A sweet-natured and loose-limbed coming-of-age tale that delivers by way of its smart, sympathetic performances and an accumulation of telling details, actor Matthew Lillard’s directorial debut, Fat Kid Rules the World, tells a simple and familiar story, but one with not inconsiderable emotional purchase. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Outsider Pictures/Arc Entertainment, R, 94 minutes)

There may not be a more important documentary released this year for the general health of especially sports-playing American kids than Head Games, director Steve James’ impactful look at the trauma inflicted by repeated concussions. Using Chris Nowinski’s November 2006 book of the same name as a leaping-off point, the film digs into chronic traumatic encephalopathy (or CTE) and its longterm links to memory loss, early-onset dementia, depression and even suicide.

Nowinski, a former Harvard football player and WWE wrestler, knows of what he writes and speaks. After his professional wrestling career was cut short from the lingering after-effects concussion, he went on to research and write his exhaustively footnoted book, and eventually co-found the Sports Legacy Institute with Dr. Robert Cantu, in reaction to a new crop of medical research showing brain trauma to be both a latent and booming public health crisis. Nowinski was at the forefront of some of this research, too, convincing the families of a handful of recently deceased athletes to donate their brains for scientific study.

Owing to the fact that the NFL is where the story broke and played out, after the 2006 suicide of ex-Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Andre Waters, Head Games devotes about the first half of its 91-minute running time to professional football before cycling through progressively less time devoted to NHL hockey and soccer — as funneled through the perspectives of former player Keith Primeau and Olympic medalist Cindy Parlow, respectively — and, essentially, a third act-as-closing argument. Nowinski shares his own experiences, as does his best friend and college teammate, while New York Times writer Alan Schwarz walks viewers through the unfolding story from his perspective.

Still, Head Games isn’t just a jeremiad or hand-wringing assault on all physical activity, though. While the brutal collisions of football get the most attention, James (Hoop Dreams) uses the articulate Nowinski and others to sketch out a timeline of changing dynamics, and how research can hopefully be used to foster better concussion diagnosis, and perhaps even develop better equipment. Smartly, the director doesn’t overload his movie with voices; the doctors number no more than a half dozen, and this tightened focus benefits the material.

The first-person testimonials of the aforementioned ex-athletes carry a lot of significance as well, and give the movie sympathetic heft. Parlow talks about suffering from chronic headaches during her career, and even now always leaving on her car’s GPS guidance system, even on familiar streets. The grander importance of Head Games — what makes it a movie that isn’t just about a problem in professional sports — lies in how James also spotlights the competitive drive of various kids playing these sports, often with less equipment and certainly with less medically informed training and supervision than their sports idols. Late in the film, one doctor estimates that around 15 percent of even one-time concussion sufferers endure persistent cognitive dysfunction. Darkly, plenty of viewers might leave Head Games wondering if why they can’t find their car in the parking lot has some connection to all those Pop Warner football games years ago. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Variance Films, PG-13, 91 minutes)

If the key to girl-next-door romantic comedy appeal is said to lie in an actress’ aspirational qualities, then the same is true of another subset of comedy embodied by Kevin James, whose stocky physicality but surprising grace with it feed an affable, self-effacing demeanor that serves as a pleasantly embraceable stand-in for legions of weekend warriors with anecdotes of past athletic glory and romantic prowess. Conventionally plotted but bighearted, crowd-pleasing teacher-turned-fighter tale Here Comes the Boom serves as James’ most well-rounded starring vehicle to date. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony, PG, 104 minutes)

A thunderously stupid horror movie of slapdash construction and ping-pong tonalities, Smiley builds its narrative around the notion of a viral video serial killer who’s summoned by way of a specific web chat incantation. Impressive only for its ability to chase unlikeliness and viewer frustration down an ever-increasing rabbit hole of bewilderment, director Michael Gallagher’s motivation-free genre exercise is populated with characters who, when not busy exhibiting the decision-making and inner emotional landscapes of 12-year-olds, are pantomiming the same age group’s mindset of adults and scariness — all ideas which they’ve absorbed through cultural osmosis.



