One of the harsh realities of the film festival circuit is that even the most well received, truly independent features (those not featuring, say, three or four big stars taking a swing at an arty filler project between studio fare) stand the chance of getting lost in the shuffle. Forgetting the Girl, which played recently at Cinequest, is one of those indies that deserves a shot at wider distribution. A psychological drama that arrives at its tension naturally and a character study about damaged souls whose orbits begin to exert a further destabilizing gravitational pull on one another, director Nate Taylor’s debut feature exudes a smooth, easy hold throughout.



The movie opens with a sort of direct-address confessional by photographer Kevin Wolfe (Christopher Denham), a socially yearning New Yorker obsessed with finding a girl who can help him forget his turbulent past, which includes painful memories of his younger sister’s death many years ago. He does this by habitually asking out any and all girls who come in for their head shots, which seems to further irritate and unsettle his depressed and quasi-suicidal assistant, Jamie (Lindsay Beamish, above center).

After a one-night stand with Adrienne (Anna Camp), Kevin tries to spin their relationship into something more, but Adrienne rebuffs him. His desperation again surges, but Kevin seems to finally find refuge with the pretty, nice Beth (Elizabeth Rice, quite natural and charming). When it’s discovered that Adrienne is missing, however, some of Kevin’s engrained troublesome behaviors flare up. This, along with some of Jamie’s actions, lead to more instability.

Working from a script by Peter Moore Smith, Taylor manages to ably capture a disparate array of emotions in his movie’s compact running time — everything from the commingled terror and simple pleasure of reaching for a girl’s hand to the crushing isolation of romantic rejection. There’s a smooth confidence at work here that never tips over into flamboyance or stylistic overreach. Taylor and cinematographer Mark Pugh also concoct an imaginative visual template that greatly benefits the material, a la last year’s indie standout Bellflower.

If the late-developing plot strand related to Jamie feels a bit less well sketched than the movie’s main story (there’s a bit of a problem with narrative focus), it at least still achieves an interesting crescendo that is creepy without coming across as completely unearned or inane. The performances, too, are superlative almost across the board. Denham (of the forthcoming Sound of My Voice) in particular gives a solid turn. Vocally, and in a few small mannerisms, he recalls Topher Grace; there’s a certain lilting, lyrical cadence which embodies a robust inner monologue in Kevin, shot through with uncertainty. The audience, meanwhile, is tethered to him, and along for that queasy ride. For more information, visit ForgettingTheGirl.com. (Full Stealth Films, unrated, 85 minutes)

A socially engaged documentary with more heart than head, The Island President takes as its central figure the charismatic, crusading, image-savvy (and now ex-) president of the Maldives, Mohamed “Anni” Nasheed, detailing his efforts to drive climate change conversation and cooperation to the top of the international to-do list. A friendly, somewhat lightweight portrait that doesn’t really dig down into the issues at its core, director Jon Shenk’s movie, the Audience Award winner at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival, unexpectedly achieves ancillary connection as a ground-floor look at a grand clash of political and governmental wills that takes place at the Copenhagen Climate Summit of 2009. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie and playdate availability, meanwhile, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, unrated, 101 minutes)

An amiable comedy import at once thoughtful and low-key, multi-hyphenate Nanni Moretti’s Italian-language We Have a Pope takes an unlikely subject — the aftermath of the election of a new pontiff, and the swirl of self-doubt surrounding the newly infallible voice of God on Earth — and turns it into something rich, surprising and altogether rewarding.



The performances, too, are special; Michel Piccoli is arresting and sympathetic as newly elected pontiff Cardinal Melville, bringing a great vulnerability to the role. And Moretti himself (above) is wry and wonderful, delivering a droll turn as a not particularly religious psychiatrist brought in to try to settle matters. There isn’t a big play for theological profundity here, but the narrative omissions of We Have a Pope shouldn’t count as strikes against it, and given a simple surrender to its basic conceit the movie richly compensates arthouse-leaning and intellectually curious viewers with both laughs and an awakened contemplation. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here. (Sundance Selects, unrated, 104 minutes)

