizemore back and robustly engaged in something other than Eastern European-produced genre tripe. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (White Knight Films, unrated, 85 minutes)

A deadly dull melodrama of familial dysfunction and emotional abuse in the face of patriarchal anger management, writer-director Debbie Goodstein’s Mighty Fine leans heavily on autobiographical inspiration for dramatic heft and connection, a tactic that proves ill-advised. A somewhat drab and unimaginative telling further dents this offering of already rather limited psychological insights and pat conclusions and catharses.



Set in the 1970s, Mighty Fine centers around a so-surnamed husband and father, small businessman Joe (Chazz Palminteri), who uproots his family and moves them from Brooklyn to New Orleans. His wife Stella (Andie MacDowell) is a Holocaust survivor for whom Joe wants only the material best, so he overextends himself buying a big home and steady stream of extravagant gifts for Stella and their two daughters, Natalie (Jodelle Ferland) and Maddie (Rainey Qualley, MacDowell’s real-life daughter).

Unfortunately, his apparel business suffers a downturn, and Joe turns to loan sharks to keep his lifestyle afloat. The stress of this leads to flashes and fits of anger that frequently leave his family scared and/or in tears, but Joe seems unable to curb his destructive behavior, even (and perhaps especially) as his eldest daughter grows more willing to confront him about it.

First-time narrative feature director Goodstein has a good instinct about the toll of parentalization and walking-on-eggshells management that such sideways bursts of adult behavior can take on children, noting that the family worked hard to “keep that monster in a cage.” Too often, though, she deploys terribly obvious voiceover (“My dad missed the whole show — where the hell was he?”) that neither advances the plot nor illuminates characters’ feelings in a manner that isn’t already evident. Goodstein tells rather than shows, consistently missing opportunities to dig deeper into the effects of Joe’s lashing out.

None of this falls on Palminteri, really, whose performance does a good job of highlighting some of the underlying fear and insecurity that informs Joe’s behavior. MacDowell and Qualley, though, are out of their element. The former’s ridiculous, stilted accent does her no favors, and Qualley, in her film debut, can only unconvincingly pantomime the white-hot flashes and swings of teenage emotion. Nothing about their reactions to Joe’s fits feels particularly nuanced or well sketched out, and the well worn grooves of dramatic engagement that the film follows render Mighty Fine anything but. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Adopt Films, 80 minutes, R)

Already an international smash, to the tune of an incredible $340 million, The Intouchables arrives on American shores having picked up nine Cesar Award nominations, multiple prizes at the recent COLCOA Festival in Los Angeles, and smiles and hearts in just about every territory in which it has opened. It’s easy to see why. A rich, buoyant tale about the simple act of human connection and how it makes the heart sing, co-directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano’s fun, witty dramedy is an unabashed crowd-pleaser, spanning languages and cultures.

Set in present-day France and based on a true story, The Intouchables chronicles the deepening relationship between a classic odd-ball couple. Philippe (Francois Cluzet) is a multi-millionaire handicapped from the neck down, the result of a paragliding accident that broke two of his vertebrae. Consequently, he requires round-the-clock care. Looking to fill a position and fed up with the usual caretakers, and all the pretense and pity that come along with their service, Philippe rolls the dice on Driss (Omar Sy), a Senegal-born ex-convict who initially answers a job posting just to get a signature so that he may continue collecting governmental assistance. Taking Philippe for strolls in Paris during the midnight hour, Driss introduces him to marijuana, and also ditches the stodgy handicapped-enabled van for one of Philippe’s racy sports cars. In short, Driss pushes Philippe toward the edges of his comfort zone — including finally trying to arrange an in-person meeting with a woman with whom he’s been corresponding — and learns a few life lessons from his boss as well.

Everything that is right about The Intouchables starts with its two wonderful leads. Sy, the Cesar Best Actor award winner, has an effusive personality, while Cluzet (who faintly recalls Dustin Hoffman in his expressive eyes and wry smiles) provides a deft, counterbalancing quiet charm in the more physically constrictive role. Their rapport is impeccable.

It helps, too, that the film treats Philippe’s condition somewhere between The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and The Bucket List, which is to say with seriousness but not a grim subjectivity. It’s not necessarily terminal, his state, but while The Intouchables leans to the uplifting irreverence of the aforementioned, latter Morgan Freeman-Jack Nicholson boomer bait, it feels less laboriously manufactured, and a bit more honest, actually. Yes, it peddles a certain freedom in “letting go,” but when Driss is dressing down Philippe over the inflated price of his artwork or the boredom of opera, and Driss and Philippe are exchanging musical educations via classical orchestrations and Earth Wind & Fire, the movie feels laced with an electric authenticity.

