Infidelity and sexual temptation are understandably rich and frequently utilized dramatic devices, but writer-director Massy Tadjedin’s evocative and engaging Last Night is a much more interesting, intellectually ambitious and emotionally honest exploration of refracted desire than almost all of its recent cheating-hearts cinematic brethren. A well-acted dramatic roundelay of enticement starring Keira Knightley, Sam Worthington, Eva Mendes and Guillaume Canet, the film stands out as a rare example of a work more interested in evoking universal thoughtfulness than telling its audience what to think.



In her feature directorial debut, Tadjedin, the screenwriter of The Jacket, shows a remarkable psychological insight into both men and women, as well as considerable trust in her material, by having all of her characters speak relatively openly and honestly. She’s interested in neither subterfuge nor judgment, but instead the human condition. Last Night is characterized by honest adult exchanges about romantic and sexual craving, and there’s an erotic charge to the dialogue without it ever becoming tawdry. Tadjedin also spotlights in savvy fashion two different types of temptation — the potential thrill of someone new, and the allure of someone with whom circumstances never quite properly aligned. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Tribeca Film, R, 93 minutes)

There’s a natural drama and tingly anticipation that marks all reunions of once thick-as-thieves adolescents, which is why of course the subgenre of movies that specifically trades in anniversary gatherings is so healthy and robust. Another filing in this category arrives in the form of writer-director Aaron Metchik’s 10 Years Later, a low-budget, character-based thriller of sorts in which a high school reunion goes awry, and ends up with a kidnapping.

The movie unwinds in a small town in California, where Josh (Jake Hoffman) still lives locally in his boyhood home, his once-promising potential arrested by anxieties that have resigned him to life as a pizza delivery guy. Aspiring actor Adam (multi-hyphenate Metchik, above left) and uptight white-collar professional Miranda (Kathleen Rose Perkins) are a couple, while nervous Becky (Senta Moses) is still in pain from discovering that her significant other has been cheating on her. Big-man-on-campus Darrell (McKinley Freeman, above center) is now a professional football player, with a young son in tow (apparently a babysitter can’t be found). And then there’s Kyra (Rachel Boston). She’s the straw that stirs the drink, a stripper who’s tried to bury the hurt of her past by adopting a vibrant, cheery, anything-goes exterior.

Everyone gets together in the afternoon at Josh’s house, and after some genial back-slapping some slightly more revelatory yearnings and inclinations get trotted out. When Kyra and Becky run out for cigarettes and refreshments prior to their evening reunion proper, an incident with Garrett (Cabin Fever‘s James Debello, gagged above), an old classmate who nastily forced himself on Kyra, quickly spirals out of control. After smashing him over the head with a bottle, Kyra and Becky load Garrett in the trunk of their car and return to Josh’s place. Naturally, the rest of the gang freaks out, and debates what to do. Compounding the problem is the fact that Garrett is now a police officer. Needless to say, some Four Loko, beer pong and a good-natured group game of Parcheesi do not ensue.

10 Years Later, which just screened at the 14th annual Dances With Films festival, draws upon a rich lineage of more talky, urbane high school and college reunion flicks — from the notable, like The Big Chill, to other festival works, like Seven and a Match — but it also blends in elements of the “accidental kidnap drama,” as found in The Ref or the forthcoming The Perfect Host, starring David Hyde Pierce. Its plotting is fairly rangy. The movie stretches its legs and works through an inquisitive appearance by Garrett’s sheriff father, an escape attempt, an incident with another interloper who could identify the group and, eventually, a fire. But as often as not, these naked stabs at drama elicit more shrugs than nervous emotional involvement, or certainly thrills. The twists herein feel reactionary in measure, a collection of goosing pivot points rather than the logical extension of characters’ actions.

