Shared Darkness

The third and biggest-budgeted sword-and-sandal action movie to arrive this year, 300: Rise of an Empire unfolds in 480 B.C., but it might as well be “K.C.,” or Known Commodity. Such is the laid track that this punishingly brutal follow-up to Zack Snyder’s influential 300, which told the story of the battle of Thermopylae and a group of Spartan soldiers’ valiant but ultimately futile defense against a marauding army of Persian invaders, unfolds upon. With its low-angle shots, ominous thunderclaps, glistening pecs and bellowed celebrations of freedom, Rise of an Empire peddles a very particular, fetishized form of masculine hero worship in telling the story of a concurrent naval campaign, but all in service of little more than a state-of-the-art showcase for unremitting violence.

Snyder and Kurt Johnstad’s script, based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller after the first film’s success, is a mélange of familiar bits and half-cooked motivations ladled over graphic bloodletting. There is absolutely a place for this sort of faux-historical entertainment — for bombastic films of representational value — but Rise of an Empire lacks the characterizations and intrigue to make it work. This film could be fun, or it could be grisly and of more consequence. Instead, it’s like watching someone else play a videogame. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Warner Bros., R, 103 minutes)

Describing it as a cross between Misery, What Lies Beneath and Eve’s Bayou has the unfortunate side effect of making director Philippe Caland’s Repentance sound a lot more interesting than it actually is. A yawning, mopey thriller that unsuccessfully tries to blend psychological portraiture with pointless tension derived from torture, Caland’s film wastes a couple of invested performances that outstrip the material’s intelligence deficit.

Repentance unfolds in New Orleans, where author and life coach Tommy Carter (Anthony Mackie) lives with his yoga instructor wife Maggie (Sanaa Lathan), peddling positivity and a vague sort of synthesized religiosity. Dormant familial tensions get front-burnered when Tommy’s screw-up older brother Ben (Mike Epps) turns up out of the blue, needing money and a place to crash.

Trying to help out Ben, Tommy decides to take on an individual client who approached him at a book signing — Angel Sanchez (Forest Whitaker), a troubled handyman whose daughter Francesca (Ariana Neal) is also a student in one of Maggie’s children’s classes. Angel is fixated on the untimely death of his mother, and while Tommy’s work with him initially seems to have some benefit, he reacts violently when Tommy attempts to bring their professional relationship to an end. A confused Angel holds Tommy against his will, and begins to inflict his own brand of twisted therapy.

Caland, a French-Lebanese immigrant, has led one of those fantastically weird and charmed lives touching upon all sorts of entrepreneurial endeavors. He was a producer on Boxing Helena and the founder of JuntoBox Films, which provides a crowd-sourcing vehicle for independent filmmakers. A number of his previous directorial efforts have been of the “inside Hollywood” variety, about a filmmaker nobly struggling to make their movie, and Repentance itself is apparently a remake of a film with the same narrative, in which Caland directed himself in the role Whitaker plays here. The basic takeaway of all this is the polite suggestion that perhaps moviemaking is not the occupation for which Caland is best suited — at least on a creative level. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Lionsgate, R, 95 minutes)