An unusually intimate peek behind the curtain of the Followill fraternity, Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon arrives at particularly bizarre time, coming as it does on the heels of the successful, Grammy Award-winning band’s cancellation of the entirety of its remaining U.S. fall tour dates after a disastrous show in Dallas in which lead singer Caleb Followill (below, second from right) suddenly left the stage. After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, the documentary bows on Showtime this evening, with repeat presentations scheduled over the next several weeks.

The sons of Betty Ann and Ivan Followill, a homemaker and traveling Pentecostal revivalist preacher, Caleb, Nathan and Jared joined forces with their cousin Matthew to peddle their own brand of Southern garage/roots rock, riding a couple well received albums to overseas touring success before truly punching through Stateside with 2008’s multi-platinum Only By the Night. Co-directed by Stephen C. Mitchell and Casey McGrath, the former of whom was a Nashville A&R rep who initially signed Nathan and Caleb to a record contract, Talihina Sky unfolds somewhere between fan document and tantalizing expose. Mitchell’s decade-plus-long relationship with the group gives him access to personal home videos, interviews and behind-the-scenes rehearsal and recording studio footage, not all of it flattering. And he and McGrath also make the decision to frame their film around the Followills’ return to one of their annual family reunions in rural Oklahoma, where various cousins, uncles, second cousins and uncles who might be second cousins provide — in their sometimes drunken ramblings — provide in cumulative a telling portrait of familial roots that implicitly if sympathetically offers up a psychological explanation of some of the Followill boys’ behavior and (latent) problems.

Still, even though Ivan and Betty Ann submit to interviews, and there’s a proper accounting of the circumstances that led in particular Nathan and Caleb from Jesus-praising hymnals to peddling “the devil’s music,” Talihina Sky unfolds at a bit of a remove, probably in large part because the band members are all producers on the project, and therefore reluctant to sign off on anything that lastingly portrays either them or their loved ones in too negative of a light. Caleb talks rather movingly about the shame of being poor as a child, and how that is definitely a motivating factor in his young adult life. And Ivan speculates about the impact that the divorce of he and his wife had on his kids. But every time Talihina Sky seems close to offering up penetrating insights — in regards to Ivan’s alcoholism, say, or any of the other Followills’ bouts with booze and marijuana — it pulls back, and throws in some old public access performance footage, or clips of a spirited game of horseshoes at the aforementioned reunion.

There’s a lot between the lines, in other words. In the sparse and seemingly free-association interview segments, Mitchell and McGrath obviously don’t press the Followills for a lot answers. So when Caleb ruminates about an A&R rep stopping by the recording studio and giving his opinion recording singles choices, and evocatively compares it to a smut film, there’s no clarifying follow-up. Similarly, some gripping tour bus footage in which one of the band members rips into Caleb for his drunken selfishness appears out of nowhere, and lacks any contextual placement.

Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon is a picture of a group of twentysomething guys in motion, and development. It lacks definition, and clarity. Still, that’s hardly a mortal sin, given the not-yet-cast maturity of its subjects. Both the sheer amount and quality of achingly personal footage here is easily worthy of a viewing by even casual fans of the group, or just those for whom modern music and the accompanying tour lifestyle holds interest. Just don’t expect firm answers about some of the problems that plague these guys. That speculation is left up to each individual viewer. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Phreak Creative, unrated, 86 minutes)

A pumped-up remake of the same-named 1984 vampire horror-comedy, director Craig Gillespie’s Fright Night (not to be confused with Fight Night) represents a well oiled machine of goosed senses that has no clearly defined motivating purposes, even within the genre confines of its own story. Fun and engaging performances from especially Colin Farrell, David Tennant and Anton Yelchin carry the film a great distance, but it eventually bogs down courtesy of loosely defined stakes and poorly incentivized action. Overall, the story feels beholden to a series of character choices and
actions that make no particular sense. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Touchstone/DreamWorks, R, 105 minutes)

If one has on their “bucket list” seeing a live-action, achingly precious ensemble drama in which a butterfly recites some of the lyrics to “I Want Candy,” then they should definitely see Cafe. Then, and only then. Actually… you know what? They may want to hold up and wait a bit longer, rolling the dice to see if some other enterprising would-be auteur works that left-field tidbit into their armchair-philosophizing cinematic treatise on paying it forward or embracing life or some such malarkey. A sincere and wildly self-serious film that seems to chiefly exist due to some pact/dare to do a hiatus-schedule movie together that erstwhile lovers Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jamie Kennedy forged on the set of The Ghost Whisperer, this Cafe should have its beverage license revoked, no matter the lack of alcohol.

