A vibrant, fun, cross-cultural romantic comedy with echoes of Jerry Maguire, writer-director Daniel Hsia’s Shanghai Calling tells the story of a multimillion-dollar business deal gone sideways, and a type-A, on-assignment American lawyer scrambling to make things right while also incrementally, almost subconsciously, experiencing an attitudinal shift in priorities. Offbeat scenarios, a fresh backdrop and warm performances enliven this surprising, Chinese-shot treat, which makes great use of its cast without ever sacrificing the integrity of its characters. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Shanghai Calling opens in Los Angeles at the Mann Chinese 6 and at the Laemmle Playhouse 7 in Pasadena, and is also available across VOD and digital platforms, including iTunes, Vudu, Amazon, Google Play and more. To view its trailer, click here. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (China Film Company/Americatown, unrated, 101 minutes)

I’m not sure what’s more depressing about A Good Day to Die Hard — its gassy qualitative failings, or the fact that star Bruce Willis, never particularly shy about what he deemed some of the shortcomings of the second and third movies in the series, thinks that this is what audiences want to see from beleaguered police detective John McClane. Unquestionably the worst entry of the once-great 25-year-old action franchise, this fifth film has the look, feel and defunct personality of an anonymous 1980s actioner. Drained of the spirit, charm and meticulous smarts that made the original movie such a breath of fresh air within its genre — and indeed, elevated it to a piece of great filmmaking, period — it’s an across-the-board dud.

Directed in mostly plodding fashion by John Moore, A Good Day to Die Hard plops McClane (Willis) down in Moscow, where he’s headed on some sort of impromptu diplomatic make-good mission, to try to assist his estranged son, Jack (Jai Courtney, the top villainous henchman of Jack Reacher). Jack’s been charged with trying to kill a scientist, Komarov (Sebastian Koch), on behalf of Chagarin (Sergey Kolesnikov), a former partner who has political aspirations and is eager to eliminate anyone who can testify to his dirty past. Little does McClane know, however, that his son is actually an undercover CIA agent, and in reality tasked with breaking Komarov free and protecting him in advance of American bureaucratic extraction. When things immediately get a little blow-uppy, John and Jack find themselves on the lam with Komarov and his daughter, Irina (Yulia Snigir), trying to stay out of the crosshairs of Chagarin’s henchman, Alik (Rasha Bukvic).

The vulnerability of McClane — physically, with his bare feet, but also emotionally, with his fractured marriage and two young kids — was a huge part of what made 1988’s Die Hard so special, and made the character’s wisecracks, alternately self-effacing and panicked, so swollen with legitimate feeling. In stark contrast to the hulking physicality of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, Willis’ character, his first starring big screen role, was a true Everyman — outnumbered and most of the time physically overmatched, but possessing of an indefatigable will and an inherent sense of wrong and right.

In A Good Day to Die Hard, McClane stills has quips, but they’re empty, pointless action movie rejoinders, and the manner in which he acts — at one point punching out an innocent guy after a car accident, in order to take his vehicle — feels like an utter betrayal of the character. When, late in the movie, he says he and Jack should be “doing our thing, out there killing scumbags,” it rings false, because that’s never what McClane, a reluctant hero, has been.

Instead, the screenplay, by Skip Woods (Swordfish, Hitman, The A-Team) and Jason Keller,
tries for a bit of parent-child reconciliation parallelism in the form of the McClanes and Komarov and Irina, though this is so half-sketched as to hardly matter. While missing some easy and potentially smart franchise callbacks (the notion of McClane as a nervous flier, and a chance to “shoot the glass”), it instead crams in a couple nods of homage
to the original movie (some helicopter stuff, a villain’s fall) which
seem especially awkward and forced. And while there’s a requisite twist, the villains and their plot — concerning some loose nuclear material from the Chernobyl disaster — are so colorlessly shaded as to invite complete disregard. In fact, the script lacks so much in the way of intelligence that it falls back on old cliches like having its villain eat theatrically (in this case a carrot… yes, seriously) whilst rhapsodizing about how much he hates Americans.

