Steven Soderbergh is an interesting throwback to directors of yore, in that he is far less precious with his career than many of his contemporaries, and seems to regard the medium of film as inherently a place to explore, and play around. This means not only that he’s rather astonishingly prolific, but also engages in willful genre experiments (the Ocean’s trilogy, certainly, as well as something like Solaris, and even Contagion), plus low-fi adventures like Full Frontal, Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience. Rather than own one genre or mood, Soderbergh lets them intermittently possess him, all while putting his own stamp of personality on narrative material.

His latest film, Haywire, is more of the mindset of the former, but also exhibits some of the seat-of-the-pants inclinations of some of the latter, aforementioned DIY productions. Built around MMA fighter Gina Carano, it’s an action movie, at once lithe and bruising, but also a sort of character piece chess game, in which the personalities of the participants and the stylishness of its telling matter more than its junky, familiar, high-calorie revenge plot. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Relativity, R, 93 minutes)

If the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs spotlights some fascinating occupations that many of us wouldn’t necessarily rush to embrace as our own, then Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey tells the tale of a job every bit as quirky and atypical, and seemingly a lot more fun, and better smelling. More specifically, it tells the life story of Kevin Clash, an African-American kid who grew up in the 1970s in Baltimore, and eventually would find fortune, if not fame, as the voice of Elmo, a breakout Sesame Street character that became a full-fledged zeitgeist phenomenon, spreading from the preschool and adolescent set into the broader culture at large.

Narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, the film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where it was awarded with a special jury prize. Mixing archival footage, sit-down interviews and other material from the present day, filmmaker Constance Marks delivers a tapestral, feel-good tale of outside-of-the-box self-actualization, replete with loads of rare, behind-the-scenes glimpses at Sesame Street, Captain Kangaroo and other pieces of Jim Henson’s legacy. For those who ever had dreams outside the mainstream, Being Elmo tickles those fanciful reminiscences, in a heartening way.

Sensitive and candid, Clash is an engaging subject, if also sometimes unable to fully articulate the experiential depths of his teenage obsession with puppets, and how it made him feel. Chronicling the scissored destruction of his father’s coat is one thing, and certainly amusing. But movies like Make Believe, about teenage magicians, and even the Scottish dance documentary Jig, in every other respect a much lesser film than Being Elmo, each spent at least a bit of time reflecting inward and addressing the subjects’ feelings about their interests and finely honed talents. Marks’ film does not.

What else Being Elmo misses are a few small but telling things. Viewers see Clash in Paris, instructing puppeteers on hand movements and other techniques for an upcoming live stage show. And there’s nice material on the Henson workshop where Elmo, Bert, Ernie and other characters are constructed from drawers full of elements, and reams of felt, fur and the like. But the movie doesn’t really address how, if at all, puppeteers see and refine their own work. And neither does it really address the scripting process, which seems strange. While Clash — who took over the physical puppet of Elmo from a colleague who determined he’d hit a creative dead end — talks about the creation of the character, and the breakthrough of building it around the defining characteristic of Elmo’s love of hugs, and bodily contact, Marks’ movie makes it almost seem like huge portions of Sesame Street are improvised, which surely can’t be the case.

These quibbles aside, Being Elmo still has a certain warmth, and emotional resonance. The reason for the character’s popularity seems clear — Elmo expresses unconditional love, and support. In many ways, he’s a little, red, furry manifestation of the support that Clash’s parents provided him, when he had this crazy dream so outside the boundaries of their socioeconomically depressed, lower-middle-class experience. For some little kids, that feeling is, sadly, virtually unknown in their home lives. For every child, though, that embrace — both literal and figurative — is important. Elmo is a giver, and Clash’s story one bound to put a soft smile on your face. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Submarine Deluxe, unrated, 78 minutes)

The logline of director Lars von Trier’s latest film could actually be described in a manner to lure in genre fans (“At the home of a millionaire scientist, as a rogue planet hurtles toward Earth, do the premonitions of a fragile young woman hold the key to survival for the gathered inhabitants?”), but Melancholia unfolds at a pace, and with a mannered coyness, to match the emotional remove of its lead character, rendering its impact diminished.

