The presence of a very recognizable ensemble cast can’t save The Big Bang, a colossally strange film noir misfire that plays like a TV pilot run amok, and is bound to go down in history — to the extent that it’s remembered at all — only as the stumper answer to the niche cinematic trivia question, “In what film does Antonio Banderas have a sex scene with a waitress who spews jibberish about particle physics, and also share two separate scenes with a robe-clad Snoop Dogg and a robe-clad James Van Der Beek?”

Far and away the most interesting and involving thing about the nonsensical The Big Bang is its cinematography, from Shelly Johnson, who also lensed Jurassic Park III, Hidalgo and the recent remake of The Wolfman. Trading in big, canted angles and other imaginative framing, Johnson sketches a neon-lit urban hellscape that gives the material an electric charge otherwise lacking in its story proper. Even a score by ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, seemingly a big deal and nice fit, fails to connect. The Big Bang tries to inject the soupy moodiness of the noir genre with a surfeit of cool and edgy thrills, but, ironically, it’s actually just a big snooze. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay, R, 101 minutes)

Those who’ve ever seen Punk’d can attest to the improvisational comedy skills of Dax Shepard, who put both himbo bewilderment and mock outrage to good use for Ashton Kutcher’s hidden-camera show, which eventually launched him into costarring roles in proper big screen entertainment like Without a Paddle, Employee of the Month and Idiocracy. Shepard’s latest film finds him chafed by the constraints of comedy, however, and working to try to break out of the box into which he feels he’s been put by Hollywood. A low-budget, long-on-the-shelf, industry-satirizing mockumentary in which Shepard recruits a pal to help him mount a self-financed, Chuck Norris-type martial arts flick, Brother’s Justice meets with some mixed early success before eventually crumbling due to a lack of focus.

With supporting appearances by Tom Arnold, Jon Favreau and Kutcher, Brother’s Justice has considerable heart, pluck and amiable, ambling chemistry, and to the degree that one grades on a curve and takes those qualities into account, they’ll find some reward herein. It also has some quite funny bits, too, both small and seeded throughout. The chief problem, though, is that the film doesn’t have a well-defined angle driving it. Lip service is paid to the idea of Shepard having a love of martial arts since childhood, but the movie doesn’t convincingly portray this, or invest the concept with enough manic, obsessed energy. Neither does Brother’s Justice tap into or define the wounded ego of a comedian seeking industry relevance via overseas box office clout — another motivating factor with which it briefly flirts.

While Shepard has a certain shaggy charm, he unfortunately plays “himself” here as a total idiot, absent any true sense or grasp of the film world business realities involved in such a wild, self-financed venture. Ergo, while often amusing from scene to scene, all of the satirical underpinnings feel flat and undercooked, unattached to a more grounded reality. Diverting, improvisational, flight-of-fancy comedy is fine, but the mockumentary format requires a stronger, more focused and honed conceit that Brother’s Justice just doesn’t possess, alas. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 81 minutes)

A soupy, entirely unconvincing grab bag of unmotivated behaviors and unearned emotional payoffs, An Invisible Sign feels chiefly like part of some woebegone, misguided stab at indie credibility and image adjustment for star Jessica Alba, who sports infantalizing pigtails and playacts vaguely emotionally retarded throughout. A risible, nonsensical effort that tries to meld occupationally oriented coming-of-age drama with an emotionally stunted romance, the film collapses early on under the weight of yawning plotting and labored eccentricity. Several recent independent films, including Matthew Lillard’s Spooner and Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne’s Adam, have to varying degrees of success tried to mine this seam of wounded-soul/mentally askew romance, though none have particularly punched through in the commercial marketplace, and neither will this ill-considered entry. Receiving only a halfhearted theatrical release, An Invisible Sign will quickly and deservedly disappear from theaters, before baffling completist fans of its star when it hits home video and ancillary markets. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (IFC Films, unrated, 96 minutes)

