Samuel Maoz’s claustrophobic war drama, which picked up the Golden Lion prize at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, is decidedly a case of the emperor’s new clothes — a forcedly subjective movie that takes the complexities and moral grayness of war and reduces it to empty melodrama cloaked in air-quote artfulness.

Based on Maoz’s personal experience serving in the Israeli army during the 1982 war of the same name, Lebanon takes place inside a tank during the first 24 hours of the invasion, as an inexperienced crew pushes nervously into a fire zone. There’s some initial imaginativeness to the film’s cinematography — unfolding through the tank’s crosshairs, with all its jerkiness and zooms — but this tack rather quickly becomes grating, and overall seems like a gambit to avoid taking responsibility for choices of framing.

A big part of the problem is that Maoz’s film is populated with characters so ineffectual as to undermine any cultivated sense of bother for or investment in their predicament. More problematically, Lebanon is riddled with falsely struck notes regardless of the subjects’ character and mettle. It’s wildly inconceivable, for instance, that once a Syrian who has fired a RPG at the group is captured and placed in the tank for transport, no one within has a problem with him, or indeed even seems concerned with interacting with him, one way or another. In introducing the potential for tension, only to fumble it away in ways equally unrealistic and infuriating, Lebanon proves itself resolutely incapable of adding anything new to the old adage, “War is hell.” (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 92 minutes)

Human history is littered with all manner of mass killing — from serial murders and genocides to crusades and wars of territorial incursion — and yet such evil is consistently rendered as beyond the pale in public accountings, as somehow aberrant and not a default state of the human condition that we are almost all possibly capable of if pushed to the limit, and faced with some of the same sorts of terrible circumstances.

Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath’s stirring, stomach-churning new documentary, Enemies of the People, reveals just how banal evil really is. The winner of a dozen top documentary festival awards, including the Special Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival and the Grand Jury Award at the Full Frame Festival, the film provides a from-the-bottom-up look at the brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, and concludes, chillingly, that amorality can indeed not only exist but also apparently thrive in a vacuum.

Journalist Sambath, whose family was wiped out in the Killing Fields, serves as the movie’s anchor and guide, his friendly smile masking a world of swallowed pain. The end of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War set the stage for lingering unrest in neighboring Cambodia, where they remained distrustful of Vietnamese influence, to boil over, with terrible consequences. Sambath’s father became one of the nearly two million people murdered by the Khmer Rouge when he refused to give them his buffalo and other personal property. Sambath’s mother was then forced to marry a Khmer Rouge militiaman, and subsequently died in childbirth in 1976; his eldest brother disappeared in 1977. Sambath himself escaped Cambodia at age 10, when the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979.

Fast forward to 1998, when Sambath, now a newspaperman in Phom Penh, got to know the children of some senior Khmer Rouge officials, and gradually earn their trust. For almost a decade he toiled on this passion project, leaving his own family and spending weekends on the road, working to gain the confidence of various
lower-level Khmer Rouge soldiers, now ordinary fathers and grandfathers, as well as the regime’s most senior surviving leader, Nuon Chea, the ranking number two officer under Pol Pot. Piecing together these interviews with narrated bits recounting some of his own familial history, Sambath and co-director Lemkin show how readily in the din and chaos of war — or, indeed, even just the presence of an emotionally charged us-versus-them scenario — ordinary people will do terrible things to their fellow countrymen.

This subject matter and the wrenching firsthand details that Sambath collects — ex-Khmer Rouge foot soldiers demonstrate in matter-of-fact fashion how they slit people’s throats, but one confesses that sometimes he had to alternate his grip and go for a straight stab of the neck because his arm became too tired from the repetitive motion — make for an engrossing if at times sickening experience. It’s a bit frustrating, then, that Sambath’s skill set as a filmmaker (and by extension Lemkin’s, since while he doesn’t appear on screen he shares in every other significant credit) doesn’t quite match his abundant reservoir of personal tolerance, and don’t extend to include a slightly more pointed and assertive investigatory style. Sambath’s hesitance to share his personal history with his most senior subject is understandable (and repeatedly explained within the film), but when video footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution by hanging surfaces and is shown to Nuon Chea, he has a curious reaction (“In spite of his arrest, [Saddam] showed he was a winner, and not a loser”) that, disappointingly, the filmmakers never follow up on.

