A visually gorgeous dystopian sci-fi think piece from Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski, Oblivion is far more ruminative than the average action flick of its ilk, but it collapses under the weight of its own webby, familiar plotting, which is little more than an expensive grab-bag of genre tropes wrapped around a characteristically invested and empathetic performance from Tom Cruise. A boldly rendered film with faulty nuts, bolts and wiring is still, at its core, a movie that doesn’t work when it eventually comes time to pay off narrative set-up and beats.



Set on Earth in the year 2077, following a nuclear decimation that was part of a last-ditch effort to fend off an invading alien race that had already destroyed the moon, Oblivion centers around a restless drone mechanic, Jack Harper (Cruise), who lives thousands of feet up in the sky in a nice little Jetsons-type condo with his communications officer partner and lover, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough, quite good, if purposefully cool). They make “an effective team” the latter consistently assures Sally (Melissa Leo), from whom the pair receive daily directions and oversight via satellite, while Jack jets off to and fro, repairing the flying guardian weaponized robots that help keep the remaining alien “scavs” (or scavengers) away from the technology humans are using to harness energy from Earth’s remaining resources.

It’s just a couple weeks before Jack and Victoria are supposed to join the rest of what remains of humankind up in the monolithic “Tet,” after which point they’ll all repair to Titan, a moon of Saturn. Victoria is all ready for the reunion, but Jack is more restless. He’s plagued by dreams of Julia (Olga Kurylenko), a mysterious woman who may or may not be from his past, prior to his mandated five-year “memory wipe.” He also eventually crosses paths with Malcolm Beach (Morgan Freeman), who, you know, is also mysterious. It doesn’t give things away to say that along with the external threat, a confrontation with his own past ensues for Jack.

It’s far too early to consign Kosinski to the bin of Zack Snyder — that is to say, a visually gifted filmmaker who should be kept away from screenwriting software and simply steered to story ideas more fully developed by others. He obviously has a broad imagination, encompassing both physical worlds and bigger ideas. But Kosinski has a rather leaden, conventional touch with character and sets up his world — Karl Gajdusek and Michael DeBruyn take screenplay credit, but Oblivion is based on an unpublished graphic novel co-wrote — via some exposition-heavy voiceover, which means that the sludgy conveyance of these thoughts tip his film’s direction long before the plot has a chance to fully ripen.

Oblivion dreams big — its canvas is expansive. (Special IMAX presentations only enhance this effect.) Shot largely on location in Iceland, the film has a great look and mood, particularly in its opening hour, which has moments of trance-inducing beauty. Working with cinematographer Claudio Miranda and composers Anthony Gonzalez (of M83) and Joseph Trapanese (who collaborated with Daft Punk on the great Tron soundtrack), Kosinski trades in declamatory storytelling that lacks the more overt pomposity of something from Michael Bay. He aims to attach naked feeling to evocative imagery and sound; it’s like he’s aiming for involuntary audience response, akin to a doctor’s knee tap.

But Oblivion’s source material, and many antecedents, give it the feel of a cobbled together greatest hits album being dutifully plugged through by a reconstituted rock ‘n’ roll band. The Matrix, The Island and Total Recall are among the big touchstones here, but there are echoes of Moon, Solaris and THX-1138 as well. Even with its extraordinarily distinctive visual telling, paradoxically, little of the movie gives off the scent or vapor of originality. When it’s not papering over more interesting offshoot questions it raises, its narrative is busy ponderously cycling through clichéd dramatic obstacles on its way to a very familiar stand-off and climax. Cruise invests this tale with much intensity, but there’s not a depth or matching verve to the storytelling itself. (Universal, PG-13, 125 minutes)

A quirky but unfulfilling Canadian-Danish horror-comedy that offers up neither quite the deliciously mad slapstick-y gore of its title nor a more penetrating treatment of its character-rooted instincts, writer-director Boris Rodriguez’s Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal has a substantial helping of originality on its side, but not much in the way of inspired execution.