College freshman Ashley Brooks (Caitlin Gerard, possessing a nice smile and beatific presence) is still recovering from the suicide of her mother just a year earlier, but becomes fast friends with Proxy (Melanie Papalia) when she moves into an off-campus house with her prior to her first semester. Proxy takes Ashley to a party where she introduces her to a bunch of anonymous users of a message board she frequents. These include alpha male Zane (Andrew James Allen, getting his “acting” on), who flirts seemingly by talking up his interest in “the intersection of the strange and the retarded,” as well as Binder (Shane Dawson), a meek kid bullied and kicked out of the party ostensibly for flagging inappropriate content like child pornography.

Against the ongoing backdrop of a reason and ethics class taught by Professor Clayton (Roger Bart, coming the closest to escaping this mess unscathed), Ashley and Proxy decide to test out the urban legend of Smiley by typing three times “I did it for the lulz,” which sounds like something a stoned, kitten-loving Limp Bizkit fan would have dreamed up circa 2000. They then witness a murder, and soon other members of their little group are felled as well. Fearing that her fragile sanity is unraveling, Ashley reaches out at various points to Proxy, Zane and Binder, trying to get to the bottom of this brutal killer.

The script for Smiley, by Gallagher and Glasgow Phillips, is a hodge-podge of clichés and nipped bits from many other horror movies, from The Ring and Bloody Mary to the Scream sequels. Its handling and portrayal of the average twentysomething’s relationship with technology is frequently silly, and its efforts to achieve notional topicality by way of basing its story around a Chat Roulette-type website already feel dated and lame. The movie tries to paper over all these deficiencies by way of spurious leaps in logic and some half-hearted mumbo-jumbo about the Internet achieving a greater consciousness (“From The Terminator, like Skynet — or like Neo!”). All other shortcomings (of which there are many) and red herrings are “solved” by a lazy, post-modern twist that feels cobbled together like a Mad-Lib.

Smiley is a movie of obviously limited budget and resources, but its failures run much deeper than that. The result leans on jump-scares and sound design in an attempt to summon some small modicum of dread or tension. On a purely visual level, the actual character of Smiley — with stitched shut eyes and a carved jack-o-lantern grin — is creepily effective, not unlike the striking slasher Chromeskull of a couple years ago, from Laid to Rest and its sequel. But everything about Smiley is nonsensical, derivative, or both — right down to an air-quote shocking ending that then tries to leave room for ambiguity or a sequel but only further undercuts the stupid narrative choices made by its makers. Leave this turd alone. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Fever Productions, R, 90 minutes)

No, this is not the story of a crayon-obsessed kid and his plot to nourish and grow seedlings of Stubhub’s “Ticket Oak,” alas. A rangy coming-of-age drama based on Marianne Fredriksson’s Swedish book of the same name, Simon and the Oaks spans a couple decades in telling the story of an outcast adolescent of partial and secreted Jewish heritage growing up amidst the considerable political and social turmoil of World War II. Arthouse appreciation for this attractively photographed recipient of 13 Guldbagge nominations, Sweden’s Oscar equivalent, will depend on a given viewer’s tolerance for broad-strokes melodrama of intertwined fates that lacks the ambition and emotional complications of many similar screen works.

Simon and the Oaks is directed by Lisa Ohlin, and there’s no doubt that the film’s technical package is a solid one. The cinematography and score are both superlative, and the film never feels phony or even less than entirely authentic in its period piece detail and evocation of a bygone era. The acting, too, is solid, giving the movie a collection of many strong, self-contained scenes.

It’s just that the sum is less than the whole of its parts, since the film continuously opts for narrative forward movement rather than a deeper exploration of motivations and feeling. Ohlin’s film is beautiful, but John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas — both its 2008 cinematic adaptation, and the original source material — remain stronger evocations of Jewish-rooted World War II drama, the early intrusion of “the dark hour of reason” upon adolescence, and the dramatic consequences thereof. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Simon and the Oaks opens this week in New York City at the Paris Theater and in Los Angeles at the Landmark, expanding nationally from there. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Film Arcade, unrated, 118 minutes)

Middle of Nowhere may have a nondescript title, but the skill of its staging is anything but pedestrian. An intimate, confidently directed and superbly acted humanistic drama that is utterly at home in the subtle push-and-pull of long-standing family arguments and tensions, the Los Angeles-set film casts a long spell — not unlike the recent For Ellen — through its beguiling maintenance of melancholic mood.