It’s these sorts of small omissions in pressing that, far more important than just letting Nuon Chea off the hook, fail to fully illuminate the mindset that, in his words, would have stood by while governmental orders for the arrest and execution of specifically targeted political opponents were somehow translated into a systematic campaign of minority elimination in the eastern portion of the country. Enemies of the People toes the truth of human unpleasantness, getting closer to it than is comfortable for many general audiences (a Khmer Rouge boss, decades on, continues to refer to the ethnic cleansing as a “problem”) but doesn’t fully hold a mirror up to its most repugnant subject. Still, it’s a powerful and important work. For more information, click here. (International Film Circuit, R, 94 minutes)

Starring Luke Wilson, Giovanni Ribisi, Gabriel Macht and Laura Ramsey, co-writer-director George Gallo’s Middle Men is a rangy immorality tale and crime drama inspired by the true story of a mid-1990s company that revolutionized the peddling of pornography online. The film has energy and some sleazy fun around the edges, but critically fails to ever locate a sincere and deeply lasting feeling, be it titillation or trepidation. It’s also dinged mightily by Wilson’s performance, sad to say. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount, R, 112 minutes)

Filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev follows up the fascinating My Kid Could Paint That with this unsettling, emotionally affecting look behind the curtain of American mythmaking — a film that examines the truth behind NFL player-turned-soldier Pat Tillman’s April 2004 death in Afghanistan from friendly fire, and exposes the high-level Army cover-up (and, yes, grinning, flag-waving media complicity) in knowingly packaging a phony version of this event as a heroic adjunct in a two-for-one narrative about noble wars of necessity.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those with an abiding interest in the intersection of media, politics and the particular history of American aggression will certainly find the movie gripping on that level, but it’s also affecting in nearly a dozen ways both specific (familial) and broader (rousing one’s independent-minded patriotic ire at such overt governmental manipulation). Interview footage with comrades provides a clear-eyed view of the tragedy itself, while family reminiscences give heartrending color to Tillman’s ghost. Some of the archival material is bracing (Tillman’s younger brother, Richard, strides to the podium to eulogize him with beer in hand, and pointedly tells the assembled pro-military crowd, including John McCain, “He’s not in heaven — he’s fucking dead”), and agonizingly illustrates the often hidden personal toll of what is now a war nearing a decade in length — in this case a family torn asunder once, and then re-traumatized through the betrayal of their government. Powerful and thought-provoking, The Tillman Story is sure to be on the documentary short-list for Academy Award consideration. For more information, click here. (Weinstein Company, R, 94 minutes)

Based on Guillermo Martinez’s award-winning novel, The Oxford Murders is an unlikely thriller, given its narrative investment in number theory and logical series. And the result, adapted by director Álex de la Iglesia and pitched at a breakneck, didactic clip, absent any sensible, modulated emotional investment in the characters or material, falls flat, accordingly. What wants to be a gumshoe Sherlock Holmes-ian tale with a hearty pinch of The Da Vinci Code‘s symbology never coalesces into anything more than a grating cinematic hybrid exercise, in which convoluted academic deduction enjoys the warmth of esteem and respect despite an increasing gulf between it and simple narrative logic.

The story deposits Martin (Elijah Wood), a young American graduate student, in England, where he’s just arrived at Oxford University, hoping to be a pupil of Arthur Seldom (John Hurt), a prestigious professor of logic and mathematics. When Martin’s elderly, terminally ill landlady is apparently murdered, the police initially focus on her daughter Beth (Julie Cox), but Seldom and Martin have a connection to the woman as well, having discovered the body together, and the former posits that hers is the first in a series of murders linked by strange symbols. Ergo, professor and student join forces to try and crack the code, setting into motion an elaborate game, even as the motivations of the alleged killer remain blurry.

The Oxford Murders goes to considerable lengths to establish and play up a litany of possible suspects, including Beth; a squash-playing nurse, Lorna (Leonor Watling, above), with a romantic connection to both Seldom and Martin; an oddball fellow student of Martin’s, Yuri (Burn Gorman); and the Christian fundamentalist father (Dominique Pinon) of a terminally ill little girl. A shame, then, that the suspense elements never catch fire, since we don’t really come to know any of the victims, and it’s posited early on that those targeted will be already close to death, for labyrinthine reasons related to the chain of symbols, and how the killer wishes to challenge Seldom.

Owing probably to both its novelistic roots and the nature of the material, the film possesses a certain breezy if at times self-satisfied intelligence and ambition, but almost nothing about the manner in which characters meet and interact seems to fit comfortably within the recognizably real world, and so the movie’s entire mystery plot feels like a hammy put-on almost from the get-go. When Martin meets Beth and her mother, huge chunks of expository dialogue are unleashed, and it becomes readily apparent that characters are going to behave in ways that feed (or obscure) a given plot point, rather than comes across as genuine. A couple scenes later, as Martin makes a play to attract Seldom as a thesis advisor, a lecture hall confrontation ensues, with a classroom full of students chuckling, for no other reason than to underline Martin’s humiliation. Later still in the movie, a madcap planned elopement (“to a place with no books, or logic series”) comes off as risible.

