Bruce Springsteen has sold 120 million albums worldwide, and racked up 20 Grammys, but it’s his reputation as a consummate live showman that perhaps shines most brightly, and still has the ability to bring even sitting governors to tears. Taking inspiration from the Ridley Scott-produced Life in a Day (Scott also nabs a producing credit here), the crowd-sourced concert-and-reminiscence documentary Springsteen & I highlights with an unadorned effectiveness the deeply personal connection so many fans have with the man they call “The Boss.” For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (NCM Fathom Events/Arts Alliance Media, unrated, 78 minutes)

With scene-stealing turns in movies like Funny People and a solid role in the small screen ensemble Parks and Recreation, Aubrey Plaza has exhibited no short supply of crack comedic timing. The looming question, then, was whether she could translate that gift into the lead role in a film. The answer, in the form of last summer’s quirky, winning Safety Not Guaranteed, was a resounding yes. And that’s part of the reason the lackluster The To Do List, her second foray into leading lady-hood, lands with such a disappointing thud.



Written and directed by Maggie Carey (the real-life wife of co-star Bill Hader), this 1990s-set tale means to put a gender spin on the sex comedy formula, telling the coming-of-age (nudge, nudge) story of a brainiac virginal girl who gets it in her mind to make some mad, make-up progress on her sexual bucket list during the summer between her high school graduation and college matriculation. The problem is, nothing about this potentially rich conceit is handled in an emotionally honest or resonant manner, and the yawning, indifferently paced result has none of the sharp wit of something like the similarly themed For a Good Time, Call…, making for an at times painfully interminable viewing experience that variously wastes and works at cross purposes with the charms of its lead actress.

Plaza stars as Brandy Clark, a Boise, Idaho valedictorian and the family “good girl” in comparison to her older sister Amber (Rachel Bilson). After an abortive, mistaken quasi-hook-up with the hunky Rusty (Scott Porter), Brandy submits to the advice of her friends Fiona (Alia Shawkat) and Wendy (Sarah Steele), and decides to attack her sexual inexperience as if cramming for an exam. Working opposite Rusty, and under the supervision of loafing manager Willie (Hader), as a lifeguard at the local public pool, Brandy spends her summer putting various notches in her proverbial belt, much to the consternation of her long-suffering friend, Cameron (Johnny Simmons, aptly channeling puppy-dog devotion), who initially views Brandy’s libidinal awakening as a chance to finally get out of the friend zone.

Carey scores a few zingers here and there, at the expense of “innovations” like call-waiting and Snack Wells, but there’s truly nothing real here; her movie lurches to and fro, as if written as a collection of loose, thematically grouped sketch comedy scenes. For a Good Time, Call… found and exploited for laughs both the differences and similarities in male-female sexual attraction and gratification, and actually took seriously its female characters’ sexuality. Carey nominally puts Brandy in charge (the movie is her “quest,” certainly), but embraces narrative contrivance and wind-sock characterizations instead of rooting down into substantive feeling. Consistently, characters don’t behave in rational ways, which makes the story feel arbitrary. The closest Carey comes to something interesting and honest is in Brandy and Amber’s sexually enlightened mother (a wonderful Connie Britton), but even here she eventually undercuts herself.

When not indulging in digressive, increasingly uncomfortable and, more important, unfunny humiliations of its lead character that are irrelevant to the movie’s putative core exploration, The To Do List is marked by lazy plotting, and bailed out repeatedly by look-at-me casting, as with Andy Samberg and Jack McBrayer. (The former plays the lead singer of a touring band who comes through town, while the latter pops up in one scene, as the manager of a swanky private pool that Carey randomly introduces as a “rival” late in the movie, after spending no time whatsoever developing it.) And even grading on the curve of a small budget, the film’s production design feels cheap, haphazard and inattentive, propped up by soundtrack choices (hi there, Spin Doctors and Naughty by Nature) meant to evoke a certain breezy nostalgia.

Plaza, meanwhile, pushing 30, exhibits no small difficulty in channeling teenage angst and wound-up hormonal discovery, but not just because of her maturity. Rather, it’s because of Carey’s thinly imagined script, which doesn’t give her a solid enough character. If The To Do List was her chance to show a sunnier, looser side than the deadpan style for which she’s known, she fails, sadly. It’s not just on Plaza, though. This undisciplined affair simply doesn’t deliver on its concept. Cross it off your own late summer to-do list. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (CBS Films, R, 107 minutes)

Rote, declamatory representations of paranoia, fear, delusion and counter-attack get cycled through in Stranded, a low-budget science-fiction actioner that unfolds on a heightened emotional pitch which doesn’t leave much room for intrigue or escalating tension. Starring Christian Slater (inexplicably sporting a leather jacket), this futuristic movie from Battlefield Earth director Roger Christian is set on the lunar surface, but it lacks the overall virtuosity of Moon, the visual elegance of the flawed but interesting Europa Report, or even the outlandish lunacy of Apollo 18.

