An open-hearted, engaging documentary that follows the lives of a group of young autistic kids for the 18 months leading up to them placing out of a special needs school at age 21, Best Kept Secret is a movie that flirts with heartbreak and despair while also showcasing — in the form of both struggling yet involved parents as well as its strong, crusading teacher protagonist — the better angels of human nature. In telling a more compact, focused story than recent, similarly themed nonfiction feature The United States of Autism, the film packs an undeniable emotional punch, throwing a spotlight on characters one won’t soon forget. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, which opens today in New York City at the IFC Center and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Playhouse 7, click here to visit its website. (Argot Pictures, unrated, 85 minutes)

If war is hell, then adolescence is too, in its own differentiated, downscale way. I Declare War, a brilliant, terrifically imaginative comedy of commingled nostalgia and allegory, gets this, on a gut level. Co-directed by Jason Lapeyre and Robert Wilson, the film unfolds as a surreal, seriocomic riff on Lord of the Flies, exposing the hidden seams of psychological depth present in war-as-playtime, wherein kids (mostly boys) first start trying on some of the absolutes and certitude of adulthood.



Unfolding entirely in a sprawling woods, I Declare War tells the story of an especially spirited game of Capture the Flag, wherein a bunch of 12-year-olds act out fantasy aggressions that bleed over into the rivalries and burgeoning crushes of unglimpsed “normal” lives. This is their playtime, but it’s deadly serious. With the help of his best friend Paul (Siam Yu), P.K. (Gage Munroe, above) has never lost a war. His side is matched up against Quinn (Aiden Gouveia), who’s similarly invested in strategy, but when Quinn is overthrown by his impulsive, angry lieutenant, Skinner (Michael Friend), it upsets the normal rhythms of war.

Since there’s nothing explicitly against it in the rules (which dictate things like remaining motionless and counting to 10 after being shot), Skinner keeps Paul hostage rather than “killing” him (via a paint-filled grenade, which sends the deceased home), figuring P.K. will have to mount a rescue operation that can be easily defeated. Skinner’s leadership — loud, but lacking in any specifics, forget nuance — makes things difficult for Jessica (Mackenzie Munro), as well as Frost (Alex Cardillo) and Trevor (Dyson Fyke), who sort of serve as the film’s Abbott and Costello.

One of the things that’s most immediately arresting about I Declare War is the forcefulness and glee with which it blurs lines of entertainment and quasi-uncomfortable exploitation. “This is war, man — not fucking hopscotch!” exclaims P.K. Most importantly, though, the sticks the kids use for guns manifest as real weapons, and so firefights unfold with all the decibel-appropriate, shoot-’em-up intensity of a straightforward action flick. (Blood-letting is still kept mostly representative, but the movie does touch on torture and bullying in a forthright manner that evidences a clear erosion of innocence).

A good comparative leaping-off point for I Declare War is perhaps something like Garth Jennings’ Son of Rambow, which has an inventive hook, is likewise caught up in adolescent preoccupations with brawny combat, and displays a somewhat similar exploding sugar-rush imagination. I Declare War, though, is much darker, albeit in a way that realistically digs into both the wild creativity and warped value system of youth. (Whether that ethical compass is under-developed or in the process of being corrupted by adult fallibilities is left somewhat open for debate.)

Working from a script by Lapeyre, the film mixes play-acted violence with a few bursts of the real thing, but is threaded throughout with hearty ribbons of humor both dark (would-you-rather questioning, and foul offered bets involving dog crap) and light (“No, I’m not quitting, I’ll be back later — I just want some juice,” says one participant, opting for a break). It all rings true, and the characters are extraordinarily well sketched — believable as kids, but also touching on well-worn war film archetypes, for comedic effect.

