A crisp, procedural-type throwback to 1980s-style financial world thrillers about rich men behaving badly and skirting danger, writer Nicholas Jarecki’s narrative feature directorial debut, Arbitrage, has the benefit of a superb, invested cast and a narrative that’s plugged into the current zeitgeist in a compelling fashion. The story of a billionaire hedge fund manager trying to broker the sale of his company ahead of the discovery of either long-simmering financial impropriety or a tawdry and possibly criminal matter from his personal life, Arbitrage won’t necessarily win awards for originality, but it’s a sleek, engaging and efficient little cat-and-mouse thriller about some darker human impulses, and the lengths to which a man will go to maintain his rewards and style of life.



On his 60th birthday, Robert Miller (Richard Gere) appears to have it all. A Wall Street titan with a successful financial trading and investment company, Miller has a beautiful wife, Ellen (Susan Sarandon), and a brilliant daughter, Brooke (Brit Marling), who is his chief financial officer and heir apparent. He even has a secret mistress, French-born art magnate Julie (Laetitia Casta). What no one else knows, however, is that his company is poised to take a punishing dive — the result of an over-extended financial bet and fraudulent shell game to conceal it.

So Miller is already desperately trying to unload his troubled empire when an automobile accident with Julie leaves her dead. With the assistance of Jimmy Grant (Nate Parker), an unlikely face from his past, Miller selfishly flees the scene, mindful of both the secrecy of his affair and the trouble messy manslaughter charges could cause for his professional fortunes. As dogged detective Michael Bryer (Tim Roth) pursues various leads and zeroes in on whom he believes to be the culprit, Miller’s behavior gets even shadier.

Its basic narrative is essentially a smooth-blended version of Margin Call and a rangier Law & Order episode, but one really gets a sense of Miller’s captain-of-industry sense of entitlement, and also the intelligence and cloistered-world thinking that informs it. Arbitrage exists in a swirling fog of duplicity and overall grey morality — one that pulls a viewer in and binds them to the narrative, however innately familiar, by refusing to allow for the existence of white knights. Everyone here lives in compromise.

If there’s an overarching criticism, it could relate to the movie’s rather needlessly compressed timeline, which basically unfolds over less than 48 hours and requires a few silly leaps in logic. Still, Arbitrage is a competent, slickly made thriller of corruption and immorality — it knows of the noose, and how to tighten it. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions, R, 108 minutes)

There’s a familiar saying that even a broken clock is right twice a day, which Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky’s assertively minimalist Francine recalls. An emotionally impressionistic story of a recently paroled woman coping with life on the outside of prison, this character study feels like a less successful riff on Kelly Reichardt’s much more evocative Wendy and Lucy — caught up in its own metaphor, its blank canvas and broadly sketched melancholic tones an empty vessel for those who would like to automatically turn the personal into the political.

There isn’t much in the way of plot to Francine. Oscar nominee Melissa Leo stars in the title role, as a woman who leaves prison and tries to re-acclimate to life in a downtrodden lakeside town. Though awkward around pretty much all humans (she frequently doesn’t respond at all in conversation), Francine comes to life through animals. She gets a couple odd jobs at a pet store and then a veterinarian, taking in felines and other animals until her house begins to resemble an episode of TLC’s hit new show “Crazy Old Cat Lady.” Boozy interactions with other societal fringe-dwellers then ensue.

It’s not that Francine feels phony, necessarily — it just feels tripped up and smitten with the notion that in saying so little it’s actually saying a lot. Francine is a fairly realistic emotionally stunted character, and Leo inhabits her with a deadpan commitment and complete lack of vanity — and not just because of a full-frontal nude scene in which she exits the prison shower. There’s just not enough latent intrigue or outside force upon Francine, and the movie’s elliptical psychological explorations feel half-sketched rather than arty. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Washington Square Films, R, 74 minutes)

 

More high-calorie, low-sense, audiovisual CGI stimulation arrives in the form of Resident Evil: Retribution, the fifth and most roundly unsatisfying entry in the previously lithe and fun, $700-million-grossing sci-fi videogame franchise. Slow-motion action and lots of noisy gun battles cannot mask a decided lack of ideas and genuine narrative hurdles in this dispiriting claptrap, which serves chiefly as an inexorable march to the concluding set-up of yet another sequel. Returning impresario Paul W. S. Anderson has written every movie in the franchise, and occupies the director’s chair for the third time here. Rather than bring a unifying vision, however, his imagination and orchestration instead exude the slapdash feel of a hastily assembled, studio-curated greatest hits collection. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony/Screen Gems, R, 96 minutes)