Nope, the directorial debut of Jules Stewart, the mother of Twilight star Kristen Stewart, isn’t a flash-forward sequel to James Belushi’s K-9, or the tale of an exponentially high mountain range. Instead, the bewildering K-11, at once intense and archly presented, is a careening updating (send-up? celebration?) of women-in-prison exploitation flicks like Caged Heat. In his Hollywood Reporter review from its Turin Film Festival premiere, Stephen Dalton characterized K-11 as feeling like “a deranged John Waters remake of The Shawshank Redemption,” but a Lee Daniels re-imagination of a gender-indiscriminate Girl, Interrupted might be another appropriate shorthand descriptor of the movie’s looniness.

A pulpy, psychologically hollow and emotionally indiscernible mélange of phony jailhouse intrigue and showy gender-politicking, with a bit of anal rape sprinkled in, Stewart’s film is too ridiculous to be taken seriously and not tightly scripted and purposefully tongue-in-cheek enough to track as parody (behold the photo above). For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its 15-city theatrical engagements, including the Laemmle NoHo 7 in Los Angeles, K-11 is also available day-and-date across VOD platforms. For more information, click here to visit its website. (Breaking Glass Pictures, unrated, 88 minutes)

The ghost of Christopher Dorner, the former Los Angeles police officer who held the imaginations of television news producers captive for a week several weeks ago when he went on a rampgage, shooting several cops and their family members as part of a twisted statement of grievance, hangs over The Kill Hole, a well meaning indie drama of post-traumatic stress disorder and ex-military account-settling. Despite a fairly convincing evocation of mood by writer-director Mischa Webley, this spare yet affected would-be thriller never ripens past the point of a wobbly character study. It’s a half-developed Polaroid, and as such an artful yet shrug-inducing time-whiler. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here to visit the film’s website. (RBC Film Group, unrated, 92 minutes)

The United States of America is celebrated as the land of the free, and heralded as a place of great opportunity for entrepreneurs. While true, there’s also a dark grey lining to the silver optimism of that sunny-faced reading, because for almost every societal innovation that helps change and better the way we live, there’s some tale of an enterprising inventor getting screwed out of credit or otherwise left twisting in the wind due to corporate ruthlessness. The engaging documentary Genius on Hold details one such story, and if its attempts to weld a larger allegorical framework extending both backwards and forward in time onto a more structured familial narrative come across as rather hamfisted overreach, there’s still enough of interest here to generally satisfy alt-history buffs. It’s a movie that underscores that the winners and losers of some battles of capitalism aren’t always confined to a single generation; its shadows are long ones. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Freestyle Releasing/Top Cat Productions, PG, 91 minutes)

The title of Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey is somewhat misleading. An indulgently apportioned look at the classic rock band Journey and their recent reinvention with Arnel Pineda, a Filipino lead singer found through YouTube, director Ramona Diaz’s film takes what could and by all rights should be a fun, engaging fairytale story and stretches it out to near interminable lengths. Two parts shambling tour document and self-congratulatory biography for every one part cross-cultural coming-of-age story, the sporadically lively Don’t Stop Believin’ is all mic-ed up, but also all mixed up.

This is essentially a glad-handing fan project all the way, which certainly isn’t the worst thing in the world with a bit of clarity of vision. But Diaz’s film — which at 105 minutes could use more than just a little haircut — has no strong editorial point-of-view, and as such it drags and fumbles away one’s attention, like a song on repeat. Truly hardcore Journey fans may well greet it with open arms, but others will stop believin’ in its meaningfulness less than halfway through. (See what I did there?) For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its various, rolling theatrical engagements, Don’t Stop Believin’ is also available on VOD beginning today; for more information on both methods of viewing, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Cinedigm/Docurama Films, unrated, 105 minutes)

A documentary snapshot of American photographer Gregory Crewdson‘s decade-long quest to create a series of haunting, exactingly arranged, melancholic portraits of small town life, director Ben Shapiro’s Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters is a nonfiction affirmation of the latent sorrow and loneliness attached to certain surface images, and in its own way a quiet celebration of that almost telepathic connection. An example of narrowcasting through and through — Shapiro punts on a variety of ways to expand the canvas of his storytelling — the movie achieves a certain hold for those inclined toward psycho-social rumination, but by and large fails to connect its subject’s work to society at large.

Crewdson, perhaps best known, if at all, as the guy responsible for the print ad campaigns for Six Feet Under as well as Yo La Tengo’s album art, is an artist with a vision every bit as meticulous as filmmaker David Fincher. His photographs are essentially vast moviescapes crystallized into a single frame — at their core otherworldly moments of arrested time in the lives of the disenfranchised or quietly desperate, with a barely submerged drama lurking just underneath the surface. This sort of attention to detail helps explain the costs involved, which can often rival an independent film production, as well as Crewdson’s inclination for involving himself in every department of his crew.

