A tonally heightened comedy of criminal hijinks, misunderstanding and male bonding/reconciliation, 30 Minutes Or Less is a manic yet middling comedy that elicits a few laughs but mainly exudes the impression that a better, more rigorous treatment of the same wild concept could have yielded something truly special. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Sony, R, 83 minutes)

A powerhouse drama set against the backdrop of a very complicated and muddied story, The Whistleblower is one of those dramas that induce wearied sighs, furrowed brows and worried thoughts about the default state of human nature. Inspired by actual events, it’s both a crusading cop investigatory thriller and a sort of surrogate, gender-politic struggle-for-equality tale loosely in the vein of North Country.

The story centers around Kathy Bolkovac (Rachel Weisz), a tough and exceedingly competent Nebraskan police officer who — facing a divorce, denied a job transfer and wanting to scrape together enough money to move and still be close to her daughter — takes a part-time assignment working as a United Nations peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia, where ethnic strife has left a largely destitute population distrustful of both one another and outsiders. Kathy’s expectations of helping to rebuild a devastated country and mostly assist in procedural matters are upturned when she uncovers what she believes to be a forced prostitution ring operated at least partially for the benefit of a corrupt local police office. While she labors to first find and then flip a frightened girl she can use as a corroborating witness, Kathy takes her concerns to her new mentor and confidant, Madeleine Rees (Vanessa Redgrave), who eventually loops in a friend and Internal Affairs investigator, Peter Ward (David Strathairn). As Kathy comes by more evidence, though, the layers of complicity and corruption disturbingly seem to widen even further, including UN contractors and throwing into doubt who at all she is able to trust.

The script, co-written by director Larysa Kondracki and Eilis Kirwan, offers up some squarely righteous and on-the-nose dialogue plus a fairly pat ending, propped up by multiple explanatory codas both general and specific. But The Whistleblower ably summons the distrust that victims of crime (especially of a sexual nature) and war have towards a system that turns a blind eye to their suffering and pain. The film doesn’t come by this lightly, with overwritten monologues of angsty exposition. Instead, it shows, and not just tells; there’s an intense sexual assault scene in which the violence is inflicted merely for the point of showing a group of women what happens when someone cooperates with authorities. Handheld camerawork further communicates the palpable anxiety and despair of this and other scenes.

A small bit of familial material with Kathy — her calling home to check in on her daughter — is perfunctory, and The Whistleblower is better once it sheds its obligations to this thread, no matter how rooted in real-life events it might be. The story is better served by pivoting away from “mere” maternal anger (i.e., the patronizing notion that Kathy is so doggedly invested in the case and the lives of these young girls because she’s separated from her own daughter), and tapping into a deeper, more fundamental rage over this deplorable sex ring, and entire idea of human trafficking. That sense of indignation, along with a well-seeded sense of who-can-she-trust paranoia, help give The Whistleblower both a nice emotional pull and overall sense of engagement and investment.

Channeling all that anger is Weisz, of course, who packages it alongside a determination, unshowy intellect and heartrending vulnerability. In this foreign land, far away from home, Kathy is a character that exists independent of her sexuality, even as she experiences womanly wants and needs, and her gender informs the manner in which others interact with her, and accept her investigation. It’s a strong central role, yes — the sort upon which awards nominations are built, definitely — but neophyte director Kondracki also crafts a grim and gripping movie that asks tough questions about the boundaries and responsibilities of occupying, ostensible do-gooders, and one all the more stomach-churning for the fact that it’s based on a true story. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 118 minutes)

There’s an odd and easygoing charm to Superheroes, a colorful new documentary which enjoys its world broadcast premiere on HBO on Monday, August 8. While in the narrative realm James Gunn’s Super, Peter Stebbings’ Defendor and Matthew Vaughn’s ultra-stylized Kick-Ass, among others, have examined the warped worlds and worldviews of those who take on a superhero guise without any particular special powers, Superheroes is a nonfiction look at those who don self-made spandex costumes along with alter egos, patroling city streets at night to stop evildoers and protect the innocent. An engaging if ultimately intellectually lightweight subcultural safari, the movie offers up something for and ultimately connects about equally with clucking gawkers and admiring comic book fanboys alike. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 82 minutes)

A special feature debut from multi-hyphenate Evan Glodell and a group of collaborators with whom he shares a long list of short-form credits, Bellflower is the sort of polished, distinctive freshman effort that unfolds with such cool assurance as to restore one’s faith in independent filmmaking.

