Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Polisse is a French cop drama that comes across as something of a cinematic “turducken” — filling, yes, but also rather unnaturally stuffed to the breaking point with different and sometimes at odds tastes. Directed and co-written by Maïwenn (who typically eschews her surname, Le Besco), the movie connects fitfully through its sheer urgency — it’s a work of deep feeling. Vacuuming out the exotic benefit of its foreign film presentation, however, many arthouse patrons might be left wanting slightly more disciplined and pruned storytelling.

The film centers around a Child Protection Unit in a northern Paris police precinct, where ethnic and gender tensions inform the squad’s behavior, giving it the feel of a prickly family whose bickering stems from an intensity of caring and investment. Leader Balloo (Frederic Pierrot) tries to keep everyone in line, including Nadine (Karin Viard), Iris (Marina Fois), Mathieu (Nicolas Duvauchelle), Chrys (Karole Rocher) and the hotheaded Fred (Joeystarr), who is suffering from a separation from his daughter. When a photographer, Melissa (Maïwenn), is assigned by the Interior Ministry to track them and photograph their efforts, it exacerbates underlying tensions.

Nominated for 13 Cesar Awards, the French Oscar equivalent, Polisse (its title reflects a childish misspelling of the word “police”) feels lauded a bit more for its reach than its grasp. The movie has a gritty technical construction that certainly lends it a compelling, documentary-like feel, but in its panicked rush to include so many personal crises and underline the point that there is no line of clear demarcation between the professional and private lives of its characters, it comes across as too cocksure and overbearing by about half.

Its rangy and frequently jaw-dropping collection of case stories — said to be comprised wholly of material that Maïwenn witnessed directly during a lengthy research embed with police officers, or factual experiences shared by them — certainly afford Polisse its most arresting moments. And there is a delicateness to a great many of the film’s scenes with children, at least insofar as the presentation of the minors. Its performances, though, range from solid to simply over-modulated. Maïwenn opts for a baseline emotional setting of overheated, so the movie — already more of a slice-of-life portrait that doesn’t have any naturally building dramatic tension — just starts to come across as pummeling, and one-note. An ending that includes some out-of-left-field tragedy feels like cheap overreach for emotional statement, too. Polisse has moments of raw connection, but it comes across also as less than the sum of its parts — a messy canvas that equates every square inch of color with manifest profundity. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sundance Selects, R, 127 minutes)

The darling of last year’s South By Southwest Film Festival, where it picked up seven awards, Natural Selection has an interesting central idea and a pair of fairly arresting lead turns, but it doesn’t convincingly dig down into its characters, and is further bogged down and hamstrung by its technical limitations. A cracked road trip in which a devoted Christian housewife jointly rescues and falls for a hedonistic, previously unknown family member, writer-director Robbie Pickering’s feature debut is an indie effort shot through with good intention, but lacking in either deft enough execution or a tonal commitment one way or another that might tip it toward an honest recommendation.

After her husband Abe (John Diehl) suffers a stroke, Linda White (Rachael Harris, quite good) discovers that, though she’s been living in abstinence due to the fact that she can’t have children and Abe professes a belief that acted upon sexual desire outside of procreation is immoral, her husband has actually been visiting a sperm bank regularly for almost 25 years. Discovering that he might have a child, Linda sets out for Florida, where she finds Abe’s 23-year-old son Raymond (Matt O’Leary, above left) outside of Tampa, living in a filthy shack with drug paraphernalia strewn about. After convincing him she’s not a door-to-door proselytizer, and paying him $20 for his time, Linda asks if Raymond has “any hobbies, aspirations or pets.” He shoves her out of his house, but later, needing to escape a police dragnet, Raymond shows up at Linda’s hotel and submits to her desire to reunite him with the biological father he’s never known.

The mismatched pair hit the road. Raymond means to quickly ditch Linda, and take her car and money. But, somewhere between petulant and overjoyed at being pampered by her, he soon develops a certain begrudging respect. Linda, meanwhile, cut off from romantic connection for so long, finds herself opening up emotionally in ways that she hasn’t been able to with her husband.

