Documentaries rarely spawn sequels. And yet five years after Herb & Dorothy, a fascinating look at an elderly New York couple who over several decades amassed a massive, world-class collection of minimalist and conceptual art despite their modest means, here’s a follow-up to director Megumi Sasaki’s nonfiction film about both the place of art in modern life and its broader relationship to the proletariat. It’s too cruel to call the pleasant, milquetoast Herb & Dorothy 50×50 pointless or boring, but in truth it does feel defined more by its inessential nature than any of the updates it provides.

For years, married Brooklynites Herb and Dorothy Vogel lived in a single-bedroom apartment on the latter’s salary as a librarian, while using the former’s earnings as a postal employee to collect thousands of pieces of art. In 1992, though their collected works were now worth millions of dollars, they donated their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. Sixteen years later, a national gift project called the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States was conceived. The simple idea, since their collection was too large to ever exhibit at one location, was to bequeath works to museums and art galleries across the nation. Having lived as public servants, the Vogels wanted to share their love of art with citizens across the entire country.

Herb & Dorothy had the advantage of surprise, certainly, serving as an introductory snapshot of the Vogels, two characters fascinating in their ordinariness. And yet that movie also had an important hook, forcefully promulgating the theory that art was meant to be lived with, and essential to a meaningful, well-rounded and intellectually stimulating life. Herb & Dorothy 50×50 would seem ready to plumb that same terrain (after all, what is the very idea of “50×50” but an extrapolation of that philosophy), but while the film does feature some interviews with patrons of the museums that receive the Vogels’ art, Sasaki doesn’t pursue that concept aggressively enough.

Instead, the movie just kind of wanders to and fro, spending time with the Vogels as they travel to various museum installations (Herb, increasingly silent and in poor health, would pass away last summer), querying grateful artists about the Vogels’ status as benefactors, and chatting up equally appreciate museum directors who talk about how they frequently wouldn’t otherwise be able to bring such notable works to their galleries. It lacks a cogent spine, as well as a lot of emotional punch. There are ways a more visually oriented filmmaker could have endeavored to bring the Vogels’ collection to life, but Sasaki eschews the hunt for any inner fire, and the result is a minor chord cinematic riff that lives and dies, moment to moment, by a viewer’s predetermined level of interest in and familiarity with the source material. (Fine Line Media, unrated, 86 minutes)

An indefatigable, forward-leaning concoction, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 breathlessly mimics the adolescent playtime, anything-goes sensibility of its predecessor, but can’t recapture the essential magic of 2009’s inventive children’s book adaptation, one of the more purely enjoyable animated films of the past five years. Directors Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn take over for originating helmers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who each take executive producer and story credits, and while Cloudy 2 is undeniably the product of massive collaboration (it’s even billed as “another film by a lot of people” in a pre-title card), Lord and Miller’s unifying touch and oversight are sorely missed. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony, PG, 95 minutes)

A lot of nonfiction films of the social activist strain peddle scattershot panic or unfocused, call-to-arms rhetoric in lieu of taking the time to properly root down into a particular issue, present compelling characters or craft throughlines of a deeper and more sincere engagement. However well intentioned they might be, they fan the flames of discord, attacking those promulgating different opinions as backwards, uninformed or worse.

GMO OMG, which explores the loss of seed diversity and the rise in the genetic manipulation of food, is thankfully not one of those films. Directed by Jeremy Seifert, this bighearted, family-centric effort has no small amount of skepticism about the dubious efforts of companies like Monsanto and others to patent the building blocks of life (and sue out of existence the farmers that would deign to oppose them) but it’s powered by an honest curiosity rather than a completely predetermined agenda. Recognizing that minds are changed as much through the heart as a litany of facts, GMO OMG manages to provoke important self-reflection in viewers. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. GMO OMG opens in Los Angeles at the Arena Cinema before expanding to various Laemmle theaters; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Submarine Deluxe/Natures Path/Compeller Pictures/Heartworn Pictures, unrated, 91 minutes)

Eschewing shaded characterization and often basic sense, and establishing what should be the high-water mark for most crotch-grabbing in a single film in 2013, Battle of the Year drapes a pro forma narrative over lots of acrobatic hip hop dancing. It’s not a good film, necessarily, but director Benson Lee, drawing inspiration from his 2008 documentary Planet B-Boy, at least crafts a vehicle that establishes a certain sub-cultural milieu and delivers what viewers most predisposed to movies like this are most interested in. Unfortunately, the script is utterly lacking in interesting characters, it awkwardly shoehorns in a bunch of product placement, and it then works its way through choices ranging from misguided to risible — like having dancing cure a character’s homophobia. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony, PG-13, 109 minutes)

A disappointingly scattershot, sigh-inducing comedy from the creators of Reno 911!, Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, Hell Baby represents a slog through improvisation run amok. A horror comedy that doesn’t make hay out of lampooning the genre (which is totally fine), Garant and Lennon’s joint feature directorial debut seems downright allergic toward anything that might be construed as a legitimate throughline, lest that somehow be interpreted as “selling out,” and not subversive enough.



