In conversation with a colleague recently, the subject of Stephen Dorff came up. With Dorff’s recent electronic-cigarette ads, his steady stream of light-lift, scruffy-faced straight-to-video roles and reputation for an offscreen life of, ahem, considerable enjoyment, he’s like the actor equivalent of a 1980s-era hair metal band that never packed it in, I opined. He’s an unapologetically dick-swinging actor — just livin’ the ring-a-ding dream, baby.



Despite cheap shots many might take, it’s not that Dorff doesn’t have talent, and isn’t capable of restrained work (see Somewhere) or even some interesting excess (um, see Shadowboxer). In the new Tomorrow You’re Gone, however, he assumes a series of increasingly empty noir postures and grimaces, expediting the plunge into frustrating pointlessness of this curious psychological drama.

Not that he’s the only one to blame — adapted by Matthew F. Jones from his own novel Boot Tracks, Tomorrow You’re Gone arrives the subject of considerable offscreen drama. A lawsuit by the author seeking, among other things, an injunction against its release accuses director David Jacobson (Down in the Valley) of sullying his work beyond redemption. So… who’s the chief culprit? It’s hard to say, and even harder to really care about, given the level of overwhelming indifference the movie engenders.

Out of jail after a four-year stint, Charlie (Dorff) gets set up in a dungy apartment courtesy of a shadowy contact/ex-colleague known as the Buddha (Willem Dafoe), who also tasks him with killing someone. Charlie promptly meets a woman with gold shoes on a city bus, Florence (Michelle Monaghan, cycling through a set of fairly beguiling if always symbolic emotional markers), and tells her his name is Samson. She’s an ex-adult film actress, and wouldn’t mind helping Charlie relieve some stress, but he’s all for car shopping and chaste dinner dates, which “keeps his head clear” and leaves him with more free time to mosey off to another neighborhood and do this killing. The additional rub? It’s clear Charlie is not of completely sound mind, and that his interactions with others may represent some sort of fractured reality.

Jacobson delivers a nice technical package, aided by some moody music from Peter Sallet. His composition and framing sometimes suggests Charlie stepping out of body and almost watching himself, which is interesting. But there’s simply no hook or appealing tension to this movie as it unfolds, only counterbalanced scenes of Dorff’s gruffness and Monaghan’s pinprick flirtations. Tomorrow You’re Gone is a muddled game of hardboiled pattycake that I’m certain even all the participants themselves would admit doesn’t convincingly or satisfyingly sell an absorbing story or point-of-view. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Image, R, 91 minutes)

Indie import Hunky Dory, starring Minnie Driver, may have been initially conceived before the hit small screen show Glee, but it suffers mightily in comparison to the pop cultural shadow of that series, playing like a mash-up of it and a decidedly retro version of High School Musical, as filtered through the gauzy lens of underclass-artistic-exuberance that’s plagued a certain subset of comedic-leaning British offerings ever since Billy Elliot.

The 1970s-set story of an idealistic drama teacher (Driver) who endeavors to fire up her apathetic students by staging a glam rock/pop adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Hunky Dory builds to an undeniably poppy and somewhat cathartic finale, but Laurence Coriat’s screenplay is a superb example of mere dutiful execution, lacking much distinctive flourish in either character or dialogue. The movie drags on too long as well, needlessly investing in backstories that aren’t that interesting and don’t add that much to the main plot of the production. When director Marc Evans is able to concentrate on some of the actual inventive musical stagings, there’s often a rush of wind under the film’s wings. Alas, that’s not frequent enough to fully redeem matters. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, unrated, 110 minutes)

Obsession, in all its various shapes and forms, is a rich thematic vein when it comes to filmmaking. And of course labyrinthine myths and legends are integral parts of storytelling proper, but they also crop up and gather naturally around a variety of Hollywood productions — from ambitious but troubled blockbusters to the works of secretive and/or iconoclastic auteurs. All these swirling elements come together in Room 237, director Rodney Ascher’s nonfiction indulgence of a bunch of theories about the true meaning of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film The Shining — hypotheses that, ultimately, even Mel Gibson’s wild-eyed character from Conspiracy Theory or Jim Carrey‘s digit-fixated paranoiac from The Number 23 would have trouble believing.



