A selection at Sundance earlier this year, period piece drama Holy Rollers lifts a veil on Jewish Orthodoxy and reveals a world where — shock of shocks — religious adolescents aren’t immune to doubt and desire and even behavior that contradicts their own sense of self. Unlike the recent Happiness Runs, another skewed sort of coming-of-age tale, Holy Rollers takes filtered, subjective truth and drug experimentation and spins it into something personal and woozy and idiosyncratic, yet still relatable to an outside audience without much of a deeper knowledge or rooting interest in its subcultural milieu.

Directed by Kevin Asch, from a screenplay by Antonio Macia, the film is inspired by actual events in the late 1990s when Hasidic Jews were recruited as mules to smuggle ecstasy from Europe into the United States. Jesse Eisenberg stars as Sam Gold, a young Hasid from a tight-knit Brooklyn community who is nervously following the carefully prescribed path laid out for him by his family, which includes studying to become a rabbi, working with his garment dealer father, Mendel (Mark Ivanir), and awaiting the final confirmation of a pending arranged marriage to Zeldy (Stella Keitel, daughter of Harvey and Lorraine Bracco). At this time, Sam falls under the sway of the charming older brother, Yosef (Justin Bartha), of his good friend and neighbor, Leon Zimmerman (Jason Fuchs).

Yosef taps Sam to help him transport “medicine” for Jackie Solomon (Danny Abeckaser, above left), an Israeli dealer who operates under the guise of an import-export business. (Yosef’s amusing advice for a nervous Sam: “Relax, mind your business, and act Jewish.”) Crunching numbers on the fly, Sam quickly demonstrates his business acumen to his new boss, who takes Sam under his wing. As he showcases his increasing indispensability to Jackie, Sam finds his heady exposure to the respective nightlife worlds of Manhattan and Amsterdam, which he frequents for travel, to be both exciting and corrosive. As the business grows and his family starts to become suspicious of his illegal activities, Sam grapples with a not-exactly-discouraged burgeoning attraction to Jackie’s girlfriend Rachel (Ari Graynor, above right), and slowly comes to realize the unstable nature of the façade related to all this easy money. Caught between life as a smuggler and the path back to God, Sam has no easy answers, but instead only tough choices.

Eisenberg is an actor who, ever since bursting onto the scene in 2002’s precious, somewhat contrived Roger Dodger, has induced in me a not completely explicable exasperation. He suffered a terrible wig in Cursed, which would’ve failed irrespective of his involvement. And I’ve actually legitimately dug a couple films in which he’s appeared, most notably The Hunting Party and Adventureland; while it would be snide and neither fair nor totally true to say I enjoyed them in spite of his presence, they haven’t exactly been actorly triumphs, in my view. I’ve tolerated Jesse Eisenberg, in other words, waiting for him to give me something different, something less mannered and obvious than the same stammering nice guy wallflower of whom he’s played various iterations.

Holy Rollers is the film that finally shows a glimpse of something different. It’s not jaw-droppingly revelatory, but Eisenberg’s attuned performance showcases the slow bleed of secularism into Sam’s distinctly ethnic patter, and when he propositions elopement with Rachel in fitful fashion late in the movie, it plays as both a mock come-on from a guy who doesn’t know from flirting as well as heartbreakingly real.

Debut feature director Asch keeps the tone relaxed and real, so that one has an appreciation of the sincerity of Sam’s faith without it becoming a smothering trait. In portraying the difficulty with which Sam stands astride two worlds, increasingly at odds, the movie doesn’t implicitly choose a side, and the audience is the ultimate winner in the adaptation of this unlikely true story, which richly captures all the befuddlement of youth, albeit in some circumstances of extreme duress. (First Independent, R, 89 minutes)

It’s no surprise that Middle Eastern-set tales of war, religion, families torn apart and the jumbled intersection of all three have become rich documentary fodder over the past decade; nonfiction filmmakers, as much as anyone else trading in the feature narrative realm, go where the stories are. The worst of these movies goad and poke, playing merely to audience expectation about what feelings their subject matter should elicit. With The Oath, though, director Laura Poitras does something remarkable, and in its own way instructive and important: she constructs a three-dimensional portrait of a ex-jihadist who, nearly a decade removed from the commencement of the war in Afghanistan, still hasn’t found what he’s looking for, and in some ways remains more confused than ever.

Though imprisoned at the time, Abu Jandal (above) became an important figure in American intelligence circles in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks. As Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard and a self-proclaimed “emir of hospitality” for Afghan jihad recruits, he personally met and hosted all of the 9/11 hijackers, even though he claims (and there’s good reason to believe) he had no operational foreknowledge of their plan.