At its core, there is a chasm between the filmmakers of A Good Day to Die Hard. Its insistent editing — full of zooms and pulses — headlines a technical package that evinces no confidence (and rather justifiably so) in its actual narrative. An early chase sequence anchored by practical effects and the destruction of lots of automobiles offers some undeniably pulse-pounding thrills, but it’s all downhill from there. The film’s conclusion, awash in murky greys on a cheap-looking set, feels downright made for television. Even on the small screen, however, this Die Hard doesn’t represent a good day of work for Willis or anyone else — and certainly not a good time for viewers. (20th Century Fox, R, 97 minutes)

An unusual blend of  nonfiction recollection and rather tranquil dramatic re-enactment, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files attempts to disassemble and reconstruct the ordinary-guy façade of a necrophiliac murderer by way of testimonial from three people whose lives intersected the notorious Milwaukee serial killer. The result, while intermittently engaging, feels less cinematic and more suited to television news magazine programming of the sort one might see on A&E or MSNBC during any given weekend.

Dahmer, for those perhaps too young to remember, was arrested in the summer of 1991 when a man’s head was found in his refrigerator, and he was eventually charged with killing 17 people, dismembering their bodies in gruesome ways, saving various trophies and in some cases even eating them. Originally titled just Jeff, director Chris James Thompson’s movie intersperses archival footage with the remembrances of a unique trio — the police detective, Pat Kennedy, who first queried Dahmer and took his confession; the city medical examiner, Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen, who processed the crime scene and handled much of the testing that helped identify the victims; and Pamela Bass, a neighbor of Dahmer’s who lived in the same apartment complex and befriended him.

Taken together, these interviewees weave a fairly compelling tale, including their reactions to Dahmer’s death in prison two years after being sentenced to 957 years incarceration. Kennedy in particular is a somewhat theatrical character — his slightly-too-big-for-his-face moustache makes him seem like a cross between Harry Reems and Tom Crean, ready for a rodeo — and his ruminations give the movie its spine. In fact, Kennedy’s memories and anecdotes (it was clothes from his high school-age son that Dahmer borrowed to wear to his first public hearing) are often almost as fascinating for his processing and feelings regarding them as some of the content itself.

It’s a shame, then, that The Jeffrey Dahmer Files, which otherwise benefits from a subtle yet strong score by composer Robert Mulrennan, seems so restless and rudderless. The film’s recreations — starring Andrew Swant as Dahmer — are far from exploitative or gruesome; they mainly consist of everyday routines, and quiet scenes of him buying items he would use in his killings, like a barrel, security cameras and acid. Yet they add little to the collective punch of the movie, and are further undermined by the ill-reasoned use of archival footage featuring the real Dahmer.

Thompson tries to thread a too-fine needle with this already spare experiment, which clocks in at just over 75 minutes. It’s an art collage project that unnecessarily obscures its sizzle and raison d’être when a more straightforward tack would have worked better. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files is also available across various cable VOD platforms, as well as iTunes, Xbox and Sundance Now. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (IFC Films, unrated, 75 minutes)

A hollow center, in the form of a decided lack of ambition, lies underneath the colorful candy shell of Escape From Planet Earth, a peppy and at times downright manic animated adventure that eschews much in the way of substance in serving up a familiar story that will connect best with undemanding family audiences and younger viewers. Unremittingly bland conflict and stock characterizations mar what could have been the much more cleverly executed concept of a bunch of desperate aliens who band together to foil the power-grab of a military general gone mad, and get off of an uncivilized Earth. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Weinstein Company, PG, 89 minutes)

A slice of dinner theater torture porn that attempts to mine the inner sadism of regular folks for squirm-inducing entertainment, Would You Rather comes across like a combination of Saw and 1995’s The Last Supper, but without any of the queasy delight that designation might connote. Scripted by Steffen Schlachtenhaufen as a twisted exploration of the titular party game, director David Guy Levy’s movie isn’t wickedly playful enough to qualify as a darkly comedic horror romp, a la the Final Destination movies, and it’s not coiled enough to succeed as a gritty work of macabre tension.

