If, as the saying goes, humor can be a great revealer of and conduit into hard, unspoken truths, then surely a parallel axiom could also be valid — that a humorist might be able to provide an important and clarifying look at heretofore muddied and jumbled realities. Such a hypothesis is born out in the form of Harry Shearer’s feature documentary debut, The Big Uneasy. A look at the true root causes of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, the movie, while a bit pedantic, nonetheless stands as an important correlative primary historical document, alongside Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Double Exposure, unrated, 98 minutes)

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and into the 1990s, few filmmakers captured New York City as lovingly as Woody Allen. The writer-director’s move across the pond to Europe, however, which began with 2005’s Match Point, has served him well, seemingly rejuvenating his creative spirits and resulting in a string of mostly engaging films. A charming, whimsical and beautifully shot romantic comedy, and a big rebound from last year’s muddled, disappointing You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Midnight in Paris is one of Allen’s top efforts of the new millennium, and a strong contender for an Academy Award Best Screenplay nod, which would be his 15th such nomination.

The story centers on a present-day American couple visiting Paris. Gil (Owen Wilson) is a hack Hollywood screenwriter who still harbors a wish that he’d given honest literature more of a try, and so is working on a novel. His fianceé is Inez (Rachel McAdams), and before a return to their Stateside wedding they’re enjoying some time relaxing with Inez’s parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy). The couple-to-be also meet up with a pedantic visiting professor and old friend of Inez’s, Paul (Michael Sheen), and while that duo reconnect a distracted Gil walks the streets of the City of Lights one night, where he improbably finds himself sucked back into 1920s Paris. There, he meets and drinks with a variety of his literary idols, including Ernest Hemingway (a captivating Corey Stoll) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), and falls sway to Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a muse seemingly passed from famous artist to famous artist.

Bewildered and enthralled, Gil tries to take Inez back to the identical spot the next evening, but the same opportunity doesn’t present itself with her around. Later, when it does, Gil learns the loose, stroke-of-midnight rule of this location-specific portal, and continues going back night after night, seeking advice on his novel and possibly falling for Adriana. Back in the present day, meanwhile, Gil’s absentmindedness exacerbates tensions with Inez, who also seems to be more and more enjoying the company of Paul. Against this backdrop, Allen sketches out a roundelay that tackles with warmth and a playful intelligence the gulf between heart and head in matters of nostalgia and love.

One must submit to relaxed rhythms of Midnight in Paris, which definitely echoes back some to Allen’s own The Purple Rose of Cairo, but that’s not at all a difficult task. Cinematographer Darius Khondji’s butterscotch hues wrap viewers in a warm embrace, and Allen highlights Paris’ beauty without turning his film into a gaudy travelogue. Most winning of all, however, is the movie’s special, psychologically intoxicating blend of amusing, speculative cultural asides (aided by some delicious supporting character work) with playful, more universal ruminations on time, space, yearning and human feeling. Allen makes audiences’ hearts sing for other eras, while also being thankful they still live in their own. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 94 minutes)

Wherever Tom Arnold goes in the afterlife he will have to answer for many embarrassments, but the unlikely response to what might be his biggest arrives in the form of Hard Breakers, a jaw-droppingly inane collection of half-sketched scenes masquerading as some sort of exercise in girl-power. Actually, that’s a cheap shot… Arnold’s role here is only a small one, but it’s still an undeniable stain on what has evolved into a surprisingly nice little career. The chief blameworthy party is first-time feature director Leah Sturgis, who, using Sophie Monk (above right) and Cameron Richardson as the instruments of her celluloid crime, ostensibly tries to craft a gender-reversal of all those romantic comedies where a young guy with a wandering eye eventually learns the benefits of intimacy and monogamy. Instead, Sturgis unleashes something woefully inept and stupendously unfunny — a movie that slots into that special sub-category of terrible, the one that calls out for alcohol and friends with an appreciation for barbed derision. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Freestyle Releasing, R, 98 minutes)

