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)

For those attuned to such things, yard sales often carry their own metaphorical moroseness, silently weighted down as they are with the broken dreams of a busted-up family, unwanted move or failed business venture. It’s against this backdrop that the dramedy Everything Must Go unfolds, telling the story of an alcoholic businessman, Frank Porter (Will Ferrell), who loses his job and finds himself locked out of his house by his fed-up, filing-for-divorce wife, with all his possessions stacked on the lawn. Instead of moving on, Frank just sort of hangs out and starts drinking, waiting for a life epiphany and killing time with Kenny (Christopher Jordan Wallace, son of the late Notorious B.I.G.), a neighborhood kid, and Samantha (Rebecca Hall), a pregnant newcomer to the neighborhood.

Taking a break from more conventionally ribald comedies, Ferrell gives a solid performance here, and in his feature film debut, writer-director Dan Rush strikes a nice balance between quiet, inwardly-reflected comedy and something melancholic, tinged with an unarticulated desperation. The film isn’t really all that serious about Nick’s alcoholism, but one doesn’t mind terribly — at least until a putative catharsis in the final act, which arrives falsely, hinging on a narrative pivot with Nick’s sponsor, Frank (Michael Peña), that is simply not believable. If life, as John Lennon said, is what happens while you’re busy making plans, it’s also, in its simplest terms, the sheer accumulation of stuff. Pleasantly offbeat but not aggressively so, Everything Must Go showcases that axiom, in both the material and figurative senses. (Roadside Attractions, R, 96 minutes)

Wiry and kind of owlish at the same time, looking a bit like the physical model for the animated character of Scrat from the Ice Age films, John Hawkes is a bonafide character actor — someone whose face a lot of filmgoers might recognize, but not quite be able to place. That’s in the process of changing.

Hawkes has had success and glowing media notices before (Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know was the darling of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival), but achieved a whole new level of breakout attention last year with his turn in Winter’s Bone, for which he was eventually nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. Another small festival film, shot in 2008 but only now winding its way to theaters, the stirring Earthwork affords Hawkes the opportunity to showcase his talents front and center, as a leading man. If there’s justice, this unfussy drama will entice a sizeable arthouse audience, and perhaps as a result help pave the way for more lead roles for Hawkes.

Based on a true story, and set mostly in the 1990s, the film focuses on Kansas “crop artist” Stan Heard (Hawkes, above), whose unique, living canvases can sometimes encompass hundreds of acres. Despite being costly, the other major dilemma such temporary art presents is that it almost always requires aerial assistance to be seen properly, meaning that the only way Stan can monetize his work is through photographs. Struggling to support his wife Jan (Laura Kirk) and seven-year-old son, Stan decides to take one last roll of the dice, hoping that a no-cost bid to clean and beautify a property owned by Donald Trump in New York City will bring him the sort of national publicity that could put he and his family on financial terra firma. He wins the contract.

Taking out a second mortgage on his home, Stan relocates for a couple months to his new work site, an abandoned lot on the Upper West Side. There, he discovers a group of homeless squatters, inclusive of a troubled schizophrenic known only as Lone Wolf (James McDaniel). They regard him with squirelly confusion at first, but eventually their curiosity gets the better of them, and they join Stan, helping in his work of art. Even with their occasional assistance, though, Stan’s success is far from guaranteed. Financial setbacks, home pressures and the uncertainty of any wider recognition funnel towards a finale that is at once heartrending and uplifting.

Earthwork is somewhat of a piece with the early films of David Gordon Green, George Washington and All The Real Girls. (It also recalls the criminally underseen topiary documentary A Man Named Pearl.) It’s not quite as steeped in ephemeral arthouse postures, but it’s gorgeously photographed, by Bruce Francis Cole, and its unhurried yet confident rhythms indicate a powerful and fortifying belief in the material, and the universality of its emotional connection. Using a cast peppered with a few non-professional and/or neophyte actors, writer-director Chris Ordal does something a lot of young filmmakers either can’t do, or consciously try to avoid — tell a simple story, simply, and without overindulging in stylistic gimmicks or emotional manipulation. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Shadow Distribution, PG, 93 minutes)

A sort of poison pill for arthouse enjoyers of square-jawed foreign film literalism, Italian import The Double Hour, which scored three top prizes at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, is a woozy and engaging romantic mystery loosely in the vein of Wicker Park, Swimming Pool or even Jacob’s Ladder. It’s not for all tastes, but the movie’s superlative lead performances give it an undeniable hold.