A former high school teacher and novelist turned filmmaker, South Korean Lee Chang-dong has, with movies like Peppermint Candy, Oasis and Secret Sunshine, crafted a body of work ripe with mesmeric understatement, shining a light on quotidian pain and delight, and locating meaning as much in how his characters don’t react to certain situations as in any more active plotting. His latest film, Poetry, the Best Screenplay award winner at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, centers on a sixtysomething grandmother, Mija (Yun Jung-hee), who, after learning two bits of potentially devastating news, tries to center herself and find release in a poetry class at a neighborhood cultural center.

Laden with metaphor and seeded with a (culturally specific, some might say) passivity that is decidedly out of step and fashion with much American cinematic storytelling, Poetry isn’t explicitly a morality play, by any stretch of the imagination. Nor is it even really a movie about the slide of dementia, like Ken Watanabe’s Memories of Tomorrow, since the onset of Mija’s condition is so minimal, as presented here. Still, the film has a lyrical delicateness that marks it as something special, different and thought-provoking. Poetry is beautiful, just not for everyone. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Kino, unrated, 139 minutes)

A mélange of apocalyptic western, gothic horror and vampire action movie, Priest — decidedly not to be confused with the 1994 Miramax drama starring Linus
Roache — won’t win any awards for narrative originality, that much is certain. Based on TokyoPop’s popular graphic novel series written by Min-Woo Hying, the film nips liberally from everything from the Blade and Resident Evil franchises to The Searchers and Legion, director Scott Stewart and star Paul Bettany‘s previous collaboration. Still, while achingly familiar, Priest is streamlined and executed well enough to merit a pleased tip of the cap if not a rabid embrace from those comfortably within the movie’s demographic wheelhouse. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Screen Gems, PG-13, 87 minutes)

Everyone knows about the international muscle of Hollywood’s movies, but generally lost in all the talk about entertainment being the United States’ most dominant export is recognition of the somewhat amazing value and strength of transpositions of various American small screen hits, from Married… With Children to even, yes, The Nanny.

When Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal is tapped by Sony Pictures Television to help advise the producers of a Russian remake of his hit sitcom, he trips to Moscow, by way of a rabbit hole. Rosenthal arrives to find a rundown studio that looks vaguely like the dungeon from Saw, as well as writers and executives who seem unable or unwilling to culturally process the comedic opportunities or even the idea of a henpecked husband.

A charming and interesting real-life cultural mash-up, Exporting Raymond follows Rosenthal’s travails — from dealing with a costume designer who wants to use the show as a personal platform “to educate people about fashion,” the sensibility of characters’ costumes be damned, to casting hurdles that prove out the universality of several old showbiz maxims. With his owlish expressiveness and droll demeanor (advised to get kidnapping and ransom insurance, he’s freaked out that it apparently happens enough to go by the nickname “K&R”), Rosenthal is a warm and witty guide to this unusual travelogue, a sociocultural bauble which locates reserves of empathy where one might not expect. (Samuel Goldwyn, PG, 86 minutes)

If many modern actors frequently locate a personal commercial sweet spot and then mine that seam for all it’s worth, a lot of directors tend to do the same thing. Only a few filmmakers robustly embrace the sort of eclecticism that marked the careers of their early- and mid-20th century counterparts. After all, they want to continue working, and in an ever-competitive creative arena part of the dance of getting studios and/or financiers to keep giving you lots of money to make films is to have an identifiable “brand” or identity, be it as a peddler of comedy, action or hand-wringing dramas.

A notable exception to this line of thinking is Werner Herzog, whose intellectual curiosity and appetite for life drives him to follow up the award-winning nonfiction film Grizzly Man with something like the batshit-insane Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a series of small operatic shorts, and then the crime drama My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done. Amassing almost five dozen combined long- and short-form credits behind the camera over the course of his incredible career, Herzog is at his best when, tangentially or directly, examining the complex relationship between man and animal, or humankind and the intractability of nature.