The story unfolds entirely in a West Philadelphia coffee shop (insert The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air joke here), where Claire (Hewitt) works, an in-debt druggie (Garrett Lee Hendricks) falls under the dark sway of a dope-slinging former pal (Kennedy), and a nameless writer (Richard Short) observes a couple (Michaela McManus and Derek Cecil) enjoy some post-movie banter despite the fact that one of them is married. Other characters kind of drift in and out, and the film’s big putative shock/twist occurs when a girl (Madeline Carroll) pops up on the laptop of a dweeby guy (Hubbel Palmer) and tells him he’s an avatar, and that his entire world/life (and that of those around him) doesn’t exist. He resists her revelation, but engages in a series of tests and conversations, and eventually comes to believe her. But should the audience?

Writer-director Marc Erlbaum — who one has to assume is a recent film school graduate who wrote plenty of tortured poetry in high school — is clearly aiming for some grand metaphorical statement with Cafe, but his reach far exceeds his grasp. Nothing about the computer girl’s revelation (whether real or phony) particularly deepens or colors any of the action we see unfold (even after she directs her chubby confidant to tell Claire the same things she told him), and the movie’s insights consist of yawning bromides like, “There is no more brilliant light than that which follows darkness.” Wow, deep. The film’s ending, meanwhile, opts for both cheap melodrama and an additional twist, which hints at yet an additional layer of hokey artifice.

Stooping to the level of the material, Erlbaum’s cast does Cafe no great favors, apart from the young and talented Carroll, who radiates an unfussy trustworthiness and benevolence a cut or two above the cheap, college-level Philosophy 101 nonsense she’s pitching. Hewitt is lovely and flirty, which casts a bit of sunshine on a couple brief moments (not even entire scenes), but as her friend-zone-trapped coffee shop coworker Todd, Daniel Eric Gold telegraphs and overdials the bumbling nervousness, almost to the point that you want to reach into the screen and punch him. The single, cuts-both-ways bemusement of Cafe comes by way of Kennedy. Cast against type as a thug, he seems to be using the movie as some sort of low-fi acting exercise, so for a while it’s actually cool and kind of interesting to see him underplay things in several scenes. The problem is that he also mumbles all of his dialogue, apparently doing his impression on Fenster from The Usual Suspects, and that gets old rather quickly — kind of like all of Cafe‘s stale offerings, actually. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Maya Entertainment, PG-13, 101 minutes)

What would possess a person to stay and live in (or move to) a small, dusty town in the scorching Death Valley region of California, with a population of 35? That question is at the heart of Nick Brandestini’s Darwin: No Services Ahead, about a same-named, dried-up burgh at the end of a weathered road on the outskirts on a nearby mountain range where the government tests top-secret weapons. A unique and in some respects staggering work, Darwin is an involving portrait of people propelled from society by various tragic turns, and yet also curiously bound together by their estrangement.

When, in the spring of 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama was captured on audiotape making comments about small towns whose jobs had dried up and vanished, and were thus characterized by a populace with antipathy toward outsiders or those different than them, and clinging to guns and religion, he was in theory speaking about rural Rust Belt voters, but there are certainly significant overlaps with some of the denizens of Darwin. The remarkable thing about Brandestini’s humanizing movie, though — which also recalls David Lynch’s web-produced Interview Project, co-directed by his son Austin — is that it doesn’t sit in superior judgment of them, even as it slowly reveals some of their cracked and warped thinking.

Monty Brannigan, a salty ex-miner who’s lived in the town for almost 60 years and is old enough to remember its wild(er) roots (after several openings and closings, the mine shuttered for good in 1977), lives in as much of an unexamined cocoon as he can with his second wife, Nancy, estranged from his two adult children. Hank and Connie Jones, a couple with seven previous marriages between them, give occasional town tours, and take care of Connie’s transsexual “son,” Ryal, and his partner, who are contemplating a move. Susan Pimentel holds the town’s one real job, as postmaster. (Michael Laemmle, meanwhile, the grand-nephew of Universal Studios co-founder Carl Laemmle, oversees the 55,000-gallon water tank and single-pipe, gravity-fed waterline that descends from the mountains and serves as Darwin’s literal lifeline.) These and other interesting characters serve as a reminder that certain pockets of America are not for the hearty and hale, but for people — consciously or not — looking to avoid or run away from something.

