Trust centers around Annie Cameron (Liana Liberato), a fairly naïve 14-year-old suburban girl, and the middle child of a loving family led by parents Will and Lynn (Clive Owen and Catherine Keener). Weeks of online chatting with an out-of-town boy lead to an in-person meeting, where Annie discovers he’s considerably older than he represented. Nonetheless, she’s coerced into a sexual liaison, which has ruinous consequences for her and her family.

Director David Schwimmer work-shopped the script with Andy Bellin, one of the movie’s writers, and its layered attention to detail shows. Trust is populated with real, three-dimensional characters, and it captures both the modern-day connection between technology and teen life, as well as the manner in which adolescent judgment is reasonably fallible. For all the unsettling skill with which the film captures the somewhat darkly understandable identification and protective impulses that many statutory rape victims feel toward their abuser, the film is also heartrending in its depiction of the gulf between the female teenage victim of such an assault and especially her father. More than just about anything else males like to feel utility, of course, and the particular emasculation and patriarchal helplessness on display in Trust is both rare in modern American cinema, and strikingly devastating.

To that end, it goes almost without saying that the performances here are uniformly superb. Owen summons a tremendous amount of pathos and swallowed rage as Will — he seems to age, fray and crack before our eyes, long prior to any cathartic breakdown. And Liberato… well, burn that name into your memory. This likely won’t be her Winter’s Bone (and it’s worth noting, after all, that recent Oscar nominee Jennifer Lawrence absolutely shined in Lori Petty’s The Poker House two years prior to that breakthrough film), but it definitely marks Liberato as a young actress to watch, and will appropriately be the calling card that lands her many more films. (Millennium Entertainment, R, 106 minutes)

After Buffalo roustabout Henry (Keanu Reeves) unwittingly takes part in an ill-conceived bank robbery, he takes the fall and goes to jail rather than give up the names of the real culprits — seemingly as much to get away from his live-in girlfriend Debbie (Judy Greer) as any other reason. When he’s paroled, Henry learns of a Prohibition-era tunnel leading from a nearby theater, and — flashing back to a comment from his cellmate, Max (James Caan), who offhandedly remarked that if he’s doing the time he might as well have done the crime — gets it in his head to actually rob the bank for which he has already gone to prison. Soon Max is out of jail too, and working up a scheme with Henry, as well as a somewhat flighty but ambitious actress, Julie (Vera Farmiga, committed and so good), starring in a production of Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard.

Director Malcolm Venville (44 Inch Chest) exhibits absolutely no sense of comedic timing or aptitude for building tension, and Sacha Gervasi and David White’s screenplay is largely indifferent to the madcap possibilities its conceit engenders. It needlessly hauls in a couple extra characters, and then does precious little of consequence with them.

Reeves takes a lot of crap for his acting — sometimes deservedly so, sometimes not. But he is utterly somnambulant here, and just dreadful in a role that really requires much more dynamism. Henry is meant to be someone drifting through life, and jarred awake by the challenge of trying something new (a crime), yes, but he’s also a character burning the candle at both ends, as well as caught up in the bloom of a new relationship, with Julie. Reeves, however, seems intent on playing him like an autistic version of Luke Wilson, the modern-day champion of wet paper bags. This movie is the real crime, guilty of stealing an audience’s time. (Moving Pictures Film & Television, R, 108 minutes)

Weddings bring together disparate groups of people — including many who
are close but not always friends, or necessarily apt to play nicely
with others — and so consequently they are an almost irresistibly rich
setting for films. One of the latest such offerings arrives in the form
of Ceremony, the feature film debut of writer-director Max
Winkler, son of Henry Winkler.

A comedy starring Michael Angarano and Uma Thurman, the movie is loosely of a piece with fellow tales of twentysomething ennui and/or upended nuptials like Garden State, The Last Kiss and Rachel Getting Married, except processed through a decidedly more manic, less ruminative filter. The result is something different, a bit offbeat and certainly not unpleasant, but ultimately also not that memorably insightful or successful. For the full review, from Shockya.com, click here. In addition to playing in theaters, Ceremony is currently available on-demand, on iTunes, Amazon, PlayStation Network and Xbox Marketplace. (Magnolia, R, 90 minutes)

The obvious jokey double-feature comparison is fellow recent arm-loss big screen adaptation 127 Hours, but Soul Surfer is less stylistically adventurous and far more streamlined and built for conventional, heartland uplift than Danny Boyle’s Oscar-nominated film. A feel-good movie of genial deification, it tells the remarkable true story of Bethany Hamilton, who in 2003 lost a limb to a shark bite.