One needn’t have necessarily grown up with a dog who becomes uneasy prior to the arrival of a big thunderstorm to know that environmental occurrences and problems are often foretold by subtle shifts in behavior in the animal kingdom. Such is the working hypothesis in this investigative nonfiction mystery, which examines the baffling and sudden disappearance of honeybees from their hives, a disturbingly increasing phenomenon. The first of two new documentaries on the subject, the forthrightly titled Vanishing of the Bees, narrated by Oscar nominee Ellen Page, shines a light on a fascinating and important subject, but in the end analysis suffers a bit from some comparatively lax filmmaking, failing to provide the sort of detail which would more robustly engage the typical layperson viewer.

Part of the problem is that the film basically solves its central mystery at a certain point, and then leaves a bunch of correlative natural questions frustratingly unaddressed. That said, Vanishing of the Bees is still fairly interesting for casual foodies and the environmentally conscious alike, including as it does compelling subjects and thoughtful chats with Food, Inc.‘s Michael Pollan and Beyond Pesticides director Jay Feldman, among other interviewees. Like the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, it provides a remarkable glimpse at an uncommon profession, as well as sounding another cautionary note about the delicate relationship between humankind and Mother Earth. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For the trailer and information on tickets to the L.A. premiere, click here. (Hive Mentality Films, unrated, 87 minutes)

With its just-so production design, characterized chiefly by rust, and a gallery of weathered and otherwise stunted characters fumbling toward some vaguely defined senses of purpose or peace, Bloodworth, based on William Gay’s novel Provinces of Night, slots comfortably in the cinematic canon of Southern Gothic, wherein everything and everyone is dadgum country-fied, and, well, ain’t that interesting and grand? This isn’t to say that the film, a drama about the long shadows of alcoholism, familial neglect and demons unaddressed, is a terrible or hokey thing, just that its dramatic payoffs come across as relatively meager, and second fiddle to the sense of frozen-in-time place it seems chiefly concerned with conveying.

After abandoning his wife Julia (Frances Conroy) and three sons decades earlier, E.F. Bloodworth (Kris Kristofferson) returns to his dusty, rural Tennessee hometown, where his only real solace comes in the form of a relationship with the grandson he’s never met, Fleming (Reece Thompson, of Rocket Science). Warren (Val Kilmer), a drunken, philandering traveler in the mold of his father, is more open to reconciliation, but Boyd (Dwight Yoakam) and Brady (W. Earl Brown) are full of anger, and continually lash out at those around them. E.F. sets up shop in a trailer at the edge of his estranged wife’s property, and Fleming keeps occasional company with him, while also striking up a relationship with Raven (Hilary Duff), the daughter of a troubled party girl (Hilarie Burton). As the summer wears on and Fleming makes plans to leave town, tension mounts all around, and a few bad things eventually happen.

A lot of actor-screenwriter Brown’s adaptation is nicely restrained, but there are a couple false notes here and there (including Raven commenting on Fleming’s embarrassment with his beat-up car as a positive thing, something no teenage girl has ever done), and the movie’s solemn voiceover narration also overreaches at times. Additionally, Bloodworth ostensibly unfolds in the 1950s, but the director, Shane Dax Taylor, and other filmmakers seem intent on obscuring any degree of greater specificity that might inform the story, as if they’re trying (too hard) to lend Bloodworth a parabolic weight and significance that is beyond the grasp of its narrative. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 105 minutes)

Documentaries are great, in that they can shine a light on all sorts of niche subjects heretofore unexplored, but they can also be a major drag or bore, especially when their makers become too convinced of the grand, sweeping importance and inherent interest level of their subject matter. Case in point: L’Amour Fou, a hagiography of haute couture legend Yves Saint Laurent that played at last year’s Toronto Film Festival and this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Solemn to the point of utter suffocation, director Pierre Thoretton’s wildly tedious exploration of the French-Algerian designer– who studied at the feet of Christian Dior, and following his death briefly stood in line for ascension at his company, as artistic director — unfolds through the eyes of his business partner and mostly life-long lover, Pierre Berge (above right), but provides a maddeningly circumspect and vague portrait of the man in question. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC/Sundance Select, unrated, 104 minutes)

