An intriguing little cross-cultural curio that plays like a woozy, jazz-improv riff on romantic futility and destiny, South Korean director Hong Sang-Soo’s In Another Country is a trifling cinematic doff of the cap to French New Wave cinema, but kind of beguiling nonetheless. It’s an arthouse bon-bon all the way, but one that fans of French actress Isabelle Huppert will surely not wish to miss.



In Another Country, which played in competition last year at the Cannes Film Festival, unfolds in three segments. In each, Huppert plays Anne, a French visitor to a small South Korean beach town named Mohang. In the first, though, she’s a filmmaker visiting a colleague (Kwon Hae-Hyo, above right) and his pregnant wife (Moon So-Ri), who is suspicious and jealous of their relationship. In the second, she’s the well-off wife of a traveling businessman who slips away to rekindle an affair with a Korean filmmaker (Moon Sung-Keun) in turn gripped by his own petty covetousness. In the final story, Anne is a lonelier divorcée traveling with her friend (Yoon Yeo-Jeong), a university instructor. Undercurrents of infidelity and spiritual and romantic settledness factor into each segment, as does a kind of goofy lifeguard (Yoo Jun-Sang) with whom Anne crosses paths.

Hong is considered one of the more established (and prolific) auteur filmmakers working in South Korea today, and with In Another Country he delivers another aesthetically bold work, a movie of watchwork-like moving parts in which characters feel can variously feel three-dimensional and entirely representational. Like many writer-directors, his work often plumbs some of the same themes (neuroses born of relationships) and unfolds in familiar settings (beaches are a favorite). In this regard, In Another Country sometimes feels like a whimsical repackaging of past material.

Huppert, however, gives the movie — Hong’s first work in predominantly English — a fresh and amusing spin. (A scene of her baying at goats is a left-field delight that keeps on giving.) Hong elicits engaging, naturalistic performances from his actors, and in sketching out these different possible lives of Anne he seems to be making a commentary on the ephemeral nature of romance, while also fetishistically indulging his love of the French New Wave. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Kino Lorber, unrated, 89 minutes)

The very jokey forthrightness of its title, Gangster Squad, evokes a kind of disposable pop-art mash-up of The Untouchables and L.A. Confidential, but with the seriousness of an old Saturday morning serial, and that’s just what director Ruben Fleischer’s rendering of screenwriter Will Beall’s period piece crime drama achieves. No thunder-clap piece of cinema, this, but instead a square-jawed movie that more or less works to the degree that one watching it is wishing to be entertained at that very moment and only that moment in time, Gangster Squad is a good-looking showcase for a lot of actors who have in the past done and will do much more nuanced and interesting work down the line.



The story, rooted in some modicum of truth, unfolds in post-World War II Los Angeles, where a straight-arrow veteran, John O’Mara (Josh Brolin), finds himself recruited by Police Chief William Parker (Nick Nolte) to lead an off-the-books team of specialists tasked with taking down an ambitious and bloodthirsty ex-boxer turned gangster, Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn), who has designs on opening a lucrative gambling wire service. Cohen has judges, some higher-up cops and other beneficial parties already all in his pocket and on the take, so O’Mara rounds up the rakish and cynical Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling), sharpshooter Max Kennard (Robert Patrick), a brainy guy (Giovanni Ribisi) and the two requisite ethnic types (Anthony Mackie and Michael Peña, sorely underused), and starts busting down doors, making life difficult for Cohen’s operation. Fisticuffs, car chases and shootouts ensue, with things additionally complicated by Jerry’s burgeoning yet still secret relationship with Grace Faraday (Emma Stone), Mickey’s etiquette tutor (!) and not-very-committed girlfriend.

O’Mara isn’t much for tactical subtlety; his approach is all-frontal assault, all the time, which kind of mirrors the movie’s goofy, anything-goes-in-the-name-of-entertainment philosophy, where torrents of misplaced cover fire evoke flash-forward memories of 1980s actioners that give Gangster Squad a weird hybrid contextualization. It’s a period piece set in the 1940s but very much paying homage to ensemble buddy action flicks of a different era.