A one-time darling of the art scene, inspiration-starved, foreign-born painter Lars (Thune Lindhardt) takes a teaching position in the small, snowy town of Koda Lake, where he’s enthusiastically received by a school headmaster, Harry (Al Goulem), seeking to put his burgh on the map. His class comes with Eddie (Dylan Smith, resembling a brawny John Turturro), the lumbering, cereal-obsessed mute son of an important patron, and when she dies Lars agrees to take him in in order to preserve the promised funding in her will. It’s only then that Lars discovers the docile Eddie has a sleepwalking problem, during which he tends to, well, kill and eat things.

The rub? This bloodletting rekindles Lars’ artistic flame — so he’s less appalled than intrigued, and invested in figuring out a way to abet its continuation. When Eddie’s symptoms seem to wane, Lars mulls over whether this burst of creativity has been enough, and if he should instigate unease in Eddie in order to try and revive his murderous disorder.

Even though it possesses a rather vivid title that seems to offer up a wink of knowing parody, Eddie is mostly rooted in a realistic tone. And despite the seemingly outlandish nature of its concept, there’s actually a good deal of intrigue baked into the story, which reads like a twisted, modernized spin on an old Edgar Allan Poe tale. It’s just that this is a thin, gruel-like version of it — even a pair of post-dénouement, add-on twists land with more of a pat than an oomph — not funneled with enough energy and cleverness through a singular viewpoint.

Working from a story by Jon Rannells, Rodriguez delivers a script that, in its streamlining, is downright malnourished for clarifying background and detail. There’s meant to be a connection in all the bloody violence to Lars’ past prolific period, which brought him such fame and acclaim, but Rodriguez fumbles away the chance to delve into this with any satisfying depth. The film’s set-up is utterly perfunctory (“It happened so long ago I didn’t think I needed to tell you — Eddie has always been… different”), and its dialogue and plotting so mechanical as to invite various flights-of-fancy as to whether this is all part of some elaborate rope-a-dope scheme.

Lindhart (Keep the Lights On) is an appealing enough peg upon which to hang this tale, and Georgina Reilly (rejoining her Pontypool co-star McHattie, who cameos as Lars’ frustrated agent, Ronny) is cute and engaging. But the acting isn’t strong enough to cancel out such lethargic, incomplete storytelling. In better hands, this could be a wickedly engaging story of outsized ambition and misguided inspiration by way of sort of a hybrid cross of Fargo and Warm Bodies. As is, it’s a mildly stimulating concept that never achieves imaginative lift. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal is also available on VOD. (Music Box Films, unrated, 83 minutes)

The story of Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 broke baseball’s tacit color barrier, and thus in many ways helped lay the groundwork for the untangling of Jim Crow laws and other racial prejudices that would stretch out over the Civil Rights era, is a remarkable one — full of compelling resolve and steadfast character in the face of real, sustained nastiness. Written and directed by Brian Helgeland, 42 (so named for Robinson’s jersey number, retired by every major league baseball team) skims pleasantly enough along the surface of this potentially roiling drama, a biopic of carefully crafted but ultimately superficial uplift.



Chadwick Boseman (above) stars as Robinson, and the movie is mostly built around the plan for his ascension to the major leagues, as first crafted and then implemented, by Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), starting in 1946. Wooing Robinson from the Negro League’s Kansas City Monarchs, Rickey goes against the advice of some of his consultants, putting the speedy, five-tool player on a fairly fast track for the big leagues, routed through the Dodgers’ Montreal Royals farm league squad.

Come 1947, Rickey’s plans seem momentarily waylaid by the year-long suspension of the Dodgers’ manager at the time, Leo Durocher (Christopher Meloni), a no-nonsense guy sympathetic to Robinson as much because he wants to win as anything else. Rickey presses ahead however, tabbing Wendell Smith (Andre Holland), a Pittsburgh Courier baseball beat writer and fellow African-American, to try to help ease the transition.

Boseman has an undeniably engaging screen presence, and it’s nice to see Ford — chomping cigars and buried under some bushy fake eyebrows — fully engaged, and diving wholeheartedly into an actual character, something he’s never really done. Many of the supporting players, too, are well rendered; John C. McGinley makes a nice impression as radio announcer Red Barber, while Alan Tudyk registers in effectively uncomfortable fashion as Philadelphia Phillies manager Ben Chapman, a racist, heckling foil of Robinson’s during an early season series.

