Mental health issues are but one of many elephants in the room when it comes to any serious national political discussion of social services. Severe mental illness is often the ultimate disease of “the other” (schizophrenics who don’t take their medications and the like), additionally marginalized because those with the resources to care for afflicted family members are more likely to be wrapped up in shame and silence than advocacy.

But what of dozens of other crippling mental illnesses, and the treatments that exist and could help so many people but for the proper resources and opportunity? Funny and poignant and suffused with all the complication of life, OC87 is a nonfiction film that leaves one pondering that question. As its full title suggests, it’s a movie about depression and mental illness. But it’s also unique and affecting in that it’s a very subjective document, co-directed by Bud Clayman, a diagnosed major depressive with the good fortune of support and assets not within the reach of so many.

A therapeutic undertaking with co-directors Glenn Holsten and Scott Johnston, OC87 takes as its subject Clayman, the only child of loving, upper-middle class parents. Its title derives from a dark period in 1987, when Clayman tripped headlong into a major depression, shut out everyone and everything around him, and tried to exert a meticulous control over every element of his life. Diagnosed with all of the disorders present in the title, the present-day Clayman — who matriculated at Temple University and rolled the dice on a movie career in Hollywood before eventually finding some much-needed structure working at his father’s business — is an affable enough guy who physically resembles a sort of sad-sack cross between Bob Saget and Jeffrey Ross.

He’s gripped by wildly intrusive thoughts, though. A hoarder who carries around a massive collection of keys that he doesn’t need in his pocket, Clayman lives in a seemingly perpetual state of crippling anxiety. The movie conveys this in a variety of ways — including a stirring breakthrough moment in an appointment with his therapist, who has Clayman poise a pocket knife over his wrist as a means to illustrate living with nervousness. Most effectively, though, it has Clayman provide a voiceover narration of his everyday manic thoughts as he goes about riding the bus and walking down the street.

At once intensely personal and universally moving, Clayman’s film is of a piece with Doug Block’s 2010 nonfiction portrait of his family, The Kids Grow Up, which documented the filmmaker’s own struggles in letting go of his teenage daughter. OC87 is Clayman’s story, but it connects his struggles to the outside world in smart fashion, having him also visit and talk to his doctors and other folks coping with mental illness.

On a certain level, OC87 is a work of advocacy, no doubt. But it transcends those parameters, and the condescension such a description connotes. Perhaps even more remarkable, the film locates a stirring, amusing and improbable climax rooted in Clayman’s love of Lost in Space. “Ever tried, ever failed — no matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” Samuel Beckett once wrote. This unusual and genuinely involving film is a testament to that dictum. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Therapy Productions, unrated, 91 minutes)

Jaycee Chan, the 29-year-old son of Jackie Chan, headlines Double Trouble, a slickly packaged action comedy that, for both better and worse, gets much of its inspiration from Western sources. Seemingly composed as homage to both the elder Chan’s mismatched-cops Rush Hour series and the recent Ocean’s movies, this lithe genre effort has a surface engagement that melts like a pat of butter as the film winds its way toward its preordained conclusion. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (China Lion, unrated, 89 minutes)

A dark testimonial to the notion of artistic bloom and creative salvation through misery, Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Woman in the Fifth is an intellectually engaging puzzle box, a movie that happily dances about on both literal and metaphorical planes. Starring Ethan Hawke as an emotionally wayward novelist and Kristin Scott Thomas as his mysterious new muse, this very European film should find intrigued and mostly unpiqued embrace in the arms of Stateside arthouse audiences for whom the cast will be the main factor that gets them in the door.



American author Tom Ricks (Hawke) arrives in Paris with the intent of reconnecting with his estranged wife (Delphine Chuillot) and young daughter (Julie Papillon). The attempt at reconciliation goes poorly and Tom, after his luggage is stolen, ends up in a flophouse at the edge of the city. The proprietor, Sezer (Samir Guesmi), sort of takes pity on him, letting Tom stay without paying, and later giving him a mysterious security job at a run-down warehouse, buzzing people in if they speak the right name.

During this time, while spending his nights writing long letters to his daughter, and trying to scrape up the money to hire an immigration and child custody lawyer, Tom strikes up a relationship with Ania (Joanna Kulig, of Elles), a Polish waitress with an interest in poetry. Taking a flyer on a bohemian writers’ event, he also meets Margit Kadar (Thomas), an enigmatic translator who seduces Tom and, while complimenting him and his work, also asserts that he presently has the makings of something grander — “a real tragedy if you play your cards right.” A series of strange, inexplicable events ensue, leaving Tom even further racked with doubt over the course of his life.