His latest film, the astounding documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, allows him the opportunity to do this. For over 20,000 years, Chauvet Cave, in France, was completely sealed off by a fallen rock structure, its football field-sized interior littered with the petrified remains of Ice Age mammals. In December, 1994, a group of three explorers stumbled across the perfectly preserved structure, sensing an extremely faint draft and loosening rubble to gain entrance. The fascinating cave paintings they discovered — dating back over 30,000 years, almost twice as old as previous finds — were so pristine that researchers at first doubted their authenticity, until they were later confirmed by carbon dating.

Maintaining the integrity of the cave and this astounding cultural discovery of course became of paramount importance to the French government, who strictly limited seasonal access, declared certain portions too unstable and unsafe to explore, and installed an exterior door to preserve the atmospheric conditions. Herzog’s engrossing film, then, provides a spellbinding public record of this space, unseen by human eyes for millennia. Filming only from narrow metal catwalks that span the cave, Herzog and his skeleton crew utilize 3-D to capture the artwork in all its contoured glory. The images and feelings they evoke are in and of themselves stirring, but the mystery and imaginative flights of fancy only deepen when it’s revealed that researchers are able to identify one artist individually, by the palm prints he left, and that several of the images were painted at least 5,000 years apart.

A companion piece of a sort with Herzog’s recent Encounters at the End of the World, in which he tripped to Antarctica, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is — at once quite simply, and also in a fashion most complicated — a movie about human imagination, desire and possibility. It is about all the things that are deepest inside of us, as a species. Herzog’s thick accent — which vaguely sounds like what one imagines Arnold Schwarzenegger doing a Christopher Walken impression might sound like, or perhaps vice versa — gives the movie’s narration a fine gloss of bemusement that nicely counterbalances his more ruminative, intellectual musings. Yet Herzog also has a canny knack for pulling back, eliciting wonderment through silences, and allowing an audience to trip headlong into the images, losing themselves in their primitive beauty.

In his documentaries Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog worked as a kind of conjurer of elemental dread and awe, delving into modern man’s relationship with his surroundings, and what he views as the unforgiving harshness of the world. This film, which ranks among his crowning achievements, shows that that same sense of questioning has existed for all of humankind, and is innately within us, not merely a product of modernity. (IFC Films, unrated, 90 minutes)

For those attuned to such things, yard sales often carry their own metaphorical moroseness, silently weighted down as they are with the broken dreams of a busted-up family, unwanted move or failed business venture. It’s against this backdrop that the dramedy Everything Must Go unfolds, telling the story of an alcoholic businessman, Frank Porter (Will Ferrell), who loses his job and finds himself locked out of his house by his fed-up, filing-for-divorce wife, with all his possessions stacked on the lawn. Instead of moving on, Frank just sort of hangs out and starts drinking, waiting for a life epiphany and killing time with Kenny (Christopher Jordan Wallace, son of the late Notorious B.I.G.), a neighborhood kid, and Samantha (Rebecca Hall), a pregnant newcomer to the neighborhood.

Taking a break from more conventionally ribald comedies, Ferrell gives a solid performance here, and in his feature film debut, writer-director Dan Rush strikes a nice balance between quiet, inwardly-reflected comedy and something melancholic, tinged with an unarticulated desperation. The film isn’t really all that serious about Nick’s alcoholism, but one doesn’t mind terribly — at least until a putative catharsis in the final act, which arrives falsely, hinging on a narrative pivot with Nick’s sponsor, Frank (Michael Peña), that is simply not believable. If life, as John Lennon said, is what happens while you’re busy making plans, it’s also, in its simplest terms, the sheer accumulation of stuff. Pleasantly offbeat but not aggressively so, Everything Must Go showcases that axiom, in both the material and figurative senses. (Roadside Attractions, R, 96 minutes)