For all the engagement of the material, Toledano and Nakache don’t quite settle upon a unifying visual scheme and template; the movie is a bit flatly shot and stitched together, quite honestly, which gives the proceedings a bit of a boxed-in, small screening feeling at times. A bit of subplot with Philippe’s teenage daughter Elisa (Alba Gaia Bellugi) doesn’t really play, either. Still, Cluzet and Sy are such a fine engaging pair that this treat is greater than the sum of its parts, and easily one of the year’s more baldly enjoyable films to date. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Weinstein Company, R, 112 minutes)

Co-directed by Dallas Hallam and Patrick Horvath, Entrance is a deliberately paced indie offering that bills itself as a psychological thriller but in actuality is a fairly aimless tone piece about twentysomething emotional dislocation that only in its final reel leaps somewhat clumsily into genre-oriented skirmish and combat. As a showcase for narrative restraint and a non-forced lead performance by newcomer Suziey Block, the movie works on a theoretical level, but its grip is a bit too slack and its payoff too pointless to really recommend it.

The story centers around Suzy (Block), a young Los Angeles woman who can’t quite locate happiness. She lives with her dog and a roommate, and works as a barista, but still seems plagued by a fog of unhappiness. She dates a bit, but doesn’t have a fulfilling romantic relationship. When her dog disappears and she starts hearing strange noises, Suzy begins to feel like there’s a menace lingering just outside her field of vision. After she makes the decision to leave L.A. and move back home, her friends decide to throw Suzy a going-away dinner party.

Entrance aims for a sort of free-floating menace of loosely the same type that movies like Martha Marcy May Marlene, Sound of My Voice and even the Duplass brothers’ Baghead plumbed, but it chiefly misses the mark. The film’s mise en scene is interesting and impressive, especially for the budget on which it is achieved. The problem is that there’s just not enough “there” there; employing a sort of pedestrian parallelism, along with a minor allergy to dialogue, Entrance stretches minute shifts in everyday humdrum events past the point of intrigue, and into tedium. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC, R, 84 minutes)

Period pieces often get a bad rap simply by virtue of the fact that so many of them center around stuffy romantic hand-wringing, and so they perpetuate the idea that there exists between the various generations an impenetrable chasm of behavioral dissimilarity and fractured emotional resonance. The utterly delightful Hysteria, however, explodes that myth. A sly yet seriously mounted comedy that plays like a post-war Ealing Studios pin-prick satire of British character and society, director Tanya Wexler’s film, about events leading up to the creation of the vibrator, might just be one of the more drolly enjoyable cinematic experiences of the year.

Hysteria unfolds in 1880s London. Worn down by doctors who regard his sanitation and “germ theory” advocacy (as in, arguing their existence) as poppycock, Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) is reconsidering a life in medicine at all when he finally secures an apprenticeship under Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce). Dalrymple’s thriving solo practice centers around treating women suffering from nymphomania, frigidity, melancholia and anxiety — afflictions of the female nervous system thought to stem from a disorder of the uterus. His enlightened methods show that such conditions can be ameliorated by relieving tensions within women — manually stimulating them to a certain emotional “reset,” if you will.

The younger, handsome and dexterous Granville proves a hit at this, and his improved lot makes him a worthy suitor of Dalrymple’s daughter Emily (Felicity Jones). As Granville works himself to numbness (literally), however, he develops more complicated feelings for Emily’s headstrong elder sister, Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a firebrand social reformer who, much to her father’s chagrin, runs a settlement house in London’s East End. After having offended a patient, though, Granville eventually finds his good fortune reversed. It’s at this point that, in a flash of tangential inspiration, Granville teams up with his friend and benefactor, the eccentric and wealthy amateur inventor Edmund St. John Smythe (Rupert Everett), to tweak a new creation and birth the vibrating electric stimulator. Amazement and good feelings ensue, naturally.