In 1999, a low-budget teen comedy put a wicked, winning spin on tried-and-true formula — a group of high school guys make a pact to try to lose their virginity — and led a successful takeover of the waning-millennium American zeitgeist, as embodied by pie fucking and other gross-out gags. Many other movies, from Superbad to, most recently, Project X, have taken up the mantle of American Pie‘s party-hearty, pull-no-punches hormonal comedy, but the original game-changers return in American Reunion, an adequate if not especially memorable get-together. More middling than ineffective — laughs are intermittent but the tone is lively throughout — the film is a reminder that there is a time and season for all things, and some relationships are not meant to last. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, R, 112 minutes)

When it first got its start, Comic-Con was a little annual subcultural curio down in San Diego, and certainly an after-thought for Hollywood. Now it’s a high-stakes proving ground for almost every genre film and any other non-drama tentpole release with even the most tangential connection to superheroes, sci-fi or fantasy, a media feeding frenzy where the buzz on debuted trailers and photos can feed a pro forma narrative and help lift or doom a movie’s commercial fortunes. Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock turns his lens on this crazed fanboy convention in Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, a movie whose breezy title indicates its soft, chewy, geek-friendly center.

From his debut, Super Size Me, up on through his latest film, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Spurlock has exhibited an uncanny knack for both tapping into the zeitgeist and self-promotion. He takes a backseat here, however, funneling his movie chiefly through the experiential lens of five different subjects — aspiring illustrators Eric and Skip; ambitious DIY costume designer Holly; comic book store owner Chuck, hoping for big sales to pay down some debts; and James, an amiable kid looking to pop a marriage proposal to his girlfriend on the anniversary of their meeting at the previous year’s event. These folks are interesting on different levels, but each pretty engaging in their own way.

Spurlock rounds out his movie with sidebar confessionals and other interviews with fans and some other very familiar faces. Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon talks convincingly about finding “his tribe” at Comic-Con (other famous interviewees include Seth Rogen, Matt Groening, Eli Roth, Frank Miller and of course Stan Lee, also an executive producer on the project). In its able chronicling of the event — and the sweaty exhaustion it brings about — Comic-Con is a solid little treat, the cinematic equivalent of a rock tour T-shirt.

Where the film really misses the opportunity to blossom into something special is in Spurlock’s refusal to dig down into the enmity bubbling just underneath the event’s surface, the tension and conflict between old-guard attendees like Chuck and the many thousands of annual attendees who have less of a connection to comic books or graphic novels and more of a generalized pop cultural interest in the latest projects that Hollywood is peddling. One or two throwaway lines make mention of this, but ignoring it instead of more robustly embracing or trying to understand this pressure point puts a glossy shine on the radical metamorphosis that Comic-Con has undergone, and how that in turn has impacted — for better or worse — both the present-day marketing and moviemaking formulas. Fans will applaud, but more inquiring minds will be left wanting for a little more. For the movie’s trailer, click here. For more information, including VOD options, click here. (Wrekin Hill Entertainment/NECA Films, PG-13, 88 minutes)

An outré nonfiction offering from director Marie Losier, this lively and most assuredly provocative document details — in arty, roundabout fashion — the strange love affair between an aging proto-punk performance artist, Genesis P-Orridge (above right), and his younger muse, as they undergo a series of plastic surgeries to more closely resemble one another. A brisk watch at just over 70 minutes, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye evinces a loose sense of engagement just based on subject matter alone, but it unfortunately rather pathologically buries its lede regarding the abuse and trauma suffered by its subjects, thereby offering up only an inch-deep exploration of its wild and supposedly liberated behaviors. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Adopt Films, unrated, 72 minutes)

A spatially contained thriller loosely in the same vein as P2 and The Perfect Host, ATM squanders the participation of a solid young cast, fumbling away viewer sympathy and engagement with a string of increasingly harebrained scenarios. Audiences will feel as ripped off by ATM as they would be by exorbitant user fees at the namesake devices.



After having long nursed a crush on sweet co-worker Emily (Alice Eve), slightly bumbling David (Brian Geraghty) finally gets up the nerve to haltingly ask her out at the company Christmas party. She agrees, and they start to leave early from the party. Thwarting David’s plans, however, is his chatty, cock-blocking friend Corey (Josh Peck), who was using David as his designated driver. The plan then becomes to drop him off first, but, wanting food and needing cash, Corey makes them stop at desolate parking lot ATM. What should be a routine transaction soon turns into a fight for survival when an unknown man (Mike O’Brien) appears outside, blocking their collective exit. Inane cat-and-mouse shenanigans ensue.