In Linda and Raymond, Pickering has one of the main ingredients for a solid cinematic effort — two extraordinarily different characters thrown together by circumstance and forced to coexist. But he never scratches past the surface of any of the other characters — including Linda’s sister Sheila (Gayland Williams) and her high-strung brother-in-law pastor, Peter (Jon Gries, of Napoleon Dynamite) — and so a subplot involving pursuit by the latter comes across as sloppy and ill-conceived.

Linda and Raymond remain oil-and-water types, too. The film successfully sketches the contours of their guilt and loneliness, and there’s a potent scene where Linda and Raymond open up and share difficult truths about their respective pasts after breaking into a diner and cooking up some waffles. But Natural Selection requires that they ignore issues front-and-center, too, like Raymond’s drug use or Linda’s Christian devotion. These problems melt away, so caught up is the movie in the self-supposed heft and engagement of its thematic underpinnings or allegorical statement. Natural Selection possesses the loose framework of a more interesting film, but it’s an incomplete sketch rendered in disposable fashion. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Cinema Guild, R, 90 minutes)

A documentary about the man who clawed his own way out of drunkenness and then forged a path for countless others to follow by co-founding Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill W. benefits from the plainly fascinating nature of its subject — a man of contradictions and consistent struggles, who lived a life of sacrifice and service and yet always seemed racked with doubt over whether it was quite enough. Borrowing liberally from moving and articulate personal correspondence as well as audio recordings of insightful speeches, the movie overcomes a bit of problematic construction to stand as a testament to the world’s most enduring and successful program of self-betterment and healing.

It’s no reflexive hyperbole to characterize Bill Wilson — as one of the movie’s interview subjects does, along with a 1999 Time magazine cover story on the 100 most influential persons of the 20th century — as having had a near-peerless personal and positive impact on the most lives over the last three-quarters of a century. His deep and sincere desire to quit drinking (which he only turned to as a pathologically shy young adult, beset with a gnawing sense of inferiority) and his redoubled efforts in the face of many setbacks make his story gripping enough in and of itself, but when one factors in the careful formation of his 12-step program, the story takes on almost mythological proportions.

It’s a credit, then, that this eight-year labor of love from co-directors Kevin Hanlon and Dan Carracino imparts such a solid sense of Wilson as both an addict and a man. Few that personally knew him (Wilson died in 1971, from complications resulting from emphysema) are available to speak, but Bill W. has a lot of interesting archival material, and many who can talk eloquently of his time spent honing the work and mission of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Perhaps most importantly, it also has the words of Wilson himself, who, in letters to his wife Lois and recorded talks at various A.A. events spanning many years, lends stirring voice to the dark grip of his disease. Wilson’s breakthrough personal realizations and doctrine — that self-knowledge did not by itself equal safety or long-term sobriety, and that acknowledgment of a higher power must be free from dogma or theology in order to most widely connect — shaped his 12-step program, and their ability to be subsequently reinterpreted throughout the lifetime of one’s recovery.

Bill W. features loads of pantomimed re-enactment segments, with Blake J. Evans as Wilson, and other actors as key figures in Wilson’s life and the creation of A.A. These sequences are meant to breathe life into the story and open it up cinematically, but while they’re capably if tightly staged, they actually end up coming across as a bit distracting. Much more engaging — emotionally, intellectually and otherwise — are the stories of those actually helped by A.A., of which the film could actually use a bit more.

