The action movie equivalent of the guy who, a couple years on from university, is still concerned with the sort of empty, cock-of-the-walk masculine posturing typically associated with teenagers, Olympus Has Fallen, or “Die Hard in the White House” as the pitch meeting surely went, attempts to graft geopolitical seriousness onto a swaggering siege tale, to ridiculous effect. A slick technical packaging by director Antoine Fuqua can’t offset the lumbering plotting and patchwork quality of producer-star Gerard Butler‘s vehicle — the first of two movies this year in which a Secret Service agent has to rescue the American president from a paramilitary takeover of his highly fortified residence. (The other, Sony’s White House Down, starring Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum, arrives this June). The thrill of the original Die Hard, the filmmakers seem to have forgotten, lay truly more in its brains than brawn. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (FilmDistrict, R, 117 minutes)

Inspired by Philip Shabecoff’s book of the same name, the ambitious documentary A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet takes as its subject the very history of American environmentalism. From the foundings of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club as well as the inaugural Earth Day through the Love Canal disaster, fights for global rain forests and the counter-revolution pushback of industry during the Reagan Administration on to climate change and more, director Mark Kitchell’s wide-ranging yet compelling film — essential viewing for those with a social conscience, and an interest in where we’ve been and where we’re going in the struggle for a better, sustainable planet Earth — showcases a rare and cogent macro-portrait skill unmatched in the arena of this topic since the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (First Run Features, unrated, 101 minutes)

Over the past three-and-a-half decades, the paranormal events at a house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, a suburban tract along the south shore of Long Island, New York, have inspired all kinds of books — most notably Jay Anson’s 1977 bestseller — and 10 different movies. Make that 11, now. Director Eric Walter’s new film, however, is a bit different. My Amityville Horror is a documentary look at the events that terrified young Daniel Lutz and his family in late 1975, as told from the perspective and recollection of Lutz himself.

In December of ’75, young Daniel, part of a newly blended family, moved into the aforementioned Dutch Colonial-style house with his mother Kathy, younger brother and sister, and new stepfather George, a burly, bearded ex-Marine. Thirteen months earlier, Ronald DeFeo had shot and killed all six members of his nuclear family in the home while they slept. The Lutzes knew of this before purchasing the home and moving in, and didn’t have a problem with it. Over the next month-and-a-half, though, they would report all sorts of strange disturbances and chilling incidents, from swarms of flies and pockets of cold and overwhelming odors to apparitions, green slime and demonic possessions. In mid-January they would leave, sending a mover for their possessions and never returning again.

Rather understandably guarded by nature, Daniel, now a divorced UPS driver and father of two teens, is a frequently sympathetic figure (“All I walk around doing is protecting that 10-year-old kid,” he says of his memories, and interactions with others). He relates some of his recollections of events with detail, confidence and emotion, all of which certainly underscore his belief in them. And yet Daniel also confesses to a tremendous antipathy toward his stepfather, who would later delight in introducing himself as “that Amityville guy,” only one of many things that disgusted him about George. Daniel also doesn’t seem to connect any of this — the weird and/or supernatural events he describes the entire family witnessing, or his relative state of mind at the time in question — to what he calls George’s obsession with the occult, and skill with telekinesis.

Director Walter flirts around all these bizarre incongruities and coincidences, constructing his film in an unusual tapestral manner. Sometimes he is the off-camera interviewer, asking questions of Daniel; other times it’s a psychologist with whom Daniel isn’t in regular therapy. Still other times it’s a paranormal investigator who investigated the case years ago with the Lutzes. Also interwoven are a couple awkwardly structured roundtable-type chats with various academics and talking heads.

The net result is a movie that tantalizes, but always feels just off its mark. Walter does a poor job in establishing a basic chronological timeline of events, and, time after time, doesn’t follow up on what should be obvious questions — Daniel’s offhand mention, for instance, that he tried to kill his stepfather “many times.” Perhaps needing to kowtow a bit to keep his sensitive and potentially volatile subject in the fold, Walter doesn’t want to put to him hard questions regarding the potential suggestibility of a disaffected and lonely child reeling from “losing” the special relationship with his mother. So many years later, there is probably no easy or pat explanation of all the events in Amityville, but the aforementioned and other details (along with the fact that Daniel’s siblings declined to be interviewed for this project) help contribute to a skeptic’s point-of-view. My Amityville Horror opens this weekend at the Arena Cinema in Hollywood. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information in general, click here to visit the movie’s website. (IFC Films, unrated, 85 minutes)

What begins as a grand concept full of unusual possibilities — twinned, touching planets with opposing gravitational fields — quickly succumbs to a frustrating mixture of pretentiousness and torpor in Upside Down, Argentinean-born writer-director Juan Solanas’ dystopian romance, starring Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturgess. A gussied-up, threadbare fairytale narrative that unfolds in perpetual pursuit of memorable images over narrative sensibility, this misfire illustrates the axiom that even if not all good ideas are original, all original ideas are certainly not good.



