By all accounts, Woody Harrelson, Ben Foster and director Oren Moverman developed an unusually strong bond during their work together on 2009’s The Messenger, a gritty, character-rooted drama about the difficulties and emotional turbulence faced by a pair of soldiers — one a veteran, one new to the assignment — who work as part of the Army’s notification team for the next of kin of deceased soldiers. The film netted Harrelson a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination (and a Best Original Screenplay nod to boot), and so the trio reteamed for Rampart, co-written and directed by Moverman, starring Harrelson, and co-produced by Foster, who also pops up in a small supporting role.

A “bad cop” drama somewhat in the vein of Street Kings and Narc, and a sort of West Coast companion to (either version of) Bad Lieutenant, Rampart, set in 1999, centers on an arrogant, chauvinistic and otherwise prejudiced police officer who finds the sins of his hotheadedness and long accepted procedural shortcuts finally closing in and crumbling down around him. If a bit short on psychological perspicacity, Moverman’s movie at least provides a solid vehicle of display for Harrelson’s squirrelly, off-kilter intensity. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Millennium, R, 107 minutes)

With the lead-up to Valentine’s Day comes the requisite flood of commercials for teddy bears and flowers, yes, but especially Whitman’s Samplers and other boxed chocolates. In fact, probably more chocolate is gifted on February 14 than on any other single day of the year. But how many happy recipients will necessarily spend much time thinking about where their chocolate came from, and whether it was produced in a fashion that ethically compensates the farmers who harvest the cacao beans used in that manufacturing? The humane and engaging new documentary Nothing Like Chocolate, fresh off a much buzzed-about Santa Barbara Film Festival presentation, shines a light on the gulf between first-world manufacturers and consumers of chocolate and the for the most part third-world growers and producers of said delights.



Director Kum-Kum Bhavnani gives voice to boutique chocolatiers who either cannot or won’t wade into this ethical pool (Gary Guittard provides an eloquent defense), and also illuminates the complicated process by which chocolates and other items achieve “fair trade” status. Still other interviewees, including former Grenada Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, speak intelligently about both central subject Mott Green (locals call him “Smilo,” the name under which Green’s company markets its chocolate powder) and the larger considerations driving him, making for an engaging movie that provokes both the brain and the taste buds. For more information about the film, click here; for more information about the Grenada Chocolate Company and Cooperative, meanwhile, click here. And for the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Nothing Like Chocolate LLC, unrated, 63 minutes)

A mirthless, preening action comedy populated with gorgeous caricatures, This Means War isn’t so much an imitation of life as it is a setpiece-focused aping of other movies that have more sincerely attempted to commingle spy or assassin hijinks, gunplay and romance, like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Knight & Day, Bad Boys and The Whole Nine Yards. Directed by McG, it’s indefatigably paced but consistently insulting to viewers’ intelligence.

This Means War bears much in common with the slick, colorful fantasy worlds of McG’s Charlie’s Angels movies, as well as work he has overseen on the small screen, like Fastlane, The O.C. and Chuck. The look is polished, and favors kinetic movement and unremarked upon opulence over sense. The action “sizzle” arrives via occasional cheery blasts of brainless, bloodless, consequence-free shootouts, designed so as not to challenge or offend. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 97 minutes)

A low-fi genre hybrid that attempts to cash in on both the burgeoning trend of “found footage” thrillers and superhero origin stories, Chronicle only scratches the surface of its junior-level Magneto narrative. Leaning on an increasingly ineffective patchwork blend of diegetic sources, the movie opts for showy theatrics and set pieces over more honest character investment, and ultimately fritters away a quite promising concept. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 84 minutes)

Writer-director-actor Eric Schaeffer has made a career out of more or less channeling his offscreen insecurities, foibles and sexual appetites into what could loosely be categorized as slices of desperate-plea entertainment. His filmography behind the camera — which includes If Lucy Fell, Wirey Spindell and 1997’s critically lambasted Fall, to which his latest film is a quasi-sequel — is littered with movies in which he plays articulate, misunderstood, down-on-their-luck guys (often cabbies or writers, sometimes both) who bag chicks consistently out of their league and then get wound up about the impending implosion of said relationships.