No paean, this, The Woman in the Fifth takes as its source material Douglas Kennedy’s novel of the same name. Pawlikowski, however, isn’t interested in plumbing the notion of the tortured artist solely for purposes of masturbatory self-exaltation. He constructs his movie as a kind of lightheaded, slightly buzzed mystery of the tension between the id and ego, something that composer Max De Wardener’s music wonderfully and slyly abets. In this respect, Tom’s corralled consciousness is both literal and a bit of a metaphorical dream device, but neither alone.

As a conundrum that’s perhaps a bit too proud of it, there are plenty of lingering questions the movie doesn’t answer. But the performances here are so finely modulated — Hawke shines, in owlish, large-lensed glasses that make him look slightly like a younger, more intellectual Mr. Magoo, while Thomas luxuriates in caginess and a mature sexuality — that for most of its running time its refusal to sketch out much by way of its characters’ pasts hardly matters. The film is savvy about slow-peddling Tom’s neediness, and smart about what gets its hooks in him; “You have a voice, I believe in you,” says Margit, which is like catnip to a creative type like Tom.

If there’s a complaint, it’s that The Woman in the Fifth — whose title refers to Margit’s lodging, a European colloquialism — seems a bit slim, and dodgy especially in its end game. It clocks in at only 83 minutes, and misses the chance to plumb Tom’s cultural isolation to further moody effect. And when its most intriguing and unsettling twist occurs, it’s a short, 15-minute sled ride to the off ramp, which comes across as an abortive wrap-up that, no matter the ambiguity of its ending, feels like it deserves a bit more investigation. Perhaps that’s intended for the post-viewing conversation over coffee, however. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Art Takes Over, R, 83 minutes)

A pulpy, low-budget slice of film noir cross-pollinated with a martial arts flick, the curiously titled The Girl From the Naked Eye will certainly win no awards for great originality, but nonetheless serves as a stylish and engaging little vehicle for the surly charms of star Jason Yee, as well as its filmmaking team. The sophomore effort of director David Ren (Shanghai Kiss), the movie is a case of style over substance, to be sure, but boy is that style impressive on what must have been a true shoestring budget.

When a young Los Angeles escort, Sandy (Samantha Streets), is murdered, her protective and grief-stricken driver, Jake (Yee), confronts strip club owner Simon (Ron Yuan) about who might have been the culprit, as flashbacks fill in the story of their unusual friendship. Sensing that Simon isn’t telling him everything, Jake then starts dropping beatdowns left and right, cutting a swathe of retribution across the night. This leads him to Simon’s gun-dealing gangland benefactor, Frank (Gary Street), who also has the benefit of a police shield. Dominique Swain pops up in a small, flirty role, as does adult film star Sasha Grey (the lead in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience); that they’re well integrated amongst all the fisticuffs is a further credit to Ren and his collaborators.

If the hardboiled plot description above inspires little more than a yawn, unabashed B-movie The Girl From the Naked Eye actually has a lot going for it. Shooting digitally (and almost entirely at night), Ren and cinematographer Max Da-Yung Wang concoct a rich, foreboding visual palette that doesn’t get lost in the murky darkness of the film’s noir-ish roots. And Ren — working with Yee on the choreography of the fight sequences — doesn’t overdo it on the spastic edits, gifting his movie the benefit of a real personality.

Still, the story here is thin, and propped up less by real characters and more by a referential love for its genre forerunners. Both in the name of its crusading protagonist and various tossed-off bits of dialogue (“You don’t know when to quit, do you Jake?”), The Girl From the Naked Eye echoes Chinatown and a dozen another miniaturized knock-offs. Story-wise, there aren’t reasonably enough obstacles to stretch this out to feature-length, even at a paltry 84 minutes that includes an extended closing credits crawl.

All that said, those demerits almost all relate to sins of omission, and/or the movie’s basic DNA make-up. If it doesn’t live up to the wildness of Park Chan-Wook’s Old Boy, another obvious antecedent and inspiration, The Girl From the Naked Eye at least makes good on its modest aims, allowing Yee to slap silly a bunch of would-be human roadblocks. There are some moments of sly charm and connection here, making this polished movie a treat for fans of indie genre fare. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Archstone Entertainment, R, 84 minutes)

The gleeful, stunted-maturity idiocy at the heart of Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore and Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod is the target at which That’s My Boy, their new comedic collaboration, is aiming. Unfortunately, if a wild, anything-can-happen philosophy permeated those delightfully warped offerings, the same thick, indolent haze of self-satisfaction that characterized 2010’s Grown Ups, Sandler’s previous latter-day nadir, is manifest here, in a laboriously programmed vulgar comedy of air-quote outrageousness.

