Patton Oswalt‘s fifth stand-up special finds the comedian in strong form, humorously putting under the microscope his perceived strengths and shortcomings as a father, while also pondering the future of America and humankind as a whole. In large measure an engaging, curated trip into the performer’s own commingled personal and professional lives, Patton Oswalt: Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time is proof that wit, intelligence and innate narrative instincts are often a better foundation for comedy than rapid-fire jokes built around discrete subjects.

Oswalt is a personable storyteller, and as with many of his previous shows and appearances, Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time unfolds as a narrative-based effort, with long-ish, shrewdly observed yarns punctuated by occasional pin-prick asides. It isn’t powered by jokes in the traditional sense, though when Oswalt drops one (“Part of getting old for a man is suddenly becoming interested in World War II, for no reason”) it tends to connect just fine, like a sharp jab.

Director Bobcat Goldthwait, meanwhile, oversees an unfussy technical package, shot on location at San Diego’s Spreckels Theater, that eschews any lengthy filmed set-up, and instead uses changes in background lighting to serve as visual counterpoint to some of the more natural partitions in Oswalt’s show. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time world premieres on Epix on Friday, January 17 at 10 p.m. Eastern time, and replays throughout the month. For more information, visit the channel’s eponymous website. (Epix, unrated, 55 minutes)

A well-intentioned coming-of-age drama, based on a true story, about a teenage delinquent’s flirtation with more permanent ruination, indie offering Jamesy Boy features a grounded, engaging lead performance from newcomer Spencer Lofranco, against an equally solid technical backdrop. Unfortunately, while its redemptive arc offers minor chord catharsis for those predisposed to embrace adapted tales of real salvation, the movie never pushes past a comfortable orbit of earnestness in search of deeper truths.

Flashing back and forth between periods before, after and during incarceration, the film tells the story of James Burns (Lofranco), a troubled nascent teenager who — after attempts by his mother Tracy (Mary-Louise Parker) to get him enrolled in and settled at a normal high school — runs away from home and falls under the sway of drug dealer Roc (Michael Trotter). The rest of the characters in James’ world slot into recognizable roles. There’s the bad girl, Crystal (Rosa Salazar), whose wild behavior and uncouth come-ons (“Let’s get out of here, and go find a place to fuck”) are part of the siren song of life on the wild side; the good girl, Sarah (Taissa Farmiga), whose affectionate gazes seemingly represent safer ground, if not a way out; the gruff yet wise convict, Conrad (Ving Rhames), whose elucidated regret helps tame James’ recalcitrance; and the mousy fellow inmate (Ben Rosenfield) who of course has to die to help redeem James’ sins.

While director Trevor White, working from a script co-written with Lane Shadgett, doesn’t commit the typical cardinal sin of constantly overarticulating his characters’ feelings and tragic pasts, neither does he quite punch through to an elemental awakening. (The fact that the real-life Burns is a co-producer on the film likely doesn’t help matters.) Apart from a few cursory domestic scenes, James’ relationship with his mother and younger sister — a potential outlet for significant drama — is largely ignored, in favor of more difficult to convey scenes which throw a spotlight on James’ love of writing, specifically poetry.

Similarly, while James’ introduction and connection with Roc is nicely sketched out, the manner in which he drifts away after hooking up with Sarah feels arbitrary. (Drug-dealing kingpins aren’t typically big on freelancers making their own hours, one presumes.) The split structure doesn’t totally work, either. White and Shadgett mis-budget some of their focus, and at 109 minutes, the movie drags, in large part since so many of the characters take on such heavy representational qualities. We know where this is going, so it would be better for all parties involved if it got there quicker.

Despite the fact that it can’t quite cut through a low-hanging fog of narrative familiarity and inevitability, Jamesy Boy still features some nice performances. Salazar and Farmiga each imbue their characters with small moments of feminine coercion believably informed by their respective fractured backgrounds. And Lofranco, recently cast in a supporting role in Angelina Jolie‘s sophomore directorial narrative feature film, Unbroken, gives an intuitive performance that is mindful and in line with the unseen angel sitting on his character’s left shoulder. A young actor with more blustery, outwardly manifested angst could tip the film over into insufferability, but Lofranco is impressively restrained; he (rightly) plays James as a character hiding his pain from the world. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Jamesy Boy is also available across VOD platforms. (XLrator Media/Phase 4 Films, R, 109 minutes)

When a director is so utterly disheartened with a finished product that, regardless of whether they had final cut, he or she takes measures to actually remove their name… well, that really says something. And such is the case with Reasonable Doubt, a labyrinthine legal thriller that starts off with an interesting enough premise but quickly devolves into a ramshackle delivery vehicle for Dominic Cooper‘s misadventures in accent and the sort of disinterested glowering bullcrap that Samuel L. Jackson reliably pulls out for paycheck gigs devoid of character or sense. Director Peter Howitt (Sliding Doors, Antitrust, Laws of Attraction) was the man behind the camera for this, but the name viewers will see (or not, if they’re wise) credited at the end of the film as director is Peter P. Croudins.



The story centers around district attorney Mitch Brockden (Cooper), who has a promising career, and a new baby daughter with his wife Rachel (Erin Karpluk). So when he strikes and wounds a man with his car after a night of drinking, he swallows hard and makes a quick, bad decision, calling an ambulance but leaving the man alone on a snowy street. When car mechanic Clinton Davis (Jackson), an apparent good Samaritan who picked up the man in his van, is charged with murder in his subsequent death, Mitch feels compelled to throw the case — something he does with the assistance of his ne’er-do-well, recently paroled stepbrother Jimmy Logan (Ryan Robbins). His compromised and halfhearted effort, though, arouses the suspicion of Detective Blake Kanon (Gloria Reuben).

Sounds passably intriguing, right? Well, that’s merely the first act of Reasonable Doubt, which then tosses any notions of character-rooted suspense out the window in proceeding to rifle through plot developments seemingly generated by some special game of Moral Quandary Mad-Libs. Clinton, it turns out, may be guilty of crimes much worse than with what he was charged, leading to all sorts of games between he and Mitch which it’s very clear were described both to and by various producers as “cat-and-mouse.”

I’m not privy to the particulars of why and how Howitt got his name removed as director, but there are very large structural problems in Peter Dowling’s script. Yes, it takes 11 minutes of a slow end credits crawl to get this flick to 91 minutes, suggesting happy scissorhands on the part of at least one of the nearly two dozen producers on Reasonable Doubt. But the vague characterizations, insipid dialogue and chicken-wire stabs at parallelism had to be present to some degree from the start, as well as the decision to magically confer the status and skill set of a forensic investigator upon Mitch.

Shot on location in Winnipeg and Chicago, Reasonable Doubt makes nice use of some wintry environs but seems to lack any unifying visual aesthetic, and otherwise suffers from extraordinarily cheap production design (it’s courtroom is laughably bare bones), and production value in general. Composer James Jandrisch contributes some nice music — he has a way with syncopated unease — but this film is otherwise one big, snowy slog through Stupidville. It piles implausibility on top of implausibility, without ever downshifting out of its very self-serious tone. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 91 minutes)