So does that make Room 237 — its title referring to a notably spooky suite in the film — a waste of time, or even boring? No, not at all. Even though several of these analytical readings don’t pass a cursory smell test, and all have been pretty much debunked by Leon Vitali, the late Kubrick’s personal assistant on The Shining, that doesn’t dint the film’s power as a testament and kind of paean to the sticky psychological hold of great art. One interviewee views Kubrick’s liberal adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling novel as an indictment of the U.S. government’s treatment of indigenous peoples, while for another — seeing significance in the number 42, and its divisibles — it is a sweeping parable about the Holocaust. Still another sees The Shining as an elaborate confessionary lament on the part of Kubrick for his involvement in faked space exploration footage with the government. (“I’m not saying we didn’t go to the moon,” he says, before opining that he’s setting himself up for an audit. “I’m just saying that what we saw was faked, and it was faked by Stanley Kubrick.”)

What Ascher doesn’t do, for better and worse, is offer up push-back or analysis of this conjecture, or query his nine different subjects about whether any of these theories might in fact be mutually exclusive. (In fact, Ascher doesn’t even show his subjects, some of whom are interviewed over the phone, it’s evident.) A movie of more intellectual rigor or ambition might have tackled that. Instead, Room 237 is a platform for their compulsions and fixations, and in its unironic embrace of their singular truths it sometimes takes on the feeling of trying to engage a schizophrenic bus passenger on their own conversational terms.

Still, the flipside of this is that Room 237 kind of ably conjures up the isolation and disorientation of The Shining itself, abetted by a great score from Jonathan Snipes and William Huston. It’s also just a good deal of fun, in its own wonky, slurry way. Powered by a deep and abiding affection for both The Shining and Kubrick in general, Room 237 is an amuse-bouche of remix culture — a very specific film that is also about the dance of intention and interpretation in art. In his scrupulous avoidance of debunking, it’s clear that Ascher’s aim, essentially, is to throw a spotlight on interpretive criticism and embrace, and underscore that the relationship between art, artist and the culture at large is a complex one, with frequently hazy boundaries. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Midnight, unrated, 104 minutes)

A winning little dramedy hung chiefly on the solid peg of Lou Taylor Pucci‘s lead performance, The Story of Luke offers up an experiential snapshot of adult autism without descending into cloying sentimentality or didactic moralizing. Written and helmed by first-time feature director Alonso Mayo, the movie is mostly a comedy, but one that largely eschews outlandishness and never drifts too far from recognizable human feeling.



When his grandmother dies and his senile grandfather (Kenneth Welsh) is no longer able to care for him, 25-year-old Luke (Pucci) is taken in by his Uncle Paul and Aunt Cindy (Cary Elwes and Kristin Bauer), in a move that further stresses their already strained marriage. His cousins (Tyler Stentiford, Mackenzie Munro) are fairly welcoming, but the autistic Luke is thrown by all the sudden change. He knows he needs to grow up (“I can’t watch cooking shows for the rest of my life — I want to screw”), but he’s uncertain of how.

Taking some advice from his grandfather, Luke heads to a temp agency and quickly becomes enamored with Maria (Sabryn Rock) — or more specifically, her breasts. Placed in the mailroom at a nondescript company, Luke makes an unlikely friend in the boss’ son, the virulently antisocial Zack (Seth Green), who is also not “neuro-typical,” but comes around to Luke’s attention to detail. Zack decides to share his special proprietary invention — a computer program that reads and responds to the facial expressions of those with autistic-spectrum disorders (“I programmed her to be a bitch because that’s what you’re up against”), in order to help coach and nudge them toward “normal.” Nominal hijinks ensue, of course, as Luke screws up the courage to ask out Maria, but the movie also spends an equal amount of time showing both Luke and his “new” family feeling their way through a grander socialization with one another.

With his fey, sing-song voice and buttoned-up fashion, Pucci delivers an indelible performance that doesn’t cheat on the anxiety Luke feels — which swells considerably when considering the abandonment of his mother. If Green, angry and wound up, plays much more of a type, their interactions are still amusing, and give The Story of Luke a fresh, off-kilter comedic vibe that one doesn’t expect to see in a story that could easily be a lot more staid, and typically plotted.