Unfolding against a backdrop of inter-world tension, the basic split on display in Upside Down tracks loosely along the same line as the recent Total Recall remake, except with contrasting gravities — the planet “up there” is a wealthy, business-oriented and exploitative one, while the one below it exists in poverty-stricken servitude. Despite this, Adam Kirk (Sturgess) and Eden Moore (Dunst) strike up an adolescent friendship when they meet at the mountain peaks that almost touch. As teens, it bends toward romance when Adam pulls her down into his world with a rope (visiting the other planet doesn’t release a person from the gravitational pull of their native planet). They canoodle, but when interplanetary border patrol agents attack them, Eden tumbles back into her world.

Flash forward a decade. Adam believes Eden to be dead, but it turns out that she was merely concussed, and has amnesia. In his desperate attempts to gain some face time with Eden, Adam gets a job at TransWorld working on an innovative face-lift cream based on a secret, gravity-neutralizing ingredient that’s been passed down for generations in his family. So begins Adam’s quest — with the assistance of disaffected co-worker Bob Boruchowicz (Timothy Spall) — to both devise a weighted suit to mask his innate gravitational pull and woo Eden all over again, all while maintaining a separate identity.

It all sounds outrageous, I realize, and it is, on a certain level. Yet for the uniqueness of its conceit, there’s a simplicity to the actual story at the movie’s core. The setting may be distinctive, but the narrative is anything but fanciful or unmoored. In fact, it’s kind of a yawn. (Various benchmarks include Another Earth, The Vow, Cloud Atlas, The Adjustment Bureau as well as pretty much the entire filmography of Andrew Niccol.) Solanas is clearly aiming for a sort of less-is-more lyricism. The problem is that Upside Down is loaded down by misstep after misstep.

First, and most crucially, is a lack of honest investment in the putative civil unrest between the worlds. Solanas’ simple little love story has a certain ceiling of intrigue, but what initially comes across as just piddling eventually comes to feel overwhelmingly insipid when the plot begins to revolve around Adam’s universe-revolutionizing formula. Upside Down then asks viewers to believe things beyond the pale — that an almighty and evil corporation like TransWorld can’t conduct a simple chemical analysis, or that they’d eventually be foiled by… having someone beat them to file a patent application (yes, seriously). Later, Solanas shoehorns in a ridiculous stepping-stone-type chase and shoot-out (you know, for “thrills”) that feels grafted on per some weird studio note.

I could go on (and on — don’t get me started on its stupid ending), but even the idea of further dissection wearies me, honestly. Terrible isn’t the right word to use to describe Upside Down, which suffers from a myopia that comes only with the indulgence of a Big Idea; it is a real, top-shelf mess, however. Dunst and Sturgess are fine, and have an OK chemistry together, but the film suffers from having so few supporting characters of note. While Spall brings a wry personality to Bob, he can’t breathe a convincing multi-dimensionality into his character. And, lacking characters, Solanas’ movie is just this strange, enervated mash-up of poorly sketched ideas tossed across an expensive canvas. It’s a tone poem of wobbly, inconsistent pitch. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Millennium Entertainment, PG-13, 103 minutes)

An odd little duck of a film, writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin’s If I Were You kicks around enjoyably for quite a while in the same sandbox as some of Woody Allen‘s mid-career farces, before eventually pivoting and skipping off into less rewarding territory. The story of a woman who accidentally learns of her husband’s infidelity and then enters into a strange friendship and pact with his unwitting mistress, this bouncy but meandering comedy would benefit from an editorial haircut that trims down some of its less inspired subplots.