Still baby-faced as he approaches 30, Wood doesn’t find a way to convincingly convey Martin’s unhinged obsession with Seldom, which is meant to cast a bit of suspicion on him as well. Instead he just comes across as whiny, without much reasonable cause. Watling puts an assertive spin on a character who as written is a bit of a cipher, and she’s quite attractive to boot, but other characters are occasionally seen reading some of their math-jargon-specific dialogue off of cue cards. A pro’s pro, Hurt provides a bit of mooring, but not enough to give The Oxford Murders any lasting sense of purpose, or impression.

Hours after the conclusion of de la Iglesia’s movie, in fact, the only two moments that linger involve a random bit of colorful dialogue (“One day the Mad Hatter will come out of his closet and ass-fuck the lot of you!”), and Wood eating spaghetti off of Watling’s apron-clad chest. Oh, there were murders in the film, you say? I’d already forgot, I guess. While it’s theatrical release is fairly limited, for those interested, the movie is also available on VOD, Xbox Live, Playstation, Amazon and Vudu. For more information, click here. (Magnolia, R, 109 minutes)

The star-free Step Up franchise has proven a lucrative moneymaking machine for
corporate parent Disney, with the first two films racking up just under
$265 million combined, and the peppy second installment — helmed by Jon
Chu, who returns for a third go-round — in particular dramatically increasing its percentile foreign returns. This brings us to Step Up 3D, a movie that tries to serve as a reminder that, for all the advances in digital technology, the human body is and remains one of if not the most engaging big screen special effects there is. Unfortunately, loud and insurmountable narrative gear-grinding completely derails the energetically pitched third installment of the popular dance series, which never convincingly locates any sort of emotional pulse amidst its occasionally dazzling choreography. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Touchstone/Summit, PG-13, 97 minutes)

Atypical genre plotting and some absolutely delicious twists feed British kidnapping thriller The Disappearance of Alice Creed, the solid and engaging feature directorial debut of J Blakeson. Plenty of movies have covered this narrative terrain before, but few in recent memory with as streamlined a sense of tension-soaked purpose.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed is a tightly drawn “three-hander,” with a deceptively simple plot. Planning to make a mint on a ransom-and-exchange scheme, ex-con kidnappers Vic (Eddie Marsan) and Danny (Martin Compston) snatch Alice (Gemma Arterton), a young woman estranged from her wealthy businessman father. Despite having set up a secluded safe house and seemingly left nothing to chance, Vic and Danny — the latter the younger and more nervous of the two, the former powered by a snarling, steely conviction — soon find their plans upended. Though scared witless, Alice isn’t about to let her captors just use her as capital, but neither is the film merely some prodding feminist revenge tract.

From the outset, it’s clear that Blakeson’s film won’t kowtow to genre convention. The movie opens with an intriguing, dialogue-free, five-minute prep sequence in which Danny and Vic methodically set up shop — buying a drill, a mattress and other supplies; lining the inside of a windowless van with plastic; assembling a bed for the mattress; and stapling foam
insulation and plywood board to the walls and windows of the bedroom that will serve as Alice’s quarters of confinement. When the actual kidnapping takes place, it’s similarly presented in dispassionate, matter-of-fact fashion, despite Alice’s kicks and screams. In fact, it’s 10 minutes into the film before either party utters a line, really.

Interestingly and admirably, Blakeson isn’t concerned with or particularly invested in repeatedly using Alice’s vulnerability to wring tension and unease from his audience. Yet neither does he shy away from it, as when a hooded Alice is stripped, given new clothes and handcuffed in spread-eagle fashion; Arterton arches her back in wild anxiety, which is a visceral and realistic depiction of primitive fear. Once some measure of chatting and an explication of the chain of events yet to unfold begins, though, the movie really hits its stride, fed in large part by the differences in age and gender, and the underlying but ever-shifting power dynamics therein. Without giving away the movie’s twists, it suffices to say that — both before the ransom money arrives, and after — Blakeson does a fantastic job of screwing with both his audience’s expectations and senses of identification, though always in ways rooted in character, and never in a manner that feels tawdry or false.

Given the quiet, steely verve of its set-up, it’s somewhat to be expected that the film’s energy eventually starts to flag a bit. And it would have been interesting — once the film opens up a bit from its quite theatrical staging, and gets to stretch its legs some in its final act — for an outside character or two to force the hand of those grappling for control. But the performances here are gripping, and The Disappearance of Alice Creed‘s commitment to character-driven minimalism makes it a standout genre entry in the late summer indie sweepstakes. For more information, click here. (Anchor Bay, R, 100 minutes)