Filmmaker Gus Van Sant, even at 59 years old, looks like the sort of guy who should be wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a hoodie. In face, body language and spirit, he retains a certain boyishness — perhaps in some small way infused, throughout the years, by his thematic preoccupation with unconventional romance and coming-of-age stories, and the idea of surrogate family. Restless, his latest effort behind the camera, and the first since Sean Penn scored a Best Actor Oscar for Milk, treads this same familiar ground, but to mostly pleasurable if still rather fleeting effect. A tenderly stylistic evocation of young love wrapped inside a New Wave-esque bundle of wistfulness and nervous, under-the-surface energy, it’s a movie whose graceful direction doesn’t merely trump its plotting, but instead helps elevate it. A kind of arthouse mash-up of Sweet November, One Day and Love and Other Drugs, Restless is a well constructed little diorama, but one whose elicited feelings do not, alas, linger. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics/Imagine Entertainment, PG-13, 95 minutes)

If one were to ruminate on the equivalent of a Mother Teresa-type figure for the advocacy of natural animal research and wildlife conservation, it would likely be Dr. Jane Goodall, a world-famous icon known for her groundbreaking scientific field work accrued while living amongst chimpanzees in Africa. Directed by Lorenz Knauer, the documentary Jane’s Journey offers up a biographical snapshot of both the personal and professional Goodall. Inclusive of some compelling piecemeal details, it’s a film that’s hard to assail with much enthusiasm or gusto, but the truth is that it’s an awkward and generally unfocused mash-up of mixed perspectives and mission statements. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Note: in addition to regular theatrical engagements this week and next, on September 27, Goodall will appear live on hundreds of movie screens across the country for a rare event that will include a screening of the film, interaction with theater audiences and in-studio celebrity guests. For theater and ticket information regarding that event, click here. (First Run, unrated, 105 minutes)

Centering on a group of young friends and deployed reservists from the shores of Lake Superior, on the northern tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Where Soldiers Come From delivers unto viewers a slice of somewhat meandering but nonetheless quite affecting blue-collar heartbreak. After all, the subjects, none older than 22 at the time, joined the National Guard together on something of a lark, drawn in — even in wartime — chiefly by a devil-may-care sense of fraternity and the benefits of a $15,000 signing bonus and college tuition assistance. This understated, delicately anthropological real-life coming-of-age tale tracks the end of their Stateside training, a rough tour of duty in Afghanistan, and the disillusionment and troubles that follow upon their return home. It’s not for all tastes, but these stories, alas, are the new back stories of many individual American tragedies and triumphs yet to be written. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (International Film Circuit, unrated, 91 minutes)

To frame it in the form of a simile that baseball fans will understand, Ryan Gosling right now is like Greg Maddux in 1994 and ’95, or Pedro Martinez in 1999 and 2000 — just absolutely crushing it, turning in casually dazzling performances in such a fashion that it will be virtually impossible for him to further forestall a People‘s “Sexiest Man Alive” magazine cover. Yes, in case there were any remaining doubts, after having danced around and avoided it for several years, not unlike Johnny Depp, Gosling is now taking the bullet train to stardom. His latest film, Drive, amply drives home that point.

The story finds the forthrightly named Driver (Gosling, oozing utterly unforced cool) a quiet loner who does movie stunt work during the day and serves as a for-hire criminal wheelman at night, falling under the spell of his neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), a vulnerable young mother. When Irene’s husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) gets out of jail, it lights a fuse of danger. Driver agrees to do a job to wipe clean Standard’s prison debt, but things go sideways, resulting in the further, unwanted scrutiny of a syndicate of deadly criminals.

Working from an adaptation of James Sallis’ eponymous novel by Academy Award nominee Hossein Amini, director Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson) delivers a movie that pulses with an unwavering, premium-unleaded sense of purpose, giving its no-frills story a sense of supremely heightened stakes. Eschewing freeways and landmarks, Refn and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel turn L.A. into an at once intimate, mystical and menacing place. The performances are top notch, and Drive‘s score (by Cliff Martinez) and music selections, too, are hypnotic and of a piece — nervous, pulsing and desirous gems that give the movie a dreamlike hold. Yes, this is somewhat recombinant terrain, previously tilled by Michael Mann, William Friedkin and David Lynch. But when it’s this utterly mesmerizing, who in their right mind is complaining? (FilmDistrict, R, 100 minutes)