In short, it’s a paycheck project for all involved, and nothing that those outside of diehard genre completists need waste their time on. Stranded isn’t thrilling, or scary, or remotely scientific. Rather, its title just describes how viewers will feel in its 88-minute grasp. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Stranded is also available across VOD platforms. (RLJ Entertainment/Image Entertainment, R, 88 minutes)

Power seeks to protect its interests, inherently — to validate its judgments and its actions, or even inaction. That’s perhaps the most salient, unnerving lesson of The Cheshire Murders, a confounding documentary that can’t quite figure out what stories it wants to tell. And the fact that said point lurks just outside of frame says everything one ultimately needs to know about this dark true crime offering from directors Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, which drops the ball in illuminating with any discernment the tale of a horrible 2007 triple-homicide in Connecticut.

Is The Cheshire Murders about the failure of a broken mental health system? The dark, warping legacy of child abuse, particularly sexual abuse? The equally distorting, sometimes damaging effects of Christian fundamentalism? The heartbreaking story of police incompetence and after-the-fact cover-up? The death penalty writ large, and/or as it intersects with fiscal responsibility? Or just a family’s grief, and the ripples it sends throughout a close-knit community? There is certainly no shortage of subplots, or post-arrest mini-twists to the case, but The Cheshire Murders is a movie with about a dozen different topic sentences, and messy, unfocused editing undoes any satisfying blending together of these disparate elements. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. The Cheshire Murders debuts today on HBO, and plays throughout the month on the channel. Check your local listings for showtimes. (HBO Films, unrated, 117 minutes)

After the success of Arrested Development and Superbad, Michael Cera promptly, predictably found himself plugged into a roster of other Hollywood studio comedies with varying levels of successfully integrated quirkiness, while also exhibiting a keen sense of taste relating to indie films (e.g., Juno, Youth in Revolt). This summer, after having already played a coked-up version of himself in the “Apatow All-Stars” project This Is the End, Cera again dives headlong into Indieville with what might very well be his most daring, off-the-beaten-path professional choice yet.

Drected by Sebastián Silva — from a story loosely based on an autobiographical experience, and shot in a period of several weeks while he and Cera were waiting to film Magic Magic — the highly improvised, Chilean-set travelogue Crystal Fairy unfolds in long, shaggy, straggling stretches seemingly meant to mimic and induce the frazzled vexation of its protagonist, as he copes with the flighty title character he’s unwittingly invited into the lives of he and his friends. Think an ambling The Sitter by way of Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, stripped free of any of the former’s lunacy and replaced instead with passive-aggressive back-biting and obsession over a hallucinogenic cactus. That’s Crystal Fairy, a meandering movie that doesn’t do a lot to reward one’s time but still gives one something to think about once they’ve escaped its clutches. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Films, R, 100 minutes)

Pimp turned successful urban fiction author Robert Beck gets a loving, burnished treatment in the new documentary Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp, a film which awkwardly straddles the line between amiable hagiography and a more discerning sociological study of the constricted economic opportunities for African-Americans in the pre-Civil Rights era. A world premiere at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival, director Jose Hinojosa’s colorful movie is consistently engaging, but also consistently marked by pockets of missed opportunity.

An idol to rappers like Ice-T and others, the late Beck would help birth the Blaxploitation film genre with a series of bleak, gritty and at times jarringly poetic novels that captured the brutality and viciousness of the pimp’s lifestyle — works deeply rooted in his own experiences. In older interview clips Beck talks about the (phony, assumed) glamor of the pimp lifestyle, and how the life of a pimp is one of unremitting pressure and tension, playing God to a cabal of broken women living in his refracted glow. With its roster of recognizable talking heads (Ice-T, Chris Rock, Don “Magic” Juan, Henry Rollins, and others), Iceberg Slim (one of Beck’s nicknames) also sketches out the sense of communal respect accorded pimps and lionizes, rather uncomfortably at times, their skills of psychological manipulation (or, as interviewee Snoop Dogg puts it: “You can’t just dog a woman out and gorilla pimp a bitch to death — there’s got to be some compassion and tender loving in there”).

While it doesn’t outright deny it, Iceberg Slim skirts around the chaos of its subject’s family life, and certainly his history of violence perpetrated against women. The question of how deep a scumbag’s amends must run hangs uneasily over the entire movie, because Beck clearly gave voice to an underclass in his writing. Part of the unsettled quality of the film owes to Hinojosa’s unreconciled ambitions for the project, and others to a family unit still semi-estranged, which casts long shadows of doubt over certain recollections. (The movie weirdly, passingly hints at Beck’s return to the pimp lifestyle in the 1970s; there’s vehement disagreement amongst his daughters over this fact, though they all seem to agree he was a serial philanderer.)