AnnaSophia Robb stars as the teenage Bethany, a Hawaiian surfing prodigy whose doting parents (Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt) home-school she and her siblings, the better to allow them time to also catch waves. After an accident claims her left arm almost all the way up to her shoulder, Bethany faces an uphill climb back toward competitive surfing with aplomb beyond her years.

There is something of a dearth of dramatic conflict here, since Soul
Surfer basically just amounts to a gorgeous, sun-toned and by all accounts extraordinarily well-adjusted family coping with an admittedly terrible tragedy and coming (further) together. There’s a lot of rah-rah moralizing and Christianist parallelism herein, not all of which connects. (An incredible seven screenwriters share story credit, from the adaptation of a book by three others.) But the performances are solid, appealing and wholly invested in across the board, and John Leonetti’s you-are-there cinematography is gorgeous, making for an engaging albeit predictable emotional ride that should play especially well in Red State rural and suburban areas. (TriStar/Film District, PG, 106 minutes)

Nonfiction films and television programming documenting various aspects of America’s burgeoning obesity epidemic seem to constitute their own peculiar entertainment subgenre these days, so one could be forgiven for approaching Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, Australian filmmaker/subject Joe Cross’ juice-diet road trip flick, with
some skepticism, thinking it little more than a rolling, sycophantic
infomercial for the health benefits of liquidated fruits and vegetables.

Which it is, actually — at least partly. Starting out at 310 pounds, the amiable Cross wears his foreignness throughout (yep, Men at Work and INXS even pop up on the soundtrack), deploying it heartily in the name of his personality-peddling film. But he doesn’t really connect his struggle with his choice to come to the United States for 60 days of “juice fasting,” other than explaining his decision by way of saying he loves hamburgers and American food. The first half of the movie, saddled with lame animated segments showing cells under attack and the like, does an inadequate job of linking Cross’ obesity with a chronic, debilitating autoimmune disease which he has also battled for years. The audience is served up a genial but indulgent and entirely aimless travelogue.

So it’s more than a small surprise when the film — leaning much more toward the sort of self-promotion found in Super Size Me rather than something like the fact-oriented, revelatory emotional punch of Food, Inc. — pivots at its halfway point, and becomes a heartrending portrait of Phil Staples (above right), a 429-pound truck driver whom Cross met in Arizona, who suffers from the same condition. His reaching out to Cross for help, and his ensuing amazing story, give the film an undeniable poignant punch, and might leave one pondering their own micronutrient intake. For more information, click here. (Reboot Media, unrated, 97 minutes)

Russell Brand slips into the tuxedo of Dudley Moore in Arthur, an energetic but essentially only middling re-imagining of the 1981 comedy about a perpetually soused man-child who awakens to life outside his debauched comfort zone. Despite some amusing bits and a very capable and handsomely mounted production, the results never truly outgrow diversionary setpiece amusement, and coalesce or gel into something humanistic and more deeply funny. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 110 minutes)

A documentary portrait of art world provocateur Mark Kostabi, Con Artist is another movie that acknowledges the existence of a particularly American air-quote culture (both high and low) which requires new product to fill its pipelines, and the art world’s important role in feeding that machine. It’s a breezy, facile thing, and if it doesn’t completely crack the riddle of the man, it at least lays bare his popularized thinking regarding branding and self-promotion, the forward-reaching impact of which can also be glimpsed in the ways plenty of smiling lost souls these days jockey to make “ex-reality show participant” a full-time, life-long occupation.

Directed by Michael Sladek, Con Artist eschews a strictly chronological tack, mixing biography, archived material and the (frequently unflattering) musings of various talking heads with present-day footage tracking the artist’s movements and whims. The third son of dirt-poor Estonian immigrants, Kostabi grew up in Whittier, Calif., and attended Cal State-Fullerton before moving to New York City in the 1980s. There, he was a contemporary of Jean-Michael Basquiat, and, like many of his peers, he idolized Andy Warhol. Kostabi, though, seized upon Warhol’s “factory” sensibilities and the idea of multiple artist revenue streams, and after a measure of personal success, created a system whereby he oversaw the creation of art, and signed his name to canvasses, but did little if any of the actual work. (You know, kind of like the painter version of Ron Bass*.) After a near-bankruptcy in the ’90s, Kostabi continues in this vein to this day, while also harboring cracked visions of taking his terrible public access cable game show national.

