Shared Darkness

He’s won a Tony Award on stage, for 2005’s The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, but Dan Fogler‘s film career has been defined chiefly by crass and/or live-wire best friend roles, in movies like Good Luck Chuck and Take Me Home Tonight. A wild-eyed, barrel-chested bundle of energy loosely in the mold of a Chris Farley, he’s the guy (along with Josh Gad, whom he lost out to on a starring role in the forthcoming HBO biopic of Sam Kinison) who gets the offers that six to eight years ago were going to Jack Black and Zach Galifianakis.

Naturally, though, as with many a true creative type, Fogler has chafed a bit at this limited vision of his talents. He’s delved into some indie productions over the past several years, to sometimes very engaging effect, as with Kevin and Michael Goetz’s Scenic Route, penned by Kyle Killen. He also apparently watched a bunch of the History Channel’s old Mayan prophecy programming and surveyed the viral mania rampant in the culture at large to inform his second effort behind the camera, and as whacked-out a passion project as one is likely to see this calendar year, Don Peyote. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (XLRator Media, R, 98 minutes)

The trial, convictions and subsequent quasi-voiding of the guilty verdicts of West Memphis, Arkansas teenagers Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley in the 1993 killings of three other, younger adolescents have already served as the basis for four high-profile documentaries, so director Atom Egoyan’s Devil’s Knot arrives somewhat anticlimactically for those who have been gripped by the lurid true crime tale over the past two decades — a queasy, repackaged hits collection of judicial incompetence and malfeasance heaped on top of human tragedy. For those wholly unfamiliar with the case, meanwhile, it’s no less of a mixed bag. If the narrative muddle is somewhat understandable, given the many unanswered questions surrounding the terribly sad events, neither does its lack of a clear mandate gel into something heady and artistic, like a vivisection of crime’s impact on community. Instead, Egoyan’s film embraces posed and expeditious dramatic signifiers, rather than plunging more daringly into the mouth of madness. For the full, orignal review, from Paste, click here. (RLJ/Image Entertainment, R, 114 minutes)