Anchored by interviews with Holloway House CEO Bentley Morriss, other writers who labored under the label (an important vessel for marginalized African-American voices), and present-day authors like Ian Whitaker, Richard Milner and others who interviewed and wrote about Beck before his death in 1992, the portion of Iceberg Slim dealing with Beck’s unlikely rise to literary prominence is its strongest, by far. In delving down into the sub-genre of realistic African-American “street” fiction and the hungry need it met (there’s even a clip of Beck’s masked appearance on Joe Pyne’s television show), it makes one wish Hinojosa had opted for deeper waters throughout. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Phase 4 Films, R, 89 minutes)

Drive partners Nicolas Winding Refn and Ryan Gosling re-team on Only God Forgives, a shadow-drenched, neon-infused, fever-dream rumination on vague notions of loyalty and honor that labors so hard to wrap up its narrative in abstruse metaphor that it ends up saying almost nothing of consequence at all.

The spare, Bangkok-set story — a looping series of violent reprisals and refusals of same — is full of often mesmerizing touchstone signifiers. It’s Shakespearean, it’s a square-jawed Western set in the Orient, it’s an intricate mood piece that ponders the question of what would happen if Michelangelo Antonioni had tackled a film with commingled crime world and martial arts tropes. Only God Forgives is all of these things in theory, and yet none of them in practice. It’s a bravura exercise in style — a fairy tale (or nightmare) that unfolds in the same language as Drive, as Refn has said — but as any sort of drama it is inert.



When his brother Billy (Tom Burke) is murdered after killing an underage prostitute, American ex-pat Julian (Gosling), who works as a trainer at a boxing club that’s actually a front for an illegal drug business, finds himself roiled by a certain amount of inner conflict. Upon finding out some of the darker truths about his brother, he’s seemingly disgusted. But his imperious mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), who flies in to identify and claim her beloved Billy’s body, insists that Julian extract revenge.

Julian demurs, but in a wishy-washy manner that invites more abuse from his mother, who has no qualms about making clear whom her favorite son was. When Julian brings home for dinner a prostitute whom he’s been visiting, Mai (Ratha Phongam), Crystal doesn’t hide her contempt either, labeling Mai a “cum-dumpster,” among a few other choice insults. Still, Julian dutifully lights his mother’s cigarette.

This cracked family dynamic — and Crystal’s ongoing machinations to find and slaughter those responsible for Billy’s death — ignores the film’s true main character, though. That would be Lieutenant Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), an avenging-angel cop who enjoys karaoke when he isn’t meting out his own brand of justice by lopping off people’s hands. Naturally, he eventually crosses paths with both Julian and Crystal.

Only God Forgives is rather exquisitely photographed; cinematographer Larry Smith’s compositions mean something, and the slow tracking shots give ample time to admire the vivid production design, with its deep, symbolic reds. And it’s put together with nerve, definitely. Cliff Martinez, who also contributed music to Drive, offers up a score that’s appropriately ominous at times but also communicates waves of mournful distance between mother and son, even as they remain locked in a weird, sexually charged, symbiotic relationship. The best portions of Refn’s film impart an elemental dread, but these moments are few and far between. His screenplay is too thinly sketched to work as an existential crime thriller. It lacks the purring, streamlined purpose of Drive, and its characters aren’t merely types — they’re complete ciphers.

Dating back to even some of his earliest work, Gosling has a true gift for nonverbal elucidation, and finding large meaning in the smallest gestures. Here, though, he seems to treading water, delivering a dour performance that verges on parody. Julian doesn’t have a lot of dialogue (maybe two dozen lines, tops), but Gosling plays the character as enigmatic and sullen simply for the sake of showcasing those qualities. Coming on the heels of another whispery, reticent turn, in The Place Beyond the Pines, it mostly makes the case that Gosling is hell-bent on shedding himself of teeny-bopper fans. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Radius/TWC, R, 89 minutes)

The comedown of a haughty socialite provides the basis for Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, an examination of existential crisis and self-delusion that is nimble, glancingly funny and yet also marked by sly, unstressed depths. Anchored by a superlative, wound-up turn from Cate Blanchett that will surely generate some awards consideration talk, the film exhibits perceptive dramatic insight with only a leavening pinch of melodramatic inclination, highlighting the gravitational pull of the love one thinks they deserve. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 98 minutes)

An indie horror flick that debuted at the Fantasia Festival last year and made the rounds at a number of genre fests, the suburban-set Under the Bed unfolds with a nuance and relative level of sophistication that belies its generic title, before eventually succumbing to a haphazard, poorly explained explosion of gore at the hands of a nasty creature hell-bent on terrorizing a pair of brothers. Directed by Steven C. Miller, the movie is for much of its running time quite engaging, and plugged into a sense of clammy unease, but unfortunately pays off its story in familiar, uninteresting ways.