It’s a shock for New York City focus group and marketing manager Madelyn Reid (Marcia Gay Harden) when she stumbles across her husband Paul (Joseph Kell) one afternoon in a restaurant, in a lover’s clinch with his mistress. When he gets nervous and scampers off after an exploratory phone call from her, the young woman, a would-be actress named Lucy (Leonor Watling), is despondent and hysterical. Madelyn follows her back to her apartment, where she foils a bungled suicide attempt.

When her unsuspecting rival opens up to her, Madelyn at first sees an opportunity to seize the upper hand. But Lucy, stressing their shared unhappiness, suggests that they start making choices for one another (“The way to fix our lives is to stop making our own decisions!”). Madelyn slowly accedes, and trips into a contemporized production of King Lear when she accompanies Lucy to an audition. Hijinks ensue, wouldn’t you know — with Madeyln lying to Paul about an affair she’s not having, Paul getting jealous about a co-worker of Madelyn’s whom he believes to be the offending cuckolder, and a handsome and affable stranger, Derek (Aidan Quinn, quite good), popping up at a moment of crisis.

It’s not merely the introduction of the King Lear gambit that makes If I Were You easy to imagine as a stageplay; it’s a fairly hermetic story, with lots of talky one-on-one or small couples scenes. This tack works for a while, but a sense of claustrophobia eventually sets in, aided by the movie’s lack of compelling visual vocabulary. It’s a low-budget offering, understandably, but Carr-Wiggin and cinematographer Bruce Worrall deliver a flat telling, and Aidan Leroux and Sean Breaugh’s spare production design offers little by way of distinguishing features.

If I Were You‘s abundant early charms are built largely around the amusing interplay of the distraught, distracted Harden and the deliciously flighty, simple-minded Watling. But several subplots — including one with married co-worker Keith (Gary Piquer), who’s enthusiastic about Paul’s infidelity, figuring it opens up the door for he and Madelyn to have a fling — aren’t as amusing as Carr-Wiggin imagines them to be. A far tighter focus, and re-imagination of the piece as basically a three-hander, would have given it greater punch and pay-off. As is, If I Were You is only worth a look for hardcore fans of the talent involved, or indie comedies of existential crisis more broadly. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. If I Were You opens in select theaters nationwide, and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall 3. (Kino Lorber, R, 115 minutes)

Horror has always been a popular format for anthologizing, both because of its DIY roots and the fact that certain kernels of elemental discomfort often don’t quite rise to the merits of a full-length story or movie. A massive anthology film rooted in those children’s educational books from days of yore, producers Tim League and Ant Timpson’s The ABCs of Death corrals 26 short movies from 26 different directors — assigning each a letter of the alphabet and then giving them free reign in choosing a word (or phrase) to encapsulate a story involving death. It’s an interesting idea, certainly, but one that never fully congeals or takes flight, owing to the vast qualitative spread of the offerings.

A natural (and popular) selection at both last year’s Fantastic Fest and the Toronto Film Festival, The ABCs of Death features a number of known or critically anointed young genre directors, but also as much as anything serves as a hand-up showcase for young talent. That experiential diversity is reflected in the breadth of the work. Some entries are under-sketched while others, like Jon Schnepp’s aptly named WTF!, are stylistic orgies of pointlessness. Many, like Noburo Iguchi’s giggly-gross Fart, actually have a comedic bent.

Of the spread, though, seven were by my count passably entertaining, and only around five others truly superlative. The cream of the crop share a penchant for experimentation — the lifeblood of short-form film and video. Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet’s heady, gorgeously shot, investigational Orgasm leaves a mark upon one’s memory, as does Simon Rumley‘s grim Pressure, a slice of kitten snuff porn. Srdjan Spasojevic’s Removed tantalizingly hints at something deeper, while Xavier Gens’ deeply unsettling XXL presents a fat girl’s self-immolation. The best effort, though, may just be Marcel Sarmiento’s slow-motion Dogfight — a twisted, how’d-they-do-that rendering of an underground death match between man and dog.

It sounds perhaps racist to say, but The ABCs of Death could have perhaps benefited from a few more Western voices. A number of entries dote in yawning fashion on weighted topics that are familiar psycho-sexual stand-ins (Japanese schoolgirls, female body taboos), while others — with Nazis, and a girl with a tattoo of the exploding Twin Towers on her breasts — seem designed for empty shock. This compilation lacks some great genre minds, and overall pales in comparison to other recent anthologies. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnet Releasing, R, 129 minutes)

Cop thrillers are ubiquitous, but it’s fairly rare to see a movie that takes as its primary focus other emergency responders. That novelty is but one of several factors that help distinguish and elevate The Call, an enjoyably nerve-racking thriller of imperilment that takes as its heroine a distraught 911 call center operator. Solid performances by Halle Berry and Abigail Breslin abet a rigorous, smart packaging from director Brad Anderson.