Almost all of Crewdson’s work is done in the same small Massachusetts town, including his “Beneath the Roses” series, which Brief Encounters captures. A friendly if not quite effusive guy, Crewdson talks some about the impact of seeing David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet (which has a similar interest in suburban decay), as well as the influence of Edward Hopper and Alfred Hitchcock too; though it evolves into something else, one of his photographs even takes Psycho as its leaping-off point. But these shared anecdotes have a certain surface-only quality. It would be interesting to hear more about Crewdson’s artistic inspirations, which seems to draw as well from Diane Arbus and Stanley Kubrick.

As the son of a psychoanalyst — he recalls laying on the ground as a kid with his ear to the floor of his father’s downstairs office, and that being a potent metaphor for his work now — Crewdson has a keen grasp of the myriad inner feelings and impulses that drive his photography, which can’t be said for all artists. He’s also open to discussing them (unlike, say, Lynch). But Shapiro seems to leave a lot of heavy or more probing questions unasked. Similarly, while some of the small town residents who serve as the subjects in Crewdson’s pictures are interviewed, it would give Brief Encounters a nice sense of contrast to further spotlight their thoughts and impressions about his work.

For those inherently interested in photography, and the relationship between images and human feeling, Shapiro’s hands-off tack more or less works. But, somewhat frustratingly, Brief Encounters also presents viewers with all sorts of unexplored side avenues. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, whose exclusive Los Angeles engagement takes place at the Laemmle Music Hall, click here to visit its website. (Zeitgeist, unrated, 77 minutes)

A lot of movies wash over you, and that’s OK, even — many are almost designed to. Others, however, cast a pall over your day, and stick to your bones. Alex Gibney‘s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God is an example of the latter. One case of child sexual abuse is certainly a tragedy, but the stories at the core of this movie are beyond the pale. A gut-punch nonfiction look at the Catholic Church child sex abuse scandal as filtered through the experiential prism of a group of victims from a single Midwestern school for the deaf, and their long quest for justice, the Oscar-winning Gibney‘s documentary takes what seems by now to be an almost depressingly proforma tale of outrage and humiliation, and connects the dots to a much larger and systemic international cover-up by the Vatican. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 107 minutes)

A terrifically fresh narrative backdrop and the often delightful interplay of two timing-savvy comedians, Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, help give wings to director Paul Weitz’s Admission, an airy and engaging adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel of the same name. Evincing a pleasant yet not too demanding sense of depth, this comedy of midlife awakening digs into issues of loss and love but in an ultimately comforting manner, resulting in a crowd-pleasing film that should connect heartily with slightly more adult audiences.

In seriocomic films like About a Boy, In Good Company and Being Flynn, Weitz has tapped into familial rediscovery via stories of adrift protagonists who either struggle with or feel outright that they don’t have anything to offer emotionally. Though shot through with a harried quality which feels like a bet-hedging surrender to the casting of Fey (this could easily have been her stab at Truman Show-type reinvention, if only the filmmakers would have had more courage), Admission slots comfortably in the aforementioned canon of Weitz, as a loose-limbed movie whose nominal sins are of omission rather than commission. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Focus, PG-13, 106 minutes)

An achingly earnest immigration drama whose compelling low-budget artistic vision can’t save it from its overly programmatic dramatic roots and muddled assemblage, Dreamer is the sort of expressive indie film one wants to like and recommend more than one honestly does and can. A recent premiere at the Cinequest Film Festival, writer-director Jesse Salmeron’s movie is loosely in the mold of something like Chris Weitz’s well received A Better Life, from a couple years back — each film showcases the razor’s edge of life as an undocumented immigrant in the United States, in which one simple accident or slip-up can send a hard-working but unfortunate person tumbling into criminal desperation and/or terrible moral compromise. The problem is, Dreamer isn’t as good, and poignant, as the macro story it’s telling. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Undocumented Productions, unrated, 91 minutes)

Somewhere deep inside The Last Exorcism Part II may lurk an intriguing idea for a character-based horror movie follow-up, but it never manages to quite tease it out. Ditching both the mock-doc framework of the original 2010 possession film (which was inventive but undone by some thunderously stupid editorial choices in the third act), as well as its flashes of dark humor, this technically efficient but wholly pointless follow-up fails to expand on its mooring mythology in as compelling a fashion as in something like the Saw and Paranormal Activity franchises. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (CBS Films, PG-13, 88 minutes)

It seems incongruous during a rampant obesity epidemic in the United States, the notion of around 49 million Americans suffering from “food insecurity” — not knowing where either their next meal will come from, or the money for it. But the smart and poignantly argued new documentary A Place at the Table, in assaying governmental farm subsidy policies and other social welfare assistance, casts hunger and obesity as neighbors, not distant and exclusive conditions separated by a yawning chasm. Engorged with feeling, this nonfiction tale leads with its heart, and successfully makes a persuasive case for social investments that offset future “up-stream” societal costs across a wide range of arenas.