Eric Stolze’s script scores early points for the manner in which it nibbles around the edges of something darker, drawing a viewer in by hinting at reasons for this and that. It’s invested in all the human relationships to a heartening degree, and the film’s good performances (particularly Chasing Mavericks‘ Jonny Weston and young Gattlin Griffith, who have a very good rapport) are aided by heightened arguments (“You don’t get chances, you earn them!”) that really feel like honest extensions of legitimate parental frustration rather than telegraphed, plot-point conflict.

But somewhere in its second act the wheels pretty much come off for Under the Bed, and the less-is-more approach eventually yields to a more-is-more tack, wherein characters indiscriminately start getting their necks snapped and heads popped off, seemingly if for no other reason than to showcase the movie’s effects budget. Composer Ryan Dodson’s obliges these yawning instincts, bending from intriguing moodiness to conventionally clamorous aural declaration. And Miller’s direction, heretofore so artfully restrained, sags to indulge in flat, schlocky stagings of typical horror mayhem. In the end, Under the Bed doesn’t pay off its set-up in deeply rewarding fashion. Still, it confirms a certain talent in Miller and his cast, when they’re given shaded, interesting material with which to work. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (XLrator Media, R, 86 minutes)

An unsettling, forthright drama about a man falsely accused of sexual child abuse, Danish import The Hunt is anchored by a painfully haunting turn from Mads Mikkelsen. Drawing from the McMartin Preschool scandal in Southern California, and similar cases of child abuse hysteria across the United States in the 1980s and ’90s, co-writer-director Thomas Vinterberg fashions a darkly gripping tale in which presumed guilt spreads like a virus, engulfing an entire small town.



Having recently lost his job as a secondary school teacher, the divorced Lucas (Mikkelsen, above) is also locked in dispute with his ex-wife (Anne Louise Hassing) over visitation rights with his teenage son, Marcus (Lasse Fogelstrøm). Still, Lucas has a lot of things going for him, including his best friend and next-door neighbor Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen). Working at a kindergarten to make ends meet, he takes up a relationship with Nadja (Alexandra Rapaport), and seems a hit with almost all the young kids, including Theo’s daughter Klara (Annika Wedderkopp), who takes a particular liking to him.

One day, however, Klara makes a disturbing accusation, saying that Lucas showed his genitals to her. The school’s principal (Susse Wold) oversees an interrogation with a litany of leading questions, and quickly determines not only the veracity of Klara’s statements, but that there were other victims as well. Lucas is drummed out of school and ostracized by almost all those around him. Attempting to “prove” his innocence, however, is a difficult task. Later, physical violence is visited upon both Lucas and also his son.

Rather than mightily juice things up in the name of drama, though, Vinterberg, working from a script co-written with Tobias Lindholm, mostly aims for a maddening mundanity — maddening, that is, in the sense that Lucas suffers this plight more with sadness and confusion instead of howling his innocence from rooftops. This tack works because The Hunt is so carefully modulated — and because of Mikkelsen’s superbly put-upon performance, which throws a light on Lucas’ inner anguish in a way that a dozen declamatory monologues cannot.

At times there’s a certain tension that creeps to the surface — viewers will want Lucas to lash out, to be more proactive or throw around righteous indignation. And while it’s true that there are moments marked by curiously little pushback, a more assertive stance is at odds with the story that Vinterberg wishes to tell. His 1998 film The Celebration dealt with a family’s secrets and lies, but The Hunt is more explicitly about the latter — and the daisy chain of consequence that can spread from the unverified embrace of vague accusations.

Vinterberg’s film forces an (at times uncomfortable) identification with Lucas upon its audience because he wants to make a statement about not only human fallibility, but also a greater social responsibility. The Hunt‘s eerie, ambiguous ending, which embraces our core decency and highlights the power of forgiveness while also showing the lasting stains of abusive mistrust, marks the movie as an uncommonly thoughtful, and thought-provoking, entry in the social-issue drama subgenre. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnolia, R, 111 minutes)

A deeply affecting indictment of the aquatic theme parks that build tricks-and-splashes family shows around captured and bred orcas, Blackfish introduces viewers to a parade of rueful SeaWorld trainers who share stories that are decidedly at odds with the misinformation and scrubbed-clean tales peddled by park owners. In charting the existence of one popular but troubled killer whale, Tilikum, it also makes a clear and easy case for the unique intelligence and majesty of these behemoth creatures — and the moral dubiousness of their current treatment in captivity.



Blackfish, which enjoyed its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is in some ways a whistleblowers’ tale, and in other ways a murder mystery — albeit a “whydunit,” or the unraveling of the aftermath of a corporate cover-up, rather than a conventional whodunit. First and foremost, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s film is well-researched; a series of comprehensive articles by Tim Zimmermann from Outside Magazine were her launching point, and Zimmermann even came on board as an associate producer. So there’s a factual, chronological backbone here that makes it easy and compelling to track and follow, no matter its considerable emotional punching power.