Set in grubby Los Angeles, and gorgeously photographed in super-saturated, feverish tones by cinematographer Joel Hodge, working with a customized SI-2K camera, Bellflower centers on aimless best buds Woodrow (writer-director Glodell, sort of a more masculinized Jack McBrayer) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson), whose joint focus in life is the construction of a flame-thrower and a tricked-out muscle car, so that they can do damage with chicks after the apocalypse. (Yes, seriously.)

The film’s opening indicates quite plainly that some very bad things are going to happen. It then flashes back in time, charting Woodrow’s awkward courtship with a wild party girl, Milly (Jessie Wiseman, above left). On a dare/whim, they drive to Texas on their first date, while Aiden slowly nurses a crush on Milly’s friend and roommate, Courtney (Rebekah Brandes). Later, construction of their big-boy toys continues, until unraveling relationships bring different sorts of ruin to almost all involved.

For all its emotional honesty, there’s a certain ceiling for the film, since it eschews the heavy lifting of pointed interpersonal conflict for flashier acting out in its third act. And the cast/characters seem a bit old for some of their doomsday preoccupations, which aren’t delved into with enough specificity to illuminate Woodrow and Aiden’s true mental states. But no mind — the basic conflicts and jealousies here are timeless, and Bellflower is so superbly constructed and well acted that it basically exists to approximate the haze of adolescence and young adulthood, when the actions of emotionally charged-up boys and girls are dictated more by hormones than sense. Glodell and his cohorts will continue to grow up, and hopefully make even more interesting films together. (Oscilloscope, R, 106 minutes)

A tender, well sketched drama of familial reconnection and rebirth in the wake of tragedy, Julie Bertucelli’s The Tree, a French-Australian co-production set in the rural environs of the latter country, for the most part successfully balances the literal and metaphorical in its telling of coping with loss, and trying to move on after the death of a loved one. Engaging acting and some gorgeous and involving cinematography make this movie a treat for arthouse audiences. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Zeitgeist, unrated, 100 minutes)

Writer-director-star Miranda July’s follow-up to Me and You and Everyone We Know is another precious, peculiar, cunningly mundane arthouse bauble — a movie whose abstractions will undeniably baffle certain viewers while also eliciting smiles of bemused engagement from its intended specialty audience target.

Forced to wait 30 days before adopting a terminally ill cat, Paw Paw (who provides occasional narration to the proceedings, in a high-pitched, plaintive voice), live-in Silverlake sweethearts Sophie (July, above left) and Jason (Hamish Linklater, above right) find themselves suddenly overcome by all they haven’t accomplished in life. In preparation for their new pet, they quit the jobs they hate, but as the month slips by Sophie finds herself paralyzed by fear, and unable to complete the dance-a-day YouTube video project she so wanted to do. So she throws herself into an affair with a middle-aged man (David Warshofsky) who makes promotional signs for a living, while Jason gives door-to-door environmentalism a spin. When Jason is on the precipice of learning of Sophie’s infidelity, he tries to literally stop time, in order to prevent change.

Seeded in equal measure with playfulness and poignancy, The Future is a reflection on the accumulated burdens of generational anxiety, as filtered through a quasi-Dadaist, quasi-Absurdist sensibility. It’s about the panic of time becoming an active antagonist in one’s life, and how a seemingly well-matched couple reacts to that in different ways. Precocious and decidedly not always literal, the film requires a more active viewing experience than your typical indie dramedy; July wants to provoke parallel trains of thought as much as tell a simple story with these characters. Her efforts are never less than absorbing, however. And in a nod to the imponderables of its title, The Future of course doesn’t end in neatly packaged fashion, but rather the possibility of both heartache and uplift. (Roadside Attractions, R, 91 minutes)