A nominally reformed family man (after serving more than two years in Yemeni prison, for charges stemming from the bombing of the USS Cole, he was released in 2003 as part of a government reeducation and reintegration program), Jandal is a taxi driver in Yemen when we meet him. He doesn’t make a great first impression. One glimpses some of the salving effects of domesticated life (Jandal waking up his
son Habeeb for 4:30 a.m. prayers, and instructing him in religious ritual), even as one winces at the pictures of an infant with an AK-47. Almost immediately, Jandal emerges as a bundle of contradictions, extolling the “stain” upon America’s reputation rendered by the World Trade Center attacks while also popping a Coke, a detail the director doesn’t miss. Later, he explains why, despite having fought on the front lines in Bosnia, he would not have participated in a “spectacular” attack like 9/11, even if asked by bin Laden; the next day, he reconsiders, and asks the tape of that interview to be deleted.

The offscreen foil for much of Jandal’s inner tumult is his brother-in-law, Salim Hamdan, bin Laden’s personal driver and the first Guantanamo Bay prisoner to face America’s controversial military tribunals. The pair’s intertwined personal histories, and Jandal’s lingering guilt over his role in Hamdan’s fate, act as prisms which allow Poitras to explore and contextualize a world that has largely confounded Western media — that of the aggrieved and politically voiceless Muslim working poor.

Poitras, helmer of the Oscar-nominated My Country, My Country, constructs The
Oath largely as a psychological character study of Jandal, so the natural ebbs and flows of one’s opinion of her subject seem to matter relatively little. She works in file footage (Jandal on 60 Minutes,
etcetera) alongside new interview material, but also lets audiences see him in a more natural and relaxed habitat, holding forth with younger Yemeni Muslims, some of whom might be sympathetic to a life of dedicated jihad. On a certain level, the educated, reflective Jandal seems to have a bit
of a narcissistic streak; he appears to like the attention that his erstwhile
association with bin Laden provides. Yet his regret and concern for Hamdan is genuine, as is a seemingly burgeoning realization that guns and violence do not solve everything.

In so tracking Hamdan, the film also provides an overview of the flaws in America’s schizophrenic treatment of war-on-terror detainees (Congress adopted a retroactive “material support to terrorism” felony charge after the 5-3 landmark 2006 Supreme Court decision in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case). The Oath‘s objectivity, its greatest narrative asset, naturally limits its potential commercial reach, since reactionary forces even beyond the reach of FOX News still peddle this brawny, mock-patriotic notion that the faintest strokes of grey morality give “aid and comfort to America’s enemies,” as if either complacency or contentment can themselves pack a C4 cap or trigger a dirty bomb, or were somehow in abundance in Afghanistan on September 11.

What one is left with in The Oath is a stirring, engaging film that elicits more questions than it answers. Near the end of the movie, we learn that the actionable intelligence
from Jandal’s (non-coerced) debriefing, spread out over two weeks, was so
important to the United States learning more about bin Laden and
Al-Qaeda that the very start of the war in Afghanistan was delayed in
order to allow for it to continue. We also see Jandal talk broadly about human rights, and then moments later argue against Al-Qaeda ever being drawn into the political process, saying, “When you accept the other as he is, then you’re in agreement with his infidelity and lowliness.” His fuse seems still lit, basically. So what gives? Radicalism isn’t just a flame to be snuffed out, the movie posits, perhaps unnervingly to some. After all, both water and fire are sometimes used to fight fire. (Zeitgeist, unrated, 96 minutes)

Teaming up for the fifth time, Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott exercise their gladiatorial instincts once again with Robin Hood, a beefy, brawny epic that, not unlike Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven before it, exudes a certain world-weary spirit. While the filmmakers and studios involved in most Hollywood summer flicks are trending ever increasingly toward streamlined, bantamweight fare, Scott is tracking in the exact opposite direction.

While not dour, per se, Robin Hood provides ample evidence that the veteran filmmaker wants (and indeed, maybe is incapable of delivering anything otherwise) to make films that kick up no small amount of dust, that look beautiful but have grit, that feature dirty fingernails alongside their aggressively modern foley mixes. In placing such an emphasis on chainmail authenticity and the events that lead to “Robin Longstride” returning from the Crusades and slowly growing into such a fanciful figure of legend, however, Scott and Crowe potentially run the risk of delivering a film that is so inconveniently, wildly out of step with mainstream audience expectation as to disappoint.