Director Sean Anders, who in 2008’s Sex Drive delivered as fun, lived-in and casually assured a teen sex comedy as since the original American Pie, here serves as a pace-master and little more. There’s no frisky independent personality to this tale, only an inexorable slog from set piece to set piece, and scenes written to seemingly fold in as many friendly cameos as possible. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony, R, 116 minutes)

A stupendously inane and pointless slice of revenge-based horror whose title might as well describe the audience watching it, The Tortured chronicles the story of a young married couple’s capture and torment of the man convicted of kidnapping and murdering their five-year-old son. Told in hammy fashion and marked by a pair of hysterical, uneven lead performances, this inept genre entry is an embarrassment to almost all involved.

A mass of expository set-up opens the movie, which centers around suburbanites Craig and Elise Landry (Jesse Metcalfe and Erika Christensen). Craig witnesses their son being snatched from their front yard, and a feverish search ensues, along with glimpses of the psychotic abductor, John Kozlowski (Bill Moseley, adding another demented jewel to his crown of leering, morally detestable reprobates), terrorizing and presumably molesting the boy. The police finally nab John, but not in time to save the Landrys’ son. When he’s convicted with the possibility of parole, Elise and Craig, a doctor, hatch a plan to extricate John from police custody and extract their own systematic retribution, keeping their victim alive for as long as possible. As a detective (Fulvio Cecere) works to locate the presumably escaped John, the couple hole up in an abandoned house, but soon find their own moral compasses put to the test.

Other films, including Dennis Iliadis’ recent remake of The Last House on the Left, have with some success delved specifically into parents pushed too far, and/or confronted with harm to their child. So the failings of The Tortured do not lay with its conceit; instead, they’re a matter of vision and execution. The movie, penned by Mark Posival and directed in stirringly bungled fashion by Robert Lieberman, stumbles out of the gate, never seeming to come up with a good “in” for its story. From its first panicked scene, The Tortured starts off at such a high emotional pitch that it renders nearly everything that follows almost neutered by comparison.

For a movie in theory about the warping, darkly transformative power of parental grief, there’s a striking paucity of intellectual application or even basic ideas here. The film clocks in at a meager 82 minutes, but its first 20 minutes could easily be collapsed to but five or six. After plodding along and setting up its torturing-the-monster conceit, the third act stupidly hinges on poorly reasoned flip-flops in intestinal fortitude between Craig and Elise. There’s an almost obligatory end twist, of course, but the movie doesn’t even see this through to the end, instead wrapping things up in a manner almost as tidy is it is risible.

Metcalfe and Christensen most bear the weight of this problematic narrative; they’re not particularly convincing as parents, and, individually and collectively, their interpretations of grief chiefly exist in volume. This film is a mess, and not in a campy, entertaining way. Avoid the torture. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. NOTE: In addition to its theatrical engagements, The Tortured is available on a variety of VOD and digital platforms, including iTunes. (IFC Midnight, R, 82 minutes)

The thirteenth animated feature film from Pixar Studios, Scottish-set Brave is essentially a body-swap movie impressed upon a comfortable fable-of-yore narrative template, wherein an at-odds parent and child rediscover their love for one another against a backdrop of magic-infused conflict. Amiable and action-packed without being overbearing about it, and marked by a new level of visual complexity, even by Pixar standards, the film peddles with assurance and panache the pleasant tale of a new young heroine, even if the payoff of its more traditional legend elements is a bit stilted. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney/Pixar, PG, 100 minutes)

As it gets out of the starting gate, 6 Month Rule, from writer-director-star Blayne Weaver, seems like it’s going to be an Eric Schaeffer-type cinematic exercise, infused with a pinch of Swingers. After all, multi-hyphenate Weaver contrives situations for him to make out with multiple women, postulates a strict theory about dating and relationships, and puts himself at the center of a universe in which others’ feelings, need and wants are all secondary piffle, collateral damage to be shrugged off. His movie gamely rallies from the awkwardness and all too evident seams of its conceit, but still, despite some atypicality and a few memorable supporting turns, lacks the sort of roundhouse kick and spice that would truly make this Rule a golden one.