The day of her wedding to Michael (Alexander Skarsgaard) should be one of the happiest of her life for Justine (Kirsten Dunst, in a strong performance), an advertising junior executive. She’s in a deep funk, however. Against a backdrop of dinner reception bickering between her hostile mother (Charlotte Rampling) and kindly but detached father (John Hurt), Justine begins to withdrawal further and further into a shell, confounding Michael and her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), whose put-upon husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) is picking up the tab for the event. After much drama, the evening ends with Justine and Michael a couple no more.

The second chapter of the film opens with Justine severely depressed, and unable to even get out of bed. Claire tends her every physical need, but news of a new planet that is supposed to pass perilously close to Earth in its orbit makes her anxious. As that improbability seemingly gets ready to become a reality, Justine eventually achieves a sort of zen calm, in contrast with her sister’s increasing hysteria.

Billed by the famously provocative filmmaker as “a psychological disaster movie,” Melancholia is gorgeous in many respects (cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro’s tones and handheld camerawork are evocative), but also swollen and portentous. “Artful hooey” might be the best critical shorthand, even though there are flashes of dark humor embedded throughout. A sort of tragicomic opera, Melancholia isn’t a film that for one instant one holds tremendous regret over watching, and yet it doesn’t connect in a lastingly emotional way, because for every moving or interesting thing that occurs, there’s another frustrating moment, or missed opportunity to dig into the marrow of characters’ relationships.

As with von Trier’s last film, the wildly divisive Antichrist, Melancholia makes use of a stunningly artful opening credit sequence (in this case presaging later events) and a partitioned narrative. The problem is that, while its title and story have both literal and metaphorical heft, von Trier seems to shy away from a more subjective point-of-view that would give his film emotional punching power. Melancholia is in theory about how depressives can react more calmly in stressful situations, already expecting the worst to happen. Dunst gives a captivating performance, her best in years, but the audience is still left on the outside of her character, looking for a way in. (Magnolia/Zentropa, R, 130 minutes)

As basketball has spread across the world, so too has the view of it as a unique opportunity, and a tool for upward social mobility. While sports — and in particular boxing, baseball and soccer — have long offered a potential path out of the proverbial ghetto for socioeconomically disadvantaged kids, hoops entered this phase of its public trajectory only fairly recently. As a global phenomenon, the National Basketball Association now attracts interest from Europe, Asia and beyond. Anne Buford’s engaging documentary Elevate takes a look at the professional aspirations of a handful of West African kids.

At the center of the movie is Amadou Gallo Fall, a former scout for the Dallas Mavericks and a current member of management who founded the private SEEDS Academy (Sports for Education and Economic Development in Senegal) to help house, train and school 25 youngsters per year from his native country, preparing them for possible scholarships and enrollment at American prep schools, where the goal is to attract collegiate grant-in-aids and then, possibly, move on to careers in the NBA. With his steady gaze and no-nonsense but uplifting rhetoric about them representing their country, and opening doors for not only themselves but their families but others, Fall comes across as a genuine, progressive-minded benefactor.

Mostly, though, Elevate focuses on the kids — raw, athletic seven-footers like Assane and Aziz (NCAA amateurism concerns frown upon the use of their full names, even though most are already now matriculating, including at Division I schools like the University of Virginia and the University of Washington) who in most cases have only been playing organized basketball for two or maybe three years. Some find a home at private prep schools in Connecticut and Illinois, while others find dreams waylaid or delayed by visa problems and other concerns.

Implicit in the movie is the fact that this outreach is as much a business consideration as it is an act of moral benevolence, or some starry-eyed mission about cultural connection via athletics. NBA teams (particularly in smaller markets) are under tremendous pressure to field competitive and winning squads with less resources at their disposal, and part of that means locating, signing and developing talent that doesn’t necessarily come with all of the outsized senses of entitlement too often found on the Stateside AAU circuit. The feeding ground for this professional demand — competitive basketball universities and, below them, private prep schools — also have a vested interest in attracting talent that is hungry, and willing to work.

Buford would do better to underscore these points a little more. It’s borderline awkward and unsettling when a headmaster talks to a Senegalese kid about it being “a bottom-line world,” and starts pushing Princeton, like it’s his alma mater or something. This offers a glimpse of the ulterior motives bubbling just underneath the surface with so many of the coaches and handlers close to these kids, alongside completely sincere feelings of connection. Then again, there’s plenty of natural human intrigue to the coming-of-age stories on display in Elevate, so it perhaps makes sense not to delve too deep into the points-of-view of those charged Stateside with molding the character and basketball skills of these young men.