But Cowperthwaite is also incredibly savvy about the manner in which she structures her movie. It opens with warm recollections from a litany of trainers, who detail how they landed their jobs (there’s far less marine science experience or background required than one might expect) and began work with dolphins, sea lions and killer whales. From there, Blackfish gets more specific in telling the story of Tilikum (above), who was captured in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1983 at around two years of age. It tracks his (sadly, deadly) stay at Sealand of the Pacific, where in 1991 he was responsible for killing trainer Keltie Byrne, on through to his sale to SeaWorld Orlando, where — with trainers there kept in the dark as to the whale’s involvement in Byrne’s death — he would eventually fell veteran trainer Dawn Brancheau.

Given this loss of life, the story is obviously tragic from a human perspective, but the manner in which Blackfish interweaves these disasters with the parallel troubling story of Tilikum’s care (there are zero recorded incidents of killer whales ever attacking a human in the wild) is what makes it such a heartrending affair. Without getting bogged down in endless minutiae, Cowperthwaite deftly drops in damning details from a legal case against SeaWorld brought by OSHA, intercutting all of that with a variety of vintage SeaWorld television commercials that, in their juxtaposition, put a creepy and slightly unnerving spin on the company’s family-friendly image.

Given its watery setting, the most obvious antecedent to Cowperthwaite’s movie is the Academy Award-winning The Cove, which called attention to the mass killing of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, as well as, more broadly, cruel and otherwise suspect measures in that country’s fishing practices. But Blackfish also underscores one of the more lasting and salient points of fellow documentaries like Project Nim and One Lucky Elephant, which is that not all animals have it in them to be domesticated as pets. Certainly humans have the capacity to keep them as such, and dependent animals, needing food and water, will bend their behaviors to accommodate. But for a variety of reasons, including social strata we don’t understand and other needs we can neither measure nor fully grasp, there are higher-functioning creatures for whom captivity creates a profound emotional turbulence and depression.

Undeniably, the film has an agenda, and to the extent that its effective punches land on a hardened chest, one may wish for greater push-back or clarification from SeaWorld as to certain matters. (Voices of dissent are included, though their arguments seem to be around the edges, and in the end not much in the way of substance.) If it’s a hit piece, though, as detractors would argue, it’s of a broken-down system that doesn’t have an adequate defense for itself in the modern world. The incredible inner turmoil and conflict that these trainers possess — the people who worked with the orcas most closely, and to the extent that they can be “known,” knew them most intimately — speaks to this.

A heartbreaking, gut-punch work that doesn’t come by its feeling through cheap manipulation, Blackfish is designed to open eyes and change minds, and it does just that. For anyone who cares about animals, or ever has been on or is considering a vacation to SeaWorld or a similar aquarium, this film is a true must-see. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Blackfish opens this week in New York City and Los Angeles — the latter exclusively at the Landmark Theatre — before expanding nationally in the following weeks. For more information on the film, and to view its trailer, click here to visit its website. (Magnolia, 83 minutes, PG-13)

Filmic evidence of both mankind’s folly and its boundless capacity for thrill-seeking still connected to the natural world, Storm Surfers, presented in 3-D in select theaters but also available in regular 2-D, offers up a look at surfing legends and best friends Tom Carroll and Ross Clarke-Jones. Narrated by Toni Collette, somewhat ironically for such a Fire in the Belly-type work, this gorgeously lensed affair is one part “Redbull cinema” (okay, maybe one-and-a-half) but also one part fraternal rumination, buoyed by the maturity and rootedness of its subjects.

Storm Surfers unfolds in and around Australia, homeland to the aforementioned pair. With the assistance of surf forecaster Ben Matson, Carroll and Clarke-Jones track and chase giant storms in their effort to ride some of the biggest and most dangerous swells in the Pacific Ocean, dropping in via jet skis. Co-directors Justin McMillan and Chris Nelius do a good job of blending their film’s action footage with interview segments talking about inner motivations and the like, although from a certain perspective Storm Surfers could use a bit more familial mooring. When Carroll talks about he and Clarke-Jones, both well into their 40s, passing through the stages of life together, with “wives and kids and all that,” it begs the question: wait a second, where are they again, and what exactly do they think of what you do?

The film’s visual bona fides, however, are never in question; its cinematography is exquisite, providing you-are-there thrills by putting viewers right inside the barrels of waves along with its subjects. Cameras are mounted actually on the surfboards and jet skis, and the directors make use of helicopters (already part of the safety and oversight crew) to provide aerial perspective. At the third annual International 3-D Awards, Storm Surfers picked up the Outstanding Achievement in Documentary prize, besting Katy Perry: Part of Me and the James Cameron-produced Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away, among other movies.