Somewhere, no doubt, adult film actor and shameless publicity whore Ron Jeremy is kicking himself over finding out that there exists a movie entitled The Hedgehog in which he is neither the star, nor the beneficiary of a large life-rights check. No, director Mona Achache’s movie is no hairy skin-flick biopic, but instead a darkly comedic broadside aimed at stuffy French elitism, a movie very loosely of a sort with Gosford Park and the forthcoming The Women on the 6th Floor, written and directed by Philippe Le Guay. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (NeoClassics Films, unrated, 100 minutes)

A nicely photographed and initially intriguing character study of a road trip gone awry, and a sibling pair of foreign travelers waylaid in a land foreign to them, Littlerock quickly fumbles away any sense of delicate engagement, and ends up a collection of posed and meandering down-tempo moments in search of an inciting incident or clarifying signifier. Pleased with itself more than it ought to be, the movie seems to believe or feel that dawdling for dawdling’s sake is in the end its own kind of precious artistic statement, a fact only underscored by a heavy-handed political statement finale.

Written and directed by Mike Ott, Littlerock is one of those indie films where the actors (non-professionals or neophytes, one assumes) all play characters with the same first names. Whether this was because the film is “real,” and rooted in actual experiences and their personalities or just so no one got confused on set, one can’t be certain. Regardless, the story centers on brother and sister Atsuko and Rintaro (Atsuko Okatsuka, above, and Rintaro Sawamoto), Japanese tourists whom we glean through a small handful of narrated postcards written back home, have a rocky relationship with their father. The pair gets stuck in the title town, a sleepy ex-urb of Los Angeles, when their car breaks down. Later that night, the duo happen upon a party at a nearby hotel, and make friends with Cory (Cory Zacharia), a kind of feckless loafer with loosely defined ambitions to be an actor or model.

Rintaro speaks a little English, and Atsuko none at all. The next day they “site-see” with Cory, meet some more people, and then head to another party. Despite the language barrier, Atsuko bonds more with the locals than her brother, and when he presses her to continue north as part of their agreed upon itinerary, she balks and stays behind. Staying with Cory (who lives with his father), Atsuko further tethers herself to her new surroundings, striking up a quasi-relationship with another boy, and taking a job at the Mexican restaurant where Cory works when he feels particularly gripped by the urge. Will Rintaro ever return? And what is bonding Atsuko to this place? Ah, these are the mysteries of Littlerock, where twentysomething kids ride bikes for fun when they’re not enjoying some beer and a smoke.

Somewhat (very loosely) like the recent Bellflower or the Polish brothers’ 2001 dramedy Jackpot, Littlerock aims to be a portrait of arrested place and curious ambition. It means to be a sort of dusty, Southern California thematic companion to Richard Linklater’s SubUrbia, in which characters drink, smoke pot and passive-aggressively hassle one another while figuring out what to do with their lives. (Instead of parking lots, though, we get empty, rundown state parks and dingy apartments and RVs.) The problem is that there is no substantive and sustained outside force acting upon Cory, or Atsuko and Rintaro. Everyone is drifting, like a tattered leaf caught in a lazy breeze. Even when Cory is hassled over money he mysteriously owes an acquaintance, the stakes ($200) and pressure (a verbal berating, a poured-out beer) never amount to much of anything.

The performances, too, fail to engage. Okatsuka has a certain watchable mysteriousness, but that chiefly owes to the fact that she doesn’t speak any English. Zacharia, meanwhile, cycles through a thoroughly unconvincing catalogue of babytalk-inflected mannerisms in his dealings with Atsuko, whom his character is supposed to have a crush on. He comes across as an open-mouthed trout; it’s an annoying turn that only becomes more irritating when the script requires him to repeatedly fail to pick up on any nonverbal indicators. (At one point late in the film, he even gets cross and says, out loud, that it’s like Atsuko can’t understand him. Ummm… yeah.)

Most damningly, though, despite the ambivalence of its characters, Littlerock has no headstrong, purposeful sense of its own identity. Ott constructs a cutesy, willfully modest and submissive cultural mash-up, and proclaims it profound, or art, merely by virtue of its construction. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s web site. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance, unrated, 83 minutes)

French actress Isabelle Huppert, nominated for a record 13 Cesar Awards, has made a career out of playing nervy characters with all manner of sexual foibles or secrets. In Special Treatment, she’s a high-class prostitute with dormant issues fueling a desire for a career change. The eighth feature offering from cult filmmaker Jeanne Labrune, this generally well sketched and set-up drama cashes in its early intrigue, though, abandoning darker overtones for rather wan interpersonal revelations. Those seeking kinky erotic drama of the sort found in early David Cronenberg will be sorely disappointed.