What helps distinguish Gangster Squad is its sense of humor. Beall, a former police officer turned debut but now in-demand screenwriter, writes winkingly self-conscious noir-style dialogue, in which redheaded gals are “tomatoes” and all the men talk about how they didn’t Come Back From The War to let their city turn into the sort of hell-hole Cohen is turning it into. There are a couple fun sequences involving a botched raid, a jailbreak and the planting of a bug device in Cohen’s home. So the movie eschews moral murkiness in favor of programmatic conflict and slick gamesmanship. What’s the big deal, right?

The issue is the characterizations are so thin and its main conflicts and resolutions so familiar, right down to the dialogue exchanges that doom various supporting characters, as to invite mental check-out. And when Gangster Squad has to pivot into meatier dramatic terrain, especially in its final act, that’s a problem. Most of the actors, then, lean back into tough-guy posturing and rawhide-chewing, almost like they’re doing a radio play. Notable exceptions are Mireille Enos, as O’Mara’s pregnant wife Connie, and Gosling, who locates layers of sardonic remove and bubbling-to-the-surface inner decency and conflict in Jerry.

Gangster Squad isn’t terrible, really. In fact, it’s quite watchable for most of its running time. Cinematographer Dion Beebe and production designer Mather Ahmad craft an appealing look for classic-era Los Angeles. The vehicle, however, isn’t a classic. A bit of a tonal mish-mash, it’s a lowered stock car in need of a tune-up and a couple fresh coats of paint. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Warner Bros., R, 113 minutes)

If, as Susan Sontag once opined, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is, then the fever-grip that the intimacy of celebrity tabloid photography exerts is, on a psychological level, an entirely understandable phenomenon. Still, in a society with broad freedoms of expression and the press, the junction of those liberties and personal privacy is a messy, complicated one. The documentary $ellebrity digs into that arguably symbiotic relationship between jostling, freelance photographers and their famous, sometimes unwitting subjects — examining celebrity culture, the increasingly bold intrusiveness of the paparazzi, and the jumbled intersection of authorized and unauthorized image management.

If it sounds empty and salacious, it’s not. And, of course, given the celebrity angle, it’s certainly not academic and boring, either. Directed with aplomb, the film is helmed by renowned rock ‘n’ roll and icon photographer Kevin Mazur, whose legitimacy and connections no doubt helped land the roster of famous actors and musicians who share their thoughts as interview subjects — a slate that includes Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lopez, Elton John, Sarah Jessica Parker, Sheryl Crow, Salma Hayek and Kid Rock. A smart, noteworthy socio-cultural snapshot, $ellebrity evinces a surprising depth, charting the history of paparazzi and how new media in particular has helped shape the landscape of entertainment journalism over the last 30 years. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here to visit the film’s website. (D&E Entertainment/Run Rampant Productions, unrated, 90 minutes)

A superbly crafted low-boil drama about an East German doctor who must balance dedication to her patients with a potential escape to the West, Barbara represents the latest entry in a continuingly successful working relationship between actress Nina Hoss and director Christian Petzold. A smart, engaging story built on telling details, the film gets its hooks into you the old-fashioned way — through character — and highlights the difficulties and cost of living by principles.



Winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear Prize for Petzold, Barbara unfolds in 1980, in a small rural town in East Germany. Idealistic Barbara Wolff (Hoss) used to be a top doctor at a respected Berlin medical facility, but has been banished to a provincial pediatric hospital after applying for an exit visa out of the communist country. Tracking her movements is Klaus Schutz (Rainer Bock), a representative of the Stasi secret police who views Barbara with a personal contempt (“If she were six you’d say she’s sulky”) that seems to extend beyond his tasked surveillance of her.