If or when extraterrestrial aliens ever dissect the full and complete library of our entertainment options, they will surely be somewhat puzzled by our fixation, per capita, on lawyers, ER doctors and hitmen. Murder, of course, in theory represents the ultimate in dramatic stakes, but given our collective genre preoccupation with for-hire killings, one could be forgiven, from the outside looking in, for thinking this was a growth sector with no tangible ceiling. The latest movie to till this earth is Assassination Games, the first action entry from Jean-Claude Van Damme getting a bit of a Stateside theatrical shake in a while. It’s a credible enough genre entry that gives the “Muscles from Brussels” a nicer showcase than anything his erstwhile action-flick competitor, Steven Seagal, has had in recent memory, but it’s also a movie that drops the ball with respect to a lot of the conflicts that it sets up. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 100 minutes)

Born of a partnership between Ridley and Tony Scott’s production company, Scott Free, and YouTube, Life In a Day is a unique, user-generated documentary given formal shape by director Kevin Macdonald, editor Joe Walker and a small army of cataloging research assistants. The idea: to enlist the global community to capture and upload fragments of their lives on a single day, July 24, 2010, and then sift through the material to try to provide a fleeting snapshot of modern life, in all its dazzling arrays of form.

Culled from over 80,000 submissions, representing 4,500 hours of footage, Life In a Day ping-pongs from bustling metropolitan centers to some of the furthest and most remote corners of the Earth. What’s perhaps most impressive, in its own fragmented-shard way, is the clarity and quality of some of the shots, which indicate set-ups with specific ideas of composition. It’s interesting to ponder (if one is so inclined) the manner in which consumed film and television has in turn framed and influenced the way we witness and experience our own lives, and thus record it in our own photos and videos.

Small parts of Life In a Day dazzle, no doubt. It’s most interesting to see how incredible montages of seemingly pedestrian meaning can be winnowed from material from such a wide variety of sources. A “breakfast montage,” for instance, incorporates quick cuts and dozens of short shots, yet speaks volumes about the simultaneous worldwide similarities and differences in this most basic and shared of human acts, eating. A couple births are shown (a giraffe, a bird, and a human baby, the latter of which brings about the fainting of the video-recording father), and a marriage proposal is engagingly juxtaposed with romantic rejection.

There are moments, too, that are both nervy (a gay youngster calling his grandmother to break news of his homosexuality) and touching (a father lighting incense and goading his young son into ringing a bell to give greetings and respect to their obviously deceased wife/mother; an awkward and pimply Toronto teenager shaving for the first time, under the guidance of his father). Life In a Day also takes some time to get to know some characters, too, returning a couple times to a Korean man who has already traversed 190 countries as part of his mission to ride his bicycle across the world.

Still, Life In a Day is a movie that succeeds more in theory than practice. It’s a fabulous concept, but overall less than the sum of its parts, largely because the film slips back and forth, in kind of jarring fashion, between different modes of storytelling. It’s a perhaps impossibly difficult task, finding an order in this sort of disorder. And that’s emblematic of real life, one supposes. But there are more engaging examples of that paradox than Life In a Day, even for fans of reflected reality in cinema. (National Geographic Entertainment/Scott Free/YouTube, PG-13, 95 minutes)

With cable channels, poker is, literally, now on television every day of the year, oftentimes for many hours. Powered by an explosion in online playing, it’s a multi-billion-dollar industry, and a far cry from the late 1980s and early ’90s, when the game was in decline. These trends and more get spotlighted in Douglas Tirola’s All In: The Poker Movie, an achingly comprehensive documentary that unfolds in scattershot form, yet still remains entertaining enough to engage non-players, even as it neglects to provide a basic overview of different styles (the insidious, divisive creep of “Texas Hold ‘Em”!) or indeed a working definition of the game itself.

Celeb aficionados like Matt Damon, Jennifer Tilly, Denny Crum, Evander Holyfield and The Simpsons co-creator Sam Simon get face time here, but most of the interviewees are industry insiders, whose stories — about high-stakes, secret Mayfair Club matches, or Henry Orenstein’s card camera innovation, which helped make poker watchable for the layperson — are interesting and colorful. There’s plenty of high-falutin’ talk that wildly lionizes the game (I’m willing to entertain a description of it as “the epitome of capitalism,” and emblematic of the American spirit, but less certain that poker is “love, life, religion and politics, all wrapped up into one”), yet Tirola has clearly cast his net far and wide. Using Chris Moneymaker, a self-described “gambling degenerate” and Joe Everyman who pulled off a shocking victory at the 2003 World Series of Poker, as his narrative spine is also a good choice. It gives All In some semblance of normal heartbeat, even if a viewer doesn’t know a straight flush from a full house.