If much of the enjoyment of The Call is not necessarily in what happens so much as how it happens, the movie still imparts good, popcorn-level tension and thrills. Further adding to its differentiation, The Call also delivers a nice end twist that isn’t so much a wild revelation as just a little spiky add-on of moral ambiguity. This is pop Hollywood filmmaking done right — stirred cocktail of tension, with the ability to also actually spark a conversation. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony, R, 94 minutes)

Language of a Broken Heart is exactly the movie that one expects it to be — a frustrating quality for some, perhaps, but smooth medicine for those who trust and like writer-actors’ puppy dog tales that unfold loosely in the vein of the work of Edward Burns. An earnest, uncomplicated and funny-around-the-edges little romantic comedy about a guy on the rebound but still stuck in psychological orbit of his ex, multi-hyphenate Juddy Talt’s movie works best as a showcase for his talents.

The story is paper thin, even by genre standards. Nick (Talt) is a best-selling author who can write eloquently about feelings and love, but can’t ever seem to find a woman that doesn’t cheat on him. (There’s some truth-in-therapy insights about his romantic picker to be tilled, but this isn’t that movie.) When his fiancée Violet (Lara Pulver) suggests a break after a dalliance with another man, Nick leaves New York City and heads home to reconnect with family and friends, including best pal Cubbie (Ethan Cohn) and his mom Mimi (Julie White). A luggage screw-up leads him to meet free spirit Emma (Kate French), who wears berets, shoots a mean game of pool and pushes Nick out of his comfort zone.

Emma is of course a total cinematic fantasy construct — the perfectly made-up girl with beaming white teeth and “dorky hip” glasses who, you know, also manages an unopened antiquarian bookstore she recently inherited from her grandmother. She’s fun-loving and “spontaneous,” and uses words like scallywag. And Nick, as written, isn’t necessarily much better developed; he’s kind of clueless, and a doormat, which doesn’t track with his professional success.

Still, just when one might be ready to either punch themselves in the head or the filmmakers in the nuts over the preciousness of said logline and description, it’s a pleasure to report that Language of a Broken Heart wins out — at least on the margins, for those predisposed to have an interest in laid-track rom-coms — by way of its way of its performances and interplay. It’s kind of nice that Talt doesn’t resort to slapstick-y hijinks or gross-out humor; his screenplay, however functional the characterizations, is at least rooted in the interactions and recognizably human frustrations of those characters. Oscar Nuñez, of The Office, contributes a funny supporting performance as Nick’s therapist, who’s undergoing his own divorce, and there are some smart little well-observed barbs, too, as when Cubbie, in only the manner a best friend can, takes the piss out of Nick by saying, “I read somewhere that depressions effects losers the most — that’s just science.”

Talt, who sort of recalls Owen Wilson by way of Chris Evans, is an appealing peg on which to hang Language of a Broken Heart, even if it is a well-worn jacket. And French is beautiful and appropriately, engagingly flirty. Apart from a nice time-lapse bit in Times Square, director Rocky Powell delivers a fairly straightforward and blandly shot interpretation of the script. There’s never a real suspension of disbelief here — one always knows they’re watching a movie. But it’s a popular track for a reason, so rom-com fans with an indie appreciation might enjoy just saying, “Play it again, Sam.” For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For the movie’s trailer and more information, visit its eponymous website. (House Lights Media, R, 98 minutes)

Nope, the directorial debut of Jules Stewart, the mother of Twilight star Kristen Stewart, isn’t a flash-forward sequel to James Belushi’s K-9, or the tale of an exponentially high mountain range. Instead, the bewildering K-11, at once intense and archly presented, is a careening updating (send-up? celebration?) of women-in-prison exploitation flicks like Caged Heat. In his Hollywood Reporter review from its Turin Film Festival premiere, Stephen Dalton characterized K-11 as feeling like “a deranged John Waters remake of The Shawshank Redemption,” but a Lee Daniels re-imagination of a gender-indiscriminate Girl, Interrupted might be another appropriate shorthand descriptor of the movie’s looniness.