Its specificity may preclude certain general audiences from seeking it out, but Storm Surfers does devote time to cultivating a message that resonates beyond the X-Games subset. Find your bliss, it tells viewers. Such pursuits fill up the soul. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Storm Surfers opens in Los Angeles at the Chinese 6 Theatres, but also enjoys an exclusive two-night run at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, July 20 and 21. To view the movie’s trailer, click here. (XLrator Media, unrated, 95 minutes)

Its title a slur for Northerners who opposed the American Civil War, Copperhead marks the third film from director Ron Maxwell (Gettysburg, Gods and Generals) about the United States’ bloodiest armed conflict. In theory, movies like this produced outside of the Hollywood system have the potential of some measure of additional freedom, being unburdened by casting dictates and endless studio notes that often polish down history’s rough edges. Unfortunately, in reality, Maxwell’s film is a drawn-out, schematic melodrama rife with somnambulistic speechifying, and a work every bit as turgid and baldly sentimental as the centerpiece lecture at a convention of historical reenactors.

Based on a novel by Harold Frederic, Copperhead unfolds in upstate New York, telling the story of Abner Beech (Billy Campbell, who replaced Jason Patric three weeks into shooting), a stubborn and morally righteous farmer who defies his neighbors and government in the bloody, contentious autumn of 1862. Beech loathes slavery but is also against the war, on the grounds that he finds it unconstitutional. This puts him at odds with abolitionist Jee Hagadorn (Angus MacFadyen), who in turn turns many of the townspeople against Beech. Things are even more complicated by a love story involving their respective children, Esther (Lucy Boynton) and Jeff (Casey Thomas Brown).

With a score that even the most ardent PBS aficionado would find too flowery and precious, Copperhead unfolds as a series of moralistic theorems and poses filtered through characters defined chiefly by their at-odds natures. Author Bill Kaufman, delivering his first adapted screenplay, serves up an endless parade of soliloquies most often delivered in solemn, stately hushed tones, like the entire film was some dinner theater piece. Campbell finds a bit of fleshed-out sadness around the edges of Abner, but MacFadyen for some reason goes the bug-eyed route. Other younger actors, too, seem out of their element. Copperhead may have its head in the right place, but Maxwell’s movie is dry and inert — a historical drama that even hardcore history buffs will have a hard time convincing themselves is worthwhile. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Brainstorm Media/Swordspoint Productions, PG-13, 120 minutes)

Nice ribbons of naturalism and even poetical idyll root Beneath, a sort of lake-set Jaws homage, before an unconvincing turn toward Lord of the Flies territory and even more unconvincing acting conspire to sink this low-budget indie horror offering. Director Larry Fessenden’s nice use of limited resources and some early superlative, artful evocation of mood are in the end no match for a screenplay that mistakes and substitutes volume for well staked-out, compelling interpersonal disagreement. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements on July 16 and 17, Beneath is also available across a variety of VOD platforms. For more information, click here to visit its website. (Glass Eye Pix/Chiller Films, unrated, 90 minutes)

An engaging and rather scary nonfiction look at the death-by-papercut of online privacy, Terms and Conditions May Apply roots down into those small-print promises that companies extract from consumers via the Internet on a weekly if not daily basis. Directed by Cullen Hoback, the film makes a compelling case for if not outright societal revolt then at least much greater awareness, attention and oversight, lest a clear and settled-without-debate caste system of governmental spy privilege become the new normal.



Interviewees include Ray Kurzweil, musician Moby, Orson Scott Card, Margaret Atwood and Mark Zuckerberg (well, sort of — more on that later), but Terms and Conditions May Apply is less a star-oriented talking head affair than a pleasantly shambling curated tour through the brave new world of online rights management and manipulation, as bureaucratic systems grapple with technological advancements and try to integrate them into their vertical power structures in a way most advantageous to them, individual liberties be damned.

Hoback points out that such consumer agreements are a relatively new phenomenon (no terms and conditions, for instance, were necessary for land-line phones or television), and he also provides a nice overview of why and how Americans have no baseline online consumer privacy law (the events of September 11 certainly didn’t help, immediately killing off around a dozen bills that were bopping around). With companies discovering that there’s less money for them in anonymity, and the U.S. Government eager to exploit a third-party exemption/loophole to the Fourth Amendment, default privacy settings have over the five or six years in particular taken a beating.

That said, Hoback doesn’t always seem to have a clear bead on a consistent throughline, so Terms and Conditions May Apply at times feels choppy. The film’s listless, three-minute animated opening, along with other occasional interstitial inclusions, is a perfect example of this; it seems just an air-quote accessible idea nipped from other documentaries.

Still, many of the actual anecdotes the film cycles through prove quite interesting to ponder. There’s a Cold Case writer able to be identified through de-anonymized web searches from his computer for terms like “how to murder your wife”; a 7th grader posting a social media warning to President Obama about suicide bombers in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden, and then receiving a visit at school from a Secret Service agent; and a New York comedian, frustrated by a bad customer service experience at an Apple store, quoting Fight Club on Facebook and having a SWAT team descend on his apartment a couple hours later.