Brandestini doesn’t load up his movie with fancy directorial gimmickry, or even prod his interview subjects with a seemingly specific agenda, instead leaning on an ethereal Southwestern-inflected score from composer Michael Brook for mood and just letting them talk. The skillfully edited result is fairly remarkable. A history of the town emerges first; its namesake was Dr. Erasmus Darwin French, a U.S. Army deserter who headed west during the Gold Rush and spent years (unsuccessfully) mining in the area. When silver was discovered nearby in 1874, the town briefly boomed, achieving its peak population of 3,500 in 1877. Then, in a roundabout way, colorful unseen supporting characters are illuminated through survivor’s memories. One Darwin dweller who passed in 2003, Greville Healey, lived in a hollowed-out metal water tank, having been “banned” from living in a home (trailer) after burning two of them down while falling asleep with lit cigarettes.

Finally, of course, the characters themselves come into crisper focus — with edifying details and sometimes shocking stories about their pasts, and ruminations (spoken and sometimes editorially implied) on what’s drawn them to and/or kept them in Darwin. There are few explicitly religious zealots in the mix (fistfights or the threat thereof seem more likely to broker peace than the blessed holy scripture), but more than a handful of Darwin residents confess a belief in apocalyptic, doomsday scenarios. To that end, one gentleman leaves a variety of loaded handguns, rifles and shotguns scattered around his home; another, for reasons unclear, has buried his guns outside of his trailer, in the desert. It’s fascinating and more than a little moving to contemplate the histories and dilemmas of all these people. They are by degrees damaged souls, yes, but in their basic needs not so different from you or I. (Nick Brandestini Productions, unrated, 86 minutes)

The latest big screen iteration in a character that has held a grip on fan imagination for almost eight decades, Conan the Barbarian is a full-bodied piece of throwback sword-and-sorcery entertainment that dutifully meets its target-demographic quotients for nudity and violence, but otherwise inspires little in the way of crossover thrill or appeal. A convincing backdrop can’t completely save a narrative stuck somewhere between unapologetic pureblood retribution and something a bit more ambitious, just as neither can Jason Momoa — who has a certain snarling charisma that, combined with his well honed physique, nicely matches the needs of the part — or the wasted presence of Rachel Nichols. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, R, 112 minutes)

In a world where religion and politics often divide folks quite nastily, sports — and of course in particular sports heroes — can serve to unite and uplift people, especially if their field of competition is international, and therefore allows for a degree of nationalistic fervor to creep into play. Such was certainly the case with Ayrton Senna, a fiery and hard-charging Formula One racing star who rose to prominence and a certain level of domination in the sport in the 1980s and early ’90s, serving as a rare beacon of pride and hope for his homeland of Brazil. A new documentary bearing his name — and the not undeserving stamp of Audience Award prizes at both the Sundance and Los Angeles Film Festivals — tells his story, in a unique and interesting way that doesn’t necessitate an abiding occupational interest in racing. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Universal/ESPN Films, PG-13, 104 minutes)

A cinematic smart-bomb of heavily processed yet still not entirely inescapable sunny uplift, Glee: The 3-D Concert Movie mixes almost two dozen energetically pitched musical numbers from the hit FOX series’ recent spate of concert dates with laudatory audience testimonials and footage of three different teenage fans for whom the show’s embrace of diversity and individualism has made a difference. The movie is chiefly just a cash-grab hymnal to the choir, but briskly paced enough to still remain inoffensive to those outside of its prescribed demographic. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 83 minutes)

Coming off the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, author Ken Kesey in 1964 set off on a road trip across the United States with a bunch of like-minded friends — a renegade group of counter-culture truth-seekers known as the Merry Pranksters. The ostensible target or end-point destination of their journey was the World’s Fair in New York City, but in truth this, ahem, trip was as much about the hedonistic experience of the open road as it ever was about getting to the other side of the country. Poised somewhere between the beatnik and hippie generations, Kesey and his clan — including Neal Cassady, the central figure immortalized in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road — intended to make a documentary about their expedition. Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place is a rangy, messy sort of snapshot memoir of that unfinished work, pieced together under a spate of new and collected interviews by filmmakers Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood.