Against a backdrop which has seen a 40 percent rise in the cost of fruits and vegetables over the past three decades, versus a 40 percent decrease in the price of processed foods, A Place at the Table puts in its crosshairs agricultural policies (including $250 billion in USDA subsidies since 1995) that underwrite the massive production of in particular corn, wheat, rice, soy and sugar — the basic ingredients in many high-fat, high-sodium processed foods — but not other staple crops, or whole grains. It does this mostly by polite cajoling, though, rather than heated hectoring.

The film’s rhythms sometimes tip toward the sedate, and while co-directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson succeed in finding articulate and compelling interview subjects, they sometimes have trouble picking effective editorial pivot points and sharpening the spear tip of their arguments, making full sense of their case subjects’ situations. Still, with original music by T Bone Burnett and the Civil Wars, A Place at the Table aims to be a movie with more emotional punching power, which isn’t to say that it’s shoddily researched, just sensitive (perhaps a little too much so) to charges of wonky factorial overkill.

Not unlike Food, Inc., though, it shines a light on just the dispiriting degree to which so many — and especially so many children — are prisoners of a system in which the vast majority of the scope of their diet lies outside of reasonably expected mechanisms of their own control. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For the more about the movie, click here to visit its website. (Magnolia/Participant Media, unrated, 86 minutes)

If superhero tales are our modern-day big screen myths, fairytale adventures like Snow White and the Huntsman and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters are attempting to run a certain zeitgeist side game, blending fantasy folk legend with a decidedly contemporary appetite for action swashbuckling, albeit of the sword-and-crossbow variety. Peddling pat celebrations of valor and perseverance, but marked by distressingly humdrum characterizations, director Bryan Singer‘s Jack the Giant Slayer arrives as a piece of showcase entertainment for the continued advancement of in particular facial motion-capture, putting its characters through an effects-laden steeplechase that squeezes out some synthetic bedazzlement unattached to much in the way of deep or transportive feeling. Nicholas Hoult, so great in the recent Warm Bodies, acquits himself here, but he has chemistry with Eleanor Tomlinson that can be described as lukewarm at best. Ewan McGregor, Ian McShane and Stanley Tucci, meanwhile, seem hedged in by the prescribed functionality of their characters. All in all, Jack tames, rather than slays. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 114 minutes)

When Quentin Tarantino‘s Pulp Fiction hit big in 1994, like an open-handed smack to the face of the film industry proper, its stylized noir plotting, fizzy mixture of violence and pop cultural dissection, and in particular its partite storytelling structure spawned a tsunami of imitators. Almost two decades later, that influence can still be felt, most recently in the form of writer-director Leone Marucci’s caffeinated, terminally bizarre The Power of Few. A New Orleans-set tapestral affair whose disparate storylines nominally coalesce over the course of one afternoon, this jumbled mash-up of conspiracy-tinged action and armchair philosophizing is offbeat and unique in some respects but hamstrung by a strange combination of slapdash plotting and its own self-importance.



To say that The Power of Few, produced by co-star Q’orianka Kilcher (above), revolves around the theft and smuggling of the Shroud of Turin — which is what a retired Larry King, playing himself, pops up to bloviate about in a couple televised segments within the movie — makes it sound a lot more interesting and exciting than it actually is. Imagine if, instead of race and socioeconomic class, Crash was set in the Big Easy and more wanly about hope and positivity, and then just had an occasionally mentioned subplot about a stolen religious artifact. Oh, and a few select characters using slightly futuristic technology, to muddy the timeline. Oh, and then the movie was open to fan casting, as well as online editing suggestions in post-production. That seems to be The Power of Few, basically — an independent film casserole in which a mess of ideas are erroneously declared to add up to one big one.

Needing some medicine for his baby brother, a teenager (Devin Gearhart) goes to a store, where he mulls plans to hold up the pregnant cashier (Moon Bloodgood). Dom (Jesse Bradford) is on the run from a couple of gang-bangers (Anthony Anderson and Juvenile) looking to silence him in advance of testifying against their friend, and he finds himself rescued by Alexa (Kilcher), a courier who could be the sister of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character from Premium Rush, except by way of Aeon Flux. While a couple of homeless pals, Doke and Brown (Christopher Walken and Jordan Prentice), serve as the piece’s informal Greek chorus, police agent-types Clyde (Christian Slater) and Marti (Nicky Whelan, giving nice tough-grrrl) zoom around town arguing about finding the “mark” and “package,” which may or may not be an item given to Alexa.