The film starts out as a seemingly fairly straightforward drama of lonely hearts disengagement. At a speed-dating event, mousey, unhappy hotel maid Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport, above left) meets the mysterious Guido (Filippo Timi, above right), who turns out to be a widower and former cop turned security guard. They circle each other cautiously, seemingly still marked by past hurts. Guido eventually makes a move, but it’s at his place of business, where a group of robbers burst in and menacingly hold them at gunpoint. After a gunshot, we jump forward a couple of weeks, and follow Sonia as she tries to put her life back together following Guido’s death.

Soon, however, strange things start happening. A picture of the two of them that Sonia can’t recall ever being taken surfaces, and she starts hearing unusual noises, and then seeing Guido. When her friend and coworker (Antonia Truppo) commits suicide, it seems to hearken back, in bizarre fashion, to a similar horrific incident she earlier witnessed. Is she going insane? Is Guido actually alive? Is a cop pressing for more answers regarding the incident trying to ensnare her in a lie, or merely confuse her?

The Double Hour‘s lead performances make it an involving head trip — a thought-provoking movie at its core (arguably) about the corrosive effects of guilt. Timi, best known to American arthouse audiences for his portrayal of Benito Mussolini in Marco Bellochio’s Vincere, here gets to sort of play both lion and lamb, as his arc takes him from a mysterious (and potentially dangerous) character into more reactive territory. Rappoport, meanwhile, has a face that haunts, not easily yielding answers or giving comfort. The uncertainty, romantic and otherwise, that the film evokes will be queasily familiar to anyone who’s looked upon a lover and wondered, “Who is this person?” For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 95 minutes)

It’s not just about the free, high-end swag for celebrities, although that’s certainly nice. Of the many perks and privileges they are afforded, one of the more precious ones that can’t be entirely quantified is the professional line-jump pass that actors receive to jump behind the camera and into the director’s chair. Trading on their name-recognition value, they have instant credibility with an assortment of potential financiers, easily landing the sort of important creative meetings for which hundreds of would-be auteurs would punch out their own mothers.



Their efforts are typically small, independent-minded passion projects. This can result in some strange and pretentious trainwrecks (Nicolas Cage‘s Sonny comes to mind), but also all sorts of worthwhile little curios, from arresting character pieces like Joey Lauren Adams‘ Come Early Morning to deeply affecting dramas, like Gary Oldman’s Nil By Mouth and Tim Roth’s The War Zone. Toeing the line somewhere between these two poles is Sympathy For Delicious, Mark Ruffalo’s unusual feature film directorial debut, and the winner of a special directing prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Well acted but more dawdling and frustrating than dizzily engaging, this seriocomic entry is an arthouse effort through and through.

The story centers around an up-and-coming Los Angeles deejay, Dean O’Dwyer (Christopher Thornton, who also wrote the script), who is paralyzed from the legs down in a motorcycle accident, sinks into a deep depression, ends up on skid row, is revealed to have faith-healing powers, and then joins a punk-revivalist band. (So, yeah… another one of those stories, in other words.) While there are a few touches of dark comedy here and there, those expecting a more sharpened religious satire, a la something like Saved!, will come away disappointed. Tonally, Sympathy For Delicious is more than a bit of a mess. The movie presents its supernatural premise in a somewhat intriguingly unprepossessing way, but abandons early on any deeper exploration of its crisis of faith or, indeed, just human existence, in order to dive down the rock-n-roll rabbit hole — all to occasionally entertaining but in the end hopelessly middling effect. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Maya Entertainment, R, 96 minutes)