Physically, with his long face, sunken eyes and pinched jaw, Kostabi resembles the ruddy-complexioned theoretical offspring of Nick Swardson and Richard Grant. An egomaniac with perhaps autistic or social disorder leanings of some sort, he’s not really a willing interviewee, but Sladek is wily enough to capture the essence of his subject in glancing fashion, via certain conversations with friends (where he explains how fame, in his view, is the equivalent of love) and one drunken encounter. All of the background material gives the film a convincing mooring, and Kostabi is an interesting enough character that even if he remains a bit unknowable he’s still in large measure fascinating to watch, given his various detachments from reality and the fact that he’s still experienced so much success. For Los Angeles audiences, Con Artist bows this week exclusively at the Laemmle Sunset 5. For more information, click here. (New Yorker/Plug Ugly/Acme/Room 5/Ovation, unrated, 84 minutes)

* – allegedly

Slither writer-director James Gunn channels at least a pinch of the soul-searching presumably born of his own off-screen divorce into Super, a self-reflexive, character-based, superhero spoof passion project that has some colorful moments but doesn’t fully and smoothly embrace the provocative nature of its premise.

The Office‘s Rainn Wilson stars as Frank Darbo, a fry cook and sad-sack loser who goes into an emotional tailspin when his ex-addict wife Sarah (Liv Tyler) slips up in her recovery and takes up with the sleazy Jacques (Kevin Bacon). Determined to both win her back and, vaguely, defend the sullied natures of right and justice, Frank works up a costume and starts parading around as Crimson Bolt, cracking offenders over the head with a wrench and spitting out awkward rejoinders like, “Shut up, crime!” Along the way he picks up a sidekick in the form of a spritely comic book store employee, Libby (Ellen Page), who’s sexually charged up by his vigilante ways.

Gunn seeds his movie with some weird, surprising and/or intense moments, but grossly overestimates the innate charm and hold of certain story strands. He’s also a subpar director, even working with obviously limited means. A kind of shrugging, slapdash, just-good-enough ethos — a residual effect of Gunn’s Troma days — lingers here, unfortunately. A tighter, even more emotionally inquisitive script and either more florid, over-the-top or entirely deadpan direction would have benefited this material, and taken it places its premise seems to augur. As is, however, the movie is half-sketched. Still, Page’s gleefully deranged performance — so beautifully unsafe, and lacking in preciousness — helps make Super a somewhat interesting misfire. (IFC Films, R, 96 minutes)

Eschewing the expectation that he perhaps stick to cranking out hand-wringing dramas of uptight manners, Atonement and Pride & Prejudice director Joe Wright veers in a surprising new direction with the revenge thriller Hanna, which courses with an unflagging, forward-leaning vigor. The engaging results, which feel like a bold, purposeful step toward modernity on his part, show Wright has a good instinct for melding the dynamics of a more conventional piece of pop action entertainment with something a bit offbeat and barbed. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Focus, PG-13, 111 minutes)

Sent into the body of a commuter and tasked via a secret governmental program with repeatedly living out the same eight minutes leading up to a terrorist-triggered train explosion outside of Chicago, military helicopter pilot Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) must balance his mission training with a growing sympathy for fellow traveler Christina (Michelle Monaghan). With the possibility of a second-wave attack looming on the horizon, a wildly disoriented Colter must gather clues and attempt to identify the culprit, while also trying to pry important details out of his remote handlers (Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright) as to his own condition.



Penned by Ben Ripley, Source Code slots comfortably within a grand Hollywood tradition of science-fiction-tinged, high-concept techno-thrillers impatient with the nitty-gritty specifics of their own conceits (“Every second explaining things puts more lives at risk!” one character barks). So it requires you make a little leap with it, to suspend disbelief. And yet it’s a leap so easy to make, and completely worth taking.