Hysteria represents Wexler’s third feature film, but her first in nearly a dozen years, after taking a break to start a family. There’s no rust, however; the movie serves as a cheeky, fun showcase for her overarching talents. From developing the material with producer Tracey Becker from a fledgling two-page treatment to overseeing some smart, beautiful production design from Sophie Becher, Wexler has superb instincts for melding potentially wild and over-the-top material with the sort of straightly played societal underpinnings that make the movie’s comedy stand out in relief. The performances are a delight, too. Dancy brings just the right amount of put-upon yet eager-to-please uncertainty to his role. Jones, so wonderful in Like Crazy, and Gyllenhaal, meanwhile, are both engaging, and credibly different romantic foils to Dancy’s character. And in down-shifted, arched-brow form, Everett is a scene-stealing delight.

Hysteria for the most part nicely balances the disparate tonalities of its story, rooted in fact but trussed up in formula, with a pinch of screwball banter; Dorothy Parker would dig this movie, most assuredly. A rather cutesy ending, yielding to romantic conventions, dings the movie a bit, but it’s still a delight — a genuine conversation-starter sure to put a smile on one’s face. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 95 minutes)

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Polisse is a French cop drama that comes across as something of a cinematic “turducken” — filling, yes, but also rather unnaturally stuffed to the breaking point with different and sometimes at odds tastes. Directed and co-written by Maïwenn (who typically eschews her surname, Le Besco), the movie connects fitfully through its sheer urgency — it’s a work of deep feeling. Vacuuming out the exotic benefit of its foreign film presentation, however, many arthouse patrons might be left wanting slightly more disciplined and pruned storytelling.

The film centers around a Child Protection Unit in a northern Paris police precinct, where ethnic and gender tensions inform the squad’s behavior, giving it the feel of a prickly family whose bickering stems from an intensity of caring and investment. Leader Balloo (Frederic Pierrot) tries to keep everyone in line, including Nadine (Karin Viard), Iris (Marina Fois), Mathieu (Nicolas Duvauchelle), Chrys (Karole Rocher) and the hotheaded Fred (Joeystarr), who is suffering from a separation from his daughter. When a photographer, Melissa (Maïwenn), is assigned by the Interior Ministry to track them and photograph their efforts, it exacerbates underlying tensions.

Nominated for 13 Cesar Awards, the French Oscar equivalent, Polisse (its title reflects a childish misspelling of the word “police”) feels lauded a bit more for its reach than its grasp. The movie has a gritty technical construction that certainly lends it a compelling, documentary-like feel, but in its panicked rush to include so many personal crises and underline the point that there is no line of clear demarcation between the professional and private lives of its characters, it comes across as too cocksure and overbearing by about half.

Its rangy and frequently jaw-dropping collection of case stories — said to be comprised wholly of material that Maïwenn witnessed directly during a lengthy research embed with police officers, or factual experiences shared by them — certainly afford Polisse its most arresting moments. And there is a delicateness to a great many of the film’s scenes with children, at least insofar as the presentation of the minors. Its performances, though, range from solid to simply over-modulated. Maïwenn opts for a baseline emotional setting of overheated, so the movie — already more of a slice-of-life portrait that doesn’t have any naturally building dramatic tension — just starts to come across as pummeling, and one-note. An ending that includes some out-of-left-field tragedy feels like cheap overreach for emotional statement, too. Polisse has moments of raw connection, but it comes across also as less than the sum of its parts — a messy canvas that equates every square inch of color with manifest profundity. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sundance Selects, R, 127 minutes)

The darling of last year’s South By Southwest Film Festival, where it picked up seven awards, Natural Selection has an interesting central idea and a pair of fairly arresting lead turns, but it doesn’t convincingly dig down into its characters, and is further bogged down and hamstrung by its technical limitations. A cracked road trip in which a devoted Christian housewife jointly rescues and falls for a hedonistic, previously unknown family member, writer-director Robbie Pickering’s feature debut is an indie effort shot through with good intention, but lacking in either deft enough execution or a tonal commitment one way or another that might tip it toward an honest recommendation.

After her husband Abe (John Diehl) suffers a stroke, Linda White (Rachael Harris, quite good) discovers that, though she’s been living in abstinence due to the fact that she can’t have children and Abe professes a belief that acted upon sexual desire outside of procreation is immoral, her husband has actually been visiting a sperm bank regularly for almost 25 years. Discovering that he might have a child, Linda sets out for Florida, where she finds Abe’s 23-year-old son Raymond (Matt O’Leary, above left) outside of Tampa, living in a filthy shack with drug paraphernalia strewn about. After convincing him she’s not a door-to-door proselytizer, and paying him $20 for his time, Linda asks if Raymond has “any hobbies, aspirations or pets.” He shoves her out of his house, but later, needing to escape a police dragnet, Raymond shows up at Linda’s hotel and submits to her desire to reunite him with the biological father he’s never known.