In the wake of her parents’ death, Iris (Brittany Snow) is struggling to make ends meet and also care for her younger brother, who needs a bone marrow transplant when her plight lands her an unusual invitation from a seemingly philanthropic aristocrat, Shepard Lambrick (a showy Jeffrey Combs, one of the movie’s weak links): come to exclusive dinner party and play a game where the winner will be awarded untold amounts of money, and have their life’s problems solved. Iris reluctantly accepts, and arrives at Lambrick’s mansion where she’s joined by Cal (Eddie Steeples), ex-gambler Peter (Robb Wells), sullen Amy (Sasha Grey, playing the Ally Sheedy role from The Breakfast Club), recovering alcoholic Conway (John Heard), wheelchair-bound Linda (June Squibb) and Iraq vet Travis (Charlie Hofheimer).

With the assistance of his henchman Bevans (Jonny Coyle) and depraved, unstable son Julian (Robin Lord Taylor, effectively loathsome), Lambrick sketches out the rules of his game: going around the table, each participant is given two fairly undesirable choices, one of which they must select within 15 seconds and then act upon. Car batteries, knives, whipping canes, firecrackers and other gruesome instruments are trotted out, and tears, arguments and blood-letting naturally ensues.

One of the main problems of Would You Rather is that Schlachtenhaufen’s screenplay doesn’t set up its subjects as convincingly desperate. Ergo, the collectivity of their immediately cowed nature — before the full parameters of the game are revealed, no one leaves when given the chance, even though some super-creepy and suspect stuff has gone down — rings false. The loose-cannon threat of Julian, also, who has major daddy issues, is too quickly resolved.

Mainly, though, Lambrick is just a terribly sketched villain, which snuffs out any flicker of intrigue this constrained narrative offers. In Saw, Jigsaw had a rationalized motivation — and indeed, what might be called an overarching worldview, which became more honed in the franchise’s sequels. In Would You Rather, apart from some half-reasoned mumbo-jumbo (“It’s all about decision-making in its rawest form!”) there’s not enough background to make one believe that Lambrick really gets his rocks off from this stuff, and has the ability to sustain such an enterprise, aides and all. Ergo, Combs’ performance — which comes across like some deranged game show host — isn’t rooted in any sort of reality.

Director Levy’s technical package, achieved on a modest budget, convincingly imparts a claustrophobic vibe, but can’t overcome spotty casting and the inherent limitations of the material as rendered — which peaks about 40 minutes in, and then coasts across the finish line with an ever-diminishing level of cleverness and execution. In addition to its theatrical engagements at the Laemmle NoHo 7 and elsewhere, Would You Rather is also available via digital download and VOD, across various platforms. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Films, R, 93 minutes)

Director Werner Herzog has lived life as a sort of cinematic pirate, striking out to and fro, and using the medium of film more often than not to satisfy his immense, globe-spanning curiosities, in both narrative features (Fitzcarraldo, Rescue Dawn) and documentaries (Cave of Forgotten Dreams). A stirring meditation on the human spirit in extreme conditions, and a work of a certain piece with his nonfiction explorations Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog and Russian co-director Dmitry Vasyukov’s Happy People: A Year in the Taiga delves into the lives of trappers and indigenous peoples living around Bakhtia, a remote town of 300 in the wintry plains of Siberia.

An unforgiving expanse one-and-a-half times the size of the United States, where a temperature of 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit is considered a mild day in the winter, the Siberian Taiga is reachable only by helicopter or boat. The movie centers mostly on Gennady, a middle-aged trapper who oversees a 900-square-mile parcel of land, consigned to him during communist times, where he clears snow from his main cabin and outpost dwellings, splits wood to make skis, strips birch tree bark to make a homemade mosquito repellent, and constructs and sets 1,000 traps during the springtime months — all using techniques passed down for many generations.

Happy People was originally birthed by Vasyukov, who, not terribly unlike the filmmakers of Restrepo, lived for over a year with his subjects in remote Siberia, in order to craft a four-hour work for Russian television that captured and celebrated this fading way of life. This film represents Herzog’s edit of that, but it’s no mere unthinking abridgement. Anchored by a characteristically ruminative voiceover from the filmmaker, Happy People also reflects Herzog’s passion and fascination for the often unforgiving nature of the wild.