Chief to the movie’s point is the fact that many people treat Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms not as companies, but rather as benign public utilities. Indeed, Hoback notes, the companies themselves encourage this reading, since it allows them greater leeway with all of the personal pieces of information and preferences they gather. (It also makes it much easier for police and other authorities to then have a de facto “time machine” that allows them to reconstruct behavior dating back many years.)

Terms and Conditions May Apply ends with Hoback making a surprise appearance at Zuckerberg’s home, and trying to secure an answer about Facebook’s default privacy settings. The film draws an interesting (and I’m not certain correct) conclusion from this interaction, but it certainly points toward one of the most important public debates in this still-young century — one with far-reaching consequences. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here to visit the film’s website, or check out (yes, ironically) its Facebook page. (Variance Films, unrated, 79 minutes)

David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin provided a superlative look at the messy founding of one of the new digital age’s true pillars with the Oscar-winning The Social Network. Before Facebook, though, there was of course Napster — the decentralized music file-sharing service that represented the original web-era socioeconomic disrupter, and brought the recording industry to its knees before itself flaming out in a bevy of lawsuits. Directed by Alex Winter, the documentary Downloaded provides a robustly engaging overview of its renegade birth and premature death rattle.



Wanting to be able to trade and share electronic music files, Shawn Fanning (above left) and co-creator Sean Parker (who would later go on to dip his toe in Facebook) conceived of Napster as a connecting service for music fans around the world. The fact that they didn’t own copyrights on millions of songs and albums was mitigated, in their belief, by a specific provision of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the technicality that Napster was merely serving as a conduit for the (free) sharing of files ripped from CDs and other sources. It was certainly popular (especially on college campuses); in a matter of five months Napster went from under 30,000 registered users to more than 20 million. It seemed to be a case of an audience or fan-base beating industry to technology.

Naturally, the record labels weren’t too happy about this huge and sudden evaporation of profits — an embarrassment that likely colored their unwillingness to enter into good-faith negotiations to “legalize” Napster, or bring it inline with practices and standards that would deservingly compensate not only artists (the line flogged so mercilessly in public) but also, in some fashion, their bloated, vertical corporate structure. So… lawsuits followed. Napster would limp out of several legal bear traps, but essentially find it impossible to come up with a business model to placate the moneyed powers-that-be.

Winter gets much right with Downloaded, and with good reason; he initially approached Fanning almost a decade earlier, and for some time worked on a narrative feature adaptation of the Napster story before deciding to go the documentary route. So he grasps the entrepreneurial spirit that powered this leap of faith. Deftly interweaving interviews with Fanning, Parker and various industry insiders, Winter also nicely sketches out the contrast and inherent standoffish tension between the “ruling class” and these young, T-shirt-wearing interlopers, who had no contacts in the music business (or any other business, for that matter) and barely seemed to understand the industry they were revolutionizing before they started out.

The mystery meat left on the bone, though, seems to be a particularly contentious periods of months in the fall of 1999, just before the Recording Industry of America Association’s ton-of-bricks lawsuit. While reality is probably a deep shade of grey, Winter doesn’t really get down in the weeds and press for hard answers from his various subjects. As such, Downloaded can’t fully tease out the truth regarding either Napster’s aims and intent, or the record labels’ willingness to change and compromise.

It’s a shame, too, that bigger Napster litigants and some of the most vocal critics, like Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and Dr. Dre, don’t sit for fresh, reflective chats about what might have been had Napster been given the room to change and grow. The aforementioned are all glimpsed in prior interviews and news footage (and the grandstanding Ulrich provides an inescapably big thread), but some of the arguments being had about the consumer-friendly changes that Napster helped bring about in music seem downright antiquated. Maybe that’s oddly appropriate, though. Napster remains such an interesting case study as much for its ultimate failures as its many successes in assaulting the status quo. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Downloaded is available across VOD platforms. For more information, click here to visit its website. (VH1 RockDocs, unrated, 105 minutes)

At some point, someone in a position of authority will tell Adam Sandler no, or at least ask to read a screenplay. Until then, there will exist a good chance of further unchecked hyper-indulgences like the punishingly unfunny Grown Ups 2, which opens with a sequence in which a deer urinates all over the face of his character (a stand-in for viewers, perhaps?) and goes only downhill from there.