The mismatched pair hit the road. Raymond means to quickly ditch Linda, and take her car and money. But, somewhere between petulant and overjoyed at being pampered by her, he soon develops a certain begrudging respect. Linda, meanwhile, cut off from romantic connection for so long, finds herself opening up emotionally in ways that she hasn’t been able to with her husband.

In Linda and Raymond, Pickering has one of the main ingredients for a solid cinematic effort — two extraordinarily different characters thrown together by circumstance and forced to coexist. But he never scratches past the surface of any of the other characters — including Linda’s sister Sheila (Gayland Williams) and her high-strung brother-in-law pastor, Peter (Jon Gries, of Napoleon Dynamite) — and so a subplot involving pursuit by the latter comes across as sloppy and ill-conceived.

Linda and Raymond remain oil-and-water types, too. The film successfully sketches the contours of their guilt and loneliness, and there’s a potent scene where Linda and Raymond open up and share difficult truths about their respective pasts after breaking into a diner and cooking up some waffles. But Natural Selection requires that they ignore issues front-and-center, too, like Raymond’s drug use or Linda’s Christian devotion. These problems melt away, so caught up is the movie in the self-supposed heft and engagement of its thematic underpinnings or allegorical statement. Natural Selection possesses the loose framework of a more interesting film, but it’s an incomplete sketch rendered in disposable fashion. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Cinema Guild, R, 90 minutes)

A documentary about the man who clawed his own way out of drunkenness and then forged a path for countless others to follow by co-founding Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill W. benefits from the plainly fascinating nature of its subject — a man of contradictions and consistent struggles, who lived a life of sacrifice and service and yet always seemed racked with doubt over whether it was quite enough. Borrowing liberally from moving and articulate personal correspondence as well as audio recordings of insightful speeches, the movie overcomes a bit of problematic construction to stand as a testament to the world’s most enduring and successful program of self-betterment and healing.

It’s no reflexive hyperbole to characterize Bill Wilson — as one of the movie’s interview subjects does, along with a 1999 Time magazine cover story on the 100 most influential persons of the 20th century — as having had a near-peerless personal and positive impact on the most lives over the last three-quarters of a century. His deep and sincere desire to quit drinking (which he only turned to as a pathologically shy young adult, beset with a gnawing sense of inferiority) and his redoubled efforts in the face of many setbacks make his story gripping enough in and of itself, but when one factors in the careful formation of his 12-step program, the story takes on almost mythological proportions.

It’s a credit, then, that this eight-year labor of love from co-directors Kevin Hanlon and Dan Carracino imparts such a solid sense of Wilson as both an addict and a man. Few that personally knew him (Wilson died in 1971, from complications resulting from emphysema) are available to speak, but Bill W. has a lot of interesting archival material, and many who can talk eloquently of his time spent honing the work and mission of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Perhaps most importantly, it also has the words of Wilson himself, who, in letters to his wife Lois and recorded talks at various A.A. events spanning many years, lends stirring voice to the dark grip of his disease. Wilson’s breakthrough personal realizations and doctrine — that self-knowledge did not by itself equal safety or long-term sobriety, and that acknowledgment of a higher power must be free from dogma or theology in order to most widely connect — shaped his 12-step program, and their ability to be subsequently reinterpreted throughout the lifetime of one’s recovery.

Bill W. features loads of pantomimed re-enactment segments, with Blake J. Evans as Wilson, and other actors as key figures in Wilson’s life and the creation of A.A. These sequences are meant to breathe life into the story and open it up cinematically, but while they’re capably if tightly staged, they actually end up coming across as a bit distracting. Much more engaging — emotionally, intellectually and otherwise — are the stories of those actually helped by A.A., of which the film could actually use a bit more.