Chiefly by way of Jack Alexander’s big 1941 cover story for the Saturday Evening Post, Bill W. also touches on some of the early push-back and skepticism against A.A. — religious, general establishment and otherwise. It would have been perhaps even more instructive, however, to delve deeper into this, along with Wilson’s difficulty in bringing about racial integration and exerting control over rogue chapters that would be inclined to charge membership fees or, even more maddeningly, serve beer at meetings. These sorts of problems, deeper into A.A.’s effective social entrenchment, are all crammed into the movie’s third act, and feel like they deserve a bit more of an expanded treatment. Jettisoning the re-enactments in favor of a pursuit of this material would more strongly tie Bill W. to the present day, and its new wave of compulsions, including prescription pill abuse. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Page 124 Productions, unrated, 104 minutes)

If Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne were Japanese instead of French-Belgian, or perhaps set out to craft a homage to Yasujiro Ozu that was crossed with a sort of whimsical yet melancholic version of The Parent Trap, it might well resemble I Wish, writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest effort. A tender but yawning story of childhood desires and maturation, the movie features some superlative adolescent performances, but also seems a bit caught up in its own relaxed rhythms and beatific point-of-view. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnolia, unrated, 128 minutes)

Quirky but never false, French import Nobody Else But You, from writer-director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu, is a terrifically involving murder mystery that invests in psychological parallelism, and a kind of dark, fated bond between victim and investigator. Traversing pulpy territory, but largely with a tenderness and intelligence matched only by its crisp characterizations, the film’s droll grip loosens in the third act, under the weight of some metaphorical highlighting, but there’s still plenty of enjoy here for arthouse and mystery fans alike.



Beset by writer’s block, Parisian crime novelist David Rousseau (Jean-Paul Rouve) hears on the news of a strange death in the small, snowy town of Mouthe, nestled up against the Swiss border. Intrigued, he sets out to learn more about Candice Lecouer (Sophie Quinton, above), a pin-up gal, cheese spokesmodel and regional celebrity who’s been found buried in the snow. While the local police chief (Olivier Rabourdin) is quick to label it a suicide, Rousseau isn’t so sure. After he sneaks into the morgue, he seems to hear Candice’s voice; later he breaks into home and reads her diaries. Eventually, Rousseau finds a friend, in sensitive cop Bruno Leloup (Guillaume Gouix), for some his theories. But the more he digs into Candice’s life, the more evident her tangled web of sadness and deceit becomes.

Hustache-Mathieu uses Marilyn Monroe as his template for the blonde Candice (who was born Martine Langevin, and a redhead), and delves into the same crippling lack of self-esteem and prescription pill abuses that would fell that actress. He invests deeply in his victim, including occasional narration from her (hardly a new device, but still an effective one), and as a result Nobody Else But You has an uncommonly strong emotional pull for such a relatively simple and straightforward plot. Part of this certainly owes to the lead performances, which are tender and finely attuned things; Rouve in particular has expressive eyes that convey reservoirs of latent connection.

As the movie progresses, however, its woozy hold starts to dissipate. Some of the vagaries of Candice’s story are filled in in a fashion that, albeit clever, traces a yellow highlighter back and forth under the phrase “allegorical significance.” Less is more, yet Hustache-Mathieu — tips of the hat to The Misfits and Monroe’s breathy birthday performance to John F. Kennedy notwithstanding — seems overly beholden to cutesy plotting that ties things up with a pretty, neat bow.

Still, there’s so much to like here about the packaging that it’s hard to levy too many demerits. Akin to Twin Peaks and Fargo, two thematic antecedents name-checked in press materials, the movie also makes fantastic use of its environs. Stylishly shot by cinematographer Pierre Cottereau against the backdrop of Eastern France’s wintry landscapes, Nobody Else But You is a film that’s at once forlorn and hopeful, unfolding in a space that seems real and familiar, yet also a bit off-kilter and dreamlike. If it’s a candle in the wind, it flickers some, but doesn’t get blown out. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (First Run, unrated, 102 minutes)

A number of winning performances help keep nominally afloat ensemble baby-bump dramedy What To Expect When You’re Expecting, a colorful crowd-pleaser that is facile but about an inch deep with respect to honest relationship complications. Adapted liberally from Heidi Murkoff’s 1984 book of the same name, which peddled anecdotal and peer-driven information for soon-to-be parents, this confection works mainly as a piecemeal showcase for the talents of its cast, including Anna Kendrick (above left), Elizabeth Banks and Rebel Wilson. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 110 minutes)