The footage itself is fascinating, but more in line with something like Interview Project or Darwin: No Services Ahead than the willful aesthetic remove of Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s minimalist Sweetgrass. Vasyukov and Herzog have a keen, intuitive grasp of when to let this material speak mostly for itself — as with the construction of a wooden canoe by one of the last indigenous persons trained in the craft — and when and where to interweave Gennady’s ruminations on his work and life, and its relationship to something like domesticated farming (“In the wild an animal knows that no good can come from me, from man — here, it’s about who outsmarts whom”).

Living in such extreme conditions is part of its story, but Happy People also highlights the dignifying effects that nature has on humans. In this sense, the film’s surprising emotional scope is as expansive as its setting. It’s a mesmerizing portrait of human resilience, but a reminder as well that we remain tethered to the natural world, despite our increasingly wireless existence in a digital age. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Music Box Films, unrated, 94 minutes)

Forget the tears of a clown as it pertains to the inner psychology of a comedian — what about the rage of a clown? That’s the principal focus of The Bitter Buddha, a documentary portrait of middle-aged stand-up Eddie Pepitone that surfs along the edge of his angry but self-aware shtick and celebrates his standing among fellow comedians, but all without fully and insightfully digging into the deep-seated emotion that informs his existential angst.

Praised as the sort of comedian whom other comedians love (“the Charles Bukowski of comedy, except if you replaced alcohol with Nutter Butters,” says one), the Brooklyn-born Pepitone serves up a dizzying blend of caustic candor. He’s honest about his occasional resentment of young comics, but just as hard on himself (“I get heckled a lot in clubs. It’s usually generic, but accurate, like, ‘Eddie, you suck!'”). It’s this sort of “decades of fear and failure, and learning to deal with that creatively,” says champion Patton Oswalt (one of many other comedians who give testimonials of support), that informs the backbone of both Pepitone’s perpetually agitated professional voice and regular, off-stage personality.

Director Steven Feinartz follows his subject around, and even works in some occasional animation, by Allen Mezquida, which is a nice touch, production-wise. But unlike American: The Bill Hicks Story, another nonfiction snapshot of a cultish stand-up figure, The Bitter Buddha doesn’t fully connect the dots between professional water-treading and the sort of stinging personal rejection that seemingly helps keep Pepitone in a state of under-appreciated arrest. Ostensibly, the movie’s arc builds toward a show Pepitone does in Harlem — his first in New York City in nine years, which coincides with the last time his father saw him perform. And seeing some of their interactions definitely informs a reading of the man.

But The Bitter Buddha, while passably engaging, is too polite and removed to resonate deeply for a wider audience. When Feinartz gets into Pepitone’s feeding of squirrels at a local park, and love of animals more broadly, or his fitful embrace of meditating in lieu of more personal sharing at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, it hints at the pain and latent psychology of its subject, but the movie then too quickly steps away from conflict and tension. The result is a nice glimpse into Pepitone’s private life for fans, but not a worthy introduction for more mainstream documentary buffs. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Cheremoya Films, unrated, 90 minutes)

His previous film, the surrealistic dark comedy Rubber, was about a psychokinetic tire that wandered the dusty American Southwest exploding the heads of those who got in its way, so anyone who saw that will not be very surprised by Quentin Dupieux‘s new movie Wrong, which trades in the same sort of absurdist humor. A work of significant playfulness and imagination — it features cinema’s best dog crap joke ever, hands down — Wrong hints at a broader promise of budding, starburst auteurism upon which the film as a whole doesn’t fully deliver. It’s a nice, silly riff that could work better in truncated form, but will strike plenty of folks as merely odd for odd’s sake, even as it connects roundly with a certain subset. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Drafthouse Films, unrated, 94 minutes)

Crafting a movie around the notion of Charlie Sheen as a louche womanizer experiencing some sort of midlife crisis is hardly the stuff of imaginative brilliance, but as filtered through the prism of Roman Coppola’s mind’s eye, it at least remains intriguing enough to qualify A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III as a playful lark. The first starring film project tackled by Sheen after his very open and acrimonious split with CBS and Two and a Half Men and subsequent public stint as a drug-addled performance artist, Coppola’s first feature behind the camera since 2001’s CQ is a light, and slight, surrealistic comedy of emotional waywardness.