Director Duncan Jones, taking a step up in budget from Moon, orchestrates the balance between the movie’s considerable effects work and human stakes with assurance and skill. Casting matters hugely in an endeavor like this as well, and Source Code‘s quartet of main players is more than up to the task of breathing multi-dimensionality into the material, enlivening replayed interactions and layering them with subtle but substantive and realistic physical differentiations. The result is a lively thriller that deftly acknowledges its inherent ridiculousness, but still manages to tickle the brain while also quickening an audience’s collective pulse. (Summit, PG-13, 103 minutes)

A declamatory and utterly soulless piece of recombinant entertainment, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch lands with a roar, and then spends nearly the next two hours making much noise, almost all of it married to balletic, CGI-enabled violence. A female-revenge fantasy that feebly tries to tweak gender expectations even as it relies wholeheartedly on them, the film is a miasma of glossy superficiality, and most characterized by a gaping emotional void where any sense of narrative engagement or rooting interest in its characters should be. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 110 minutes)

A peppy and energetic but not overly cloying tone aligns nicely with a clutch of lively and engaging performances in this smart, heartwarming follow-up to last year’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid, based on Jeff Kinney’s same-named series of books, which have sold a combined 42 million copies. Though characterized in fits and starts by the sort of overly demonstrative acting and tonal underlining one sadly comes to expect from so many family films, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules works as entertainment even for older audiences because its public humiliations of the familial variety are so relatable. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 99 minutes)

French filmmaker François Ozon, freely adapting a 1980 stageplay by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy, sets his sights on women’s place in society and politics with the 1970s-set, screwball-tinged Potiche, its title native slang for an empty-vessel, eye candy spouse.

Catherine Deneuve, as luminous as ever even in her late 60s, stars as Suzanne Pujol, an intelligent but submissive housewife who, after the illness-related forced vacation of her patronizing, philandering husband, Robert (Fabrice Luchini), steps into his position as CEO at the umbrella factory her father started. She drafts her two adult children into the business; reconnects with an old paramour, union advocate Maurice (Gérard Depardieu); and soon showcases an unexpectedly strong talent for brokering happy compromise with disgruntled employees. When Robert returns, however, sparks fly over her place in the company, and household.

The same freewheeling (and classically French) view on human sexuality present in a lot of Ozon’s other work is at hand in Potiche as well — Suzanne is momentarily upset by her husband’s dalliances, but more by some of the specifics than the acts themselves, since she too has romantic secrets — yet it’s not as pronounced as in something like Swimming Pool or Water Drops on Burning Rocks. Issues of gender and class are explored, and past affairs and issues of paternity get trotted out, but the satire herein isn’t necessarily pointed. Rather, it feels a bit dutiful, even if smiling and fun. A confection loosely in the vein of Ozon’s more snappishly paced 8 Women, which also featured Deneuve, Potiche certainly isn’t an essential work, but it does feature a rather sublime ending for fans of its wonderful and legendary lead actress. (Music Box, unrated, 103 minutes)

No offense intended, seriously, but Bradley Cooper is just a great jerk. In his best films (The Hangover, Wedding Crashers), he plays guys defined by a rakish self-centeredness and/or insincerity, and he does so with a correlative breezy composure that makes it look all too easy. With his pin-up looks (that tan! that smirk!) and ineffable lack of gradation, he’s a performer who elicits from other guys almost equally divided feelings of idealized affinity and jealous dislike.

And that’s fine, really, because all of that actually makes him a solid fit for the new thriller Limitless, in which Cooper plays Eddie Mora, a burned-out, would-be novelist who gets slipped NZT, a designer pharmaceutical which unlocks the allegedly unused portions of his brain and turns him into an indefatigable, self-bettering genius. With an awakened appetite for science, the arts and broader knowledge in general, Eddie picks up foreign languages and musical instruments in 24 hours, and turns several thousand dollars into $2.3 million in under two weeks as a day trader. The good times roll — at least for a while, until Eddie gets cut off from his drug supply and some nasty side effects pop up, threatening his relationship with his new energy baron mentor, Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro). Paranoia, blackmail and worse naturally ensue.

A story like this pretty much lives or dies on its cocksure, inner biorhythms, and director Neil Burger (Interview with the Assassin, The Illusionist) makes sure Limitless doesn’t get too bogged down in wonky, scientific specifics. Cooper isn’t necessarily wildly convincing as the sad-sack, stringy-haired loser in Eddie’s first incarnation, but once the movie gets past its set-up and gathers a considerable downhill momentum — partially achieved by putting Eddie in physical harm’s way, pursued by an oafish underworld type who gets turned onto the same drug — things become infinitely more intriguing.