A pulpy, psychologically hollow and emotionally indiscernible mélange of phony jailhouse intrigue and showy gender-politicking, with a bit of anal rape sprinkled in, Stewart’s film is too ridiculous to be taken seriously and not tightly scripted and purposefully tongue-in-cheek enough to track as parody (behold the photo above). For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its 15-city theatrical engagements, including the Laemmle NoHo 7 in Los Angeles, K-11 is also available day-and-date across VOD platforms. For more information, click here to visit its website. (Breaking Glass Pictures, unrated, 88 minutes)

The ghost of Christopher Dorner, the former Los Angeles police officer who held the imaginations of television news producers captive for a week several weeks ago when he went on a rampgage, shooting several cops and their family members as part of a twisted statement of grievance, hangs over The Kill Hole, a well meaning indie drama of post-traumatic stress disorder and ex-military account-settling. Despite a fairly convincing evocation of mood by writer-director Mischa Webley, this spare yet affected would-be thriller never ripens past the point of a wobbly character study. It’s a half-developed Polaroid, and as such an artful yet shrug-inducing time-whiler. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here to visit the film’s website. (RBC Film Group, unrated, 92 minutes)

The United States of America is celebrated as the land of the free, and heralded as a place of great opportunity for entrepreneurs. While true, there’s also a dark grey lining to the silver optimism of that sunny-faced reading, because for almost every societal innovation that helps change and better the way we live, there’s some tale of an enterprising inventor getting screwed out of credit or otherwise left twisting in the wind due to corporate ruthlessness. The engaging documentary Genius on Hold details one such story, and if its attempts to weld a larger allegorical framework extending both backwards and forward in time onto a more structured familial narrative come across as rather hamfisted overreach, there’s still enough of interest here to generally satisfy alt-history buffs. It’s a movie that underscores that the winners and losers of some battles of capitalism aren’t always confined to a single generation; its shadows are long ones. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Freestyle Releasing/Top Cat Productions, PG, 91 minutes)

The title of Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey is somewhat misleading. An indulgently apportioned look at the classic rock band Journey and their recent reinvention with Arnel Pineda, a Filipino lead singer found through YouTube, director Ramona Diaz’s film takes what could and by all rights should be a fun, engaging fairytale story and stretches it out to near interminable lengths. Two parts shambling tour document and self-congratulatory biography for every one part cross-cultural coming-of-age story, the sporadically lively Don’t Stop Believin’ is all mic-ed up, but also all mixed up.

This is essentially a glad-handing fan project all the way, which certainly isn’t the worst thing in the world with a bit of clarity of vision. But Diaz’s film — which at 105 minutes could use more than just a little haircut — has no strong editorial point-of-view, and as such it drags and fumbles away one’s attention, like a song on repeat. Truly hardcore Journey fans may well greet it with open arms, but others will stop believin’ in its meaningfulness less than halfway through. (See what I did there?) For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its various, rolling theatrical engagements, Don’t Stop Believin’ is also available on VOD beginning today; for more information on both methods of viewing, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Cinedigm/Docurama Films, unrated, 105 minutes)

A documentary snapshot of American photographer Gregory Crewdson‘s decade-long quest to create a series of haunting, exactingly arranged, melancholic portraits of small town life, director Ben Shapiro’s Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters is a nonfiction affirmation of the latent sorrow and loneliness attached to certain surface images, and in its own way a quiet celebration of that almost telepathic connection. An example of narrowcasting through and through — Shapiro punts on a variety of ways to expand the canvas of his storytelling — the movie achieves a certain hold for those inclined toward psycho-social rumination, but by and large fails to connect its subject’s work to society at large.

Crewdson, perhaps best known, if at all, as the guy responsible for the print ad campaigns for Six Feet Under as well as Yo La Tengo’s album art, is an artist with a vision every bit as meticulous as filmmaker David Fincher. His photographs are essentially vast moviescapes crystallized into a single frame — at their core otherworldly moments of arrested time in the lives of the disenfranchised or quietly desperate, with a barely submerged drama lurking just underneath the surface. This sort of attention to detail helps explain the costs involved, which can often rival an independent film production, as well as Crewdson’s inclination for involving himself in every department of his crew.