Some may scoff at this mixture of tones, but since Mayo is resolutely true to Luke’s wobbly steps toward independence, it mostly works. Though it’s not as much of a relationship two-hander, The Story of Luke bears some characteristics in common with Max Mayer’s Adam, starring Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne. Even though that film took a young man with Asperger’s Syndrome as its protagonist, both movies are robustly invested in an exploration of the often bewildering gaps in social recognition and body language between “NTs,” or neuro-typicals, and those with less functional social skill sets.

An engaging character study about a differently-wired guy learning to navigate the already choppy waters of young adulthood, The Story of Luke is a sweetnaturedly pleasant and optimistic coming-of-age tale that highlights much that we share, amidst all our differences. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. The Story of Luke opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, but in addition to its nationwide theatrical engagements the film is also available on VOD. For more information, click here to visit its website. (Gravitas Ventures, unrated, 95 minutes)

Playing like a M.I.A. song come to life, Sally El Hosaini’s British import My Brother the Devil transcends the gangland melodrama of its roots courtesy of a convincingly sketched setting, and rich veins of class identity, faith, political belief and sexual identity, all of which jostle and compete with the main narrative plotlines for attention.



In the ethnically mixed and socioeconomically depressed Hackney neighborhood of London, teenager Mo (Fady Elsayed, above left) idolizes his charismatic older brother Rashid (James Floyd, above right), a low-level drug peddler. The death of a friend, however, triggers a rising reticence in Rashid about the direction (or lack thereof) of his life. After forging a bond with photographer Sayyid (Said Taghmaoui), Rashid begins to envision making enough money to stake a “legit” life — possibly for his girlfriend Vanessa (Elarica Gallacher), but definitely for his brother and struggling, Egyptian-born parents. Old turf wars and unsettled accounts with a rival gang leader, Demon (Leemore Marrett, Jr.), however, seemingly foreclose an easy exit, while at the same time Mo starts doing drug runs behind his brother’s back.

There’s a certain feeling of laid-track narrative that hangs over My Brother the Devil, at least when it’s peddling the siren song of gang life to Mo. This story — enthralled, impressionable youngster caught up in the psychological undertow of a n’er-do-well older sibling — is very familiar, and that fact, combined with El Hosaini’s deliberate pacing, has one feeling every one of the movie’s first 20 or 30 minutes double-time, no matter the clarity of its observance.

But a funny thing happens on the way toward tedium, as My Brother the Devil starts vacuuming up new story strands and buoying details like a Hoover. El Hosaini workshopped the movie at three different Sundance Institute labs (Middle Eastern, Screenwriting and Directing), and the benefits of those continual, disparate fine tooth combings benefit the material, particularly in its attention to detail. My Brother the Devil feels rooted and real, and less concerned with chest-thumping braggadocio than other gang flicks. The hoods in El Hosaini’s world have lives and feelings outside the parameters of any of their illegal actions; they at one point argue about bacon, and a charge of terrorism is brought up as a feint — a cover for something a distraught Mo deems much worse.

Director of photography David Raedeker does a wonderful job of capturing this urban landscape with a simple, unshowy poetry, and the lead performances here are rich and full bodied. My Brother the Devil covers some familiar ground, it’s true, but El Hosaini locates the commingled struggle and quiet beauty of the quotidian, where opportunity and hope are frequently too little nourished. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Paladin/108Media, R, 111 minutes)

A fairly clever little indie film that shrewdly marries the popular but well-worn “found footage” framing device to a prurient storyline, the NC-17-rated Lucky Bastard may not win any awards, but it puts an imaginative spin on what is too often a sloppy low-budget aesthetic, easily outstripping charges of empty gimmickry.



After an opening consisting of crime scene footage that tips viewers off to some dark events, the rest of the film is presented as the behind-the-scenes footage from a porn shoot for a website called “Lucky Bastard,” where each month a member fan is chosen to have sex with an adult film star. The starlet in this case is Ashley Saint (Betsy Rue), a single mother who reluctantly agrees to the scenario only after much cajoling (and an increased payday) by producer-director Mike (Don McManus). After viewing a couple submission videos, Ashley and Mike agree on a winner — sad-sack Dave (Jay Paulson, above left), who looks like he could be a cousin of Kenneth Parcell from 30 Rock. The crew pick up Dave and head over to a rented house but when Dave calls Ashley by her real name it freaks her out, and she wants to call things off. She eventually relents, but more problems pop up.