The challenges of a young marriage without kids is an infrequent subject in movies, but that’s the sweet spot of examination in writer-director John Chuldenko’s bittersweet, fitfully engaging Nesting, which benefits from a pair of appealing leads and this sort of original focus, but ultimately doesn’t showcase enough psychological perspicacity or elicit a deep enough audience identification to rise quite above the sea level of bohemian curio. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (PMK*BNC/Dangertain Films, unrated, 93 minutes)

Lebanon’s official Best Foreign Language Film selection for the 84th Academy Awards, Where Do We Go Now? juggles comic fantasy and politicized drama in telling a story of religious strife held at bay by the better angels of women’s nature. Its commingled tonalities don’t always quite mesh, but if one sticks with it there is some off-kilter delight herein that cuts against erroneous notions of foreign films tackling such big social issues as necessarily staid and stuffy affairs.

Directed by Caramel multi-hyphenate Nadine Labaki (above), Where Do We Go Now?‘s insistent message of tolerance and coexistence should make it a strong arthouse performer for especially the older urban demographic, though any wider breakout is unlikely.

Set in an indeterminate time, Labaki’s movie unfolds in a remote Lebanese village, virtually sealed off from its surroundings and accessible only via a thin bridge in severe disrepair. There, church and mosque stand side by side, and the women, whose friendships more naturally transcend the religious fault lines of their community, act as a collective leavening influence, managing and rerouting the testosterone-fueled energy and impulses of the men in their village.

Widowed Christian café owner Amal (Labaki) and Muslim handyman Rabih (Julian Farhat) nurse a bit of a mutual crush, but news of religious violence from the outside world darkens the town’s mood. A series of accidents and misunderstandings ensue, and when a terrible accident befalls one of the children who serve as an errand boy, the village is pushed closer to getting caught up in a sectarian bloodbath. The mayor’s headstrong wife, Yvonne (Yvonne Maalouf), feigns a miracle connection and chat with God, and the women turn to increasingly fanciful ploys, eventually landing upon distracting belly dancing and pot-infused pastries, the former by way of a busload of mock-stranded Ukrainian strippers the women pay to vacation in their town.

While it doesn’t deal in abstractions, Where Do We Go Now? works best if one accepts it as the working draft of a kind of cinematic treatise, or a flavored, chewable children’s vitamin. A sort of cheeky moralizing is its aim, so it takes a while to get into, and additionally lags some in the middle, suffering from ill-conceived scenes that pull viewers away from the crux of the story.

While it cycles through plenty of entertaining schemes of distraction hatched by the women, Labaki and her screenwriting collaborators aren’t interested in digging much down into the lasting consequences of these acts. So the film takes on the feeling of a cutesy serial, punctuated by some serious rage. The ideas and effort often trump Ladaki’s big picture execution, in other words. Likewise, the movie’s gender politics is necessarily broad, in order to support the conceit, which puts a twist on the classic comedy Lysistrata.

The film mixes in non-professionals alongside working actors, with mixed results that, when they do work, give Where Do We Go Now? a charged sense of spontaneity and energy. Labaki and Baz Moussawbaa are particularly engaging, and exude a nice chemistry together. As its title indicates, the film ends on a note of cautious optimism. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 100 minutes)

A putative dramedy centering on the happy-face domestic veneer many of us feel it so necessary to play-act and pantomime, The Perfect Family never locates and communicates a very persuasive reason for its existence, or even a compelling dramatic throughline. As a vehicle for the not-much-seen Kathleen Turner, this indie flick from first-time director Anne Renton, which premiered at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, is so-so, but that represents the high point of qualified recommendation for this resolutely middle-of-the-road affair, a cinematic “meh” if ever there were one. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films/Certainty Films/Present Pictures, PG-13, 85 minutes)

Richard Linklater is an American original, a filmmaker with a deep and eclectic body of work, spanning studio movies and independent fare alike, who has religiously used the medium of cinema to pursue inquiries into his varied fields of interest. In an ideal world, there would be more directors like him, who labor less for stature and craft, and more to shine lights into experiential nooks and crannies, and explore their own curiosities about modern life and all its contradictions and incongruities. Linklater’s 15th feature offering, the delightfully off-kilter Bernie, is both different from much of his other work, and yet inimitably the same in its priorities and sublime telling. It’s kind of a less overtly comedic Eastern Texas response to Fargo, a fantastically absorbing and comedically inflected docu-drama which tells the tale of a beloved Sunday school teacher and a strange and shockingly unexpected murder.