The movie unfolds in a stylized, period-indeterminate Los Angeles. Swan, not unlike Sheen, is a charismatic guy who’s used both his charm and considerable wealth — in this instance from a successful career as a graphic artist — to deflect a lot of his problems but not really solve them. Ergo, he lives in a state of perpetually arrested development, where his eccentricities (Swan owns a toucan and never takes off his filtered sunglasses, even when he shaves) are shruggingly embraced by all around him. When his girlfriend Ivana (Katheryn Winnick) suddenly and angrily breaks off their relationship, however, Swan finds himself caught up in a downward spiral of confusion, self-doubt and reflection.

He’s briefly hospitalized for anxiety, where his visitors include his sister Izzy (Patricia Arquette), his worried accountant Saul (Bill Murray) and his best friend, Kirby Star (Jason Schwartzman), a comedian for whom Swan is overdue on delivery of a cover image for his latest album. Caught up in a tumble-dry cycle of conflicting emotions, Swan eschews advice to move on, and instead sets out to find out what Ivana is up to, and whether you was ever “really” in love with him.

Charles Swan isn’t a comedy, per se. Or, that is, it doesn’t really have a lot of jokes written into the dialogue. Its offbeat sense of humor is mostly located in various flight-of-fancy stagings, and the line readings of supporting players. (Some of the former are spun-off flashbacks or acted-out representations of a story being conveyed, while others, like a dance sequence and a cowboys-and-Indians shootout, are elaborate “death fantasies” in which Swan is martyred in front of Ivana.) This nimble style works well in setting up the movie, and certainly keeping one guessing as to where things are going. But it never seems anchored to much of substance, despite the existential panic of its namesake character. Unlike Silver Linings Playbook, Charles Swan isn’t really deeply invested in the idea of its protagonist having appreciable problems, mental or otherwise.

The influence of Coppola’s two writing collaborations with Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited and the Oscar-nominated Moonrise Kingdom) are very much evident in the film’s rich production design, and it’s this quality — along with an engaging overall visual style — which helps prop up what is otherwise the wan pop- and gender-psychology of a fairly thinly imagined conceit. In addition to his writing and directing duties, Coppola also serves as his own director of photography and camera operator (a tidbit adroitly revealed in the movie’s amusing, celebratory closing credits), and the Zeiss super-speed lenses he uses give Charles Swan a distinct visual signature.

Of the supporting players, perhaps unsurprisingly, the impish Schwartzman has the most fun and connects the most roundly, though Winnick is quite solid as well. Sheen’s presence — the very thing which gives the movie so much of its extra-textual cachet — is also restrictive. An actor with less baggage (and a slightly less haggard visage) would have been able to explore the character’s frailties in a way that Sheen can’t muster. As such, Charles Swan is a colorful, tossed-off ode to romantic uncertainty, but one that doesn’t leave a mental mark to match its sugary coating. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (A24 Films/American Zoetrope, R, 85 minutes)

Lovingly captured but rather dramatically inert, The Playroom is a slice of 1970s-era familial portraiture, with a special focus on wandering eyes and the secret lives of adults. If The Ice Storm was a band, think of this as the minor-chord, label-unsigned, opening act for the opening act — a boxed-in, presumably autobiographical tale in which a quartet of kids manage their mother’s alcoholism and nice-guy father’s enabling… with imagination! For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film’s theatrical engagements in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, in New York at the Cinema Village and Dallas at the Texas Theater, click here to visit its website. (Freestyle Releasing, R, 83 minutes)

The phrase “pharmaceutical thriller” doesn’t exactly mentally elicit the sound effect of ringing cash registers, so distributor Open Road Films has been taking a scrupulously crafted ambiguous tack with the marketing campaign for Steven Soderbergh‘s new film, Side Effects. Fortunately, they have a great product, so the gulf or disconnect between what audiences might be expecting going into seeing the movie and what it actually is not only doesn’t matter, but might actually increase one’s enjoyment of it. A moody, neo-noir-style psychological drama with thick, intertwined veins of tragedy, romantic obsession, legal consequence and revenge, the film unfolds against a compelling backdrop, and in captivating fashion.