A darkly comedic anthology look at the sexual confusion, appetite, insecurity and frustration of a group of modern-day Chicago couples, Autoerotic is an at once breezy and deadpan little indie film that doesn’t overstay its welcome but instead delivers a few pin-prick precision assaults on both masculine and feminine foibles and preoccupations, and then skitters away, pleased and laughing quietly to itself. While not dynamically acted, it’s a subversive, mumblecore-type exploration of the boundaries of self-pleasure, and a nice little cinematic aperitif that could slot nicely with any number of tonier Hollywood explorations of lust run amok. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Midnight Films, unrated, 73 minutes)

War stories are often terrible and grim, but their high moral contrast allows room to compellingly highlight some of the best instincts and aspects of humanity, alongside the worst, of course. Set against the backdrop of one of those amazingly under-told stories of real-life history, the compelling and pedigreed Sarah’s Key, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, is a sort of cold-case ancestral mystery, except rooted in character and told with an admirable self-discipline often lacking in thematically similar films.

The story centers around Julia Jarmond (Scott Thomas), an American magazine journalist married to a Frenchman, Bertrand Tezac (Frederic Pierrot), and living in Paris with he and their daughter. Tasked with writing an article about the notorious Vel d’Hiv round-up of over 10,000 Jews which took place in the city in 1942, Julia learns that the apartment her family is about to move into was acquired by Bertrand’s family when its original Jewish occupants were rounded up and deported. Digging deeper, Julia presses Bertrand’s father, Edouard (Michel Duchaussoy), who was a boy at the time, for more information.

Intercut with this present day material is one story of one of the objects of Julia’s investigation, Sarah (Melusine Mayance), a young Jewish girl who is cruelly separated from her parents at an internment camp, but then escapes with a friend, finally seeking refuge with a reluctantly helpful French couple, Jules and Genevieve Dufaure (Niels Arestrup and Dominique Frot). Racked with a strange guilt she’s not able to entirely articulate, Julia becomes obsessed with the mystery of Sarah and her younger brother, and whether they might somehow still be alive. After several dead ends, Julia eventually tracks down a man, William (Aidan Quinn), whom she believes can help put her investigation to rest, but his assertions end up raising another question.

Based on Tatiana de Rosnay’s three-million-copy-selling novel of the same name, the film that Sarah’s Key will likely most immediately draw comparisons to might be Stephen Daldry‘s The Reader, another World War II adaptation centering around Nazis and dark secrets. Sarah’s Key, though, lacks that movie’s portentous self-importance, and it doesn’t bathe in pathos. It’s hardly upbeat, but the split structure, between past and present day, serves the material well, and director Gilles Paquet-Brenner threads his film with an emotional restraint that gives it room to breathe.

Another way of saying this, of course, is that Sarah’s Key unfolds with all the vagaries and pockets of slack one might expect to find in an adaptation of historical fiction. And it’s true that it does take a bit of an emotional adjustment to submit to the movie’s waxing and waning rhythms, and it also does occasionally lose its way — most often in awkwardly attempting to shoehorn in a subplot involving Julia’s unplanned pregnancy. Very much a literary device, and oh-so -ripe with metaphorical significance, this narrative strand never really comes together in a satisfactory way, and could have been jettisoned without damaging the film’s poignance. There’s also a deathbed-type familial confession that is dispiritingly on-the-nose, and almost a cliche of such scenes. If it’s lifted from the book it’s unfortunate and myopic case of fidelity; if it’s invented, it’s incredibly contrived and lazy.