Weaver stars as Tyler Watts, a commercial photographer who the audience knows is brilliant since, 1) he had a book of art photos published, and 2) every character keeps talking about how brilliant he is. After a couple meet-cutes with a gal, Sophie (Natalie Morales, above left), who breaks him down, Tyler turns his attention toward trying, in tough-love fashion, to cheer up his best friend Alan (Martin Starr), who is fresh off a break-up with Claire (Jaime Pressly), his fiancée of three years. It’s only when Tyler pulls a big photo assignment for an up-and-coming rocker, Julian (Patrick J. Adams), that Tyler discovers Sophie is the one who actually recommended him for the job, and is Julian’s kinda-sorta-but-not-really girlfriend. Awkwardness ensues as Tyler faces down his disinclination for conventional relationships and Sophie tries to sort out her feelings for the two men in her life.

6 Month Rule, so named for Tyler’s self-imposed romantic term-limit, is constructed almost entirely of familiar parts: pop-infused psycho-analysis that immediately cuts to the bone; the sudden-rush-at-one-another make-out scene (which last seemed fresh in Moonlighting); montage arguments about literature (Camus, Wuthering Heights, Hemingway!); the premature break-up where any reasonable discussion is undercut by one party speeding away in a taxi cab; the list-type speech of pitched woo to try to win the girl back. Better films — movies with a bit more forceful personality, sparkling banter and/or convincingly sketched leads — can more capably transcend the creakiness of these conventions. 6 Month Rule has some nice moments, but doesn’t quite fully do that, so an embrace rests more on one’s acceptance of these elements than anything else.

It doesn’t help, mainly, that the movie is funneled so singularly through Tyler’s point-of-view. The material between Tyler and Alan — with the former often lecturing the latter, in somewhat condescending mentor-like fashion — is where the film’s humor mainly lies, and those scenes mostly work, but Sophie’s ennui is unfortunately thinly sketched. A platonic sounding-board-type relationship for her would have given the movie a comfortable parallel construction, and also more firmly established her independent thinking and personality, which would make the third act payoffs in 6 Month Rule resonate a bit more deeply.

If the plotting and payoffs of this love triangle are a bit problematic and less satisfying than they one wished, there are also pleasant inversions to be found in the film’s finale, reminding more pensive viewers that every down is a prelude to an up, and vice versa. For the full, original review, from Shockya, click here. For more information on the movie and its VOD offerings via FilmBuff, click here to visit its website. (Abramorama/FilmBuff, R, 93 minutes)

A gassy, self-satisfied adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 novel of the same name, threadbare Parisian period piece Bel Ami purports to tell the rise from poverty to wealth of a savvy if caddish war veteran and self-made man — a sort of less sociopathic, more rakish Mr. Ripley, if you will. Instead, it merely bores and grates, in alternating fashion. Making up what it lacks in dynamism or attentive psychological detail with lots of love scenes with its hunky, tween-beloved pin-up star, Robert Pattinson, Bel Ami belies the erroneous notion that costume dramas automatically have a higher IQ than their contemporary dramatic brethren.



Georges Duroy (Pattinson) is but a penniless North African war veteran looking for enough money to score a prostitute when he crosses paths with a fellow ex-soldier, and accepts his invitation to dine with him the following evening. By the end of supper, he’s won a guest newspaper editorial spot, a sort of diary of a cavalry officer, from a powerful and influential publisher, Rousset (Colm Meaney), in part because his wife, Madame Walter (Kristin Scott Thomas), is kind of smitten with him.

Having little better to do, Madeleine Forestier (Uma Thurman) then takes it upon herself to basically pen all of Georges’ columns, while Georges seduces the married Clotilde de Marelle (Christina Ricci), with whom he promptly sets up a love nest. When his himbo status and near-illiteracy are almost outed, Georges manages to connive his way further into the good graces of those who ensure him continued access to the finer things in life, eventually even marrying Madeleine, who seems ill suited to conventional love.

Co-directed by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerond, Bel Ami is a bundle of phony psychology and false motivations wrapped up in pretty, trite packaging. The costumes are nice and eye-catching, and the pompous, swelling orchestral compositions, from Rachel Portman and Lakshman Joseph de Saram, nudge viewers in the ribs, repeatedly, attempting to inject menace and substance into the proceedings, and letting the audience know what a Big Deal they’re watching unfold.

Except they’re not. Pattinson, pallid and sweaty throughout, seems in over his head, and never quite comfortable. He’s had success before at pulling off layered angst and agitation, but here he seems resolutely of modern times, and not at all believable in the context of 1890s France. With a cipher’s smile and that great sweeping hairdo, he fills a ruffled shirt, and little more. The other performances are, by degrees, much more engaging — Thurman is somewhat mesmerizing as the ahead-of-her-time Madeleine, and Thomas gets to have some fun as a society lady uncharacteristically gripped by hormonal fever — but given the degree to which Bel Ami rests on Pattinson’s shoulders, and the dearth of insight it possesses, the movie falters early on, and never recovers.