A presentation at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Magic Trip is most notable as a historic document, since as a stand-alone movie it mainly succeeds in just making one never want to do drugs. At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in what would later be revealed to be a CIA-funded study of psychoactive medications at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. He would trip through LSD, Psilocybin, mescaline and alpha-Methyltryptamines, among other substances, and some of the reel-to-reel audio recordings of those post-dosage discussion sessions (including one in which Kesey pontificates about the tape recorder’s reel serving as its brain) make for a trippy, slurry delight. The build-up to the road trip, too, is interesting, as Kesey and his pals purchase a big school bus, name it “Further,” remodel the interior, deck it out in wild colors, and even retrofit it with an exterior storage appendage and a sort of turret.

Soon we’re off, and on the road. Well… sort of. Kesey and company, totaling about 14 or 15 in all, run out of gas at the end of his property, which is perhaps an inauspicious and somewhat telling opening to their voyage. They finally get going, though, and the 16mm footage of their progress is often wild and weird. Since no one on the trip really knew how to use the camera (or the sound equipment, which was a big obstacle and the chief reason that their planned documentary never happened), there’s a decided lack of stuffy formalism or composition to the captured footage; it’s wildly subjective, but offers sometimes quickening glimpses into the mindsets (and maybe even souls) of those operating the camera at any given moment — zooming in on a fellow traveler’s ample bosom (presaging the “free love” movement, there was plenty of partner-swapping along the way), a befuddled gas station attendant, or the swirling detritus in a pool of water.

Possessing a handful of these sorts of unique moments, Magic Trip connects intermittently as a fascinating piece of captured history, a sort of “prima facie” document of the cresting impulses that would eventually take take form in the hippie movement of later in the 1960s and ’70s. Overall, though, it’s just a self-indulgent and kind of boring mess. Gibney and Ellwood don’t show their interview subjects, and while this tack sometimes works to the benefit of the material — most recently in Senna, for instance — here it has a distancing affect. Since so many culled interviews are from participants we see on screen in the captured footage, failing to show them robs the movie of a chance to carve out more discrete personalities. As a slice of Americana, there’s some measure of value to Magic Trip, but mostly it’s just another artifact of boomer self-obsession, and a reminder of their heavy hand in our current national predicaments. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Magnolia/History Films, R, 107 minutes)

Anselm Kiefer and the notion of the venerated artist more generally is celebrated in Sophie Fiennes’ documentary Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, a kind of ethereal, meandering nonfiction look at the aforementioned German painter and sculptor. Attempting to mine greater meaning out of the minutiae of artistic production, this glacially paced film will hypnotize some with its often beautiful compositions and mesmeric rhythms, but mostly confound general audiences, and those desiring a pinch more of a conventional biographical hook upon which to hang the hat of their captured interest.

Kiefer isn’t necessarily what you’d call a widely known commercial or pop artist, but casual art world viewers expecting a lot of insight or contextual explanation of Kiefer’s work will be sorely disappointed. Narrated by Klaus Dermutz, Fiennes’ film is an almost oppressively removed and arty thing in and of itself. Save for a mid-film segment in which Kiefer submits to queries from an art historian, the movie is otherwise composed largely of shots and sequences that track around its subject’s work.

Fiennes’ movie is supposed to kind of ironically showcase the gritty and often mundane processes required to transform elements into art, into something grander than their mere parts, and in doing so at such an emotional remove (perhaps?) serve as a parallel commentary on cinematic creation. But the sad fact remains that this is just a brutally unengaging forced expedition. Some of the images themselves are quite attractive to look at, but when people attack the ivory-tower elitism of academic treatises, it’s works like Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow about which they are speaking. One leaves with the rather remarkable but unpleasant feeling of simultaneously having not learned much, and yet also having contempt for what they have gleaned. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Kino Lorber, unrated, 105 minutes)