An unusual sort of prequel to the influential 1978 Hong Kong martial arts comedy Drunken Master, starring Jackie Chan and Simon Yuen, Chinese import True Legend, from respected fight choreographer and filmmaker Yuen Woo-Ping, arrives Stateside following a fairly disappointing theatrical run in Eastern territories, and it’s fairly easy to understand why. A bloated period piece epic that features a generally nice blend of CGI-assisted blood-letting and fantastical, Matrix-y punches in which people fly through support beams and stone fixtures, the movie never gets past or over the limits of its wooden, stilted set-up, and then, finally and damningly, wears out its welcome with a plodding and entirely unnecessary final act that offers none of the catharsis its makers seem to imagine it does.

If True Legend was trim and less possessing of a grim self-seriousness, it would work a lot better. But if, as it seems, part of the main intent or purpose of True Legend was really to explain why its protagonist turns to drinking in the first place (and hence is the “Drunken Master”), there are much better and faster ways to arrive at that conclusion than screenwriter Christine To concocts. After a fairly engaging and streamlined opening 75-80 minutes, the film winds on in excruciating fashion, charting his downward spiral — the sort of thing which would be compressed into a montage or pair of scenes in a more conventional American action movie — over the course of 35-plus more minutes. This allows for plenty of time for the movie’s endangered little kid to cry out “Father, stand up!” roughly 45 times, and said dad to eventually dispatch a goon squad of ‘roided-out Caucasian wrestler-types in his characteristic drunken/breakdance-style, all while the late David Carradine pops up in a pointless cameo, and yells things like, “Finish this Chinaman, once and for all!” None of this adds one iota of emotional heft or significance to the film.

A poor excuse for a legend explained, and too swollen and narratively unfocused to qualify as a martial arts treat outside of the most devoted and hardcore Eastern action genre demographic, True Legend proves that some backstories are perhaps best left untold and unexplored. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Indomina, R, 114 minutes)

Off-screen, Mel Gibson may or may not be a deplorable human being — and I tend to think on a certain level, in certain relationships, he kind of is, with the caveat that I additionally understand he’s also very much a guy in deep, deep pain — but the fact remains that he and his new movie, The Beaver, are uniquely suited for one another.



When Gibson, after a string of disastrous incidents in his personal life, mounted a comeback with last year’s Edge of Darkness, his first starring role in almost eight years, box office reception was notably muted ($43 million domestically, and only a grand worldwide total of $81 million), even though it was a revenge tale right in his crazy-eyed commercial wheelhouse. Later, he got very publicly booted from a cameo in The Hangover Part II. His bashing of women (both metaphorical and literal), and slurring of Jews, African-Americans and other minority groups seemed to have reached a boiling-over point; Gibson was toxic, persona non grata in Hollywood, at least on screen. Until an old friend came calling.

A hot spec script commodity some years back, praised in various outlets as one of Hollywood’s top unproduced screenplays, Austinite Kyle Killen’s debut effort at one point had Steve Carell attached for its lead role, of a seriously depressed toy company executive who, after a failed suicide attempt, takes to communicating with his family and coworkers solely via a beaver hand puppet. When Jodie Foster took over as director, however, she tabbed former Maverick costar Gibson as her leading man. So when even more… well, stuff from Gibon’s personal life hit the fan last fall, it briefly seemed The Beaver might conceivably be consigned to a straight-to-video release — which would be a shame, actually, since this is an intriguing and thought-provoking movie that deserves a wider audience.