Almost all of Crewdson’s work is done in the same small Massachusetts town, including his “Beneath the Roses” series, which Brief Encounters captures. A friendly if not quite effusive guy, Crewdson talks some about the impact of seeing David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet (which has a similar interest in suburban decay), as well as the influence of Edward Hopper and Alfred Hitchcock too; though it evolves into something else, one of his photographs even takes Psycho as its leaping-off point. But these shared anecdotes have a certain surface-only quality. It would be interesting to hear more about Crewdson’s artistic inspirations, which seems to draw as well from Diane Arbus and Stanley Kubrick.

As the son of a psychoanalyst — he recalls laying on the ground as a kid with his ear to the floor of his father’s downstairs office, and that being a potent metaphor for his work now — Crewdson has a keen grasp of the myriad inner feelings and impulses that drive his photography, which can’t be said for all artists. He’s also open to discussing them (unlike, say, Lynch). But Shapiro seems to leave a lot of heavy or more probing questions unasked. Similarly, while some of the small town residents who serve as the subjects in Crewdson’s pictures are interviewed, it would give Brief Encounters a nice sense of contrast to further spotlight their thoughts and impressions about his work.

For those inherently interested in photography, and the relationship between images and human feeling, Shapiro’s hands-off tack more or less works. But, somewhat frustratingly, Brief Encounters also presents viewers with all sorts of unexplored side avenues. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, whose exclusive Los Angeles engagement takes place at the Laemmle Music Hall, click here to visit its website. (Zeitgeist, unrated, 77 minutes)

A lot of movies wash over you, and that’s OK, even — many are almost designed to. Others, however, cast a pall over your day, and stick to your bones. Alex Gibney‘s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God is an example of the latter. One case of child sexual abuse is certainly a tragedy, but the stories at the core of this movie are beyond the pale. A gut-punch nonfiction look at the Catholic Church child sex abuse scandal as filtered through the experiential prism of a group of victims from a single Midwestern school for the deaf, and their long quest for justice, the Oscar-winning Gibney‘s documentary takes what seems by now to be an almost depressingly proforma tale of outrage and humiliation, and connects the dots to a much larger and systemic international cover-up by the Vatican. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 107 minutes)

A terrifically fresh narrative backdrop and the often delightful interplay of two timing-savvy comedians, Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, help give wings to director Paul Weitz’s Admission, an airy and engaging adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel of the same name. Evincing a pleasant yet not too demanding sense of depth, this comedy of midlife awakening digs into issues of loss and love but in an ultimately comforting manner, resulting in a crowd-pleasing film that should connect heartily with slightly more adult audiences.

In seriocomic films like About a Boy, In Good Company and Being Flynn, Weitz has tapped into familial rediscovery via stories of adrift protagonists who either struggle with or feel outright that they don’t have anything to offer emotionally. Though shot through with a harried quality which feels like a bet-hedging surrender to the casting of Fey (this could easily have been her stab at Truman Show-type reinvention, if only the filmmakers would have had more courage), Admission slots comfortably in the aforementioned canon of Weitz, as a loose-limbed movie whose nominal sins are of omission rather than commission. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Focus, PG-13, 106 minutes)

An achingly earnest immigration drama whose compelling low-budget artistic vision can’t save it from its overly programmatic dramatic roots and muddled assemblage, Dreamer is the sort of expressive indie film one wants to like and recommend more than one honestly does and can. A recent premiere at the Cinequest Film Festival, writer-director Jesse Salmeron’s movie is loosely in the mold of something like Chris Weitz’s well received A Better Life, from a couple years back — each film showcases the razor’s edge of life as an undocumented immigrant in the United States, in which one simple accident or slip-up can send a hard-working but unfortunate person tumbling into criminal desperation and/or terrible moral compromise. The problem is, Dreamer isn’t as good, and poignant, as the macro story it’s telling. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Undocumented Productions, unrated, 91 minutes)

Somewhere deep inside The Last Exorcism Part II may lurk an intriguing idea for a character-based horror movie follow-up, but it never manages to quite tease it out. Ditching both the mock-doc framework of the original 2010 possession film (which was inventive but undone by some thunderously stupid editorial choices in the third act), as well as its flashes of dark humor, this technically efficient but wholly pointless follow-up fails to expand on its mooring mythology in as compelling a fashion as in something like the Saw and Paranormal Activity franchises. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (CBS Films, PG-13, 88 minutes)