Unfolding in December in the wintry Northeast, ATM sets the bar for implausibilities quite high, and then keeps raising it via stupid narrative choices both large and small. First, the film is set in a stand-alone ATM in the middle of a parking lot, which is exceedingly rare if such structures even still exist. Then ATM posits that the group is immediately cowed by the mere appearance of this guy, before he’s even demonstrated any requisite bloodthirst.

It goes without saying, too, that David of course parks his car sufficiently far away enough from the structure to prevent any escape while still setting up air-quote tense dashes back and forth to the car. Perhaps most ridiculously, however, the film indulges weather-related panic; “Daylight is hours away, we’ll be lucky if we don’t freeze to death!” says one character. Poppycock, plain and simple. Even if it were zero degrees outside, you’re in an enclosed (i.e., wind-free) space!

Working from this lackluster script by Chris Sparling (Buried), director David Brooks does what he can with the staging, but ATM is mortally wounded by its stupidity. Even if one ignores all of the above problems, the movie suffers from little details that set up more potentially interesting plot twists — in the form of lies or in-fighting within the group — none of which come to convincing fruition or factor into ATM‘s stalking and increasingly desultory, mindless final act.

The cast, especially Eve, gamely tries to elevate the material, and succeed in crafting a few nice character moments here and there. But the best genre pieces milk what-if tension from characters serving as surrogates for the audience. Even with merely super-slick execution, many genre offerings can overcome what are on the surface stupid decisions by its characters. The feeblemindedness of ATM‘s characters, however, overwhelms the picture, and mirrors the lack of inventiveness on display by Sparling and Brooks. (IFC/Gold Circle Films, R, 90 minutes)

The documentary Bully arrives in theaters after much hullabaloo — it initially received a restricted rating from the Motion Picture Association of America due to the presence of a handful of curse words, sparking a social media campaign embraced by many celebrities — again confirming the marketing prowess of Harvey Weinstein. After unsuccessful attempts to reclassify the film as PG-13 Stateside, the mogul’s distribution company, the Weinstein Company, is releasing the movie unrated, and the AMC Theatres chain is allowing minors with a note from their parent or guardian to see the film — a reflective and affecting but still flawed cinematic entreaty which inveighs against teen-on-teen harassment.

Bully is constructed to elicit emotional response, for sure, and there’s an agonizing poignance to some of its pedestrian eloquence, which outstrips most scripted heartbreak. Yet for every illuminating interview tidbit and additional moment of discerning remove — as when director Lee Hirsch lingers on a near catatonic kid, allowing an audience the possibility of contemplating a seething future rage — Bully also seems to miss an opportunity to dig a bit deeper, psychologically, mainly because it doesn’t elicit explanations of mindset from those doing some of the bullying. This would crucially underscore the ineffectiveness and socially unacceptable nature of this behavior, show that this kind of acting out stems from its own type of trauma, and also illustrate that roles are often flipped later in life — with victims becoming victimizers, certainly emotionally if not physically. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. For more information on the film, click here. (The Weinstein Company, unrated, 98 minutes)

A generation or two ago, fantasy genre adventures like Wrath of the Titans still had some semblance of DNA connection to their B-picture forebears, the matinee serials that featured swashbuckling, sword-slinging heroes and backlot action shenanigans. Now, they’re just enormously budgeted machines, tent-pole franchises designed to necessarily wow with state-of-the-art digital wizardry and seemingly interchangeable heroes and circumstances. Such is the case with this inoffensive and slick if still rather middling upgrade over 2010’s Clash of the Titans, which ladles mythological spectacle on top of silly end-of-the-world boilerplate, and puts its characters through an effects laden steeplechase that squeezes out a few moments of synthetic bedazzlement that evaporate upon exiting from the theater. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 99 minutes)

The United States’ military forays into the Middle East over the past decade-plus have resulted in a fair number of big screen dramas of domestic re-entry, but few have the thoughtful delicacy of the quiet, lived-in Return, whose very title has a relaxed connotation that the movie robustly embodies. Spurning crazy outburst or demonstrative dramatic flair for something more measured, fragile and almost ineffable, writer-director Liza Johnson‘s narrative feature film debut is built around a standout performance from ex-Freaks and Geeks and ER star Linda Cardellini, as well as a nice supporting turn from Michael Shannon. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Focus World, R, 97 minutes)

The latest young adult literary property and blockbuster-teen-film-franchise-in-waiting, The Hunger Games will certainly make a mint (weekend showings
have already been selling out around the country), and likely rally many
fans of the book series to its defense, but more inquisitive minds will
find its cinematic adaptation lacking in some, if not many, crucial
respects.