Ray Dumas’ evocative cinematography highlights a remarkable technical package, and a uniformly excellent adolescent cast speaks to the exacting nature of the superb direction. (Friend especially, in all his awkward bluster, captures — whether by skill or managed happy-accident — the essence of that kid with whom everyone else in the neighborhood hates to play.) Original, engaging and thought-provoking, I Declare War eschews sentimentality or (potentially far worse) wink-wink satire to deliver a series of rather remarkably hard-hitting adult truths, wrapped up in the guise of a film about kids. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, I Declare War is also currently available across VOD platforms; for more general information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Drafthouse Films/Samaritan Entertainment, unrated, 94 minutes)

The seriocomic feature film debut of television director Liz W. Garcia, The Lifeguard offers up a contrived series of precious posed moments in telling the story of a young career woman who moves back home in an effort to shake off a low-lying cloud of personal and professional ambivalence. In her starring role, Kristen Bell delivers a charming, engaging performance, but the much sharper take on this same sort of female thirtysomething ennui (even though Bell’s character is quick to point out that she’s still 29 years old) is found in last year’s Hello I Must Be Going, starring Melanie Lynskey.



Leigh London (Bell) is an AP reporter in New York City who, after her romance with her engaged boss sputters out, moves back home to Connecticut with her parents. Her dad Hans (Adam Lefevre) is sympathetic, but Leigh’s tightly wound mother Justine (Amy Madigan) is going through issues of her own, and is chafed a bit by her daughter’s sudden presence. Leigh re-connects with a pair of old friends — Todd (Martin Starr) and Mel (a wonderful Mamie Gummer), the latter now an associate principal at the high school where they matriculated — and in short order decides to reclaim her old teenage job, as the lifeguard at a condominium complex.

It’s there that Leigh meets a group of outsider/skater types, including Matt (Alex Shaffer) and Little Jason (David Lambert, above right). They’re high school students, but on the precipice of dropping out, in order to… move to Vermont? Yep, that’s their plan. Beer is bought, marijuana is smoked, and inappropriate relationships ensue, along with a requisite side of soul-searching.

Garcia has a nice touch for pithy dialogue (“Is this parking lot passed down in the DNA of skaters, like a geese migratory pattern?” Leigh wonders aloud), and also makes quite nice use of music; her debut, which debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, feels surprisingly well stitched together from a technical standpoint. But the backstories for her characters are threadbare, and so their motivations are often bewildering. Certain scenes just start in strange places (Little Jason randomly enters Leigh’s car in a rainstorm), and a couple of the supporting characters can’t overcome the limitations of the screenplay. (Particularly under-sketched is Mel’s sad-sack husband, played to annoying effect by Joshua Harto: he exists only to play “the rooted adult,” hectoring Mel and generally moralizing.)

Bell, looking beautiful with hardly a trace of make-up, exudes a warm watchability. And she has a fantastic rapport with both Starr and Gummer; their scenes are a treat. The torrid affair between Leigh and Little Jason, though, while evocatively captured, never digs much past the surface of Leigh’s distractible libidinal impulses. What ultimately tips The Lifeguard over from marginal recommendation to marginal pan is a cheap plot device at around the 75-minute mark that attempts to suddenly wring high-stakes drama from the narrative, followed by a cloying finale. With apologies to Thomas Wolfe, you can go home again; The Lifeguard just proves that sometimes it’s not the best course of action. For the complete, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more general information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Screen Media Films/Focus World, R, 98 minutes)

A delightful documentary that dances along the edge between intellectual think-piece and ring-a-ding, Ocean’s-style criminal lifestyle celebration, director Havana Marking’s Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers is remarkable in how it sketches, connects and contextualizes the work and rising success of an international criminal syndicate, humanizing its players without absolving them from blame.

A shadowy and inventive group of jewel thieves who started snatching massive amounts of diamonds from European jewelry stores early in the new millennium, and then moved onto Asia and even Dubai, this mysterious collective has been dubbed the Pink Panthers — and not because they install Corning Fiberglass. In a decade-plus, they’ve committed an estimated 180 robberies, maybe more, with “earnings” of close to $300 million.

Smash & Grab takes a tripartite approach in telling their story — looking at some of the Pink Panthers themselves, the men trying to catch them, and the conditions that fostered their creation, the latter as seen through the eyes of a couple journalists who have tracked their story. One of the most interesting things about the Panthers is their compartmentalized, quasi-vertical power structure (a page borrowed from Al Qaeda, perhaps?), which lets thieves rise through the ranks to take part in bigger and more complicated jobs but also helps protect anonymity since there is no clear boss.