A deliberate end credits crawl extends Hoodwinked Too! to 87 minutes, but nothing else about this manically pitched animated sequel seems near as calculated or particularly well thought out. An annoying, exceptionally unengaging ball of noise that lampoons broadly and poorly, Hoodwinked Too! is an even more dispiriting entry into the marketplace than its narrative failings render it, insofar as it seems to evince no real reason of existence beyond its connection to a predecessor that turned a tidy profit. Director Mike Disa exacerbates the movie’s yawning emotional disconnect by staging breathless action bits that favor movement above all else. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Weinstein Company, PG, 87 minutes)

The fact that actual personal experience informs a movie’s narrative flavor doesn’t, of course, guarantee its quality in any way, shape or form — a fact yet again reaffirmed by writer-director Mike Pavone’s That’s What I Am, an awkward mish-mash of observational coming-of-age cliches and half-baked moralizing that feels like a bloated, not particularly well sketched episode of The Wonder Years.

Set in California during the 1960s, the film centers on 12-year-old Andy (Chase Ellison), a bright but small eighth-grade kid whose favorite teacher, Mr. Simon (Ed Harris), pairs him with the school outcast, red-haired and freakishly tall Stanley (Alexander Walters), for a class project. After a dramatic schoolyard incident, Principal Kelner (Amy Madigan) suspends a student for bullying a female classmate, and the vindictive kid feeds his father a malicious rumor about Mr. Simon’s sexuality, causing problems for all involved.

That’s What I Am means to be an earnest, uplifting family film, which is all well and good, but the movie evinces a fitful attention span, and Pavone never comes up with a way to successfully stitch together all the disparate, capital-I issues — from bullying, hormonal bloom, sexual preference and the effects of overbearing parents to wan stabs at race relations and tolerance more broadly — with which he peppers his narrative. He tries via adult narration, but this tack succeeds as neither funny and wistful nor nostalgic and knowing. Furthermore, it’s never paid off with any present day bookend, apart from lame “where are they now” character updates that roll under the end credits. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, WWE Studios, PG, 101 minutes)

A grand historical epic that evinces some impressive costume design and much natural scenic beauty, but never locates a particularly persuasive or enrapturing tone, director Jin Chen’s The Warring States tells the story of two historical Chinese figures whose head games and obstinance threaten to bring ruin to competing kingdoms. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (China Lion, unrated, 125 minutes)

If you see only one film this year about a psychokinetic tire that roams the dusty American southwest exploding the heads of those get in his way, it should definitely be Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber. An audacious horror comedy that is at once a wildly recast send-up of trashy B-movie slasher flicks (the killer tire lurks ominously, like a squat, polyisoprene cousin of Jason Voorhees) and a didactic, philosophical commentary on storytelling tropes, the film, love it or loathe it, is a one-of-a-kind must-see for fans of outré filmmaking.

When it starts out, Rubber seems at once more comedic and more expressly a cinematic exercise. Dupieux conceives of a framing device whereby a policeman (Stephen Spinella) lectures a collected (surrogate) group of folks on the intrinsic lack of reason in film narratives, and then passes out pairs of binoculars. As this bickering audience (Rubber‘s own Greek chorus) watches and develops their own opinions on the skulking tire, their analysis magnifies the powers of their subject, and helps lend the movie itself a certain sheen and added pop-academic significance.

The tire, meanwhile (tabbed Robert in the credits), rises from its desert slumber and, like a surly teenager, begins to test the limits of its power, rolling over and crushing a plastic bottle and scorpion before momentarily meeting its match in a glass beer bottle. Soon it’s stalking a girl (Roxane Mesquida), and doing worse.