Written and directed by publicist-turned-filmmaker Ava DuVernay, and released via a distributor, African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement, that she helped co-found, Middle of Nowhere focuses on Ruby (the wonderful Emayatzy Corinealdi), a bright medical student who puts her dreams on hold and suspends her career when her husband Derek (Omari Hardwick) lands in prison — hopeful that he can be released early for good behavior, after five years of an eight-year sentence.

Four-plus years later, as an important parole hearing looms, Derek seems more than a little ambivalent about a return to domestic normalcy. Against the backdrop of a pair of complicated relationships — with her sister Rosie (Edwina Findley), a single mother, and their own mom Ruth (Lorraine Toussaint) — Ruby is forced to stare past some of the walls she constructed to convince herself of her marriage’s solidity. She also meets Brian (David Oyelowo), a bus driver who seemingly offers her a stability and presence that Derek cannot.

DuVernay picked up Best Director honors at the Sundance Film Festival for the movie, and it’s easy to see why. The film’s plotting is familiar, and a couple of its gambits tired (the moment where the phone call of a daughter is briefly mistaken for that of another love interest), but there’s a lyrical quality to the direction, and the movie doesn’t attempt to distill Ruby’s contradictory emotions into neatly parceled, clear and direct motivations.

Much of Middle of Nowhere, DuVernay’s second film, is naturalistic in its own way, but cinematographer Bradford Young shoots in a muted fashion that underscores the movie’s melancholic, deeply interior vibe while not calling attention to itself. The result is earnest without being cornpone, slight without being simple, and beautiful without being overly adorned.

Corinealdi’s performance, an utter revelation, has a lot to do with this connection. She headlines a cast who captures, in smart, affecting and concise strokes, the inner restlessness and not easily articulated regret of characters fumbling toward an emotional equilibrium. Middle of Nowhere is an honest and moving account of some of the tough decisions that face those left on the outside when a loved one goes to prison — and when the not-yet-extinguished dreams of a life they wanted are commingled with a sense of shame over what their life actually is. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (AAFRM, R, 104 minutes)

A contemplative, puzzle-box anti-thriller of the sort that seemingly only the French now make (even though it’s adapted from an American novel by Douglas Kennedy), The Big Picture is an artful if overlong drama that connects chiefly as a compelling vehicle for star Romain Duris. To call it understated is its own special sort of understatement; this is a film-as-character-study, but also one that hovers drone-like over its subject rather than digging in for deep psychological insights. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (MPI Pictures, unrated, 114 minutes)

A best-selling author, lifestyle coach and proponent of Eastern medicinal practices, Deepak Chopra is known to and beloved by millions. Of course, he’s also just a man — and a sometimes distant and curious one to his son, Gotham Chopra. Decoding Deepak, then, is a documentary devoted to unraveling a bit of the myth surrounding the public figure, as the younger Chopra follows his father for a year, chronicling his brokered ordainment as a Buddhist monk in Thailand and subsequent book tour for a fictionalized autobiography of Muslim prophet Muhammad. Smart, warm-hearted and inquisitive, it digs into one of the under-examined (and ongoing) difficulties we all face — recognizing and understanding our parents as actual people, and not just a mom or dad.

Chopra recognizes and respects his father’s intelligence and drive, but his relationship with him is also leavened by skepticism, and a certain disconnection from what he eventually characterizes as Deepak’s insatiable hunger to be relevant on a grand scale. Like any son or daughter, he’s frustrated when his father thinks he has nothing left to learn, and he sketches out the contours of their relationship thusly: for engagement, follow him into his work, and listen to him talk about… whatever.

A lack of something to say is certainly not a condition normal to Deepak, who is adept at elegantly phrased, bite-size morsels of wisdom, and a master of wrapping philosophical poetry around terrible moments of human despair or depravity. In Gotham’s view, his father can turn “any mundane question into a talking point for a book,” so ripples of an understated adolescent longing for more personal connection come bubbling to the surface by way of his innocent needling of his dad over the lack of his books at a train station kiosk (“You’re not as popular as The Secret“) during a trip to India.