Metchik’s film feels like it would be more interesting if it had a more settled soul, and just let its characters talk through some of their individual and collective issues — or, conversely, it introduced a sustained, single outside investigatory force/threat (like Garrett’s father) earlier on, forcing the group to come together and present a united front. Attempting to vacillate back and forth between buried emotions and supposed action thrills doesn’t do the performers many favors, creating a tonal imbalance that makes it hard for them to stay on the same page. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (S10 Productions/BP Cooper Pictures, unrated, 97 minutes)

For all the visual thrill that modern studio moviemaking provides, there’s still a special charge that comes from discovering or submitting to, essentially, just a wordsmith — someone with a fresh, canted comedic perspective, damn any sort of slick camera razzmatazz. It’s just that sort of loose-limbed joy one finds with Stags, a New York-set, sort of Jewish-inflected version of Swingers, in which an on-the-prowl group of guys approaching 40 cope with a friend’s marriage and sudden death. The feature film directorial debut of television veteran Jamie Greenberg (co-creator of Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego?, and story producer on Michael Moore’s TV Nation), Stags just world premiered at the 14th annual Dances With Films festival, and could easily find wider embrace in arthouse distribution, among that cross-section of cinephiles who enjoy watching men act a bit like cads, and then defend or justify ,their actions in hyper-articulate fashion.

Because every group must have one, Snedden (Mark Giordano, above left) is the confident ladies’ man of Stags. A member of the “Oy Meets Girl” dating site, Victor (Matthew Rauch, above center) is the nebbish of the group. Price (Jesse Joyce, above right) is a jaded, cynical stand-up comic who unceremoniously destroys his relationship from the stage. The movie’s narrator and central figure, meanwhile, is Jack (Benim Foster), a frizzy-haired trophy store employee who in a pinch could serve as a stunt double for Michael Richards. Owing in significant part to the fact that she doesn’t understand how her name relates to the national Democratic ticket of 2004, Jack’s friends regard his girlfriend, Keri Edwards (Kimmy Gatewood), as something of a dim bulb, and he doesn’t much disagree. In fact, he loathes even calling her his girlfriend, and when a longtime pal returns from Los Angeles and springs his wedding on the aforementioned quartet, Jack weasels out of even asking Keri to accompany him.

When their friend suddenly passes away on his wedding night, however, Jack and his pals are thrown for a loop. It doesn’t bring about teary reflection and maturation, though, even after an awkward shiva. Emboldened by the newly discovered fact that their pal was a porn star, Snedden decides to “screw his way through the alphabet,” while Jack strikes up a friendship (and possibly more) with the quasi-widow, Amber (Jessica Faller). Victor, in the mean time, ponders procuring an escort. Against this backdrop of pitched lunacy, the guys individually and collectively spin their wheels, kicking and screaming against the sort of benchmarks of adulthood that they, in unspoken fashion, fear as death by papercuts.

Greenberg’s writing experience is on ample display, and gives Stags its lift. There’s some terrific observational humor throughout (Snedden muses about olives’ “little anuses,” while Price assays the tendency of liberal white guys to say “man” to blacks working in retail or service industry jobs), and the rapport between the lead actors is solid. Though it’s definitely nowhere near as black-hearted, the movie sort of recalls something like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where there’s a value placed on the pace and connectivity of the patter itself, above and beyond any emphasis on its emotional content. Stags bears the mark of a sitcom soul, in other words, though that’s hardly a disqualifying sin in this context. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Stags Films, unrated, 101 minutes)

A world premiere presentation at the just underway Dances With Films festival, The Millennium Bug boasts a simple, streamlined concept, and features poster art that strongly echoes Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, so one could be forgiven for prematurely celebrating the birth into the genre world of a groovy, gory and blissfully self-aware new creature feature. Unfortunately, writer-director Kenneth Cran’s film, while admirably incorporating some low-tech elements, never has any fun with its zonkers conceit, and even touches let alone rises above the sum of its clichéd parts.

The movie is on New Year’s Eve, 1999, as Byron (Jon Briddell) takes his new wife Joany (Jessica Simmons) and 18-year-old daughter Clarissa (Christine Haeberman, the second runner-up on VH-1′s Scream Queens 2) camping. Hoping to escape the Y2K computer glitch (aka “the millennium bug”) that he believes will cause the civilized world all sorts of problems, Byron drives his family deep into the Sierra Diablos mountains, to an abandoned lumberjack town known as Mason’s Grove. What he doesn’t count on, however, is a rampaging clan of in-bred hillbillies, who — in part since Pearlene (Ginger Pullman) has recently birthed another deformed monstrosity — abduct the trio and drag them back to their secluded cabin in an effort to replenish their stagnant, infested gene pool.