After her husband Martin (Channing Tatum) is released from prison following a four-year stint for insider trading, Emily Taylor (Rooney Mara) is hopeful about being able to piece her life back together. A familiar and crushing fog of depression soon returns, however. In the emergency room after deliberately driving her car into a wall, Emily is assigned to Dr. Jonathan Banks (Jude Law), an up-and-coming doctor in a successful practice who’s been tabbed to oversee part of a medical trial for which he’s being compensated. He suspects the incident was no accident, but agrees to release Emily from the hospital if she consents to medication and counseling under his supervision.

Emily’s new prescription seems at first to help — she and Martin reconnect sexually, and her anxiety eases — but negative by-products soon begin to manifest, and a tragedy ensues. While Jonathan seeks answers and assistance from Emily’s old psychiatrist, Dr. Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), his own wife, Deirdre (Vinessa Shaw), starts to question the similarity of his current predicament in relation to a past professional incident which he’s kept secret. Desperate and cornered, Jonathan sets out to reclaim his way of life at all costs.

Side Effects‘ milieu is among its strongest selling points; given the modern-day prevalence of anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medications and other psycho-pharmacological drugs, this convincingly rendered environment makes for a unique, timely and fascinating backdrop. But its plotting is like a Russian nesting doll of confusion and despair, with the motivations of various characters both coming into focus and changing as events unwind.

This isn’t weathervane cinema, though; its characterizations are crisp, and not dependent on long speeches of action justification. Emily speaks in haunted disconnection (“Martin’s thinking about moving us”), like she’s nothing more than a piece of furniture in her husband’s life. Jonathan, meanwhile, descends into his own mad panic that’s smartly informed by his past.

To delve further into the movie’s twists and turns risks ruining too much, but suffice to say that Scott Burns’ script is a thing of spare, streamlined beauty. Side Effects is vaguely reminiscent of Malice, Harold Becker’s deliciously twisty thriller penned by Aaron Sorkin and Scott Frank, in that both films spin intrigue and suspense off of a core mystery that itself isn’t what it seems. Trading in chilly yet evocative close-ups that help convey the head space of his superb cast, meanwhile, Soderbergh works with a bracing economy; his compositions have both space and meaning, and there isn’t a wasted or superfluous edit in the entire movie.

In charting the making of Psycho, last fall’s Hitchcock underscored the namesake master filmmaker’s joint recognition of and obsession with the narrative mechanics of storytelling suspense, and how dogged and determined he was to consistently find an idea worthy of pouring the completeness of his cinematic vision into. Were he alive today, it’s easy to envision him having a similar reaction to this material. Relatably rooted in very human feelings of hopelessness and desire, Side Effects is a thriller that would make him proud. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Open Road Films, R, 106 minutes)

A misplaced focus on action hijinks helps sink Identity Thief, a purported comedy that squanders its rich concept, as well as the talents of its two leads. The more physical-minded slapstick of Bridesmaids‘ Melissa McCarthy would seem a good pairing with Jason Bateman‘s slow-burn comedy of temperamental mismatch for this tale of a victim of fraudulent impersonation who tracks down his perpetrator, but a cabal of under-sketched narrative interlopers, an uncertain mixture of tones and, most damningly, a general lack of good ideas and jokes doom this strained offering. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 112 minutes)

A serviceable enough B-feature of the sort that could appropriately induce nightmares in adolescents and arachnophobes, modestly budgeted horror offering Spiders opts for action antics when a bit more creepy-crawly tension and mystery would have better suited its story.

Working from a script co-written with Joseph Farrugia, director Tibor Takacs baits an interesting hook (genetically-spliced mutant spiders crash land in New York City from an old Russian space station), and marshals a decent if eventually much-overused mix of practical and CGI effects. But while the screenplay tries for a bit of clever character inversion, the movie takes all sorts of annoying and stupid short cuts that quickly mark it as an essentially lazy take on a much more interesting concept.