Walter Black (Gibson) has for years suffered from extreme depression and possibly mental illness, and endured all sorts of treatments, to little positive effect. He’s mentally checked out of his marriage and family, and is at the end of his rope. When he comes to after another night of drunken anguish and hopelessness, Walter is confronted by the tough-love advice of the titular puppet (“You’re sick, on that much we agree — the question is, Do you want to get better?”), which he also voices, in a thick Scottish brogue. Slipping the Beaver onto his hand, Walter, having recently been kicked out of his house, returns to home and work, where his wife Meredith (Foster) and long-suffering second-in-command (Cherry Jones) try to adjust to his new, eccentric interaction.

Everyone at first thinks it’s some sort of stunt or joke, of course, but Walter hands them a card advising that he is under the care of a licensed psychiatric professional, and they should conversationally address the Beaver. Slight upticks in sociability and functionality are soon registered, and the declining fortunes of Walter’s toy company are reversed by a new line of “Mr. Beaver Woodchopper Kits.” Even as Walter establishes a rapport with his younger son Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart) through the puppet, though, his teenage son Porter (Anton Yelchin) — a smart but angry kid who keeps a list of Post-Its enumerating all the traits of his father of which he wishes to rid himself, and finds himself hired by valedictorian Norah (Jennifer Lawrence) to pen her forthcoming graduation commencement speech — remains aloof. Over time, too, the Beaver morphs into a less benign, more manipulative alter ego, impinging on Walter’s free will and already tenuous grasp on reality, and threatening to erase whatever newfound gains he’s made.

It’s difficult to think of a recent film that has the same sort of sociocultural import as The Beaver. Media cameos from figures like Matt Lauer and Jon Stewart help give the movie some scope and real-world mooring as Walter becomes an oddball media celebrity, and the outlandish meltdowns and wacky public behavior of Charlie Sheen doubtlessly also give The Beaver an element of popular currency. (“People love a trainwreck when it’s not them,” says one character.) Mainly, though, it’s Gibson’s aforementioned, publicly aired private failings that create this weird, super-channeled energy, and a sense that, watching him as Walter, you’re getting as close and as honest a look at some of the dark and desperate feelings of Gibson, the man, as you’re ever going to get. It’s a gutsy, captivating, highwire performance.

Tonally, The Beaver is an odd mixture of genres — it’s part dark comedy, part family drama and part social satire. Some of these strands are better developed than others, while others suffer from comparative neglect, or oversimplification. But the movie, in sum, works because it doesn’t short-change or soft-peddle its despair, and pivot into unearned sunny montages of a dancing and laughing reconciled family. It’s honest about depression, and mental illness. Its relatively dark ending, lined with a bit of bruised grace, feels appropriate, and oddly realistic, lending the film a sense of settledness. (Summit/Participant Media, PG-13, 91 minutes)

For a brief period of time, surrounding the 2004 festival premiere and commercial release of Garden State, his critically lauded writing and directing debut, it seemed as though Zach Braff’s career would be taking a hairpin turn, away from the manufactured, hyper-realized silliness of Scrubs and into the hinterlands of auteurdom. This pivot, and Braff’s second feature film behind the camera, was put on hold — at least for a while — by the life-support extension of the last two seasons of his hit sitcom, which came about late in the TV re-up cycle, and found Braff working a reduced load, handing off the baton to a younger generation of medical internists.

One of the movies he completed during this timeframe, however, provides an illuminating glimpse of the sort of subject matter that stirs and captures Braff’s interest. The High Cost of Living, from writer-director Deborah Chow, unfolds in French-speaking Montreal, where scruffy drug-peddler Henry (Braff), an American ex-pat living on an expired visa, leaves a party one night, makes a wrong turn and runs down pregnant Nathalie (Isabelle Blais). Panicked, and with his car full of all sorts of illegally obtained prescription pills, Henry drives off, and leaves her. He later returns, striking up a complicated relationship.