The film doesn’t quite crack the ineffable remoteness of its subject, but it is humanizing. The portrait that emerges is an interesting and engaging one — of Deepak as a perhaps deep but also innately restless thinker, not a phony, really, but a spiritually-minded guru who also enjoys many of the material pleasures of life. He’s a man of contradictions, like us all. This is always why he can be seen as pondering the big questions of life, while still obsessed with both his Blackberry and a contentious Nightline debate with professional skeptic Michael Shermer from months earlier.

As a kind of well-captured travelogue, Decoding Deepak is of course quite specifically about its namesake subject, but it also has a much wider reach and sense of reflection and purpose than that. The film actually shares a good deal in common with Doug Block’s superb, little seen 2009 documentary The Kids Grow Up, and Agnès Varda’s slightly better known The Beaches of Agnès, both of which were highly reflective nonfiction self-portraits refracted through the lens of modern parenting, and by degrees about the difficult but necessary notion of evolving familial relationships. If life is about answering but a few questions and the process of discovering more and more with which to grapple, Decoding Deepak suitably captures that. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, and to view its trailer and information about its availability on VOD platforms, visit its website by clicking here. (Snag Films, unrated, 74 minutes)

A recognizable cast does nothing except raise the level of viewer befuddlement attached to Butter, a heartland-set train wreck of purported satire. Set against the true-to-life backdrop of the Iowa State Fair’s annual butter-carving contest, this sluggish, unfunny and poorly stitched together tale of competitive impulse run amok is too leavened and scattershot to qualify as a dark comedy, and not smart or pointed enough to score as a lampoon. Instead it merely lurches from half-baked comedic conceit to conceit, indulging a painful-to-watch lead performance by Jennifer Garner.



With his sculptures of Schindler’s List, Newt Gingrich astride a horse, and Christ’s Last Supper, Bob Pickler (Ty Burrell) is Iowa’s reigning butter carver, 15 years running. When the powers-that-be figure it might be time for someone else to finally have a chance, he graciously steps aside. But his wife, Laura (Garner), possesses a manic ambition, and views the butter-carving crown as somehow “theirs.” Indignant, she decides to enter the competition herself.

Unlikely opposition arrives by way of Bob’s affable number-one fan, Carol-Ann (Kristen Schaal); Brooke (Olivia Wilde), a bad-girl stripper with whom Laura just caught Bob having a one-time fling; and Destiny (Yara Shahidi, above left), a preternaturally mature 10-year-old African-American girl just adopted by Julie and Ethan Emmet (Alicia Silverstone and Rob Corddry). Laura is hellbent on winning at all costs, and when a ruling in the country competition doesn’t go her way and she senses her chance slipping away, Laura recruits some nefarious assistance from her high school ex, Boyd Bolton (Hugh Jackman, channeling some great himbo charm), now a dimwitted but successful used car salesman.

Taken in darker directions, Butter could conceivably summon up recollections of something like Election, or even Red Rock West — other regionally specific tales of people overwhelmed by snowballing circumstances. If tightened narratively and executed more slickly, it could at least rate comparative mention to the best of Christopher Guest. As is, though, Butter just seems like a strange and unconvincing blend of Sugar & Spice and Lovely & Amazing, with a side serving of political commentary that is less veiled than toothless, and without meaningful follow-through. Apart from the admitted originality of its setting, whatever verve and pop was originally part of Jason Micallef’s script, the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship 2008 award winner, is undone by various editorial nips and tucks, and the hapless oversight of director Jim Field Smith (She’s Out of My League).

Butter is confusingly edited throughout, likely reflecting the behind-the-scenes turmoil over a movie that was completed some time ago and originally scheduled for release this spring before being yanked from schedules only a couple weeks before its bow, after it had already been screening for entertainment journalists. One assumes there was initially a reason for the inclusion of the character of Kaitlen (Ashley Greene), Bob’s daughter and Laura’s stepdaughter, but there’s scarcely one now. A big part of the movie’s problem, though, seems to lie in its unwillingness to cast Garner (also a producer on the project) more fully into the role of a shrill villainess, and invest narrative time elsewhere. Ergo, Butter seems unfocused.