While Byron and Joany are held elsewhere, the family prepares Clarissa for her “wedding” to young Billa (John Charles Meyer), the group’s hotheaded leader-in-waiting. What none of these folks know, however, is that a giant, fanged bug — a phenomenon that excited cryptozoologist Roger Patterson (Ken McFarlane) has been tracking for most of his adult life — is about to be born in their neck of the woods, and enter the world none too peacefully.

Unfortunately, while its inspiration may lay in movies like The Evil Dead and The Hills Have Eyes, as well as a rich litany of Japanese creature features, The Millennium Bug wears a lot of these influences too readily on its sleeve. The hillbilly characters especially (and all their behaviors) are just a yawning collection of things seen many times before, from an old man picking feverishly on his banjo to a deformed, Quasimodo-like sibling. The characters shout and hoot and holler in menacing fashion, and there’s no particular rhyme or reason to the mock-creepy set design of their rotting cabin. Other tidbits, too, don’t track or follow, as when Billa curses, is admonished not to do so by a fired shotgun… and then immediately curses again, free of consequence. It sounds idiotic, simplistic and perhaps more than a little unfair to criticize a movie like this for being all surface and no clever subtext, but The Millennium Bug never deepens in intrigue in any fashion that might grab or focus your attention beyond the fleeting moment. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Squire Film Shoppe/No CGI Films, unrated, 89 minutes)

A world premiere, in-competition title at the just underway, 14th annual Dances With Films festival, writer-director Steve Garrett’s Wake is a rangy, philosophically-tinged drama that connects mostly on the value of its production design, which gives the movie a certain grungy Venice Beach authenticity.

For a while it looks as though Wake may be a low-fi companion piece to Lords of Dogtown, chronicling the So-Cal skate scene. Bobby (Jerad Anderson) is a talented but emotionally isolated skater who’s trying to scrape together enough money to procure a better life for his stripper girlfriend Carmen (Monica Pitpit), and her little kid from a previous relationship. Unfortunately, her psychotic ex, Tony (Joseph Raymond Lucero), is still in the picture, and not always at the discouragement of Carmen. Lacking sponsorship deals, and facing pressure from Carmen, Bobby is forced to attempt a series of dangerous jumps for pay. One of them goes awry, paralyzing him from the waist down.

When he gets out of the hospital, Bobby goes to live with Carmen’s grandmother, Chelo (Renee Victor), and ponders what he’s going to do with his life. While there, he’s witness to a backyard brawl involving Tony, and gives assistance to a seriously wounded guy, seemingly healing him. This catches the attention of Father Tom (writer-director Garrett, pulling triple duty), who believes that Bobby has been divinely blessed with the ability to heal the sick and wounded.

In this regard, Wake is very much of a piece with the recently released Sympathy For Delicious, in which a cynical paraplegic (Christopher Thornton) fitfully connects and withdrawals from a skid-row priest (Mark Ruffalo) trying to similarly channel (some would say exploit) his faith-healing gifts. One of the differences is that in Wake, though, Bobby is actually able to heal himself, and so in short order he’s standing, walking, and then even skating again. While Father Tom pushes for him to continue using his gifts, though — including to benefit Paula (Janna Bossier), a young girl stricken with some vague terminal illness — Bobby is more concerned with recapturing his burgeoning skating career.

Working in HD video, cinematographer Sacha Riviere captures a fair amount of nice outdoor images, and he and Garrett bring to bear their ample commercial experience to convey a realistic backdrop, and also showcase the movie’s skating bits in a way that is engaging without being ostentatious. Anderson, too, has a nice, relaxed screen presence. While a lot of young actors would attempt to overdial the emotion, he never gets too high or too low.