The High Cost of Living is vaguely reminiscent of Don Roos’ Bounce, another movie which addressed commingled grief and guilt, albeit in a slightly more pleasant or at least tempered fashion. While it avoids some of the big dramatic blowouts one might suspect given a logline synopsis of the story, Chow’s film is still fairly downbeat, and swollen with melancholy. If there’s a miscalculation, it lies a bit in the movie’s focus, which, had it been channeled more discretely through Nathalie’s eyes, could have proven more rewarding.

That said, The High Cost of Living is a complex and well acted story about awakened integrity and the sometimes hard, concrete costs that come with honesty, rendered all the more interesting for the jumbled sociocultural backdrop against which it unfolds. The fact that Henry is American, Nathalie and her husband Michel (Patrick Labbe) are French-speaking immigrants, and another key character and his family are Asian gives the movie an almost subliminal, take-it-or-leave-it undercurrent of political allegory, if one wants to engage the material on that level. Cinematographer Claudine Sauve, meanwhile, trades in a muted color palette, awash in blues, greys and darker greens, that works in concert with the material to effect a depressive, melancholic tone, where the accumulated burdens of life leave their mark, even when the “right” decision is made. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 92 minutes)

As the film industry has contracted, and the burden of financing shifted
away from companies and more onto creative individuals themselves,
American independent films of the past 10 years or so, whatever their
genre, have been typically characterized by a certain eagerness to
please. This isn’t entirely surprising. Like any other occupational
venture in tougher economic times, there’s an element of
self-preservation involved. Emergent filmmakers have a desire to keep
working, and so they craft stories, consciously or subconsciously, that
often play to the whetted appetites of a particular audience or
demographic.

Spencer Susser‘s feature directorial debut, Hesher, is not much concerned with such niceties. It’s not flat-out confrontational, per se, but it is warped, weird and given to neither easy explanation nor pat, sum-of-its-parts analysis. By various turns a shrewdly drawn coming-of-age drama and a full-tilt, gonzo exploration of the dirty, unfortunate reality that pain and disappointment visits everyone’s life, the movie — about a young kid coping with the death of his mother, and the vaguely sociopathic loner who forces his way into his home, moving in with said kid’s father and grandmother — cruises along solidly, for much of its running time, on the unlikely interplay of its two lead characters before finally losing its way a bit in the home stretch.

A colleague described Hesher, in less than flattering terms, as a knock-off of Chuck Palahniuk produced by people raised only on Sundance films, and that’s actually not a bad description, to whatever degree one is invested in or detested with the narrative. With his crudely drawn tattoos, stringy hair, facial scruff, penchant for elliptical aphorisms, and psychotic thousand-yard stare, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Hesher comes across as a sort of punk-rock Jesus or G.G. Allin disciple — or perhaps a Beavis & Butt-head acolyte who’s stepped down out of their cartoon suburban world into a slightly more grounded but equally scummy American suburbia. He’s an outsized character, at once original and representational, and to the extent one objects to dollops of ambiguity and abstraction liberally applied to a narrative of coming-of-age and familial reconciliation, they will find molehills or not outright mountains of frustration in Hesher. Hesher is real, yes, but it’s also somewhat best to think of him as a construct or a forceful change agent rather than attempt to make sense of all of his behavior.

The film’s third act isn’t quite as tightly drawn as it should be; rather than pull back and swing for a knockout blow, Susser seems to lose his nerve. He aims for a pay-off more in line with traditional settled-grief catharsis, which doesn’t quite fully connect, the way it’s constructed. Neither does the intimation of a potential relationship between Nicole (Natalie Portman) and Hesher make total sense. Reflecting back on this now, it’s hard to fully distill or explain these criticisms, except to simply say that, for me, the movie’s hold simply loosened considerably.