It’s also chock full of thunderously false moments that betray a lack of rigorous conceptual thought and honesty. Case in point: before flashing back in time, the film opens at a glad-handing political-type rally, where a short biographical video plays to a friendly and enthusiastic crowd. In it, Laura is identified as “Bob’s second wife,” which makes absolutely no sense, other than as a needless way to try to identify and explain potential tension between her and Kaitlen. There are a handful of other examples of this lazy, sloppy filmmaking, too.

In terms of the performances, Shahidi (Imagine That, the forthcoming Alex Cross) is actually quite good, and, as mentioned, Jackman is able to locate an incandescence in dim bulb Boyd. But Garner communicates in scrunched faces and mimeographed stridence, never able to make Laura either a real character or a deliciously camp, larger-than-life antagonist. She’s just the loudest from a fanciful grab-bag of characters sprinkled over a melted mess. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Radius/Weinstein Company, R, 92 minutes)

An unconvincing portrait of downward-spiral alcoholism anchored by a noisy, look-at-me lead turn, Smashed trades on surface-level melodrama before it finally fumbles away any credibility with fundamentally false notions of what co-dependence and addiction look like. The recipient of almost universally positive notices following its Sundance Film Festival premiere earlier this year, director James Ponsoldt’s sophomore feature is a sterling example of herd-mentality hype.



Young, married Los Angelenos Kate and Charlie Hannah (Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul) exist in a pleasant haze of near-perpetual intoxication. She’s a first-grade teacher, he’s a freelance music writer set up to coast financially courtesy of a sizable endowment from an unseen family. After Kate vomits in her classroom in front of her kids, she goes along in the affirmative with one of their queries, and lets folks believe she is pregnant.

Principal Patricia Barnes (Megan Mullally) is thrilled. Kate later confides her secret to co-worker Dave (Nick Offerman), who shares that he is in fact a recovering alcoholic. Fed up with the cyclical partying and hangovers, Kate takes steps toward improving her health, and starts attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where she secures a sponsor, Jenny (Octavia Spencer). Charlie isn’t ready to quit his partying ways, however, leading to more friction in their relationship.

The script for Smashed, co-written by Ponsoldt and Susan Burke, is a hodge-podge of clichés that cycles unpersuasively through montages of self-betterment in order to make more time for “outrageous” acting out and gabby reflection. Its many positive reviews talk up the modesty of Smashed, and its unsensationalized, to-scale drama. But there is nothing particularly bright or insightful here. In fact, beat for beat, Smashed feels phony. Its story is wildly contrived; after supposedly being sober for months, Kate still hasn’t seemed to consider how to mask the lie of her pregnancy, until after co-workers throw a baby shower and her students start asking her about weight gain, leading to a terribly imagined conversation about abortion and miscarriage. And the movie’s idea of payoff is, when Kate and Charlie go to visit the former’s mother, Rochelle (Mary Kay Place), showing the frozen meal of choice from her less-than-ideal childhood which Kate previously held forth on in a drunken monologue.

Worse still, Smashed lacks emotional and psychological credibility with respect to how addicts co-exist and, more importantly, unravel and lash out when one gets sober and “leaves behind” the other. Damningly, it also misrepresents a character nine years sober, trading his dignity for a cheap and entirely unearned laugh. Smashed is not a movie that knows or understands the human condition, in states either altered, otherwise damaged or even normal.

The film’s insistently gritty technical package further feeds this self-satisfied sense of mock-faithful portraiture. Cinematographer Tobias Datum trades in handheld work just because it seems “real.” Ponsoldt, though, doesn’t even completely trust this tack, so he makes sure to have Kate hoist a beer when she belts out karaoke tune; it’s as if he believes that if alcohol isn’t in the frame, a viewer might forget that she’s stricken with addiction.

Then there are the movie’s performances. Emmy winner Paul (Breaking Bad) is a fine young actor, but given precious little with which to work here. Similarly, Winstead fails to truly access Kate’s dark places or shame, resorting to atonal yelling and volume modulation as dramatic substitutes. It’s intense, but self-limiting. Smashed is loud, and certainly sure of itself, but it’s a whole lot of noise signifying nothing much. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 85 minutes)