Since it’s based on the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn (a more abstruse title, no doubt), the movie has a fair amount of background detail, only some of which is gracefully integrated. As shoehorned within the parameters of a more conventional, big screen thriller narrative, Limitless‘ preoccupation with reintroducing Eddie’s estranged girlfriend, Lindy (Abbie Cornish), into the shenanigans is fairly misplaced — a diversion from what could be a much tauter, madcap character study. Despite both their shared past and her connection to Eddie’s drug source, Lindy doesn’t feel inherently wrapped up in his plight, but rather a tacked-on, “humanizing” sop for female audience members.

Ever since Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling Boogie Nights captured the attention and imaginations of would-be auteurs, and probably even before, the world of pornography has held a special hold on a certain subsection of aspirant directors, who’ve populated their movies with strippers and porn stars, looking to beguile and titillate open-minded film audiences before the first flickering frame of their film has even appeared on screen. Such subject matter can sometimes be a lazy choice, indicative of a filmmaker thinking the heavy lift of audience investment lies more in the setting alone than any particular combination of characters and story. All of which brings us to Sebastian Gutierrez’s Elektra Luxx, a comedy which tells the tale of an adult starlet who’s gotten out of the industry and turned to teaching an annex learning class on bedroom prowess, the better to fund her dreams of starting her new life as a single mother.



Carla Gugino stars as the title character, which goes a long way toward making the film engaging. Early on, she meets a distraught flight attendant, Cora (Marley Shelton), who approaches her with a proposition: in exchange for the purloined lyric sheets to the last album of Elektra’s recently deceased rock star lover, Cora wants Elektra to seduce her fiance, in order to “cancel out” her own cheating. Elektra reluctantly agrees, setting in motion a chain of screwed-up events and mistaken identities involving a private investigator, Dellwood Butterworth (Timothy Olyphant), and a passel of other largely fringe-dwelling types.

While such a plot condensation makes Elektra Luxx sound like a madcap farce, in truth it’s a much more character-oriented comedy, with a porn writer, Burt Rodriguez (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who loquaciously waxes nostalgic about Elektra’s career in his basement web-cam shows, even as he angrily discourages his younger sister Olive (Amy Rosoff) from doing a solo video, and uncomfortably deals with the advances of local checkout girl Trixie (Malin Akerman), who delivers a series of pictures of herself to him. What do these characters, or a couple others, really have to do with Elektra’s plight? Not much, although some are interwoven, here and there. Mainly, though, they’re used to provide a sort of tableau backdrop to the film, rendering it a sort of pornland Short Cuts.

The films and jumbled, referential style of Quentin Tarantino bear mentioning, too, since Gutierrez also seeds his movie with spun-off asides and backstories, not unlike Pulp Fiction. The chief problem is that these bits are not smoothly integrated into the final product, or made to have forward-reaching consequences. The Kill Bill films, of course, used the pregnancy of Uma Thurman’s character as the powder to spark a wild revenge ride, but Gutierrez here seems to have only loosely integrated the heady wonder of her condition — and the loss of her lover — into the proceedings. He gives us neither enough of Elektra’s backstory and life as a porn star for the pregnancy to stand in stark contrast as a life-changing event, nor evidences this richly in a major shift in her behavior, or sudden rush of manifested anxiety.

At its core, Elektra Luxx feels like it was designed around the conceit of an on-the-mend porn star, with a couple other characters and scenes thrown in. Things just kind of happen, and don’t always have lasting consequences. These moments can sometimes be fun (Adrianne Palicki and Emmanuelle Chriqui have a blast as Holly and Bambi, a pair of vacationing adult starlets, one of whose feelings give way to something unexpected), but just as often tedious, like a wayward improv sketch.

The strength of the movie is the game ensemble cast, who uniformly give lively, engaging performances — a testament to Gutierrez’s touch with actors, certainly. But when its endgame ropes in a novelist, Rebecca Lindbrook (Kathleen Quinlan), who wants to get into business with Elektra, and a book-signing that brings several characters together and ends with frantic sprint to a hospital, well… it all feels like a telenovela run amok. And no, not necessarily in a good way. For more information, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 100 minutes)