Based on a 1998 Texas Monthly article about the bizarre true story of its namesake protagonist and other characters, Bernie unfolds in the small town of Carthage, where 39-year-old confirmed bachelor Bernie Tiede (Jack Black) takes a job as the junior mortician at the local funeral home. Sweet-natured, church-going and unerringly polite, choir member Tiede soon becomes friends with virtually everyone. That includes Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), a reclusive and ill-tempered 81-year-old millionaire widow who rubs most of the other townsfolk the wrong way. The endurance of Tiede’s patience and kindness seems to wear down her nastiness, however, and Tiede soon becomes Nugent’s gentleman companion.

Nugent’s constant put-downs and nagging eventually begins to wear on Tiede, however, and in a flash of anger he murders her. For months, though, Tiede keeps her death a secret, doling out her considerable fortune in a string of charitable acts that keeps questions about her societal withdrawal at bay. Rising from the position of assistant funeral director to a full-time post, Bernie basically becomes a servant of the entire town. Suspicious district attorney Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey), however, senses something is amiss, and, tipped off by Nugent’s financial planner, eventually closes in on Tiede, shocking the town.

Bernie works so well because it doesn’t funnel the stranger-than-fiction facts of this case through one subjective point-of-view. In its commingled sympathetic affection and raised-brow disbelief and reservation about both the small town setting and various characters, the movie comes across as shaggy and oddball without ever feeling scornful or mocking. Some of the performances abet this; McConaughey is a bewigged hoot and Black gives a superlative turn, laced with light effeminate touches but also brimming with warmth and sincerity. It’s mainly a testament to Linklater’s masterful construction and deft touch with disparate tonalities, though.

The movie leans toward a comedic vibe dark and dry, but isn’t a “black comedy” per se, nor does it tip over into absurdia in the manner that a Coen brothers’ treatment of the same material might, for better or worse. Bernie feels real throughout, if definitely weird. Part of this owes to a unique framing choice made by Linklater. Co-written by the director and Skip Hollandsworth, the film interweaves interviews with real-life Carthage residents into the story, sharing their experiences with Nugent and their thoughts on the case, and mystery surrounding it. If Errol Morris and John Waters collaborated on a narrative feature, well, it might resemble this. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Millennium Entertainment, R, 104 minutes)

Pablum would be a step up for Suing the Devil, an inane, moralizing Australian production from writer-director Timothy Chey that centers around a lawsuit against Satan filed by a down-on-his-luck law school student. Aiming for some theoretical sweet spot between comedy, courtroom drama and Up-with-Jesus! sermonizing, this poorly sketched and dreadfully acted movie can’t even be saved via an attempted personality transfusion from a ranting, raving Malcolm McDowell, in the title role.

Scripture is trotted out on both sides, naturally, but Chey’s stooping efforts to try to shoehorn in comedy (wherein Satan claims responsibility for leaf blowers and automated customer service, and constantly derides everyone as losers and nitwits) is about 10 percent as clever as he thinks it is. “Trial of the century,” huh? Only in movie hell. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its Facebook page. (River Run/Mouthwatering Productions, unrated, 97 minutes)

Part thriller of containment, part horror movie, Asylum Blackout is a skillfully cobbled together little calling card of a film, suffused with a certain woozy dread. If in the end it’s a bit short on convincing payoff, its atmospheric spell should generally satisfy genre fans and also augur good things for all those involved.