The story centers on Alice Bergerac (Huppert, above right), a well-to-do fortysomething who serves up high-end sexual fantasies for her clientele, from schoolgirl submissiveness to S&M dominance. Neurotic psychologist Xavier Demestre (Bouli Lanners), meanwhile, is stuck in a marriage in which he and wife Helene (Valerie Dreville) can no longer conceal their distaste for one another, lobbing open attacks in front of mixed company at a party. When a friend recommends Alice to Xavier, he gives her a call, just on the heels of Alice suffering a nasty incident with another client. They meet, and she explains that she only offers bundled packages of a minimum of 10 sessions, and so they embark on a professional relationship in which Alice gamely tries to coax out of Xavier his preferences, and get to the root of his unhappiness. In doing so, each party learns a little something.

Special Treatment is at its best when it’s mapping out and concentrating on the parallels between psychoanalysis and prostitution — the discreet locations, the exchange of money, the promise of anonymity, the establishment of rules, and specific time limits. Never mind that its inciting incident for Alice’s occupational second-guessing feels relatively tame, and for a moment seems a part of her extended role play. Once it settles into a more standardized groove of interpersonal blossoming, maturation and desired occupational flight — no matter how elliptically sketched, in achingly European fashion — the movie is considerably less interesting, because its big-picture plot movements and character decisions all feel staked out and predetermined. Alice will feel increasing frustration with Xavier’s inability to articulate his sexual wants, and Xavier will recognize her latent unhappiness and eventually start taking steps to try to help Alice ease out of prostitution.

Director Jeanne Labrune, working from a script co-written with Richard Debuisne, also does a fairly risible job of explaining the holes or conflict in Xavier and Helene’s marriage. If it were merely or only a matter of sexual incompatibility or stasis, the film could still exist fine as is, but the sheer glee with which Helene attacks Xavier in certain scenes raises all sorts of questions that go largely unanswered. As it moves toward its painfully French finale (it gives away nothing to say that the movie ends with a character staring off into the distance in reflection), awkward symbolism — in the form of an antique angel sculpture — is also visited upon the story, a sighing reality which seems remote in the quite solid opening act.

Through it all, Huppert has a sly technique, and an endlessly fascinating face. Ergo, Special Treatment never slips in holding one’s attention when she is on the screen. Unfortunately, the film’s intrigue unravels with each passing minute. There’s great promise in this premise — of a dissection of the value of arguably substitutive experiences, and how long they can or even should last — but this Treatment falls short, and delivers no special and lastingly memorable catharsis or insights. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (First Run, R, 96 minutes)

Another unimaginatively plotted horror film which unfolds in a cursed house and pairs a young girl who thinks she sees monsters with parents who don’t believe her, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark arrives courtesy of co-writer/producer Guillermo Del Toro’s own childhood imaginations, and a 1973 teleplay that cast a chilly spell over him. Precious little of that menacing mood survives this technically proficient but rather yawning exercise in genre literalism, however — a disappointment considering the high-end creepiness and dark fantasia on display in some of Del Toro’s own films, like Cronos and Pan’s Labyrinth. The general feeling that materializes is that something much more interesting could have been done with the concept. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. Mind the paywall, though. (FilmDistrict, R, 99 minutes)

A hit in its native Hong Kong, Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy is getting a boutique release across the rest of the world, including major metropolitan areas of the United States. And why not, really? Screening in both 3-D and 2-D, the slickly produced film is a lurid, wild and weird attempt to reboot the 1990s’ Sex and Zen softcore franchise, in which outlandish sex and borderline gnarly-cartoonish violence were commingled. The end product lives up to its title, that’s for certain. A demented, Faustian-infused Flash Gordon episode crossed with a Chinese costume dramedy and some sort of discarded “Masters of Horror” script, Sex and Zen is a memorable viewing experience, in however many dimensions one watches it.

The story centers around a Ming Dynasty scholar, Yangsheng (Hiro Hayama, above left), who marries Yuxiang (the beautiful Leni Lan, above right), but finds himself lacking as a lover and unable to please her. Obsessed with the smallness of his penis and seeking carnal knowledge, he visits the conniving Prince Ning (Tony Ho), who has a Tower of Rarity (you know, with a blood-sweating horse and stuff like that) and a Pavilion of Ultimate Bliss. Yangsheng eventually wins admittance to the latter, and Prince Ning sets him up with “sex healer” Ruihu (Vonnie Lui). Then he has an operation to replace his penis with that of a donkey. Yep… seriously. During this time Yuxiang takes a lover, but still misses her husband, so she sets out to retrieve him. Additional insanity ensues.