And yet, still, Hesher courses with a unique verve missing in many independent productions, hovering somewhere between outright success and “interesting failure.” An appreciation of feeling is what informs one’s affection for this movie, much more than a simple narrative engagement, and it taps into those raging, conflicted sensations of adolescence with considerable aplomb. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For an interview with Susser, meanwhile, click here. (Newmarket/Wrekin Hill, R,102 minutes)

How will hardcore birthers (I’m looking in your direction Orly Taitz, though wincing to do so) read dark and sinister intent into the uplifting true story of The First Grader, given that it’s set in Kenya, contains the words “birth certificate” and even, in its closing, winkingly evokes the possibility of someone like Barack Obama, whose ancestors call the country home, rising to the presidency of the United States? Who knows, though I’m sure it may spawn a particularly warped conspiracy theory on some Internet message board somewhere. For the sane among us, however, the good news is that this solidly put together adult-education drama will be safely off the radars of most lunatic-fringe dwellers, arriving as it does in a low-key theatrical release from National Geographic Entertainment.

Despite its exotic setting, The First Grader, directed by Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl), is not too far out-of-field for American arthouse audiences — it’s chiefly a drama of heartening, make-do cooperation and uplift, a movie about not just the illumination of education, but the power to bestow dignity that it also possesses. Naomie Harris and Oliver Litondo (above) each deliver engaging, full-bodied performances, and Rob Hardy’s cinematography makes wonderful use of existent light and the natural Kenyan landscapes, creating a compelling physical tableau against which the human drama can more realistically unfold. The true story of The First Grader serves as an important reminder that education does not come by way of a piece of paper, nor is it a fixed-point destination. Instead, it’s a lifelong journey. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (National Geographic Entertainment, PG-13, 103 minutes)

The presence of a very recognizable ensemble cast can’t save The Big Bang, a colossally strange film noir misfire that plays like a TV pilot run amok, and is bound to go down in history — to the extent that it’s remembered at all — only as the stumper answer to the niche cinematic trivia question, “In what film does Antonio Banderas have a sex scene with a waitress who spews jibberish about particle physics, and also share two separate scenes with a robe-clad Snoop Dogg and a robe-clad James Van Der Beek?”

Far and away the most interesting and involving thing about the nonsensical The Big Bang is its cinematography, from Shelly Johnson, who also lensed Jurassic Park III, Hidalgo and the recent remake of The Wolfman. Trading in big, canted angles and other imaginative framing, Johnson sketches a neon-lit urban hellscape that gives the material an electric charge otherwise lacking in its story proper. Even a score by ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, seemingly a big deal and nice fit, fails to connect. The Big Bang tries to inject the soupy moodiness of the noir genre with a surfeit of cool and edgy thrills, but, ironically, it’s actually just a big snooze. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay, R, 101 minutes)

Those who’ve ever seen Punk’d can attest to the improvisational comedy skills of Dax Shepard, who put both himbo bewilderment and mock outrage to good use for Ashton Kutcher’s hidden-camera show, which eventually launched him into costarring roles in proper big screen entertainment like Without a Paddle, Employee of the Month and Idiocracy. Shepard’s latest film finds him chafed by the constraints of comedy, however, and working to try to break out of the box into which he feels he’s been put by Hollywood. A low-budget, long-on-the-shelf, industry-satirizing mockumentary in which Shepard recruits a pal to help him mount a self-financed, Chuck Norris-type martial arts flick, Brother’s Justice meets with some mixed early success before eventually crumbling due to a lack of focus.

With supporting appearances by Tom Arnold, Jon Favreau and Kutcher, Brother’s Justice has considerable heart, pluck and amiable, ambling chemistry, and to the degree that one grades on a curve and takes those qualities into account, they’ll find some reward herein. It also has some quite funny bits, too, both small and seeded throughout. The chief problem, though, is that the film doesn’t have a well-defined angle driving it. Lip service is paid to the idea of Shepard having a love of martial arts since childhood, but the movie doesn’t convincingly portray this, or invest the concept with enough manic, obsessed energy. Neither does Brother’s Justice tap into or define the wounded ego of a comedian seeking industry relevance via overseas box office clout — another motivating factor with which it briefly flirts.