Formerly known as The Incident, but re-titled in more forthright fashion, director Alexandrer Courtes’ movie centers on a group of friends and aspirant musicians who, between small gigs, work as kitchen cooks in a high security mental asylum in Washington State. When a big storm fries the wiring for the security system one dark and rainy evening, however, things take a turn for the worse.

Director Brad Anderson cut his teeth on stuff like this, moody sleights of hand in which small character ensembles grapple with unraveling sanity in grave and otherwise diminishing situations. Sound design and style matter enormously in such cinematic undertakings. So Asylum Blackout helmer Alexandre Courtes and cinematographer Laurent Tangy imprint a strong and frequently compelling visual scheme on the proceedings; in this respect, their film recalls Pontypool, another low-budget thriller that made unnervingly excellent use of its dingy, confined setting.

The movie’s big twist or revelation doesn’t completely come together in a coherent fashion. That said, its strong performances, effective production design and value, and technical polish make Asylum Blackout a moody treat for genre fans inclined to take a flyer on a movie with lesser known talent. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. NOTE: In addition to its theatrical engagements, Asylum Blackout is available nationwide on IFC Midnight Cable VOD, and a wide variety of other digital outlets, including iTunes, SundanceNOW, Xbox Zune and Amazon Streaming. (IFC Midnight, unrated, 85 minute)

Billed as “a provocative exploration of female sexuality,” NC-17-rated French import Elles is a self-satisfied, ponderous drama that can’t be saved by a characteristically strong and nuanced performance from Juliette Binoche. A would-be character study desperately in search of interesting characters, director Malgoska Szumowska’s film comes across as a plodding and muddled adaptation of a didactic women’s studies term paper.



Binoche stars as Anne, a French magazine journalist in the finishing stages of an article on young women ostensibly subsidizing their higher educations through prostitution. Pledging confidentiality, Anne gets the girls — French-born Lola (Anais Demoustier) and Polish exchange student Alicja (Joanna Kulig) — to open up about their work, and what led them to the sex-for-money trade. Lola, whose real name is Charlotte, describes some of the tension it creates in the relationship with her boyfriend Thomas (Arthur Moncla), while confessing that one can “get used to the money.” Both girls also note the level of organization their job requires. Some of their reminiscences with Anne are rendered in flashback, which (heavily) breathes erotic life into their descriptions.

Co-written by Tine Byrckel and director Szumowska, Elles aims as much for a stirring of the head as the loins, if not more so. Possessing a lively energy and flitting eyes, Binoche richly imbues Anne with the sort of complex interior life at which the script only hints. In addition to the requisite masturbation scene, a drunken dinner sequence between Anne and Alicja marks Binoche as perhaps the only actress in recent memory brave enough to spit up chewed food in deranged delirium. A shame, then, that Elles doesn’t serve as a better vehicle for her efforts, but instead builds to a ridiculous climax of all-caps Artistic Statement. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Kino Lorber, NC-17, 99 minutes)

Releasing on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the riots that shook Los Angeles in the wake of the not guilty verdicts in the police-beating case of Rodney King, documentary Clash of Colors: L.A. Riots of 1992 analyzes the complex political, economic and social factors before, during and after the racially infused catastrophe which claimed 55 deaths, thousands of injuries and more than $1 billion in property damage. Filtered specifically through the lens of the riots’ impact on the Korean-American community, the movie — the significance of its subject matter winning out over staid presentation — tells a story often relegated to the sidelines of most mass media accounts of the event.

Neophyte director David D. Kim, a lawyer and businessman who was Vice President of the Korean Chamber of Commerce at the time of the riots, assembles an engaging and thought-provoking collection of interview subjects, including author Lou Cannon, ex-Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Boyarsky and former pastor Cecil Murray, among many others. Production value is fairly meager throughout, with interviewees shot in a straightforward manner and archival footage sometimes less than smoothly integrated. The crucial context Clash of Colors provides, however, outweighs its lack of slickness. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (DDK Productions, unrated, 81 minutes)