Mainly, though, it’s peppered with all sorts of interesting avenues left totally unexplored, like the notion that by blocking security cameras and hiding the queen these space spiders are actually quite intelligent, and maybe even have some sort of plan. In general, given the movie’s PG-13 rating and its plot, more mystery and less action — which reaches a point of diminishing return in the third act, given the movie’s cramped, quarantined city block, where much mayhem takes place — would have given Spiders more of a chance at achieving something memorable. As is, with its square-jawed familial imperilment and frontal assault fetishism, wherein plenty of spindly legs smash through windows and get slammed in doors, Takacs’ movie is a throwback to enjoyable but forgettable VHS-era creature-feature entertainment. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, the movie is available on premium VOD beginning on February 8. (Millennium Entertainment, PG-13, 89 minutes)

A funky and fresh tale of adolescent self-doubt and blossoming young love funneled through the prism of post-apocalyptic zombiedom, Warm Bodies conjures a lovely, commingled tone of wistfulness and witticism. The best, most unique zombie movie since Shaun of the Dead, director Jonathan Levine‘s smart adaptation of Isaac Marion’s same-named novel delivers laughs as well as an unlikely, surprisingly affecting coming-of-age tale centered around the curative powers of passion and hope.



Unfolding in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Warm Bodies takes as its narrator R (Nicholas Hoult, above), a soulful and self-aware zombie who nevertheless can’t remember his name or the specifics of what exactly happened to the world around him, or even really speak. His days are spent mostly trudging aimlessly around an airport, though he shares a few grunts of half-formed thought with his “friend,” fellow zombie M (Rob Corddry). When they cross paths with a band of scavenging survivors, R is so captivated by the fetching Julie (Teresa Palmer) that he instinctively saves her from being eaten.

He does, however, eat the brains of her boyfriend Perry (Dave Franco), which gives R insights into the memories, thoughts and feelings of his victim. Taking Julie back to the abandoned airliner he’s taken as his home and filled with knick-knacks, R nervously starts trying to communicate with her (sample inner monologue: “Dont’ be creepy, don’t be creepy…”), and again saves her when she makes an abortive escape attempt. A small gesture of appreciation on Julie’s part seems to further trigger some sort of awakening in R, and later some other zombies as well. This development stands in stark contrast to the bleak worldview of her militant father (John Malkovich), but things come to a head when a bunch of “boneys” — too-far-gone zombies who’ve eaten all of their own skin off — gather to attack both humans and the regular reanimated corpses.

Its conceit sounds rather outrageous, and it is, but Warm Bodies is pitched perfectly, in a manner that invests a certain seriousness in the world it’s presenting. Director Levine (The Wackness, 50/50) has previously shown a knack especially for sly and effective moodcraft, marrying image to brightly chosen pop songs in a fashion that neither hijacks nor sells short the narrative, and Warm Bodies further evidences this. Via R’s narration, Levine’s adaptation of Marion’s novel ports over the bumbling and wry self-loathing that any nominally reflective teenager can identify with, but he also creates a beautifully melancholic backdrop that’s punctured by the contrast of Julie’s beauty and vulnerability. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe has worked in horror before, in The Others, The Road and, most recently, the remake of Fright Night, and has a smart, evocative sense of framing as well as superb sense of muted atmospheric lighting.

Mostly, though, Warm Bodies affirms its talented young leads. Palmer’s rangy performance further confirms what her tough-gal turn in I Am Number Four did — that she’s a star of the future. Hoult, meanwhile, may or may not be a star (he does have a couple big studio films on tap), but he is terrifically talented. I was a bit lukewarm on his performance in A Single Man, but his turn here is whole-hearted and so smartly modulated — carefully revealing new layers and levels of thought and engagement as he becomes more and more human.

Twenty years ago, a warped little movie called Groundhog Day released in February — an antidote to the saccharine, a sort of twisted Valentine for the rest of us. An inspired genre mash-up with allegorical underpinnings that’s also just a lot of fun, Warm Bodies is different from that ace comedy in just about every way, shape and form, except for the two most crucial — heart and brains. It has them both. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Summit Entertainment, PG-13, 97 minutes)