A thick, indolent haze of self-satisfaction hung over 2010’s Grown Ups, a fratty comedy of arrested development, but all the worst qualities of that movie are multiplied and amplified in this phoned-in abomination, which asks audiences to pay for and identify with a ceaseless stream of self-involved mugging. To paraphrase a previous, much funnier Sandler film: “What you’ve just given us is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever seen. At no point in your rambling, incoherent efforts were you even close to anything that could be considered genuine comedy. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having watched it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your souls.” For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony, PG-13, 101 minutes)

South African-born filmmaker Wayne Kramer has to have had one of the most interesting career arcs of any director of note over the past decade. After his debut movie, The Cooler, starring William H. Macy and Maria Bello, achieved a certain level of buzz-heavy breakout at the Sundance Film Festival in 2003, he parlayed that success into a demented crime thriller, 2006’s Running Scared, starring Paul Walker. Featuring warped fairytale leitmotifs (sidebar: for fun, pair the movie in a double feature with Joe Wright’s Hanna) and child-molesting serial killers inessential to the main plot, the film was clearly a tough/misunderstood sell, even for edgier distributor New Line. Given a halfhearted theatrical release, it pulled in under $7 million, and garnered the dubious distinction of being the lowest-grossing earner of Walker’s post-The Fast and the Furious career.

Then Kramer adapted Crossing Over from his own short film of the same name, and inked a high-profile cast that included Harrison Ford, Sean Penn, Ray Liotta and Ashley Judd. A sprawling drama about various illegal immigrants living lives on the fringe in Los Angeles and working to achieve legal status, it was supposed to be to immigration what Stephen Gaghan and Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic was to the drug war — an issue-based statement drama with awards potential. Various editing battles over the film’s length dragged on, Penn demanded his scenes be excised, and the Weinstein Company sat on it for a year-and-a-half before finally releasing it in a small number of theaters in 2009.



All of which brings us to Pawn Shop Chronicles, Kramer’s fourth completed film behind the camera, and yet another zonked-out entry in his strange, sexually barbed canon. A meandering yet in some ways oddly memorable anthology of sweat-soaked lunacy that in its home stretch attempts to pull off a full-circle statement of dubious clarity, the movie shares a lot of the same crazed DNA as Running Scared, but lacks that film’s… dare I say it, cracked cogency and coherence.

Scripted by Adam Minarovich and set in small Southern town, Pawn Shop Chronicles aims to evoke Pulp Fiction but more recalls something like Burning Palms. The title tips off the movie’s fulcrum setting — a grungy swap store operated by Anton (Vincent D’Onofrio, quite good) — but it’s easier, more efficient and makes just as much sense to merely list a bunch of things that are in the movie: a sad-sack Elvis impersonator (Brendan Fraser, doing his impression of Nathan Fillion doing an Elvis impression) trying to scrape by; a bunch of idiot meth addicts planning (and botching) a robbery; a newly married man, Richard (Matt Dillon), lighting out on a quest of bloody vengeance to try to find his old wife (Pell James); townspeople lining up behind feuding barbers like rabid sports team devotees; and a parade of nude girls who, to the tune of “Amazing Grace,” are ceremonially wrapped in American flags.

As an ensemble piece, Pawn Shop Chronicles allows for all sorts of colorful, off-the-beaten path work; Elijah Wood plays a particularly skeevy fellow, and Walker (also a producer on the project) co-stars as Raw Dog, a white supremacist meth-head who’s confused as to why he should hate Jews, since he owns three Adam Sandler DVDs. These performances give the movie crackle and pop; it’s certainly not a boring thing.

Minarovich’s screenplay has a few funny touches (“At least Jesus didn’t write Battlefield Earth” reads a truck’s bumper sticker) and delights in rhetorical flourish. But it also feels very much like a collection of characters arbitrarily tossed together. Kramer’s first work that he didn’t also script, Pawn Shop Chronicles lurches to and fro, lacking a dynamic narrative throughline. Its point (if there is one) evaporates early on, never to return, and Kramer struggles to summon and maintain a tone that makes sense and feels emotionally balanced. The film often looks gorgeous, but the result is definitely far less than the sum of its parts. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Pawn Shop Chronicles is also available across VOD platforms; for more information, visit the film’s eponymous Facebook page. (Anchor Bay, R, 112 minutes)

An animated family film centering around a snail magically gifted with super-speed, Turbo is marked by a rather bewildering chasm between its area of chosen focus and other, more exciting possibilities its conceit suggests. Imagine a superhero movie where Peter Parker just took up high school sports, Superman the Olympic shot-put, or Hal Jordan metalworking and fabrication. In a nutshell that’s Turbo, an inoffensively affable but unmemorable offering that showcases a bit of wily imagination but quickly ducks back into its shell, opting for a safe, all-too-familiar athletic story of underdog triumph.

With The Croods ($578 million worldwide) and Epic ($236 million worldwide), distributor 20th Century Fox already has two animated hits this year that have rung up $100 million apiece in domestic receipts, and Turbo seems a sure bet to make it a third. The movie’s catchy, simple marketing campaign (“He’s fast, they’re furious”) sells its concept in canny fashion and attaches itself to another popular franchise to boot, further boosting its overseas commercial prospects. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 95 minutes)