Wound up nicely to music by Mike Simpson, The Power of Few delights for a while simply because one doesn’t know quite what the hell to expect from it. When Walken isn’t obviously reading lines from cue cards about having once gotten his hair cut every 3,000 miles, pegged to his oil change, his other dialogue (“I could eat the ass of a low-flying duck”) just as frequently sounds like the jazz-riff improvisations of a Ron Burgandy acolyte — which kind of works, actually, since his character is supposed to be a former television news anchor. But Slater and Whelan, meanwhile, appear to be in some sort of Southland Tales spin-off, while Tione Johnson — in a small but crucial role as a candy-loving adolescent — seems purloined from some hypothetical Nicole Holofcener dramedy with Catherine Keener lurking just out of frame as an after-school care-giver stricken with white guilt. There’s no tonal consistency or unifying vision to Marucci’s work, in other words.

Cinematographer Reinhart Peschke delivers a grab-bag assortment of styles, which helps give parts of the movie an undeniable pop. But production designer Ren Blanco’s work at times feels chintzy, and Marucci doesn’t have the benefit or editorial vision of smart pivot points to help try to corral his hopelessly careening, free-form narrative. As a result, The Power of Few feels like at least four distinct movies fighting for control of the overall apportioned running time. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Steelyard Pictures, R, 95 minutes)

A nagging sense of missed opportunity somewhat weighs down Dark Skies, an intermittently intriguing and fairly restrained chiller that fails to fully flesh out some of its more interesting and distinguishing narrative elements. Relying less on CGI spectacle than his previous genre efforts, Legion and Priest, writer-director Scott Stewart’s generally well orchestrated supernatural mood piece details a suburban family who find themselves under peril of unfriendly alien visitation.

The PG-13-rated Dark Skies may have trouble touching the upper limits of the nine-figure worldwide grosses for Paranormal Activity, Insidious and Sinister, with whom the movie shares producer Jason Blum. Nevertheless, with the easy international translation of its premise, Dark Skies should deliver a handsome return-on-investment, with strong ancillary value and ready-made franchise opportunity. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Dimension, PG-13, 97 minutes)

In 2009, Arab Canadian filmmaker Ruba Nadda delivered a romance set against a significantly chaotic sociopolitical backdrop in the form of Cairo Time, starring Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig. She imprints a different genre exercise against a similarly tumultuous Middle Eastern setting, though with far less fetching results, in Inescapable, a jumbled mixture of political mystery and questing-father drama also starring Siddig.

The story unfolds in early 2011, before the wider effects of the Arab Spring helped plunge Syria into civil war. White collar Canadian family man Adib Kareem (Siddig, above) finds his blissful domesticity threatened when his oldest daughter Muna (Jay Anstey) secretly travels from Toronto to Damascus to learn more about the ancestral homeland her father never discusses. When she goes missing for several days, Adib fears Muna’s disappearance may be connected to his checkered past in the military police, so dives headlong into the closed and paranoid autocratic state, enlisting the assistance of ex-fiancée Fatima (Marisa Tomei), former friend and colleague Sayid (Oded Fehr) and Canadian consulate official Paul Ridge (Joshua Jackson). Putative intrigue ensues.

A gala presentation at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival, Inescapable has the logline and “give-me-back-my-daughter” single-mindedness of a slightly classier, mid-career Mel Gibson revenge flick, albeit with the add-on of ethnic specificity. It certainly bears many of the marks of a thriller — a car chase, a shootout, lots of people telling Adib to leave the country — but all its details and scenes seem haphazardly arranged, and don’t cohere into anything meaningful. With the fictionalized story attached very personally to the experiences of her father, a Canadian immigrant, Nada opts for strange points of focus (Adib engages in some intense beard trimming) without bothering to elucidate any deeper meaning.

The film’s cultural and political exploration tracks wholly on a surface level, too. Cairo Time, in its delicate detailing of a burgeoning middle-aged romance certainly frowned upon and even made dangerous by surrounding sociopolitical realities, felt smart and of the moment. Inescapable, by contrast, is clumsy and nonspecific, even as a prologue snapshot to the current violence and unrest in Syria.

Siddig has a stately, almost regal presence, and commands a certain amount of attention. And Tomei — as a woman who learned English as a second language in the long-dashed hopes that her beloved would eventually send for her — is surprisingly good, and almost unrecognizable. Any qualms about her portraying a Syrian are quickly laid to rest. Unfortunately, the inert Inescapable never otherwise proves its merits — getting bogged down in phony issues of loyalty and cloak-and-dagger recrimination while ignoring the much more interesting human contours of its relationships. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Inescapable will also be available on VOD beginning February 25. (IFC Films, R, 92 minutes)