Marking’s film, then, fascinatingly connects the group’s formation to a basic lack of economic opportunity — in this case rising from the ashes of the failed Yugoslavian state, following the death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980 and the country’s bloody sectarian and ethnic clashes a decade later. In a jaw-dropping passage, Marking secures an interview with a former high-level government intelligence operative who admits that they helped forge passports for known criminals, embracing a policy whereby they could leave to commit robberies across Europe but return and be afforded some measure of safe harbor in their native land.

The interviews with Panthers themselves — rendered in stylish animation, to protect their anonymity — are just as engaging. Women are afforded an equal and important place at the table, since their ability to scout locations with less suspicion is crucial to the group’s modus operandi, summed up in the film’s title. The details of some of their plots are gripping, lending Smash & Grab the energy of a proper crime thriller, but there’s also a vulnerability and sadness to some of their more confessional musings. Slick and cleverly constructed, Marking’s film tells the Panthers’ backstory in a way that honors the intricacies and infallibility of human nature. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Music Box Films, unrated, 89 minutes)

Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone is a unique, intimately scaled and enormously affecting dissection of patriarchal culture. The French-Afghan filmmaker’s drama, which debuted at last year’s Toronto Film Festival and was Afghanistan’s Best Foreign Language Academy Award submission, serves as a wonderful showcase for star Golshifteh Farahani, and if there’s any justice will deliver even more success her way.

The film’s story is extraordinarily plain, yet still gripping. In contemporary, war-torn Afghanistan, a young wife (Farahani) and mother of two children, after around a decade of marriage, tends to her wounded husband (Hamid Djavadan), who’s been rendered comatose by a bullet to the neck. Abandoned by his family and facing mortal uncertainty with the encroachment of resistance fighters, this unnamed woman, frustrated and largely alone, she begins to pour out her heart. The very act of confessing harsh, long-secreted-away truths to her husband — of her lack of sexual pleasure in their marriage, of her utter disconnection from him given his lack of even basic kindness — delivers her from a burden, transforming her on an almost religious level.

Rahimi, adapting his own award-winning novel with Jean-Claude Carrière, offers up a script that is sometimes a bit schematic. But he also provides economical and eloquent glimpses into the pathology of women raised and abused in this social system. Farahani (Body of Lies, Just Like a Woman), meanwhile, has an engaging presence — conveying both woundedness and the blooming of an intelligence suppressed too long. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 102 minutes)

A true crime period piece that interestingly eschews a lot of investigatory grind in favor of moral certitude and throwback, cat-and-mouse tension, The Frozen Ground stars John Cusack as Alaskan serial killer Robert Hansen and Nicholas Cage as the state trooper who doggedly brings him to justice. Winding its way to justice in thorny fashion, this black-and-white genre tale doesn’t reinvent the wheel but, courtesy of some intriguing casting and its unique setting, it more than adequately checks off base-level boxes of entertainment.



Getting a bit of a theatrical release in advance of its home video bow, The Frozen Ground unfolds in 1980s Alaska, where the aforementioned Hansen would eventually confess to 17 murders and more than a dozen other kidnappings and rape. The film opens with a 17-year-old runaway and prostitute, Cindy Paulson (Vanessa Hudgens), escaping from her captor, and trying to tell the local police in Anchorage about her ordeal. They don’t much believe her, but when a string of unsolved homicides lands on the desk of Sergeant Jack Halcombe (Cage), he immediately puts the dots together, hones in on Hansen as a suspect, and undertakes a massive effort to first locate Cindy and then bring her in as a cooperating witness.

Like Zodiac, part of what makes The Frozen Ground interesting, or at least different from a lot of its cops-and-killer brethren, is the fact that it unfolds absent the advances in criminal forensics and other technology that we see even on the small screen now every week. Walker’s film is nowhere near as dense and intricately crafted as David Fincher’s opus, of course, but it does track emotionally along somewhat the same lines, summoning forth moments of flabbergasted viewer frustration over some detail ignored, piece of key evidence unexamined or alibi unchecked.