It’s just that at times Elevate, which is a perfectly appealing postcard of a most unique coming-of-age scenario, seems a little frustratingly incurious. When one high school coach quits mid-season, after an eight-game losing streak, to take a job at Nike… well, it feels a bit opportunistic, and distasteful. And the movie gives one of his players a chance to ruminate on his feelings about the matter. What about other potential feelings of exploitation, though? Maybe that’s not something these kids can quite rise to the level of seeing yet; they’re still teenagers in most cases, after all. Buford, on the hand, doesn’t have the same excuse. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, visit ElevateTheMovie.com, or the film’s Facebook page. (ESPN Films/Isotope Films/Sharp 7 Entertainment, unrated, 82 minutes)

With its methodical depiction of the complicity of moneyed interests straddling multiple industries, Chris Paine’s superb, anger-evoking 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? answered its own question, unraveling the rather puzzling crib-murder of a vehicle that could have done wonders for the environment, massively curbed the United States’ dangerous addiction to foreign oil, and put the country on a clearly defined path toward export dominance in both automobiles and cell battery technology.

So, five years, a narrowly averted worldwide financial meltdown and a humbled American auto industry later, it’s sequel time! Narrated by Tim Robbins, Paine’s new film takes as its four chief subjects an upstart (Nissan, radically overhauled by Carlos Ghosn), a start-up (trendy Tesla, fronted by ex-PayPal founder Elon Musk), a re-jiggered giant (General Motors, under the leadership of Bob Lutz) and an entrepreneurial fabricator (Greg Abbott) individually converting classic gas-powered cars like a Triumph Spitfire, GT6 and 1967 Camaro into electric vehicles.

Necessarily, this follow-up is a different animal — less outraged and antagonistic, more flat-out entertaining. The night-and-day difference between the movies in Paine’s access to some industry big boys (and their relative candor) gives his film fascinating perspective, but also raises some questions about being potentially co-opted. While Nissan’s $6 billion market gamble on the Leaf and the whole competitive element give Revenge gripping capitalistic stakes worthy of a double-cross-laden narrative heist flick, the future is yet to be written with respect to a consumer verdict on electric vehicles. Ergo, it would have been interesting to delve a bit further into the market changes or signs that car manufacturers missed with respect to this abrupt about-face on the commercial profitability of EVs — especially in the face of a political climate in which one of two parties wears as a badge of honor their continued rejection of climate science and any sort of incentivization of cleaner energy and emissions. For more on the movie’s nontraditional release in smaller markets, visit its eponymous web site. (WestMidWest, unrated, 90 minutes)

Gay cinema, perhaps understandably, was for a period of many years preoccupied with coming out, which, as a defining moment in the lives of many homosexuals, was ripe for dramatic exploitation. There are, though, of course thousands of other stories that are a part of the gay experience, and so it’s its own small success that something like The Green, about a juicy suburban sex scandal in a world tipping ever closer to true marriage equality, could unfold, and only tangentially and occasionally be about its main character’s sexuality. A generally well sketched drama that fumbles away its accrued admiration late in the third act, The Green is sort of three-fifths of a good movie, which is certainly more than a lot of films can say. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (FilmBuff/Table Ten Films, R, 90 minutes)

On the surface, Oka! has a couple potential red flags that seemingly mark it as yet another tale of a white Westerner saving and/or bringing culture to the lives of black Africans. In reality, though, it’s about the inverse of that scenario, and director Lavinia Currier’s film sings with an unexpected humor and exuberance. Based on an unpublished memoir, Last Thoughts Before Vanishing From the Face of the Earth, by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno, this is a unique and fascinating tale of cultural connection, and the elemental nature of various human curiosities that bind us together. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Roland Films, R, 106 minutes)