But there’s a posed and overly polished quality to almost all the drama, not much aided by composer Mark Isham’s relentlessly prodding score. Helgeland builds his screenplay around a lot of smartly chosen moments — a player coming to Rickey with a piece of hate mail, only to discover the much larger amount Robinson himself has been receiving; another teammate attempting to talk Robinson into showering at the same time at the rest of them, instead of self-isolating — but these moments are as often as not undercut by simpleton staging, with blocked-off, back-and-forth medium shots and close-ups. When Rickey tells off a fellow team owner over the phone, Ford faces forward the entire time, performing for the camera. Similarly, platitudes flow freely in the dialogue.

The film’s division feels roughly right — the first half covers both Rickey’s rationale for integration (money, with a pinch of nobility) and Robinson’s minor league assignment, while the latter hour covers Robinson’s arrival in the majors, with a heavy emphasis on the first week — but there’s precious little inner boil here, no captured translation of the ongoing psychological toll on its protagonist, apart from an awkwardly conceived breakdown scene on the hidden inner steps of the dugout. Instead, Helgeland invests more heartily in Robinson’s domestic life, with his wife Rachel (Nicole Beharie) and their new baby boy. This plays fine enough but seems kind of yawning, desultory and generic given the rich potential for something a bit more chaotic and genuine. 42 dutifully elicits sympathy, but lacks the sort of grander multi-dimensionality its subject merits. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 129 minutes)

The Company You Keep, Robert Redford‘s ninth film as a director, is about secrets, principles and the melting value of absolutes. In dramatizing the present-day, assumed-identity circumstances of a group of former anti-Vietnam War radicals who in real life in the 1960s and ’70s advocated the overthrow of the United States government, it offers up a decidedly American story of graying moral certitude to match graying temples. If that sounds interesting, in a certain stage-crafted throwback fashion, it is. If that also sounds like it has the potential to be overly schematic, and turn into a parade of Notable Faces, well… it is that as well.



Redford stars in the film too, as public interest lawyer Jim Grant, a recently widowed single father in upstate New York who finds his life of quiet, ordered domesticity upset when Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), a former radical fugitive having lived for decades as a housewife and mother, is arrested just prior to planning to turn herself in. With a strident federal agent (Terrence Howard) looking to shake the cold-case trees and roust old colleagues of Sharon’s who are still wanted on a murder charge for an act of protest gone wrong, Jim rightly senses his past may be about to catch up with him. Stashing his daughter with his brother Daniel (Chris Cooper), Jim flees.

Meanwhile, beaten to the initial story scoop, Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf), a brash young newspaper reporter eager to make a name for himself, starts plumbing his own set of contacts and digging into Grant’s past, which in turn unwittingly abets the FBI’s investigation. Working a scattered network of his old Weather Underground comrades (including Nick Nolte and Richard Jenkins), Jim tries to track down old girlfriend Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie), whom he believes will be able to exonerate him personally, and help him keep his daughter.

In collapsing the disparate viewpoints of a lot of different aging radicals and battered idealists into a streamlined dramatic vehicle, screenwriter Lem Dobbs, working from the novel of the same name by Neil Gordon, crafts a number of solid, morally inquisitive exchanges. There’s a real push and pull here; tough, honest questions are asked (where does complicity end, for instance, and can good acts outweigh a past transgression?), for which there are frequently no easy, pat answers.

The film’s framing device works a bit less successfully, though, as person after person who has no particular compelling reason to talk openly or honestly to Ben continues to do so. LaBeouf has a squirrelly persistence that tracks well with Ben’s indefatigability. It’s just that parties who’ve kept secrets for decades seem somehow checkmated by a cocky assurance and a couple crackerjack investigative moves.