When critics use the shorthand phrase “festival film,” in either praise or derision, they essentially mean movies like writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green’s feature debut, Gun Hill Road. From its evocative title and kind of self-consciously gritty style to its blowout emotional moments and hook-y social issue conceit transposed to a working-class familial setting, the film seems constructed in moralizing fashion to pull dramatic levers and kick-start off-screen dialogues, so it’s no particular surprise that it played in dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Its failure to land a top-tier indie distributor, however, speaks to the movie’s familiar qualities and the unfortunate fact that — despite some engaging performances — its narrative just doesn’t have enough oomph to leave a lasting impact. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Motion Film Group, R, 87 minutes)

The differences between French cinema and Hollywood studio offerings are various and sundry, but perhaps best illustrated by something like Rapt, a sprawling and inventive kidnap drama which doesn’t so much deliver an adrenaline shot of nervy thrills as steadily ooze disquieting tension over the course of its two-hour running time. Watching this superb high-wire balancing act unfold, one is struck by the myriad ways American thrillers typically angle for car chases and other jolts of immediacy, even if it doesn’t always make sense within the confines of the narrative. So when word of a planned English-language remake of Rapt broke not long before its slotting at the City of Lights City of Angels (COLCOA) Festival in 2010, it elicited both tingles of anticipation (it’s rich material) and knowing sighs of all the misguided compromises and tweaks that would almost certainly distill the grim effectiveness of writer-director Lucas Belvaux’s morally grey film.

Nominated for four Cesar Awards in its native France, including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Film, Rapt was inspired in part by the real-life 1978 kidnapping and rescue of businessman Edouard-Jean Empain. Its story centers around Stanislas Graff (Yvan Attal, above), a wealthy, powerful and politically connected industrialist/CEO with a couple dark secrets (a mistress, an affinity for gambling) that a group of criminals may have used as leverage in their plot. On the eve of a trip abroad with the French president, Graff is kidnapped in a brilliantly executed snatch-and-grab on a city street. His kidnappers want cash, and lots of it, so they promptly cut off his middle finger to show the police and Graff’s wife Francoise (Anne Consigny) that they mean business.

While the particulars of the ransom are being hashed out, the man charged with overseeing Graff’s corporation in his absence, Andre Peyrac (Andre Marcon), tries to walk a tightrope between legitimate concern and the protection of broader, multi-national business assests. As tabloids threaten to get hold of some of the less than flattering particulars of Graff’s personal life, Peyrac worries about how it will impact the value and worth of the company. The police, meanwhile, often seemed more concerned with merely apprehending the kidnappers and holding them up as a public example than actually ensuring Graff’s physical well-being.

What’s most remarkable about Belvaux’s film is the way it habitually avoids pat judgments about its characters, while also coming up with interesting story twists and simultaneously burrowing deeper and deeper into its characters’ individual emotional states. No one gets off easy here. It spoils nothing, really, to say that Graff is separated from his kidnappers much earlier than the film’s final reel, leaving his family and others to grapple with the changes in their lives, and the fact that this act is not some discrete threat to be overcome and shelved away, but rather a stone thrown in the placid pond of their privileged existences, with ripples spreading farther and father after the fact, and in unknown directions.

Attal gives a superlative performance, morphing from cocksure captain of industry to an emaciated and ruminative victim of prey, and Marcon and the rest of the cast are similarly effective in projecting the interior monologues of their characters. It will be interesting to see who plays the role of Graff in Rapt‘s American remake, but it’s almost certain that the film will be injected with the sort of muscular, pop-out set pieces that chip away at the opportunity for the sort of unique nonverbal connection that Rapt affords. It may yet land in the right hands (witness the artful Swedish film Let the Right One In and its equally beautiful American counterpart, Let Me In), but Rapt should definitely be given a chance by American fans of quality arthouse cinema. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Kino Lorber, R, 120 minutes)

A sprawling, Los Angeles-set, somewhat self-consciously multi-ethnic drama of struggling immigrants from writer-director Yong Mun Chee, Where the Road Meets the Sun is a movie which means well, in unspooling its story of hard-knock, off-the-grid America, and both the unique opportunities and special perils that presents for those with headstrong dispositions. Unfortunately, despite some relaxed, inviting performances — including from Luke Brandon Field and Laura Ramsey (above) — the film repeatedly identifies plausibility as an enemy, and never truly locates a compelling enough through-line to hook and pull an audience through from beginning to end. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Big Machine Films, R, 93 minutes)