Bittersweet, Paris-set romance After Fall, Winter (or just Winter, as it was at one point known) finds Schaeffer again trying to navigate a miasma of commingled narcissism and human frailties, with a pinch of the unlikely and wounded romance on display in Never Again, which was both his most streamlined and mature, well-observed work. Characteristically dawdling and certainly a bit implausible, the film invites a certain low-fi connection for a stretch before fumbling it away with phony details and ham-fisted sexual theatrics. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For video on demand from its distributor, click here. (FilmBuff, R, 131 minutes)

A deeply vapid movie which puts no sincere care or thought into how its slapdash story choices interact with the real world, One For the Money fancies itself a spunky action comedy with a spitfire heroine and a will-they-or-won’t-they romance at its core. Instead, it’s inane (and unfunny to boot) wish fulfillment of the most dreadful variety — an utterly phony tale of empowerment whose leading lady is repeatedly rescued and enabled by men. Starring Katherine Heigl, this mishmash defies logic as an adaptation of author Janet Evanovich’s first in a series of bestselling novels, so across the board tone-deaf is it. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 91 minutes)

Six discrete stories of varying levels of effectiveness come together in The Theatre Bizarre, a macabre horror anthology that eschews the laborious weirdness of something like Christopher Landon’s Burning Palms, and instead focuses more forthrightly on crafting and sustaining a mood of uneasiness. The main commingled narrative ingredients are genre staples — sex, compulsion, paranoia and obsession — which work well for a movie that doesn’t shy away from gore, but is generally interested in more psychologically rooted fear. If, in the end, The Theatre Bizarre suffers from the same main problem that plagues so many anthology efforts — a couple weak entries weighing it down — it still compares relatively favorably to the qualitative mean established by Anchor Bay’s “Masters of Horror” series from a few years back. For the full review, from ShockYa, click here; for The Theatre Bizarre‘s trailer and more screening information, meanwhile, click here. (W2 Media, unrated, 111 minutes)

A paint-by-numbers, underdog-made-good, coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of junior circuit tennis, 16-Love is a wholesome movie of modest ambitions, shaggy and sunny personality, and middling execution. For tweens looking for something to while away the time between Twilight flicks there may be some small measure of entertainment, but nothing else here particularly merits a glance for older audiences. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here.

Viral pandemic drama takes a backseat to fraternal fisticuffs and gunplay in The Viral Factor, an enjoyably sprawling if completely scatterbrained action movie from director Dante Lam, starring Jay Chou (above) and Nicholas Tse. A nervous tendency to flit to and fro between characters prevents the movie from successfully gaining much of an emotional foothold, and its two-hour running time renders vast swathes of its action theatrics redundant. But there’s still enough expressive investment in the two leads to mark The Viral Factor as a slightly stronger than average genre piece for foreign film fans. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (China Lion/Emperor Motion Pictures, R, 122 minutes)

A description or listing of all the recombinant parts of drama Angels Crest — the plot here feels like a Law & Order episode, more or less, and the movie itself seems like a boozy, downmarket hybrid of The Shipping News and Gone Baby Gone, with a pinch of Northern Exposure — runs the risk of making it sound more interesting than it actually is. An adaptation of a missing-child novel by Leslie Schwartz, director Gaby Dellal’s wintry indie is a not very subtle and generally unpersuasive stab at tapestral grief-as-elegy. If cinematic skill lies partially in making an audience feel things they’ve felt before, but in new and different ways, Angels Crest, starring Thomas Dekker, Lynn Collins and Jeremy Piven, is a highlighted, underlined, out-of-date textbook, dogmatic about its presentation, no matter how overly familiar it is. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here.