The procession of recognizable actors and actresses — almost all dialed in, and punching out smart dialogue that defends their life choices — is what gives Redford’s movie its hold. There’s a lot to like here, but at the same time some performers are given so little to do that a longer treatment, perhaps even on stage, often feels like it would be a better servicing of the same material. Abdicating, especially in its conclusion, any cathartic punch of shown change, The Company You Keep spins a tale about heavy, universal issues — the weight of guilt, the shadows of regret and the shelf life of swallowed confidence. Would that all its pieces just fit together a little more precisely. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 125 minutes)

In conversation with a colleague recently, the subject of Stephen Dorff came up. With Dorff’s recent electronic-cigarette ads, his steady stream of light-lift, scruffy-faced straight-to-video roles and reputation for an offscreen life of, ahem, considerable enjoyment, he’s like the actor equivalent of a 1980s-era hair metal band that never packed it in, I opined. He’s an unapologetically dick-swinging actor — just livin’ the ring-a-ding dream, baby.



Despite cheap shots many might take, it’s not that Dorff doesn’t have talent, and isn’t capable of restrained work (see Somewhere) or even some interesting excess (um, see Shadowboxer). In the new Tomorrow You’re Gone, however, he assumes a series of increasingly empty noir postures and grimaces, expediting the plunge into frustrating pointlessness of this curious psychological drama.

Not that he’s the only one to blame — adapted by Matthew F. Jones from his own novel Boot Tracks, Tomorrow You’re Gone arrives the subject of considerable offscreen drama. A lawsuit by the author seeking, among other things, an injunction against its release accuses director David Jacobson (Down in the Valley) of sullying his work beyond redemption. So… who’s the chief culprit? It’s hard to say, and even harder to really care about, given the level of overwhelming indifference the movie engenders.

Out of jail after a four-year stint, Charlie (Dorff) gets set up in a dungy apartment courtesy of a shadowy contact/ex-colleague known as the Buddha (Willem Dafoe), who also tasks him with killing someone. Charlie promptly meets a woman with gold shoes on a city bus, Florence (Michelle Monaghan, cycling through a set of fairly beguiling if always symbolic emotional markers), and tells her his name is Samson. She’s an ex-adult film actress, and wouldn’t mind helping Charlie relieve some stress, but he’s all for car shopping and chaste dinner dates, which “keeps his head clear” and leaves him with more free time to mosey off to another neighborhood and do this killing. The additional rub? It’s clear Charlie is not of completely sound mind, and that his interactions with others may represent some sort of fractured reality.

Jacobson delivers a nice technical package, aided by some moody music from Peter Sallet. His composition and framing sometimes suggests Charlie stepping out of body and almost watching himself, which is interesting. But there’s simply no hook or appealing tension to this movie as it unfolds, only counterbalanced scenes of Dorff’s gruffness and Monaghan’s pinprick flirtations. Tomorrow You’re Gone is a muddled game of hardboiled pattycake that I’m certain even all the participants themselves would admit doesn’t convincingly or satisfyingly sell an absorbing story or point-of-view. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Image, R, 91 minutes)

Indie import Hunky Dory, starring Minnie Driver, may have been initially conceived before the hit small screen show Glee, but it suffers mightily in comparison to the pop cultural shadow of that series, playing like a mash-up of it and a decidedly retro version of High School Musical, as filtered through the gauzy lens of underclass-artistic-exuberance that’s plagued a certain subset of comedic-leaning British offerings ever since Billy Elliot.

The 1970s-set story of an idealistic drama teacher (Driver) who endeavors to fire up her apathetic students by staging a glam rock/pop adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Hunky Dory builds to an undeniably poppy and somewhat cathartic finale, but Laurence Coriat’s screenplay is a superb example of mere dutiful execution, lacking much distinctive flourish in either character or dialogue. The movie drags on too long as well, needlessly investing in backstories that aren’t that interesting and don’t add that much to the main plot of the production. When director Marc Evans is able to concentrate on some of the actual inventive musical stagings, there’s often a rush of wind under the film’s wings. Alas, that’s not frequent enough to fully redeem matters. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, unrated, 110 minutes)

Obsession, in all its various shapes and forms, is a rich thematic vein when it comes to filmmaking. And of course labyrinthine myths and legends are integral parts of storytelling proper, but they also crop up and gather naturally around a variety of Hollywood productions — from ambitious but troubled blockbusters to the works of secretive and/or iconoclastic auteurs. All these swirling elements come together in Room 237, director Rodney Ascher’s nonfiction indulgence of a bunch of theories about the true meaning of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film The Shining — hypotheses that, ultimately, even Mel Gibson’s wild-eyed character from Conspiracy Theory or Jim Carrey‘s digit-fixated paranoiac from The Number 23 would have trouble believing.