Director Robert Nathan, working from a script co-written with Lukas Kendall, colors and shades his film in a nice way, as well as mixing in other smaller characters — including an uptight real estate agent and a male porn star called in on short notice when things with Dave prove to be difficult. Lucky Bastard doesn’t suffer the same sense of narrative suffocation that so many other found footage films do — wherein the framing device is used as a crutch of convenience to absolve its creators from having to do the heavy lifting of character development. Nathan is a television veteran of both Law & Order and ER, and his experience with tightly structured acts is on ample display.

The film’s conceit, of course, rather cleverly masks the shortfall in production value when stacked up against a typical independent movie, though there is above-average consideration given to framing and shot selection — abetted by the aforementioned production house, outfitted with cameras.

Likewise, the acting mostly can’t, or at least shouldn’t, be judged in traditional dramatic metrics, but rather by how believably these actors inhabit a series of postures knowing full well that cameras are on them. When events later go sideways things change, but it’s a fairly difficult juggling act that for the most part the cast excels at. Especially good in this regard is McManus.

Its subject matter alone dictates that it won’t be for some audiences but perhaps the highest compliment one can pay Lucky Bastard is to say that it’s effective and also quite believable for the story it chooses to tell — well sketched out, and sincere in its characters’ motivations. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Rated NC-17, Lucky Bastard opens this Friday in Los Angeles at the Vintage Cinemas’ Los Feliz 3. For more information on the film, meanwhile, click here to visit its website. (Vineyard Haven Productions, NC-17, 94 minutes)

Supernaturally tinged Norwegian mystery-horror import Thale unfolds, on a narrative level, like some weird hybrid of Sunshine Cleaning, Splice and Lady in the Water — a work that dances around a couple moods and genres without ever really wholeheartedly committing to one in particular. Telling the story of a surprise woodland contact between a pair of guys and an awakened, captive huldra — a nymph-like creature of Scandinavian folklore — writer-director Aleksander Nordaas’ work gives off a certain eerie vibe that, along with its regional specificity, add up to give the movie something of a pungent originality. But Thale is ultimately all wind-up, failing to take its characters to more interesting places.



The unflappable Leo (Jon Sigve Skard) heads up “No Shit Cleaning Service,” a crime scene scrubbing company. Perhaps against better judgment, he’s thrown a bit of work to his friend Elvis (Erlend Norvold), with vomitous consequences. Tasked with finding the scattered remains of an old man at a cabin in the woods, Leo and Elvis instead discover a most unusual mute girl (Silje Reinåmo, above) and a bunch of audio tapes in which said man can be heard talking about the girl’s highly adaptive nature, and how she’s “different than” her sisters. As Elvis starts to seemingly become able to bridge the communication gap they also make a rather shocking discovery in a freezer, leading them to question just how dangerous this girl might be.

If there’s a nice fog of intrigue that surrounds Thale for a good long while, there’s also an imperturbability to the entire movie, which kind of dawdles and drags. For a long time Thale isn’t really a horror movie, even in any Gothic sense, but instead just a mystery about this girl’s origins, and how she’s survived seemingly on her own for an indeterminate length of time. This works, but only up to a point. At around the 45-minute mark, there’s a nice conversation between Leo and Elvis in which some of their vulnerabilities are stripped bare, and for a moment it looks as if Thale is going to dive headlong into a story of fraternal drift, with its mysterious title waif serving only as a joint kickstarter and metaphorical connection for the two.

At a certain point, the movie’s slow-peddled nature either becomes wholly mesmeric or a bit of a put-on. For me it was the latter — it felt like a lot of artful dodging in service of a story that wasn’t really fully fleshed out, or at least not taken in interesting directions. Thale doesn’t really delve substantively into mythology — its characters aren’t scientists, admittedly — so when others come looking for the same-named girl, plunging Leo and Elvis into a greater danger, it feels like a leap into tension unearned, nipped from some screenwriting manual.

Serving as his own cinematographer, camera operator and editor, Nordaas delivers an enigmatic aria in many respects. A director like Brad Anderson would be able to turn this into a work of suffocating anxiety, though. As is, Thale is a movie that’s less than the sum of its parts — interesting around the edges, but not fully developed, and lacking any sort of revelatory punch. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Thale screens in theaters this week in Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Denver and Portland — check your local listings, as they say — and then arrives on home video and VOD later in the month, on April 23. (XLrator Media, R, 77 minutes)