Even though she ranges from cool to outright standoffish, Barbara’s supervising doctor, Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), keeps making attempts to get to know and help her. A delicate dance ensues. Barbara is touched by Andre’s altruism, but suspects, not without good reason, that he’s also an informant charged with reporting on her movements and activities. As she dodges Klaus’ observation and puts up with unannounced, intrusive and humiliating searches, Barbara continues to plot an escape to West Germany with her lover, Jörg (Mark Waschke). Burgeoning, complicated feelings for Andre, however, throw into relief a looming, difficult decision about what sort of future she truly wants.

The performances here are precise and modulated, like a Swiss watch; small glances and moments of silence are pregnant with quiet meaning. Hoss, whose previous four collaborations with Petzold include the striking Yella and Jerichow, is an actress of uncommon intelligence as well as chameleonic beauty; when she puts up a stern front her inner light can seem utterly impenetrable, and when she drops it the vulnerability can be shattering.

The commingling of the personal and political (also a big part of Yella) on the part of Petzold is impressive. He doesn’t cram in a lot of chronological markers to continually reinforce and remind viewers that he’s telling a period piece story. Instead, he gives his movie a thin sheen of formality that both obscures and heightens a plot which could otherwise be construed as melodramatic, and lets an audience consider and arrive at the allegorical weight on their own terms. But Barbara is never hammy or overwrought. It plays out on an altogether human terrain, marked with recognizable uncertainty, heartbreak and other turmoil. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Adopt Films, PG-13, 105 minutes)

A nonfiction film about hydraulic fracturing aimed largely at debunking Josh Fox’s Oscar-nominated Gasland, FrackNation is a slice of agitated environmental pushback, an impassioned but slapdash cinematic rebuttal masquerading as a legitimate investigative documentary.

Directed by right-leaning filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who’s previously taken antagonistic runs at Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and environmentalism more generally, FrackNation bills itself as an exploration for the truth about the petroleum and natural gas extraction method known widely by its shorthand nickname of fracking. In much the same fashion as Michael Moore in his earlier works, McAleer casts himself as a crusading journalist wading into the fray for answers, speaking truth to power and demanding accountability from bureaucracy.

Certainly FrackNation is interesting and valuable for the voice it lends to residents of Dimock, Pennsylvania (one of the chief settings of Gasland), who don’t feel any threat to their drinking water or health from mining. It shows, quite capably, the difference of opinion in this town. The problem is that McAleer fancies those espousing environmental concerns as “green extremists,” and by and large treats the fact that both local and national opinions of support for fracking exist as disproving evidence that anyone could have any issues with water potability or other health problems caused by fracking.

The movie makes the spurious leap of logic that the fact that there are some examples of methane present in drinking water dating back many decades as proof that no drinking water is so contaminated by fracking, and takes as gospel the word of mining companies in regard to the inviolability of their methods. FrackNation addresses the proprietary (read: secret) chemical additives pumped into the ground in massive amounts during fracking only by having a scientist say that the same thing could be true about coffee (!), and it does not address at all the crucially important issue of the storage and disposal of waste water run-off.

FrackNation is emblematic of some of the worst aspects of lazy social-activist filmmaking, both right and left (see also: Top Priority: The Terror Within, a documentary about Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Julia Davis), in that it throws out a bunch of tidbits of information and theories about adversaries’ motivations without much regard to a cogent macro argument. In McAleer’s case, this includes everything from a sourcing allegation about a specific insert shot in Gasland and a weak character assassination on a public official with adjudicating authority on a fracking bill to the assertion that American environmentalists are perhaps somehow in league with a Russian energy mafia determined to monopolize the future of natural gas shale drilling.

Most problematically, however, FrackNation peddles a false narrative. In striking minor nativist chords about how the generations-old livelihoods of rural Americans are at risk by environmental activists, McAleer completely ignores the many other difficult external economic realities facing small, family-owned farms being swallowed up by conglomerates. If a farmer absolutely requires the additional income of leasing his land for natural gas drilling in order to sustain his business, is the primary threat to that way of life those who seek transparency, tighter regulation and/or, yes, even a ban of hydraulic fracturing?