There isn’t much doubt that its ending, a pseudo-intellectual sop, sputters out with far less grace and cleverness than its makers imagine. And other amusing tidbits — like the aftermath of a killing spree when Robert witnesses the rubber Holocaust-equivalent of a tire bonfire on television — are sort of half-formed. But Rubber is bold, and engaging throughout, which is more than one can say about much Hollywood product. (Magnet, unrated, 82 minutes)

A heady blend of spy thriller, period piece political drama and martial arts action flick, Chinese import Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen reaffirms star Donnie Yen’s quiet, universal charisma, while also tossing more sand on the tired, erroneous notion that more densely plotted films from the Orient can’t emotionally engage Western audiences. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, R, 106 minutes)

Ever since his attention-grabbing debut, Super Size Me, documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock has exhibited a canny knack for self-promotion. He takes that inclination to new heights with his latest effort — The Greatest Movie Sold, a purported behind-the-scenes look at cinematic product placement itself fully financed through the product placement of various brands, all of which are transparently showcased within the film. The stated logic is that since Iron Man had 14 brand partners and grossed $585 million worldwide, throwing sponsors into a documentary will surely increase its slice of the multi-billion advertising pie, and thus its commercial gross/popularity. So, wink-wink, nudge-nudge fun, right?

Well, only sort of. Spurlock’s film is fitfully engaging in its own facile way, but also restless and unfocused — and thus it never really digs into its subject matter in a deep or interesting enough way. It isn’t that Spurlock sells out (or “buys in,” as it’s also called in the movie, in a rah-rah presentation of gotta-get-mine American capitalism), it’s just that he gets so caught up in the dizziness of chasing down partnership deals with Ban deodorant, Sheetz convenient stores, Hyatt, JetBlue, title sponsor Pom Wonderful and others (even a hybrid horse/human shampoo!) that he miscalculates audience interest in this glimpse behind the advertising curtain.

While these meetings, in their own nuts-and-bolts manner, may be representative of the horse-trading involved in trying to juggle art and commerce, they meander as much as illuminate, and generally undercut revelatory and/or thoughtful talking head interviews with more interesting figures, including Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky and Hollywood feature directors like Brett Ratner and Peter Berg. Only late in his film does Spurlock delve into interesting ethical, social and anthropological questions, with a study of the newfangled science of neuro-marketing and the exploration of a citywide ban on all billboards and outdoor promotions in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. By that point, however, the movie’s tapdance sales job has worn out its welcome. (Sony Pictures Classics, unrated, 87 minutes)

In a business that frequently has the tendency to disproportionately celebrate the contributions of above-the-line talent, the allure of African Cats is a reminder of below-the-line artisans. An involving, gorgeously photographed nature documentary that puts audiences on Kenyan plains in stunning fashion amidst its title subjects, the film, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, only stumbles in its willful insistence on imposing a family-friendly narrative on footage that is more than capable of standing on its own, with less artificial constructs. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (DisneyNature, G, 89 minutes)

Stand-up comedy is one of the most difficult creative occupations out there, because it not only possesses all of the flame-out possibility of live theater, but it’s done alone. So a set that bombs isn’t just something that doesn’t work, it has the sting of a deeply personal rejection, and a career that sputters or fails to ignite isn’t just based on the whimsy of luck but, in the mind of comedian, has the capacity to be a personal indictment. The new documentary American: The Bill Hicks Story gives viewers a fairly compelling snapshot of these emotional highs and lows via Hicks, a sort of comedic wunderkind turned philosophizing social satirist who charted an unlikely course to semi-fame in the 1980s and early ’90s before succumbing, suddenly and shockingly, to pancreatic cancer. For the full, original review, from ShockYa.com, click here. For more information on the movie, click here. (Variance, unrated, 101 minutes)

Coming more than a decade since the last franchise entry, Scream 4 again mixes murder, mystery and self-awareness, to adequate if not exceptional effect. A meta horror entry which reteams writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven, the film introduces a fresh crop of victims and suspects, blending them together with old characters and past grudges, and succeeds on its own carefully prescribed terms as a piece of diversionary puzzlebox entertainment, but isn’t really very scary and doesn’t pack the wallop of the best moments of its forebears. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Dimension, R, 110 minutes)