The story centers around Jack and Vanessa (Rob Corddry and Leslie Bibb), a married couple, expecting their first child, who move into a possibly haunted and certainly rundown house in an unsafe borough in New Orleans. There’s a weird dude, F’resnel (Keegan Michael Key), living in a crawl space in their home who tells them about all the murders committed there; then a grotesque old lady, Mrs. Nussbaum (Alex Berg), appears out of nowhere and sexually assaults a confused Jack, who fights her off, apparently killing her.

While this puts two inept detectives (Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer) in Jack and Vanessa’s orbit, the former also begins to wonder if his wife — who’s taken to spiking his drinks with paint thinner — may have forces other than just prenatal stress acting upon her. Garant and Lennon, meanwhile, portray Vatican exorcists dispatched by Rome to, like, solve a mystery of in-utero evil or something.

Hell Baby is “just” a comedy, sure, but there’s simply not a lot of tension, discipline or consequence to the story, really. It’s just a bunch of lowest-common denominator wankery, without any sort of unifying aesthetic. (Even “dumb” generally coalesces around a couple central ideas.) It doesn’t help that it’s 70-plus minutes before Jack learns that Vanessa is possessed, but even when she slashes his stomach (offscreen, weirdly), there’s no immediate escalation of action. Editorially and structurally, the film is a huge mess, which makes its 94-minute running time often feel interminable.

Garant and Lennon‘s movie is also characterized by a screenplay that embraces digression, and scorns backstory. The latter is fine, but the tangential asides and other comedic indulgences herein don’t have the same warped silliness of something like Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore or Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod, which I underestimated upon its theatrical release. When Hell Baby descends into one of its extended superfluous riffs — Po Boy sandwich eating montages, group puke fests or juggling babies — it feels like a stalling technique as much as anything else. (And speaking of gratuitousness, as Vanessa’s Wiccan sister Marjorie, Riki Lindhome pops up to make a run at 2013’s Most Consecutive Seconds of Screen Nudity crown.)

The sad thing is that Hell Baby has some fine, funny folks in it. The array of familiar faces may make one want to take a flyer on this proudly oddball offering, but the curses you’ll be left uttering at the end won’t be of delight. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Millennium Entertainment, R, 94 minutes)

The story of the planet’s most famous cosmologist, told for the first time in his own words and by those closest to him, documentary Hawking is an engaging, inspirational portrait of as unlikely an iconic figure as the last half-century has produced. If modern celebrity culture values glamour, sexiness, vitality and youth — or, failing that, healthy dollops of tawdriness and puffed-up confrontation — British-born scientist Stephen Hawking is the antithesis of those qualities. And yet, beginning in the 1970s, he managed to drag physics and related topics into the popular discourse.

Directed by Stephen Finnigan, Hawking chronicles its subject’s incredible journey from childhood to PhD candidate, scientific genius and bestselling author. Though known worldwide in his wheelchair-bound form, Hawking, now 71, actually enjoyed a full and normal childhood with his siblings, and this film sketches out that adolescence in fanciful, winning fashion. Diagnosed in his 20s with a motor neuron disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (or ALS), Hawking was given only two or three years to live; though he’s beaten the odds to live a long and full life, his condition is a degenerative one, and it’s robbed him of speech and almost all movement (apart from a few muscles in his cheek) over time.

Among Hawking’s scientific breakthroughs are the idea that black holes emit particles of radiation, and a cosmological singularity that finds union in the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Hawking, though, scales these monumental breakthroughs in science in a very human way. Part of this has to do with the way that Finnigan cannily interweaves interview segments with a variety of subjects — former students and contemporaries, plus caregivers and Hawking’s first wife, Jane Wilde — along with tastefully staged re-enactments that capture the feeling of moments.

Hawking’s droll sense of humor pokes through often as well. Recounting the onset of his disease, he says, “I felt somewhat of a tragic character. I took to listening to Wagner.” Later, describing the emotions attached to scientific breakthrough, he says, “There is nothing like the ‘eureka’ moment when you discover something no one has known before. I won’t compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.”

The dual spine of the film lies in Hawking’s commitment to crafting a mainstream-accessible tome about physics and the Big Bang Theory — which he did with A Brief History of Time, which would go on to sell over 10 million copies — and his rather easy embrace of celebrity (surprisingly, even Jim Carrey pops up). The latter, for better or worse (it cost Hawking at least one of his two marriages), can be viewed from several perspectives, depending on one’s level of cynicism. But the love that Hawking has outwardly manifested, and indeed radiated, in pursuit of asking the big questions about life and solving the difficulties of the universe’s creation have a broader lesson and application. As Hawking himself says near the film’s end, “However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and excel at.” Hawking opens this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino. (Quad Cinema/Vertigo Films/Film 4, unrated, 94 minutes)

Imagine a boring, gender-swapped and totally arty and pretentious version of the travelogue-mini-film-within-a-film that focuses on Kip Pardue’s character from The Rules of Attraction, except strung out on Benadryl instead of methamphetamine, and one has an idea about writer-director Kat Coiro‘s And While We Were Here, starring Kate Bosworth as a married woman who finds herself at a personal and professional crossroads while traveling with her husband in Italy. A film of precious construction but precious little insight, this drama of young adult crisis mistakes mere mundanity for a stirring creative statement.