Most fatally, there is neither a sense of canny manipulation nor a honest occupational rooting of Georges’ social climbing in the status afforded him by his job as a newspaperman, the latter of which is a crucial component of the novel. Instead, there is only a series of thin contrivances and machinations through which various women throw themselves at Georges’ feet. His wit and seduction are evidenced less by anything manifest in the script and more by the apparent absence of any other (nominally) single lad willing to throw these women a (literal) bone. With a tip of the cap to fellow critic Tim Grierson, the hackneyed, yawning Bel Ami would have been more entertaining if it were about Bill Bellamy, or at least just starred the same. For my full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnolia, R, 104 minutes)

Modern-day American independent filmmaking, in such large measure, apes Hollywood product — or, alternately, movies made during the last great frontier boom of indie cinema, in the 1990s — in large part because the (perceived) reward seems to be informing the creative process. The increased democratization of film comes at the same time as a slew of TV reality show contests where “winners” are ushered inside the palace, and given a shot at all their professional and personal dreams.

Perhaps perversely, this seems to have seeped into the national well-water of the collective creative subconscious; would-be filmmakers so want to make films that they often make their first film with an eye on how it can be used to get them their next film. (This may be changing, but slowly; avant-garde and micro-budget movies like ¶ or Tarnation may have left their marks, in a way, but they hardly ushered in an era of widespread experimental cinema, or an army of Junior John and Johanna Sayles.) None of this aforementioned symptomatology, thankfully, is evident in Ultrasonic, a savvy, artful, well constructed little domestic drama of paranoia that builds its story around its limited production means but never sacrifices its thematic inquiry, its essence, its core.

Set in Washington, D.C., director Rohit Colin Rao’s movie centers around Simon York (Silas Gordon Brigham, above right), an aspiring musician with a pregnant wife, Ruth (Cate Buscher), and financial problems that are beginning to take their toll. When Simon starts hearing a persistent buzz that’s imperceptible to anyone else, Ruth tells him it’s probably work-related, but urges him to see a doctor. Simon does, and he learns that he can hear in lower and upper registers unlike any other patient the doctor has ever seen. As the ailment worsens, Simon’s brother-in-law Jonas (Sam Repshas, above left), an eccentric conspiracy theorist, peddles the notion that this is all the result of a strange government experiment gone wrong. Shadowy figures and mysterious black boxes posted on nearby lampposts trip the wires of Simon’s dark and panicked imagination. But is this merely a shared psychosis, his psychological vulnerability attaching itself to Jonas’ troubled mind, or actually part of something more sinister?

Rao, working from a script co-written with Mike Maguire, serves as his own composer and cinematographer, lending Ultrasonic a carefully manicured, just-so production package. The film is crisply, engagingly and digitally shot on a Canon T2i, its black-and-white hues only slightly sepia-toned and punctuated by but a few notable splashes of color. The framing, meanwhile, feeds Simon’s increasing sense of isolation.

The story? Well, it’s not dark or really edgy, per se, but there’s an often hypnotic and occasionally unsettling quality to Rao’s marriage of sound and image. Ultrasonic is a resolutely mid-tempo affair, one of the more difficult modes to sustain in feature-length filmmaking. Songs from two of Rao’s erstwhile bands, Tigertronic and the Translucents, open and close the movie, respectively, serving as nice bookends, but the electronic compositions in between give Rao’s debut a moody and sometimes frenetic feeling. Ultrasonic doesn’t really work if one is leaning forward constantly, in search of clearly delineated narrative markers. There’s an aura of mystery that hangs like an early morning mist, but the menace never manifests itself in overly hammy ways. Instead, Rao trusts in himself, and his collaborators. And he’s quite rewarded by his locally assembled talent.

Especially in its ambiguous ending, Ultrasonic slots in alongside an impressive recent spate of little film festival-minted diamonds in the rough — the biggest being  Sound of My Voice, starring Brit Marling; a couple others still awaiting or searching for distribution — that arrive at a place of tonal settledness without answering all of the big(gest) questions of their respective narratives. Does this indicate a barometric shift, a change in the creative appetite for the sort of distinct indistinctness that real life most readily provides? Maybe. One can hope. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, including its playdates and VOD options, visit its website, why don’t you? (Garden Thieves Pictures, R, 90 minutes)