FrackNation is not a totally hackish work, but it does start from a bogus and willfully cordoned off point-of-view, and exhibits a desire to grind axes more than uncover truth. Promulgating the rather ludicrous claim that Big Media — that familiar right-wing boogeyman — has peddled fear-mongering about fracking, the movie wraps itself in a cloak of besieged indignity, content to scream “Fair and Balanced!” rather than engage in a more honest exchange of ideas. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, which opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Pasadena Playhouse 7, click here to visit its website. (Hard Boiled Films, unrated, 77 minutes)

One can certainly enjoy The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” David Bowie‘s “Young Americans” or even, to employ a more recent example, Fun’s “We Are Young” on their own musical terms, in more or less disposable fashion. But for anyone who’s ever felt a stronger kinship to those songs or others because of their sterling evocation of adolescent energy and possibility, nonfiction cinematic equivalent Only the Young is a film for you — a delicate coming-of-age snapshot which locates the unextinguished youth in all of us. The Audience Award winner at the AFI Film Festival, co-directors Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims’ film is swollen with sensitivity and sentiment, capturing in moving fashion some of the wobbly first steps of teenagedom.



Only the Young follows the intertwined stories of three Southern California teenagers who live in rundown canyon country. Garrison Saenz is an introspective and polite wallflower; Skye Elmore, his on-again, off-again girlfriend, lives with her grandparents since her father is in prison; and Garrison’s best friend Kevin Conaway, a glassy-eyed, socially awkward and frequently shirtless misfit, is a skateboarding fanatic who would be most at home in Dogtown and Z-Boys. Yet preconceived notions of these kids as aimless and empty-headed “troubled” teenagers evaporate almost immediately, upon first contact. Garrison and especially Skye are committed Christians, and Garrison and Kevin have a mentor/father figure in the form of a proselytizing skateboard benefactor. The film captures the rhythms and nuances of their friendships, and how things change both when Garrison gets a new girlfriend, Kristen Cheriegate, and it seems that first one and then two of the three might have to move away.

In both its dusty, Southwestern setting and objective telling, Only the Young recalls involving nonfiction offerings like Darwin: No Services Ahead and the engrossing web-doc series Interview Project, executive produced by David Lynch. Tippet and Mims, however, make superlative use of editorial cross-cutting to purposefully blur time. Direct-address interviews are blended with thoughtfully framed, gorgeously captured fly-on-the-wall scenes, and arranged in an order with more emotional than chronological fidelity.

Its subjects are engaging narrators of their own lives, and surprisingly perceptive in the manner that teenagers often are, just when one is ready to write them off as lacking any analytical prowess. The movie’s rawness and candor is its strongest selling point, but it’s often funny, too. (“Right, but rats are, like, a lot smarter than you guys,” says Skye, when urging Garrison not to leave food, no matter if it’s locked away in the pantry, in the abandoned house he and Kevin are intent are fixing up as their skate practice crash-pad.)

Only the Young is also notable for what it doesn’t show, and how this shades and impacts its story. Technology is acknowledged but it isn’t omnipresent, which is partially owing to the socioeconomic conditions of its subjects but also clearly an editorial choice. School isn’t shown or even much touched upon, and while family life is discussed, it isn’t the focal point of the movie. Tippet and Mims understand that, almost regardless of individual situation, kids experience and process these variables as fixed givens — incidental details in the grander story of Themselves.

The filmmakers do not impress their own narrative agenda upon Only the Young, but instead allow the accumulated significance of certain anecdotal, throwaway tidbits (Kevin is a cutter) to more naturally color a viewer’s interpretation, understanding and acceptance of these characters. The unique result is a stirring portrait of the contradictory innocence and rebellion present in all adolescents, not just these “alt-minded” kids on the fringe. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more on the movie, which opens this week in Los Angeles at the Downtown Independent, click here. (Oscilloscope, unrated, 73 minutes)