While Shepard has a certain shaggy charm, he unfortunately plays “himself” here as a total idiot, absent any true sense or grasp of the film world business realities involved in such a wild, self-financed venture. Ergo, while often amusing from scene to scene, all of the satirical underpinnings feel flat and undercooked, unattached to a more grounded reality. Diverting, improvisational, flight-of-fancy comedy is fine, but the mockumentary format requires a stronger, more focused and honed conceit that Brother’s Justice just doesn’t possess, alas. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Tribeca Film, unrated, 81 minutes)

A soupy, entirely unconvincing grab bag of unmotivated behaviors and unearned emotional payoffs, An Invisible Sign feels chiefly like part of some woebegone, misguided stab at indie credibility and image adjustment for star Jessica Alba, who sports infantalizing pigtails and playacts vaguely emotionally retarded throughout. A risible, nonsensical effort that tries to meld occupationally oriented coming-of-age drama with an emotionally stunted romance, the film collapses early on under the weight of yawning plotting and labored eccentricity. Several recent independent films, including Matthew Lillard’s Spooner and Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne’s Adam, have to varying degrees of success tried to mine this seam of wounded-soul/mentally askew romance, though none have particularly punched through in the commercial marketplace, and neither will this ill-considered entry. Receiving only a halfhearted theatrical release, An Invisible Sign will quickly and deservedly disappear from theaters, before baffling completist fans of its star when it hits home video and ancillary markets. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (IFC Films, unrated, 96 minutes)

A former high school teacher and novelist turned filmmaker, South Korean Lee Chang-dong has, with movies like Peppermint Candy, Oasis and Secret Sunshine, crafted a body of work ripe with mesmeric understatement, shining a light on quotidian pain and delight, and locating meaning as much in how his characters don’t react to certain situations as in any more active plotting. His latest film, Poetry, the Best Screenplay award winner at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, centers on a sixtysomething grandmother, Mija (Yun Jung-hee), who, after learning two bits of potentially devastating news, tries to center herself and find release in a poetry class at a neighborhood cultural center.

Laden with metaphor and seeded with a (culturally specific, some might say) passivity that is decidedly out of step and fashion with much American cinematic storytelling, Poetry isn’t explicitly a morality play, by any stretch of the imagination. Nor is it even really a movie about the slide of dementia, like Ken Watanabe’s Memories of Tomorrow, since the onset of Mija’s condition is so minimal, as presented here. Still, the film has a lyrical delicateness that marks it as something special, different and thought-provoking. Poetry is beautiful, just not for everyone. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Kino, unrated, 139 minutes)

A mélange of apocalyptic western, gothic horror and vampire action movie, Priest — decidedly not to be confused with the 1994 Miramax drama starring Linus
Roache — won’t win any awards for narrative originality, that much is certain. Based on TokyoPop’s popular graphic novel series written by Min-Woo Hying, the film nips liberally from everything from the Blade and Resident Evil franchises to The Searchers and Legion, director Scott Stewart and star Paul Bettany‘s previous collaboration. Still, while achingly familiar, Priest is streamlined and executed well enough to merit a pleased tip of the cap if not a rabid embrace from those comfortably within the movie’s demographic wheelhouse. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Screen Gems, PG-13, 87 minutes)

Everyone knows about the international muscle of Hollywood’s movies, but generally lost in all the talk about entertainment being the United States’ most dominant export is recognition of the somewhat amazing value and strength of transpositions of various American small screen hits, from Married… With Children to even, yes, The Nanny.

When Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal is tapped by Sony Pictures Television to help advise the producers of a Russian remake of his hit sitcom, he trips to Moscow, by way of a rabbit hole. Rosenthal arrives to find a rundown studio that looks vaguely like the dungeon from Saw, as well as writers and executives who seem unable or unwilling to culturally process the comedic opportunities or even the idea of a henpecked husband.