In Cage and Cusack, Walker has a pair of invested leads who deliver grounded and in some instances subtle work; they’re the movie’s pillars. Other actors fare a bit less well. Hudgens, on the heels of Sucker Punch and Spring Breakers, continues to noisily throw off the make-believe shackles of Disney-dom, and seemingly work through some sort of off-screen personal issues; as Cindy, she has a lot of the outwardly manifested traits and behaviors of trauma down pat, but struggles with a skating alley monologue which is meant to color her character’s tragic backstory. She opts to bring the emotion to the fore, but offhanded and flippant would be the more heartrendingly believable choice, as a self-destructive coping mechanism on Cindy’s part.

Air-quote intense camerawork, from Walker and cinematographer Patrick Murguia, often substitute for deeper characterizations. And while the story necessarily condenses an insurance fraud strand that helps reel in Hansen, along with other choice tidbits, Walker, as a screenwriter, sometimes struggles with dialogue and other details. (Radha Mitchell plays a shell of a character, obliging Halcombe a home life that would have been best excised, along with a terrifyingly awkward throwaway line about his “last two weeks” on the job.)

What works about The Frozen Ground stems from the relative uniqueness of its setting. The location shoot takes advantage of the dull greys of winter skies, and everything about the production design feels appropriately second-hand or just slightly out-of-fashion — new two autumns ago. There isn’t much mystery here — we know who did it, and this isn’t the movie for sympathetic psychological examination — but when Hansen goes to the ground, hops in his commuter plane and starts trying to squirrel away evidence, damn if The Frozen Ground doesn’t un-thaw a pessimist’s heart and catch them up in this tale. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, The Frozen Ground also premieres today on VOD platforms. (Lionsgate, R, 104 minutes)

A spare, streamlined, desert-set psychological thriller that doubles as a study in masculine relationship drift, Scenic Route, scripted by Kyle Killen (The Beaver) and directed by brothers Kevin and Michael Goetz, is a reminder that smart writing and solid execution can lend wings to any concept that on the surface seems trite and familiar.



The film opens with a jolt that tells viewers, yes, there will be blood. What will the cause and exact nature of that bloodletting be, however? Longtime friends who’ve drifted apart, Mitchell (Josh Duhamel) and Carter (Dan Fogler) are on a road trip through the dusty American southwest when their truck breaks down. Carter is a scruffy, failing writer who lives on the societal fringe. Mitchell is family man, albeit one with a presently busted-up knee, who in the wake of a painful break-up put a ring on the finger of his hectoring rebound relationship and promptly abandoned his dream of music; Carter resents him for seemingly both of those decisions. Needling and questioning ensues while the pair wait for help. Rather quickly, Carter confesses that he actually staged the breakdown to try to actually manufacture some conversation time with his old pal. Needless to say, this revelation doesn’t please Mitchell.

Scenic Route is shot through with the same sort of wounded, howling masculinity that director Mark Pellington‘s I Melt With You, starring Rob Lowe, Thomas Jane, Jeremy Piven and Christian McKay, was aiming at. One big difference, though, is that Scenic Route lacks any of that fratty film’s druggy, bleary-eyed excess and sexual acting out — polarizing elements that effectively threw a blanket over more substantive or sincere discussions of its thematic explorations. It’s a movie which probes mid-life dissatisfaction in frank and sometimes uncomfortable ways, as when Mitchell confesses a marital infidelity to his friend, and despairs over the condition of his wife’s post-pregnancy body.

Killen’s script elevates things, and gives Duhamel and Fogler a nice range of material with which to play. Killen exhibits keen instincts for the sort of pinpoint emotional attacks that really get under a friend’s skin, and he has a smart sense of where and how to escalate arguments and even physical attacks and yet then pull back, which gives Scenic Route an intriguing, yo-yo-like sensibility. After much time and respective individual soul-searching in the desert, Scenic Route resolves its main situation, but not without a pleasant twist and some corresponding ambiguity. In going to such extremes, Killen again proves he can juggle disparate tones and deliver movies lined with a certain bruised grace. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Scenic Route opens this week in Los Angeles at the Chinese 6 Theatres; in addition to its theatrical release in top regional markets, the film is also available across various VOD platforms. (Vertical Entertainment, R, 86 minutes)

Burning Man, an annual week-long event held in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada, would seem to be a great subject for a documentary. After all, the festival — which was originally envisioned as a utopian getaway and rebuke to the constrictive nature of modern life’s duties and norms — now draws in more than 50,000 participants, nominally known as “Burners,” each year. It’s become an alternative pop culture touchstone in and of itself, in the process spawning more than 50 regional festivals around the globe — all based on the same 10 operating principles, which include radical inclusion, participation, decommodification and self-reliance.