Adapted by director Gary Ross, Billy Ray and Suzanne Collins from the latter’s bestselling novel of the same name, the film unfolds in a post-apocalyptic future, on the ruins of what was once North America and is now a super-nation known as Panem, divided into a dozen districts. As a twisted annual punishment for a past anti-federal uprising, each compliant district holds a lottery in which one adolescent boy and girl apiece are selected to compete in a televised “tribute,” known as the Hunger Games, in which there is but a single survivor.

After her younger sister is chosen, 16-year-old Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) impulsively volunteers to take her spot and represent the impoverished District 12; baker’s son Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), meanwhile, is chosen as her male counterpart. Whisked off to the fancy Capitol by Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks, sporting a wardrobe seemingly nipped from Helena Bonham Carter in Alice in Wonderland), Peeta and Katniss are soon introduced to their assigned mentor, former winner (and current lush) Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson).

After a regimented system of combat and survival training, the contestants are released into a cordoned off wilderness, and the bloodletting begins. Combatants from the elite Districts 1 and 2, located closest to the Capitol, are the aristocratic blue-bloods of this game, training in special academies for years before the competition. Katniss, though, is a skilled hunter with the bow and arrow, and repairs deep into the forest to try to outwit and outlast the others. Peeta at first seems willing to sell her out to the others for his own temporary advantage, but soon a powerful alliance and burgeoning romance between the pair blossoms, perhaps forcing a change in the Hunger Games’ rules.

Taking its inspiration from television’s Survivor, American Idol and many other sources, including The Running Man and 2001’s Series 7: The Contenders, The Hunger Games on the surface seems interested in exploring darker human appetites and impulses that feed so much of our present-day tabloid culture. Except that it doesn’t really exploit or explore anything it sets up, instead diddling around with sappy, sub-par teen romance. Haymitch makes mention of playing nice for the cameras in order to curry sponsors, but there’s no real follow-up with this, nor an explication of the events’ rules, or how the televised extravaganza fits into the broader dystopian society. Ross’ vision for this story is very programmatic, and its finale — a fight against three remaining contestants on top of a Frank Gehry sculpture in the middle of a field — is so predictable as to almost elicit yawns.

Basically, the film seems oddly disengaged from the potential richness of its conceit, and interested in little more than a parallel-world representation of the distracting spectacle in which its sub-class is forced to participate.That its politics are shapeless and its social commentary less than trenchant is perhaps hardly surprising in the grand scheme of things, given the hundreds of millions of dollars which distributor Lionsgate wishes to mine from the property, in the form of this movie, its sequels and all sorts of merchandising spin-offs. Still, at a certain point, does mere baseline structural proficience stop being enough for audiences? The Hunger Games just sets its sights on “good enough,” and ergo achieves that result in listless fashion.

Equally problematic is the visual scheme Ross and cinematographer Tom Stern (Million Dollar Baby, J. Edgar) employ, which favors wildly restless, tightly framed hand-held camerawork and close-ups that undercut any potential thrill or pop in the movie’s additionally blandly staged action sequences. For the first forty-plus minutes this is fairly interminable. It settles a bit — once settled in the Capitol, the filmmakers seem less eager to prove how wild and desperate circumstances are for the average citizen — but never comes across as more than a strange masking technique, a substitute for deeper characterization.

Some of the supporting players definitely enliven the proceedings — Banks, Stanley Tucci and especially Harrelson — but they’re still interlopers from a grander world we know little about. Lawrence is a fine actress, as evidenced in Winter’s Bone and Lori Petty’s The Poker House, but she seems a bit too perfect and un-rough-around-the-edges as Katniss. Different strokes, I realize, but a pertinent point of comparison is Saoirse Ronan in Hanna; she anchored that film, physically and emotionally, but also retained a certain feral or socially maladapted quality stemming from her having been raised alone in the woods by her father. Katniss comes from what used to be (and basically remains) rural Appalachia, but seems a bit too at ease with the circumstances around her, burdened by neither wonderment nor the fear of an animal who is lower on the food chain. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 142 minutes)