Jane (Bosworth), an American freelance writer, accompanies her British husband Leonard (Iddo Goldberg), a viola player, on a business trip to the island of Ischia, off the Amalfi Coast. She’s working on a vaguely defined book idea informed by tape-recorded conversations about World War II with her now-deceased grandmother (narrated by Claire Bloom) when she stumbles across 19-year-old Caleb (Jamie Blackley) while sightseeing one afternoon. A cautious dance of (mostly unrequited) flirtation ensues, but after introducing Caleb to her husband Jane eventually tumbles into an affair with him.

Bosworth previously collaborated with Coiro on L!fe Happens, a lively, Los Angeles-set comedy. That this film is almost 180 degrees tonally removed from that work is totally fine, but And While We Were Here lacks any sort of specificity that would make it stand out or give it a palpable emotional connection. Coiro was inspired to write the script by a series of audio tapes she made with her own late grandmother, but if Jane is to be her stand-in she gives Bosworth only a series of clichéd poses to play. The actress commits admirably to the material, but it’s neo-realism lite, nothing more.

The film doesn’t have any of the sort of balanced heartbreak and uplift of something like the thematically similar Hello I Must Be Going, forget that movie’s shrewd observation. Coiro oversees a fairly polished technical package, but the film’s picturesque locations and gauzy sentimentality seem like an ill-suited match for the sort of inner turmoil that we’re supposed to believe is ailing Jane. And While We Were Here wants to plumb the diseased silences that plague romantic relationships, but by the time Jane and Leonard finally have it out (halfheartedly, at that), it’s been long evident that this putative snapshot of the aches found in interstices is just another case of the emperor’s new clothes, lacking in real characters or foundational perceptiveness. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, And While We Were Here is also presently available across VOD platforms; click here for more information. (Well Go USA, R, 83 minutes)

A deeply invested lead performance in service of an acutely flawed screenplay most characterizes A Teacher, a Sundance-minted tale of an illicit affair, between a lonely high school instructor and one of her students, that eventually unwinds into a tangle of chaotic consequences. The feature film debut of writer-director Hannah Fidell, this artfully posed but willfully removed snapshot of emotional foundering feels like an exercise in lazy minimalism.



Unfolding in small town Texas, A Teacher follows Diana Watts (Lindsay Burdge), a teacher who gloms onto one of her teenage charges. There’s a hint of familial tension surrounding her mother in a brief get-together with her brother, but the movie is mostly about the exercising of Diana’s poor judgment with Eric Tull (Will Brittain), and the psychological duress that ensues when he attempts to break things off.

Fidell, folding in a score from first-time composer Brian McOmber that in its low buzz communicates a haze of both emotional discontent and discombobulation, delivers a movie that is more or less accurate and realistic in a lot of ways. A Teacher isn’t about plotting, but it captures both the “Hey, it’s me” phase of a relationship, where there’s a certain level of familiarity if not commitment, and then later how that slides into something more woozy and imbalanced.

A Teacher is even artful, in a representational sense. Its sex scenes are charged, without being salacious. And Fidell knows how to stage things in a way that flirts with the notion that the film is going to turn into something more interesting. The problem is that A Teacher‘s script is so very interior that it forces viewers’ attention inwards, in a subjective fashion, and onto a character that is not particularly fleshed out or knowable, and is in fact in many ways just a cipher or symbol.

Burdge and Brittain have a nice chemistry, but it’s the former whose aggrieved instability gives A Teacher its sense of pull. That’s not enough, though. Even given its brevity, Fidell’s movie readily gives off vapors of phoniness — of not avoiding conclusivity in the name of ambiguity, but of merely not having a strong sense of purpose or mission statement. This Teacher is often pretty to look at, but is lacking in the lessons it can impart. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Oscilloscope, R, 75 minutes)

A follow-up to 2011’s rather imaginative chiller Insidious, which grossed almost $100 million worldwide on a budget of under $2 million, Insidious: Chapter 2 returns all of its major players in service of a story that feels at once convoluted and undernourished. Director James Wan fashions the film as more of a domestic thriller with a supernatural edge, but a lot of potential tension dissipates in a soupy fog of twisted timelines and free-floating motivations. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (FilmDistrict, PG-13, 106 minutes)

Even the sympathetic listening abilities of a Quaker reared at the knees of his grandparents might be overtaxed by TV Man: The Search for the Last Independent Dealer, an amiable documentary that mistakes merely malingering around old people for evocative, homespun nostalgia. An inoffensive but hardly fetching borderline vanity project that follows around director Steve Kosareff as he traces the lineage of mom-and-pop American television retailers while also trying to find someone to fix his beloved 1965 Zenith Jetlite, this film — aimed squarely at an over-60 rural/suburban demographic who could never be bothered to drive to a theater to see it, and wouldn’t know how to ever track it down online — delivers more yawns than laughs, intrigue or identification. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (TV Man Productions, unrated, 82 minutes)