Spark: A Burning Man Story wants to be that definitive nonfiction offering, trying to impart the event’s origin story and history. Co-directed by Steve Brown and Jessie Deeter, the film paints in vivid colors, undeniably, but comes up short in delivering a coherent vision statement.

First, what Spark gets right: it captures the amazing can-do spirit and energy of almost all of its participants, from its San Francisco-based planners (yep, sorting out the infrastructure is a year-round thing) to its artistic-minded attendees. Spotlighting everything from drag costumes and huge projects (a five-building, #Occupy-style wooden mock-up of Wall Street excess overseen by an ex-Marine who goes by the name Otto von Danger) to the burning of a 35-foot tall titular sculpture that closes each festival, Spark lights up the imagination.

Other parts of the film are wildly interesting, too, because they dig into the organizational minutiae of trying to tame and shape this developing beast. Interviewees honor Brown and Deeter’s effort by engaging in some honest, big-picture, philosophically rooted arguments regarding issues like condoning “curated” or packaged tour experiences seemingly at odds with its participatory ethos and roots.

Still, as beautiful as a lot of the captured spectacle is, Spark could also benefit from cleaner through lines, and certainly a more rigid and structured chronological telling of the festival’s development. All of the co-founders are interviewed, but Brown and Deeter assemble the movie in jumbled fashion. Spark seems torn between behind-the-scenes perspective and a more experiential document — something 2009’s Dust & Illusions delved deeper into, chronicling the event from attendees’ perspectives. As such, it loses steam and its hold. There’s a spark here, but Brown and Deeter’s film doesn’t truly catch fire for the layperson. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. To view the film’s trailer, click here; for more information on the film, which is also available across VOD platforms, click here to visit its website. (FilmBuff/Paladin, unrated, 90 minutes)

A unique road trip documentary that attempts to throw a spotlight on the broad range of autistic spectrum disorder, The United States of Autism finds director Richard Everts traveling across the country for 40 days, visiting 20 families affected by the aforementioned condition. Everts’ film came into being as part of the Pepsi Refresh Project, which after two months of online voting awarded a $50,000 production grant. Everts also has a personal connection to autism, though — through his own childhood issues and, most immediately, his son now being impacted by the disorder. It’s that latter fact that most colors this tender, earnest offering, which broadens horizons in an invaluable way by letting viewers bear witness to some amazing stories. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Tommy Foundations, unrated, 93 minutes)

A bewildering mixture of painfully familiar tropes and dishearteningly under-sketched characters gets the blender treatment in this latest big screen adaptation of young adult adventure fiction, based on a series of five novels by Cassandra Clare. Vampires, werewolves, warlocks, demons, portals to other dimensions and enough symbology to make even Dan Brown giggle all feature prominently in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, a sci-fi/fantasy quest of awakened destiny that starts out strongly but loses steam after a half-hour, cycling through a catalogue of tween-stamped CGI mayhem en route to a conclusion less thrilling than shrug-inducing. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony/Screen Gems, PG-13, 130 minutes)

A nicely captured if fairly straightforward coming-of-age film about transcending adolescent summer camp bullying, the family-friendly Standing Up represents a rather curious filmography entry for director DJ Caruso, whose other movies (among them Disturbia, Eagle Eye and I Am Number Four) have almost all all showed a penchant for slick, pop-minded entertainment. Vacuumed free of darkened peril or any of the idiosyncratic pop of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, which charts a somewhat broadly similar story of two pre-teens on the lam, this slight but well intentioned effort seems a better fit for small screen viewing. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Arc Entertainment, PG, 93 minutes)