Still, Wake isn’t rigorous enough in its plotting, design and execution to really sink its emotional hooks into an audience. And while the story covers a lot of ground, the ways its pieces fit together don’t always make immediate sense, and the film’s end twist isn’t the knockout blow its creators believe it to be. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Always Moving Pictures, unrated, 81 minutes)

Above-the-line stars get most of the credit and glory for Hollywood successes, but dozens if not hundreds of other specially gifted artisans labor on most big-budget productions, often going their entire careers without so much as an acknowledged tip of the proverbial cap from the moviegoing public at large. Director Craig McCall’s fascinating documentary Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, then, attempts to right this wrong, shining a light on Cardiff, who on March 25, 2001 — more than five decades after winning his first Academy Award, for his stunning work on Black Narcissus — became the first cinematographer ever presented with an honorary Oscar, for his exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences.

If there’s a strike against this picture, it’s that it unfolds in a very linear and somewhat unimaginative fashion. Cameraman lacks a real spine, and doesn’t delve at all into Cardiff’s (doubtlessly fascinating) personal life. More about what shaped him in his young, formative years (there’s one scene that touches on this, but it seems the tip of an iceberg), as well as how Cardiff coped for so long with the itinerant lifestyle of a cinematographer and director, would have given McCall’s movie a much-needed extra dimensionality. Regardless, as is, Cameraman is a captivating look back at a transitory time — before basically all movies were made in color — when cinematography was slightly more welded to the emotion of the material, and used unabashedly to heighten the effect of genre elements. That Cardiff’s unique role in this era, and spanning the periods that both preceded and followed it, finally receives its own recognition is indeed a special thing. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Strand, unrated, 94 minutes)

Bill and Kate (Michael Sheen and Maria Bello), a married couple already on the verge of separation, find their lives torn completely apart when their college-age son, Sam (Kyle Gallner), goes on a shooting rampage at his school, and then takes his own life. In the pained weeks that follow, as they avoid an inquisitive media by first staying with family and then holing up a dingy hotel room, the tragedy both brings them together a bit while also exposing the seams of old grudges and wounds.

The rawness and unprecious nature of the lead performances in Beautiful Boy help director Shawn Ku’s film achieve a certain hold, enough so that fans of Bello and Sheen, or merely engaging, quality drama, will certainly find some reward in this low-fi offering. Cinematographer Michael Fimognari’s lingering handheld camerawork abets this restrained tack, which largely (though not entirely) eschews calculation and pointed drama in pursuit of something more melancholic and ephemeral.

Still, Beautiful Boy cries out for if not a stronger parental investment into delving into Sam’s anguished past (a thread which Ku clearly wants to avoid), then at the very least a more crisply observed final unraveling or more direct and sustained outside pressure upon these characters. (A burgling of the couple’s home by a souvenir-curious teen seems utterly contrived.) There are some pockets of intrigue, including a writer, possibly with ulterior motives, cozying up to Kate, who works as a proofreader. But for the most part the audience is a step ahead of the film when it comes to other conflicts (like the stress involved in Bill’s return to work), and thus left to only bob along in an ocean of nondescript grief. (Anchor Bay, R, 100 minutes)

Writer-director Mike Mills’ Beginners is the sort of movie that you never really stop wanting to love, even as it flits about and tests the boundaries of your attention. Warm, full of life and little tidbits that illuminate the bonds of love in a more elliptical yet realistic fashion than the plodding literalness of most conventional Hollywood relationship dramedies, it is distinctive — the product of a singular point-of-view, not some canned corporate mandate for surefire emotional response.



When Oliver (Ewan McGregor), a quietly grief-stricken graphic artist, meets unpredictable actress Anna (Mélanie Laurent, above) at a party, it triggers memories of his father Hal (Christopher Plummer), who passed away several months earlier, after a battle with cancer that followed his coming out of the closet after 45 years of marriage to Oliver’s mother. As the pair try to craft a relationship, Oliver thinks back over his own life, and ponders the lives of his parents.

Mills (Thumbsucker) has a canted sensibility that gives his movie a handcrafted, idiosyncratic feel, unsurprising since Beginners is based on personal experiences that dovetail with the narrative. Interweaving scenes from Oliver’s childhood with other narrated bits, and sequences with both Hal and Anna, Mills crafts an impressionistic snapshot of a guy fumbling toward a greater contentment. Scene to scene, this makes for some magical moments that capture how life lessons often arrive on tape delay, occurring long after some inciting incident. Mills, too, has a superb instinct for low-key comedy, evidenced in the sardonic subtitled interjections of Hal’s forlorn Jack Russell terrier, which Oliver takes in.