A charming and interesting real-life cultural mash-up, Exporting Raymond follows Rosenthal’s travails — from dealing with a costume designer who wants to use the show as a personal platform “to educate people about fashion,” the sensibility of characters’ costumes be damned, to casting hurdles that prove out the universality of several old showbiz maxims. With his owlish expressiveness and droll demeanor (advised to get kidnapping and ransom insurance, he’s freaked out that it apparently happens enough to go by the nickname “K&R”), Rosenthal is a warm and witty guide to this unusual travelogue, a sociocultural bauble which locates reserves of empathy where one might not expect. (Samuel Goldwyn, PG, 86 minutes)

If many modern actors frequently locate a personal commercial sweet spot and then mine that seam for all it’s worth, a lot of directors tend to do the same thing. Only a few filmmakers robustly embrace the sort of eclecticism that marked the careers of their early- and mid-20th century counterparts. After all, they want to continue working, and in an ever-competitive creative arena part of the dance of getting studios and/or financiers to keep giving you lots of money to make films is to have an identifiable “brand” or identity, be it as a peddler of comedy, action or hand-wringing dramas.

A notable exception to this line of thinking is Werner Herzog, whose intellectual curiosity and appetite for life drives him to follow up the award-winning nonfiction film Grizzly Man with something like the batshit-insane Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a series of small operatic shorts, and then the crime drama My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done. Amassing almost five dozen combined long- and short-form credits behind the camera over the course of his incredible career, Herzog is at his best when, tangentially or directly, examining the complex relationship between man and animal, or humankind and the intractability of nature.

His latest film, the astounding documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, allows him the opportunity to do this. For over 20,000 years, Chauvet Cave, in France, was completely sealed off by a fallen rock structure, its football field-sized interior littered with the petrified remains of Ice Age mammals. In December, 1994, a group of three explorers stumbled across the perfectly preserved structure, sensing an extremely faint draft and loosening rubble to gain entrance. The fascinating cave paintings they discovered — dating back over 30,000 years, almost twice as old as previous finds — were so pristine that researchers at first doubted their authenticity, until they were later confirmed by carbon dating.

Maintaining the integrity of the cave and this astounding cultural discovery of course became of paramount importance to the French government, who strictly limited seasonal access, declared certain portions too unstable and unsafe to explore, and installed an exterior door to preserve the atmospheric conditions. Herzog’s engrossing film, then, provides a spellbinding public record of this space, unseen by human eyes for millennia. Filming only from narrow metal catwalks that span the cave, Herzog and his skeleton crew utilize 3-D to capture the artwork in all its contoured glory. The images and feelings they evoke are in and of themselves stirring, but the mystery and imaginative flights of fancy only deepen when it’s revealed that researchers are able to identify one artist individually, by the palm prints he left, and that several of the images were painted at least 5,000 years apart.

A companion piece of a sort with Herzog’s recent Encounters at the End of the World, in which he tripped to Antarctica, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is — at once quite simply, and also in a fashion most complicated — a movie about human imagination, desire and possibility. It is about all the things that are deepest inside of us, as a species. Herzog’s thick accent — which vaguely sounds like what one imagines Arnold Schwarzenegger doing a Christopher Walken impression might sound like, or perhaps vice versa — gives the movie’s narration a fine gloss of bemusement that nicely counterbalances his more ruminative, intellectual musings. Yet Herzog also has a canny knack for pulling back, eliciting wonderment through silences, and allowing an audience to trip headlong into the images, losing themselves in their primitive beauty.

In his documentaries Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog worked as a kind of conjurer of elemental dread and awe, delving into modern man’s relationship with his surroundings, and what he views as the unforgiving harshness of the world. This film, which ranks among his crowning achievements, shows that that same sense of questioning has existed for all of humankind, and is innately within us, not merely a product of modernity. (IFC Films, unrated, 90 minutes)