In sports, relationships and indeed life, sometimes it’s the little things that end up mattering most — the hustle down the first baseline on a routine grounder, the changed windshield wiper blades as an unsolicited favor for a loved one, and the extra-pass proofreading of a job search query letter. Lest we forget, such can be the case with cinema, too. For all the Hollywood obsession with high-concept and special effects, sometimes there’s something enchanting about a simple story simply told, and a movie of small rather than grand gestures.

Case in point: the pleasant and enchanting Brightest Star, a narratively slight but well acted and keenly observed romantic dramedy about a twentysomething guy’s amorous fumblings and occupational uncertainty. Starring Chris Lowell, Rose McIver and Jessica Szohr, debut director Maggie Kiley’s Brightest Star isn’t a movie of conventionally structured catharsis. But it does understand, on an intuitive level, the enormous weight of young adult ambivalence, and how that can be a suffocating thing in its own right. And sometimes there’s warmth and value in such reflection. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Gravitas Ventures, unrated, 80 minutes)

If one needed a reminder that “different” is not synonymous with “good,” an ample reminder arrives in the form of writer-director Jeremy O’Keefe’s Somewhere Slow, a very self-consciously serious independent production about an emotionally fragile thirtysomething woman (Jessalyn Gilsig) acting out a life crisis by opportunistically plunging into a road trip with a dodgy, wayward Mormon teenager (Graham Patrick Martin).

Somewhere Slow actually shares a decent bit in common with another cracked road trip of emotional awakening that centers around an older woman and younger male — Natural Selection, in which Racheal Harris plays a character who discovers her coma-stricken husband long ago fathered a son (Matt O’Leary) she never knew or met. But O’Keefe’s script is a precious bundle of mannered eccentricities, and a frustrating non-starter. Its characters don’t circle one another; they fall into a make-nice rapport too easily. That puts viewers on a slow train to Posed Self-Actualization, with too many stops along the way. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Screen Media Films/Logolite Entertainment, unrated, 96 minutes)

An unusual and gripping piece of minimalist experimental cinema, Charlie Victor Romeo dramatizes the cockpit voice recordings of a half dozen actual airline emergencies. Directors Robert Berger and Karlyn Michelson — working in concert with actor/producer Patrick Daniels, who helmed the stage version of this New Frontier world premiere from last year’s Sundance Film Festival — craft a psychological thriller that blends low-fi technique with high-tension situations, and wrings a real rooting interest out of viewers.



Filmed in front of live (though never shown) audiences over the course of three days during one of its 2012 stage runs, Charlie Victor Romeo deploys a small repertory company of actors playing the various roles of the pilots, co-pilots and other flight crew members grappling with six discrete disasters. The situations unfold at different lengths, and include incidents with icing, birds, bulkhead rupture, hydraulic system failure and other mechanical malfunctions.

Brief interstitial title cards provide relevant information about the type of aircraft in each scene, and the passengers and crew on board. Otherwise, the black-box staging of the material provides a fixed, straight-on point-of-view of the cockpit, though with a couple camera angles and very occasional, tightly framed cutaways to the profiles of assisting, overheard air traffic controllers. It’s a very spare approach, but the telling suits the material. It forces a subjectivity upon the viewer which compels them to create all the surrounding elements — the passengers and scrambling ground crew — in their mind.

The acting is (appropriately) clipped and professional, though not without small moments of humor and humanity; the movie’s opening sequence includes some flirtation between pilot and stewardess. There’s profanity, too, understandably. The aviation jargon, meanwhile (“over-speed alarm,” “elevator control,” etcetera), summons forth memories of the panicked punch of television hit ER, which gave plenty of viewers their first real glimpse into the crisis reaction of frontline medical professionals. It’s considerable, this terminology, but since the scenarios are authentic it’s not distracting; the gist of all the problems in each event is always readily apparent.

By using actual “black box” voice recording transcripts (only condensing some material for time, not changing any of it) and recreating these scenes of extreme duress, Charlie Victor Romeo doesn’t so much provide a snapshot of heroic professionalism (though there is a good pinch of that) as much as plumb the valley between human frailty and our remarkable capacity for disaster response. The result is a unique and unsettling film. For the full, original review from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its New York City engagements, Charlie Victor Romeo opens in Los Angeles on January 31 at the Downtown Independent. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, visit its eponymous website and/or Facebook page. (Collective: Unconscious/3-Legged Dog, unrated, 81 minutes)