So does that make Room 237 — its title referring to a notably spooky suite in the film — a waste of time, or even boring? No, not at all. Even though several of these analytical readings don’t pass a cursory smell test, and all have been pretty much debunked by Leon Vitali, the late Kubrick’s personal assistant on The Shining, that doesn’t dint the film’s power as a testament and kind of paean to the sticky psychological hold of great art. One interviewee views Kubrick’s liberal adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling novel as an indictment of the U.S. government’s treatment of indigenous peoples, while for another — seeing significance in the number 42, and its divisibles — it is a sweeping parable about the Holocaust. Still another sees The Shining as an elaborate confessionary lament on the part of Kubrick for his involvement in faked space exploration footage with the government. (“I’m not saying we didn’t go to the moon,” he says, before opining that he’s setting himself up for an audit. “I’m just saying that what we saw was faked, and it was faked by Stanley Kubrick.”)

What Ascher doesn’t do, for better and worse, is offer up push-back or analysis of this conjecture, or query his nine different subjects about whether any of these theories might in fact be mutually exclusive. (In fact, Ascher doesn’t even show his subjects, some of whom are interviewed over the phone, it’s evident.) A movie of more intellectual rigor or ambition might have tackled that. Instead, Room 237 is a platform for their compulsions and fixations, and in its unironic embrace of their singular truths it sometimes takes on the feeling of trying to engage a schizophrenic bus passenger on their own conversational terms.

Still, the flipside of this is that Room 237 kind of ably conjures up the isolation and disorientation of The Shining itself, abetted by a great score from Jonathan Snipes and William Huston. It’s also just a good deal of fun, in its own wonky, slurry way. Powered by a deep and abiding affection for both The Shining and Kubrick in general, Room 237 is an amuse-bouche of remix culture — a very specific film that is also about the dance of intention and interpretation in art. In his scrupulous avoidance of debunking, it’s clear that Ascher’s aim, essentially, is to throw a spotlight on interpretive criticism and embrace, and underscore that the relationship between art, artist and the culture at large is a complex one, with frequently hazy boundaries. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Midnight, unrated, 104 minutes)

A winning little dramedy hung chiefly on the solid peg of Lou Taylor Pucci‘s lead performance, The Story of Luke offers up an experiential snapshot of adult autism without descending into cloying sentimentality or didactic moralizing. Written and helmed by first-time feature director Alonso Mayo, the movie is mostly a comedy, but one that largely eschews outlandishness and never drifts too far from recognizable human feeling.



When his grandmother dies and his senile grandfather (Kenneth Welsh) is no longer able to care for him, 25-year-old Luke (Pucci) is taken in by his Uncle Paul and Aunt Cindy (Cary Elwes and Kristin Bauer), in a move that further stresses their already strained marriage. His cousins (Tyler Stentiford, Mackenzie Munro) are fairly welcoming, but the autistic Luke is thrown by all the sudden change. He knows he needs to grow up (“I can’t watch cooking shows for the rest of my life — I want to screw”), but he’s uncertain of how.

Taking some advice from his grandfather, Luke heads to a temp agency and quickly becomes enamored with Maria (Sabryn Rock) — or more specifically, her breasts. Placed in the mailroom at a nondescript company, Luke makes an unlikely friend in the boss’ son, the virulently antisocial Zack (Seth Green), who is also not “neuro-typical,” but comes around to Luke’s attention to detail. Zack decides to share his special proprietary invention — a computer program that reads and responds to the facial expressions of those with autistic-spectrum disorders (“I programmed her to be a bitch because that’s what you’re up against”), in order to help coach and nudge them toward “normal.” Nominal hijinks ensue, of course, as Luke screws up the courage to ask out Maria, but the movie also spends an equal amount of time showing both Luke and his “new” family feeling their way through a grander socialization with one another.