Chiefly by way of Jack Alexander’s big 1941 cover story for the Saturday Evening Post, Bill W. also touches on some of the early push-back and skepticism against A.A. — religious, general establishment and otherwise. It would have been perhaps even more instructive, however, to delve deeper into this, along with Wilson’s difficulty in bringing about racial integration and exerting control over rogue chapters that would be inclined to charge membership fees or, even more maddeningly, serve beer at meetings. These sorts of problems, deeper into A.A.’s effective social entrenchment, are all crammed into the movie’s third act, and feel like they deserve a bit more of an expanded treatment. Jettisoning the re-enactments in favor of a pursuit of this material would more strongly tie Bill W. to the present day, and its new wave of compulsions, including prescription pill abuse. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Page 124 Productions, unrated, 104 minutes)

If Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne were Japanese instead of French-Belgian, or perhaps set out to craft a homage to Yasujiro Ozu that was crossed with a sort of whimsical yet melancholic version of The Parent Trap, it might well resemble I Wish, writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest effort. A tender but yawning story of childhood desires and maturation, the movie features some superlative adolescent performances, but also seems a bit caught up in its own relaxed rhythms and beatific point-of-view. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnolia, unrated, 128 minutes)

Quirky but never false, French import Nobody Else But You, from writer-director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu, is a terrifically involving murder mystery that invests in psychological parallelism, and a kind of dark, fated bond between victim and investigator. Traversing pulpy territory, but largely with a tenderness and intelligence matched only by its crisp characterizations, the film’s droll grip loosens in the third act, under the weight of some metaphorical highlighting, but there’s still plenty of enjoy here for arthouse and mystery fans alike.



Beset by writer’s block, Parisian crime novelist David Rousseau (Jean-Paul Rouve) hears on the news of a strange death in the small, snowy town of Mouthe, nestled up against the Swiss border. Intrigued, he sets out to learn more about Candice Lecouer (Sophie Quinton, above), a pin-up gal, cheese spokesmodel and regional celebrity who’s been found buried in the snow. While the local police chief (Olivier Rabourdin) is quick to label it a suicide, Rousseau isn’t so sure. After he sneaks into the morgue, he seems to hear Candice’s voice; later he breaks into home and reads her diaries. Eventually, Rousseau finds a friend, in sensitive cop Bruno Leloup (Guillaume Gouix), for some his theories. But the more he digs into Candice’s life, the more evident her tangled web of sadness and deceit becomes.

Hustache-Mathieu uses Marilyn Monroe as his template for the blonde Candice (who was born Martine Langevin, and a redhead), and delves into the same crippling lack of self-esteem and prescription pill abuses that would fell that actress. He invests deeply in his victim, including occasional narration from her (hardly a new device, but still an effective one), and as a result Nobody Else But You has an uncommonly strong emotional pull for such a relatively simple and straightforward plot. Part of this certainly owes to the lead performances, which are tender and finely attuned things; Rouve in particular has expressive eyes that convey reservoirs of latent connection.

As the movie progresses, however, its woozy hold starts to dissipate. Some of the vagaries of Candice’s story are filled in in a fashion that, albeit clever, traces a yellow highlighter back and forth under the phrase “allegorical significance.” Less is more, yet Hustache-Mathieu — tips of the hat to The Misfits and Monroe’s breathy birthday performance to John F. Kennedy notwithstanding — seems overly beholden to cutesy plotting that ties things up with a pretty, neat bow.

Still, there’s so much to like here about the packaging that it’s hard to levy too many demerits. Akin to Twin Peaks and Fargo, two thematic antecedents name-checked in press materials, the movie also makes fantastic use of its environs. Stylishly shot by cinematographer Pierre Cottereau against the backdrop of Eastern France’s wintry landscapes, Nobody Else But You is a film that’s at once forlorn and hopeful, unfolding in a space that seems real and familiar, yet also a bit off-kilter and dreamlike. If it’s a candle in the wind, it flickers some, but doesn’t get blown out. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (First Run, unrated, 102 minutes)

A number of winning performances help keep nominally afloat ensemble baby-bump dramedy What To Expect When You’re Expecting, a colorful crowd-pleaser that is facile but about an inch deep with respect to honest relationship complications. Adapted liberally from Heidi Murkoff’s 1984 book of the same name, which peddled anecdotal and peer-driven information for soon-to-be parents, this confection works mainly as a piecemeal showcase for the talents of its cast, including Anna Kendrick (above left), Elizabeth Banks and Rebel Wilson. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 110 minutes)

The challenges of a young marriage without kids is an infrequent subject in movies, but that’s the sweet spot of examination in writer-director John Chuldenko’s bittersweet, fitfully engaging Nesting, which benefits from a pair of appealing leads and this sort of original focus, but ultimately doesn’t showcase enough psychological perspicacity or elicit a deep enough audience identification to rise quite above the sea level of bohemian curio. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (PMK*BNC/Dangertain Films, unrated, 93 minutes)