That said, fine performances and an artful, emotional modulation make this drama feel real and lived in rather than mawkish. Scott Thomas’ fine bilingual performance anchors Sarah’s Key, but the real revelation is Mayance, who is natural and heartbreaking as the young Sarah. Her character, and performance, are each a reminder of the ancillary horrors of war — of innocence ripped away from children who should be protected for as long as possible from the malice and brutality of the world. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Weinstein Company, PG-13, 102 minutes)

Apart from Steve Carell, the cast of The Office hasn’t had much luck breaking out as front-and-center movie stars, perhaps because that hit show so resolutely commodifies and reinforces their ordinariness. Alas, A Little Help will not much help transform that track record, even though Jenna Fischer turns in an engaging, pleasantly addled performance as a self-medicating Long Island dental hygienist who must grapple with some serious life changes.

Written and directed by Michael Weithorn, the co-creator of The King of Queens, A Little Help centers around Laura Pehlke (Fischer), whose life gets turned upside down when her possibly philandering husband Bob (Chris O’Donnell) passes away and leaves her on shaky financial footing, further calcifying the emergent remoteness of her chubby 12-year-old son, Dennis (Daniel Yelsky). While a strengthened friendship and possibly more with her brother-in-law Paul (Rob Benedict, above left) develops, Laura also finds herself wrapped up in two lies — one told by Dennis at his new school, that his father was a 9/11 hero, and the other involving a malpractice suit over Bob’s death that Laura knows to be based on false pretenses.

Weithorn’s film aims more for winsome poignance than ha-ha funny, but, flatly, the more dramatic material and particularly the mother-son stuff here doesn’t especially play, in part owing to some performance issues, but also because the stakes are so ill defined. Much more interesting, if only kind of fitfully engaged, are the pressures Laura feels from her snippy mother and sister (Lesley Ann Warren and Brooke Smith, respectively), and the burgeoning relationship between Laura and Paul, an affable, henpecked guy who’s come to feel boxed in by life and his wife. Despite some interesting characters, A Little Help never quite convincingly locates a singular tone or point of focus that would kick it up and make it recommendation-worthy. For an interview with Weithorn, meanwhile, click here. (Freestyle Releasing/Secret Handshake Entertainment, PG-13, 108 minutes)

A debut at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and the closing night gala presentation at the recent Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Oliver Schmitz’s Life, Above All is a well constructed, emotionally rich, issues-oriented drama that unfolds through the perspective of a determined young South African girl. Based on Allan Stratton’s respected novel Chanda’s Secrets, the movie should receive modest embrace in arthouse and specialty markets drawn to foreign films, especially given the gravity and unfortunately enduring topicality of the tough circumstances with which its grown-up-too-soon protagonist grapples.

In a dust-ridden village on the outskirts of Johannesburg, 12-year-old Chanda (Khomotso Manyaka, above, quite good) lives with her mother, Lillian (Lerato Mvelase), and two younger step-siblings. The death of Lillian’s youngest child, a newborn little girl, has stirred up old chaos and addictions. Chanda’s alcoholic stepfather Jonah (Aubrey Poolo) has fallen off the wagon, convinced that Lillian’s breast milk poisoned his “good seed,” and killed their baby. Already distraught and depressed, Lillian becomes sick, and given Jonah’s philandering ways Chanda thinks her mother might have contracted the AIDS virus. When, on the advice of a local shaman, Lillian leaves town without her children, Chanda’s relationship with her helpful but increasingly judgmental neighbor, Mrs. Tafa (Harriet Lenabe), is further complicated by her attempts to intervene in the troubles of her best friend Esther (Keaobaka Makanyane), who has turned to prostitution.

Not entirely unlike Jennifer Lawrence’s character in last year’s critical darling Winter’s Bone, Chanda is forced into a situation whereby she must serve as a caregiver to younger (half-)siblings, while also attempting to modulate difficult circumstances further compounded by adults who have checked out. The narrative here, however, is a bit less bleak and more constructed for a sense of audience-friendly uplift, even given the potentially dark nature of some its subject matter. As the title of its source material might suggest, the film unfolds through Chanda’s perspective, and in this important respect Life, Above All has a guide worth following — sympathetic but untethered to mannered formality.

The story charts a fairly expected path but Schmitz, a South African-born filmmaker of German descent, obviously has a unique connection to the material — a sort of insider’s outside view, one might say — that keeps the movie from tipping over into the maudlin or contrived. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 102 minutes)