With his fey, sing-song voice and buttoned-up fashion, Pucci delivers an indelible performance that doesn’t cheat on the anxiety Luke feels — which swells considerably when considering the abandonment of his mother. If Green, angry and wound up, plays much more of a type, their interactions are still amusing, and give The Story of Luke a fresh, off-kilter comedic vibe that one doesn’t expect to see in a story that could easily be a lot more staid, and typically plotted.

Some may scoff at this mixture of tones, but since Mayo is resolutely true to Luke’s wobbly steps toward independence, it mostly works. Though it’s not as much of a relationship two-hander, The Story of Luke bears some characteristics in common with Max Mayer’s Adam, starring Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne. Even though that film took a young man with Asperger’s Syndrome as its protagonist, both movies are robustly invested in an exploration of the often bewildering gaps in social recognition and body language between “NTs,” or neuro-typicals, and those with less functional social skill sets.

An engaging character study about a differently-wired guy learning to navigate the already choppy waters of young adulthood, The Story of Luke is a sweetnaturedly pleasant and optimistic coming-of-age tale that highlights much that we share, amidst all our differences. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. The Story of Luke opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, but in addition to its nationwide theatrical engagements the film is also available on VOD. For more information, click here to visit its website. (Gravitas Ventures, unrated, 95 minutes)

Playing like a M.I.A. song come to life, Sally El Hosaini’s British import My Brother the Devil transcends the gangland melodrama of its roots courtesy of a convincingly sketched setting, and rich veins of class identity, faith, political belief and sexual identity, all of which jostle and compete with the main narrative plotlines for attention.



In the ethnically mixed and socioeconomically depressed Hackney neighborhood of London, teenager Mo (Fady Elsayed, above left) idolizes his charismatic older brother Rashid (James Floyd, above right), a low-level drug peddler. The death of a friend, however, triggers a rising reticence in Rashid about the direction (or lack thereof) of his life. After forging a bond with photographer Sayyid (Said Taghmaoui), Rashid begins to envision making enough money to stake a “legit” life — possibly for his girlfriend Vanessa (Elarica Gallacher), but definitely for his brother and struggling, Egyptian-born parents. Old turf wars and unsettled accounts with a rival gang leader, Demon (Leemore Marrett, Jr.), however, seemingly foreclose an easy exit, while at the same time Mo starts doing drug runs behind his brother’s back.

There’s a certain feeling of laid-track narrative that hangs over My Brother the Devil, at least when it’s peddling the siren song of gang life to Mo. This story — enthralled, impressionable youngster caught up in the psychological undertow of a n’er-do-well older sibling — is very familiar, and that fact, combined with El Hosaini’s deliberate pacing, has one feeling every one of the movie’s first 20 or 30 minutes double-time, no matter the clarity of its observance.

But a funny thing happens on the way toward tedium, as My Brother the Devil starts vacuuming up new story strands and buoying details like a Hoover. El Hosaini workshopped the movie at three different Sundance Institute labs (Middle Eastern, Screenwriting and Directing), and the benefits of those continual, disparate fine tooth combings benefit the material, particularly in its attention to detail. My Brother the Devil feels rooted and real, and less concerned with chest-thumping braggadocio than other gang flicks. The hoods in El Hosaini’s world have lives and feelings outside the parameters of any of their illegal actions; they at one point argue about bacon, and a charge of terrorism is brought up as a feint — a cover for something a distraught Mo deems much worse.

Director of photography David Raedeker does a wonderful job of capturing this urban landscape with a simple, unshowy poetry, and the lead performances here are rich and full bodied. My Brother the Devil covers some familiar ground, it’s true, but El Hosaini locates the commingled struggle and quiet beauty of the quotidian, where opportunity and hope are frequently too little nourished. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Paladin/108Media, R, 111 minutes)

A fairly clever little indie film that shrewdly marries the popular but well-worn “found footage” framing device to a prurient storyline, the NC-17-rated Lucky Bastard may not win any awards, but it puts an imaginative spin on what is too often a sloppy low-budget aesthetic, easily outstripping charges of empty gimmickry.