But there isn’t much of a sense of destination here. Despite ample chemistry, the love story between Oliver and Anna never completely sets sail, at least not in a way that rips and tears at a viewer’s heart, in pained identification. And while some of the maladies or hang-ups that plague the pair seem elucidated, there’s also a nagging feeling that they aren’t given a full, substantial airing and accounting by the characters themselves. This is a messy valentine — fitfully wonderful but also incomplete. (Focus, R, 104 minutes)

There’s a special type of moviegoing misery to be found in self-important period pieces, and that’s just the sort of screaming boredom that Empire of Silver, the nearly impenetrable, emotionally arrested feature film debut of essayist and playwright Christina Yao, delivers.

A drama focused on a powerful banking family in the late imperial/early Republican era of China, the movie rather gorgeously establishes its setting, but never locates a single compelling character or imparts any sense or sort of reality of what its subjects’ lives must truly have been like. The monkish lifestyles forced upon the mid-level financial managers that populate the movie’s telling of a son’s attempts to follow in his father’s business footsteps would seem to offer up a world of rich contrast and resentment, compared to the more lavish ruling class. But Yao never exploits this, and with the minor exception of Tielin Zhang, the acting here is all so wooden as to invite unfavorable comparison to a collection of popsicle sticks. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (NeoClassics Films, unrated, 112 minutes)

A delicate tone poem ensemble set in Portland, writer-director Matt
McCormick’s Some Days Are Better Than Others is an unfussy rumination on
modern human disillusionment and connection. The so-called “mumblecore”
genre has gotten a bit of a bum rap for the dawdling pace and seemingly
lesson-free nature of many of its entries, but there’s a pleasant and
refreshing sense of cinematic rejuvenation that comes with submitting to
a film that feels entirely of a piece in all its elements, but also
unburdened by any sense of desperate, dutiful narrative shock. If, in
their plotting, most movies roughly resemble a river current, Some
Days Are Better Than Others is like a thin, burbling brook, winding its way
across a varied landscape without even the intention of carving out its
own path over and through its surroundings.

Recently selected to play New Directors/New Films, the prestigious film series organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, Some
Days Are Better Than Others centers around Eli (James Mercer, above, frontman of acclaimed indie rock band The Shins), a listless would-be substitute teacher who can’t return to college and procure his degree because of some crippling student loans. To pay rent for the house he shares with his roommates, Eli takes odd jobs through a local temp agency, though even this work is often dependent on the availability of the car he borrows from his step-grandfather Otis (David Wodehouse), a kindly old soul taken with the kaleidoscopic images he can conjure up by placing soap bubbles under a microscope.

Eli’s story is interwoven with two other tales that loosely intersect the same small world/emotional space. Katrina (Carrie Brownstein, late of Sleater-Kinney), who works at a pet shelter and harbors dreams of being cast on a reality TV show, finds her world turned upside down when her boyfriend callously dumps her. Camille (Renee Roman Nose), meanwhile, works at a Goodwill-type donation center, and is unsettled to the point of preoccupation when an urn containing the ashes of a young girl shows up in a batch of bequeathed items.

Some
Days Are Better Than Others is a sensitive and soulful film, populated by characters recognizably weighed down by both circumstance and a greater, free-floating ambivalence. On their (unrelated) song of the same name, from their 1993 album Zooropa, U2 opined that, “Some days take less but most days take more, some slip through your fingers and onto the floor.” The feature film debut of music video and short-form director McCormick embodies just this sense of encumbrance. Plenty of movies track the wandering, distracted anxieties of randy young twentysomethings, overwhelmed and uncertain of where their lives are headed. It’s a much greater degree of difficulty, pegging the ennui and melancholy of thirtysomethings and those (like the character of Camille) even older, but McCormick does so by not injecting contrived crises or false, over-articulated panic into his story. Reminiscent of the works of Miranda July, the target at which the thoughtful, engaging Some Days is aiming is a smaller one than most modern mainstream movies even attempt to hit, and it does so in beautiful fashion. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Palisades Tartan, unrated, 93 minutes)