A pleasing throwback to an era in which ideas powered movies more than special effects, sci-fi action thriller In Time makes literal the scramble of underclass day-to-day existence, telling a story wherein everyone ages only to 25, and thereafter survives or perishes by trading on one year of allotted time, which is the currency of the world, and marked by a green countdown clock on their arm. Providing a steady flow of lively entertainment due in large part to the brain-tickling nature of its central conceit, the movie benefits from a superb below-the-line team that gives it a certain stylishness and nice production value, even though budgetary constraints obviously influence some set-ups. In Time only runs into trouble when attempting to service some of the
more whiz-bang elements of its fight-the-powers-that-be plot, instead of taking a honest swing at something more subversive or transgressive. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 109 minutes)

Based on the debut tome of gonzo novelist Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is sort of the filmic equivalent of an unexpected blast of jazz — an amusing slice of tropical noir beholden to little more than its own snappy rhythms. The movie is loosely built around a land-grab plot, but generally three parts soused character study to every one part awakened protagonist ambition, instead just perfectly happy to surf along on the strength of its enjoyably cracked characterizations and rich dialogue.

The story follows Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp), an unhinged functional alcoholic and itinerant journalist who travels from New York City to Puerto Rico to write for a rundown local newspaper that even his new editor, Lotterman (Richard Jenkins), admits is a shell of a publication, and likely to soon shutter. Making friends with a pair of coworkers that could be characterized as Drunk and Drunker (Michael Rispoli and Giovanni Ribisi, respectively), Paul soon crosses paths with Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), a shady businessman who regards the island’s natural beauty as “God’s idea of money.” Sanderson pitches Paul a sort of “advertorial” deal to drum up phony public support for a massive property development scheme. Paul considers it, but complicating the newly felt pangs of this ethical dilemma is his growing infatuation with Chenault (Amber Heard), Sanderson’s scorching hot but hard-to-read fiancé. Are her flirtations true, or part of some set-up? And does Paul even care?

There’s a pungent aroma that comes off of The Rum Diary, capturing as it does this particular late-Eisenhower era of journalism, with cigarettes in the newsroom and flasks in every jacket pocket. It’s no surprise that the movie is also eminently quotable (“You have a tongue like an accusatory giblet!” rants Paul when he trips on an especially strong drug with a colleague), given that it represents the first film behind the camera in almost two decades from Withnail and I and How To Get Ahead in Advertising writer-director Bruce Robinson, who knows outrageousness well. If you miss the woozy, drunken charm of Depp’s turn in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, before its sequels became bloated special effects reels, this shot of Rum — hardly essential but still a lot of fun — will bring back pleasant memories. (Film District, R, 120 minutes)

It’s a shame more people won’t have the opportunity to see Martha Marcy May Marlene, the superb feature directorial debut of writer-director Sean Durkin, completely cold and not impacted by any marketing impressions. For no matter how good a job the crack publicity staff at Fox Searchlight does in highlighting its ethereal and eerie qualities (and the movie’s poster is very good at that), there’s a special add-on value to letting this film just kind of slowly wash over you, so unfussy and assured are its modes of expression.

In a star-making turn, Elizabeth Olsen portrays Martha (the other names come into play), a young woman who flees from a Catskills Mountains cult and its charismatic leader, Patrick (John Hawkes, fantastic), seeking refuge with her estranged older sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and brother-in-law Ted (Hugh Dancy) at their Connecticut summer home. Beset with paranoia and delusions, Martha refuses to open up about where she’s been the past couple years, though intercut segments fill the audience in on her time at the commune. Several instances of acting out make things awkward, and sisterly tensions eventually reach a boiling point, as Lucy and Ted have plans to start a family and feel they can’t do so while also tending to Martha.

Durkin’s film is characterized by spare production design and a muted color palette that echoes its lead’s emotional detachment. Martha is best when it stays away from more conventional domestic/familial conflict (a slightly overwritten blow-up regarding adult responsibility feels slipped in from the after-school special version of this same story), and instead slowly unfurls its back story, with tantalizing hints of Martha’s trauma and her and Lucy’s troubled shared past. The directing is superb, and Olsen’s performance a star-making turn; this is a gripping debut, with one of the eeriest, most ambiguous endings of the past couple years. See it with a friend — coffee and conversation is sure to follow. (Fox Searchight, R, 101 minutes)

The striking Like Crazy is saddled with an unfortunately innocuous name — the sort given to movies about teenagers ending in some sort of a dance competition — but that’s not terribly surprising since the film is about, well, a pair of perfectly and imperfectly matched young lovers dealing with pangs of separation and the gnawing, cold reality that the hot-burning flame of their relationship may not be a forever-type thing.