After an opening consisting of crime scene footage that tips viewers off to some dark events, the rest of the film is presented as the behind-the-scenes footage from a porn shoot for a website called “Lucky Bastard,” where each month a member fan is chosen to have sex with an adult film star. The starlet in this case is Ashley Saint (Betsy Rue), a single mother who reluctantly agrees to the scenario only after much cajoling (and an increased payday) by producer-director Mike (Don McManus). After viewing a couple submission videos, Ashley and Mike agree on a winner — sad-sack Dave (Jay Paulson, above left), who looks like he could be a cousin of Kenneth Parcell from 30 Rock. The crew pick up Dave and head over to a rented house but when Dave calls Ashley by her real name it freaks her out, and she wants to call things off. She eventually relents, but more problems pop up.

Director Robert Nathan, working from a script co-written with Lukas Kendall, colors and shades his film in a nice way, as well as mixing in other smaller characters — including an uptight real estate agent and a male porn star called in on short notice when things with Dave prove to be difficult. Lucky Bastard doesn’t suffer the same sense of narrative suffocation that so many other found footage films do — wherein the framing device is used as a crutch of convenience to absolve its creators from having to do the heavy lifting of character development. Nathan is a television veteran of both Law & Order and ER, and his experience with tightly structured acts is on ample display.

The film’s conceit, of course, rather cleverly masks the shortfall in production value when stacked up against a typical independent movie, though there is above-average consideration given to framing and shot selection — abetted by the aforementioned production house, outfitted with cameras.

Likewise, the acting mostly can’t, or at least shouldn’t, be judged in traditional dramatic metrics, but rather by how believably these actors inhabit a series of postures knowing full well that cameras are on them. When events later go sideways things change, but it’s a fairly difficult juggling act that for the most part the cast excels at. Especially good in this regard is McManus.

Its subject matter alone dictates that it won’t be for some audiences but perhaps the highest compliment one can pay Lucky Bastard is to say that it’s effective and also quite believable for the story it chooses to tell — well sketched out, and sincere in its characters’ motivations. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Rated NC-17, Lucky Bastard opens this Friday in Los Angeles at the Vintage Cinemas’ Los Feliz 3. For more information on the film, meanwhile, click here to visit its website. (Vineyard Haven Productions, NC-17, 94 minutes)

Supernaturally tinged Norwegian mystery-horror import Thale unfolds, on a narrative level, like some weird hybrid of Sunshine Cleaning, Splice and Lady in the Water — a work that dances around a couple moods and genres without ever really wholeheartedly committing to one in particular. Telling the story of a surprise woodland contact between a pair of guys and an awakened, captive huldra — a nymph-like creature of Scandinavian folklore — writer-director Aleksander Nordaas’ work gives off a certain eerie vibe that, along with its regional specificity, add up to give the movie something of a pungent originality. But Thale is ultimately all wind-up, failing to take its characters to more interesting places.



The unflappable Leo (Jon Sigve Skard) heads up “No Shit Cleaning Service,” a crime scene scrubbing company. Perhaps against better judgment, he’s thrown a bit of work to his friend Elvis (Erlend Norvold), with vomitous consequences. Tasked with finding the scattered remains of an old man at a cabin in the woods, Leo and Elvis instead discover a most unusual mute girl (Silje Reinåmo, above) and a bunch of audio tapes in which said man can be heard talking about the girl’s highly adaptive nature, and how she’s “different than” her sisters. As Elvis starts to seemingly become able to bridge the communication gap they also make a rather shocking discovery in a freezer, leading them to question just how dangerous this girl might be.

If there’s a nice fog of intrigue that surrounds Thale for a good long while, there’s also an imperturbability to the entire movie, which kind of dawdles and drags. For a long time Thale isn’t really a horror movie, even in any Gothic sense, but instead just a mystery about this girl’s origins, and how she’s survived seemingly on her own for an indeterminate length of time. This works, but only up to a point. At around the 45-minute mark, there’s a nice conversation between Leo and Elvis in which some of their vulnerabilities are stripped bare, and for a moment it looks as if Thale is going to dive headlong into a story of fraternal drift, with its mysterious title waif serving only as a joint kickstarter and metaphorical connection for the two.

At a certain point, the movie’s slow-peddled nature either becomes wholly mesmeric or a bit of a put-on. For me it was the latter — it felt like a lot of artful dodging in service of a story that wasn’t really fully fleshed out, or at least not taken in interesting directions. Thale doesn’t really delve substantively into mythology — its characters aren’t scientists, admittedly — so when others come looking for the same-named girl, plunging Leo and Elvis into a greater danger, it feels like a leap into tension unearned, nipped from some screenwriting manual.