The film starts with and maintains as a sort of touchstone a generally goofy tone. When Yangsheng and Yuxiang honeymoon, he pronounces her breasts “so cool,” and when she worries about the pain associated with her first time having intercourse, he proclaims, “It will hurt, but it will be extremely awesome!” In its final third especially, as Prince Ning turns jealous and villainous, the movie’s wild violence spikes, though not enough to completely derail its carnival atmosphere, which comes across like an Oriental take on Werner Hedman’s Danish In the Sign of… 1970s sex comedies crossed with the aforementioned influences with maybe a little bit of Circle of Iron thrown in for good measure.

Sex and Zen is kind of bizarrely captivating, and not necessarily because of all the nudity and sex (though that certainly helps). It’s watchable chiefly because one never quite gets a firm grasp on where it’s headed. Part of this is no doubt a reflection of cultural differences, and part of it is undoubtedly just because it’s some disorienting combination of silly, poorly scripted and outright insane. So when Ruihu pops up and turns out to have another set of sexual running gear, and then starts flinging around and smashing massive wooden wheels with her firehose-length phallus, well… one just sort of shrugs and goes with it.

In the end, one can’t really recommend Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, at least not with a straight face. It starts to get into male and female sexual insecurities that cut across cultures and eras, but it’s too slapdash to emotionally connect, and while portions of it are certainly arousing, it doesn’t have, ahem, a lasting erotic charge. The degree to which one might feel truly cheated by a viewing, though, is dependent only on one’s company, level of alcoholic imbibement, and post-screening coital success level. For the full, original read, from ShockYa, click here. (China Lion/China 3-D Digital Entertainment, R, 113 minutes)

The idea of sexual swinging, or committed couples swapping partners, opens up all sorts of rich avenues for exploration of feeling, but the London-set comedy Swinging With the Finkels does so little of substance or sincerity with the subject that one starts to yearn for the comparative honesty of a lonely hearts drama with a forlorn guy swigging a beer and staring at a computer screen. In fact, the movie evinces no particular reason for existing other than to seemingly provide its pleasant but half-heartedly invested cast with paychecks, and perhaps serve as the answer for the trivia question of in which film Mandy Moore mock-masturbates with a cucumber.

Ellie (Moore) and Alvin (Martin Freeman) are a young, married white-collar couple seemingly suffering from a bit of the seven-year itch. Friends Peter (Jonathan Silverman) and Janet (Melissa George) are little help, the journey into parenthood having thrown something of a speed bump into their relationship. Seemingly because one attempt at “spicing it up” in the bedroom went awry (she wore sexy lingerie and lit mood candles, and he donned a fireman’s costume… ha!), Ellie and Alvin make the (entirely il)logical jump to swinging, eventually settling on a seemingly normal couple (Angus Deayton and Daisy Beaumont). After the Saturday night deed is done, things proceed but, magically, don’t get immediately better for Ellie and Alvin. What’s a committed but sexually frustrated couple to do?

Swinging With the Finkels is supposedly rated R, but it’s quite possibly the tamest R in recent memory, especially for a film dealing with matters sexual. Director Jonathan Newman’s movie is definitely the “fem” version of a swingers’ tale, with relationship mechanics valued much more over any possible prurient interests. Problematically, though, it also exists chiefly as a collection of nipped sitcom contrivances, from Ellie’s theatrically gay coworker (who gives her the initial idea of partner-swapping) and a montage of “zany” bad fits who respond to Ellie and Alvin’s sex ad to a forced-uncomfortable sequence in which an old person (in this case Ellie’s grandfather, played by Jerry Stiller) dispenses sex advice. Wow, how novel.

The script digs into none of these scenes with great aplomb, and it additionally requires Ellie and Alvin’s friends to nonsensically implode their marriage by having Peter tell Janet about a one-off affair, merely so there is some minor element of introduced contrast to Ellie and Alvin’s plight. Two grossly overwritten office pals of Alvin also serve this function, and an extremely flat shooting style and hammy music cues additionally do the material no favors. The Finkels manages to make both stanch, devoted monogamy and quiet singlehood look attractive — no small (or purposeful) accomplishment for a movie about swinging and its churned-up feelings. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Freestyle, 86 minutes, R)