The Grand Jury Prize winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the movie centers on Jacob (Anton Yelchin) and Anna (Felicity Jones, in a breakthrough performance), who meet in Los Angeles at college and tumble into a romance. When the latter faces an expiring student visa set to pull her back home to England, it tosses a monkey wrench in their would-be summer of love. As is often the case in matters libidinal, Jacob and Anna throw caution to the wind. She stays, but then later, after slipping back to the U.K. for a cousin’s wedding, is barred from re-entry. Long-distance complications ensue, spanning a couple years.

Tender and bittersweet, Like Crazy is constructed in ways that invite an audience to impress upon the film its own memories and nostalgic feelings for that heady, hormonal surge of youthful attraction — meaning evocative framing choices, plenty of delicate, lingering close-ups, and, of course, montages. But there are nuances aplenty and the storytelling sensibility on display here by director Drake Doremus is finely tuned, and a big uptick from his previous outings, Spooner and Douchebag.

Yelchin and especially Jones, meanwhile, give sensitive and smart tightrope performances, and have a natural chemistry with one another that makes them a pleasure to watch. Like Crazy‘s ending is a perhaps willfully ambiguous thing, but also kind of nice insofar as it allows the movie to be a closed-loop romance for those seeking uplift, and a melancholic rumination from adulthood for those who are so sure they know better. (Paramount Vantage, PG-13, 89 minutes)

Not to suggest that the two are in any way equivalent, but wading through Afghanistan and Iraq war documentaries, whose prevalence and grip on the psyche of the fragile American indie filmmaker is evident at festivals across the nation, is often its own kind of special hell, because sub-par storytelling technique is so often brought to bear upon legitimately heartrending stories. The deserving winner of both jury documentary and cinematography awards in the World Cinema category at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Hell and Back Again belies those notions that a nonfiction effort on the subject can’t be artistically minded, and also can’t somehow be as moving as (or even more so than) a scripted dramatic interpretation.

Photojournalist and filmmaker Danfung Dennis served as an embed with the U.S. Marines’ Echo Company 2nd Battalion in Southern Afghanistan in 2009. Footage from this time — visceral, smartly captured, on-the-ground reportage — is interspersed with homefront turbulence once 25-year-old Sergeant Nathan Harris (above left) returns to North Carolina, where he confronts the physical and emotional difficulties of re-adjusting to civilian life with his occasionally overwhelmed wife, Ashley. The result is a powerful subjective experience, in which an audience is given rich and at times uncomfortable transport into the wounded body and mind of a typical American soldier.

The number of journalistic embeds in America’s last two wars has guaranteed that we don’t need to wait on Ridley or Tony Scott to convincingly get a taste of that Middle Eastern sand in our mouths. But so many of these documentaries seem informed by a certain videogame sensibility, in which both militaristic engagement and flipside mundanity are peddled for tension and tension alone. Dennis’ war tapes at first feel like unedited B-reel, but one slowly starts to recognize and come around to the brilliance of their physical and psychological framing, which eschews wildly swung hand-held camerawork and instead focuses largely on the sorts of tasks that even low-level grunts have to concern themselves with — reaching out, through a haze of uncertainty and cultural disconnect, and trying to win the hearts and minds of Afghan citizens.

Dennis also smartly comes at Harris as a subject somewhat elliptically, opting for naturalistic interplay between Nathan and Ashley — and others, including doctors and friends — instead of more direct question-and-answer interview segments. This gives Hell and Back Again a unique, earned intimacy; nothing about its dramatic connections are cheap, or overly manipulated. Masterfully edited in concert with Fiona Otway, the movie overlays shots and sound in a manner that truly means something, and affords glimpses into the fractured thinking of combat veterans. A dozen soldiers or more can talk about the feeling of wishing they were back in Iraq or Afghanistan, but when Dennis shows Harris gazing wistfully at a Call of Duty 4 sales case in Wal-Mart, and intercuts this and game-play footage with audio and other embed material from an Afghanistan raid, it powerfully illustrates the fundamental changes in brain activity and mental health that war generates. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information about the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Docurama, unrated, 88 minutes)