Serving as his own cinematographer, camera operator and editor, Nordaas delivers an enigmatic aria in many respects. A director like Brad Anderson would be able to turn this into a work of suffocating anxiety, though. As is, Thale is a movie that’s less than the sum of its parts — interesting around the edges, but not fully developed, and lacking any sort of revelatory punch. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Thale screens in theaters this week in Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Denver and Portland — check your local listings, as they say — and then arrives on home video and VOD later in the month, on April 23. (XLrator Media, R, 77 minutes)

I guess to call Detour, director William Dickerson’s micro-budgeted drama of confinement and descent into madness, by a more accurate moniker, Mudslide, would be to court an unfortunate array of jokes centered around bodily excretions. But, seemingly taking Buried and Danny Boyle‘s 127 Hours as its inspiration, the movie spends most of its time trapped in a SUV covered with the detritus of a muddy landslide. While not lacking for decent acting or technical execution, the movie’s lead and de facto host is, as written, something of a cipher, leaving one wishing for MacGyver, or even MacGruber, to tackle a similar dilemma. The impulse to fight for survival is buried within all of us, but Detour lacks a compelling enough arc to sustain what might have worked much better as a short film. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Gravitas Ventures, unrated, 86 minutes)

A couple attractive Aussies whose respective stars are on the upswing, Teresa Palmer and Liam Hemsworth, try to help anchor Love & Honor, a well meaning but essentially dopey period piece flick that tries with increasingly diminishing effectiveness to meld an anti-war message with Nicholas Sparks-type romance. By all means, though, for the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Films, PG-13, 96 minutes)

After bowing at Cannes, writer-director Adam Leon‘s Gimme the Loot was a 2012 festival staple, and it’s easy to see why. A slim, low-budget coming-of-age tale whose richness lies entirely in its interstices, it’s a keenly observed work that celebrates the unfettered joys of youth, and rewards viewers by reminding them of the power of a simple tale told well.



Bronx teenagers Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington) are best friends but not romantically involved. Instead, they’re bound together by their love of tagging. When a rival gang of graffiti artists deface one of their beloved creations, they hatch a scheme to “bomb” the celebratory apple that pops out at home games after every home run by the hated New York Mets (they’re Yankees fans), and thus generally win all sorts of attention and respect.

The problem is they need a quick $500 to launch their big plan. After dealer Donnie (Adam Metzger) refuses to front him any cash, Malcolm slyly rips off a bit of dope, looking to sell it and make ends meet. He then winds up at the apartment of Ginnie (Zoë Lescaze, above left), an entitled college student. Flirtation ensues, and Malcolm is torn between the possibility of a more immediate servicing of his libidinal needs and the idea of nabbing her parents’ jewelry collection. Sofia, meanwhile, deals with the theft of her bicycle, and getting hassled by some of the aforementioned rivals.

Leon’s film, not unlike Jim McKay’s underappreciated Our Song, the film debut of Kerry Washington, is a simple little movie that is perceptive of and in tune with adolescent whim. McKay’s movie followed three Crown Heights teenagers over the course of an entire summer; Gimme the Loot is more condensed, unfolding over two days. Both, however, share a quasi-documentary style that isn’t ostentatious, but instead just devoted to capturing the sleepy rhythms of juvenilia, as punctuated by flashes of bickering. It lovingly captures New York City, in composed fashion, but without giving off an air of self-regard.

Some of the dialogue has an amusing anecdotal snap, but most of Gimme the Loot is just teenage jostling and posturing; the $500 and limited-window time constraint are essentially head feints, or just the skeleton for this colorful urban adventure. Eliciting engaging, naturalistic performances out of his cast of newcomers, and using a soundtrack of R&B and gospel, Leon subverts the expectations of this plot, which could easily spin off into more dire territory given a different pivot or two. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Gimme the Loot opens in Los Angeles at the Nuart Theatre. For more information, click here to visit its website. (Sundance Selects, R, 81 minutes)