Based on a script from Brian Helgeland, Robin Hood opens on the edge of the 13th century, at the end of a 10-year religiously inspired military campaign by crusading king Richard the Lionheart (Danny Huston). As they make their way home through France, Richard is felled, leaving capricious younger brother Prince John (Oscar Isaac) susceptible to the more cunning machinations of Godfrey (Mark Strong), a power player looking to stoke the fires of Northern discontent against the British crown, and pave the way for a French incursion.

Robin Longstride (Crowe) is but a lowly archer, garrisoned for fighting, but he soon finds himself on the lam with a motley crew of fellow soldiers, including Little John (Kevin Durand). Using the dead king’s crown and a dead knight’s sword, the group secures passage back to England, letting the lies of their noble stock live on for a while. Haunted by a wish to a dying countryman, Robin feels compelled to return said sword to the fallen knight’s father, Sir Walter Loxley (Max von Sydow), where he meets widower Marion Loxley (Cate Blanchett). Walter then concocts a scheme to welcome Robin back as his deceased son, which he asserts will offer legal protection for their already squeezed, almost starving estate upon his passing.

As Godfrey’s deceits are revealed, various parties inveigh upon Prince John to strike a conciliatory tone with the overtaxed, fed-up tribal factions of Northern England, in order to more effectively turn back the gathering foreign threat. The young king momentarily accedes, and the penultimate showdown in Robin Hood is a beach-set burly-brawl, in which Robin gets to wade out into the tide and smash swords with Godfrey, against a chaotic backdrop that serves as a period piece homage to Saving Private Ryan‘s opening Normandy sequence.

Despite Crowe’s insistence to the contrary, agitated Tea Partiers will likely find a political message here, sparking to the film’s anti-tax, yay-liberty! message that every man should be free to fend for himself. (They’ll conveniently ignore the fact that Robin’s country has been bankrupted largely by the hawkish over-extension of ill-advised foreign military entanglements.) But much of Robin Hood actually runs counter to what has helped entrench the character in popular consciousness. In fact, taking a page from so many comic book adaptations of late, the movie basically serves as an origin story/prequel to the Robin Hood who challenges corruption, and through his quiver and arrow gives voice to the poor. This is essentially Robin Hood’s walkabout — the period wherein he finds out about his deceased father and reaffirms the intestinal fortitude that informs his subsequent “outlaw” existence.

In and of itself that’s not a terrible thing, given the handsomeness with which this production is mounted, and the slow-burn charisma — notably from Crowe, but also some bit players — that powers the movie. It just makes for a thing to be settled into rather than whisked away by. The first hour is a bit sludgy at times, and other than the left-field decision to slap a suit of armor on her for the aforementioned beach siege, there’s not really much for Blanchett to do as Marion. Helgeland and Scott never seem to quite figure out whether their film is supposed to truly submit to the delicate flirtation between Robin and Marion (who, after all, has just lost her husband, no matter the fact that she scarcely knew him), and as such the latter just kind of floats around the film’s edges.

Finally, there’s the movie’s third act speechifying, the very idea of which is rather ridiculous; I don’t think monarchs encouraged in-the-round outdoor debate, let alone impassioned monologues of dissent. For all its investment in historical accuracy on the battlefields, it seems Robin Hood still didn’t figure out a way to completely avoid the Candyland shortcut allure of overly convenient dramatic license. (Universal, PG-13, 140 minutes)

For a moment, I thought about staying up for 72 consecutive hours after seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street, in an effort to see if sleep deprivation increased my admiration for its bleary-eyed performances, or otherwise gave the movie any shading and nuance not heretofore detected. Such an exercise in “method reviewing,” however, would be more comparative analysis than director Samuel Bayer’s reboot of Wes Craven’s 1984 horror film deserves.

Despite hewing closely to the original in some of its set piece deaths, one’s familiarity with that horror genre touchstone is hardly a necessity. As with most movies of its ilk, the storyline here centers around a group of kids stalked by a ghastly figure, in this case the burned, dream-world presence of Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley), an old elementary school groundskeeper about whom the small burgh’s other adults have been harboring an old secret. Once the babe and the only guy whose jerky-surly demeanor seems capable of infusing some personality into the proceedings (Katie Cassidy, above, and Thomas Dekker, respectively) are dispatched, that leaves audiences stuck with high school drabs Nancy (Rooney Mara, younger sister of Kate Mara) and Quentin (Kyle Gallner), as they try to unravel the mystery of why they’re suddenly being dream-stalked by the same menacing figure.

There’s a bit of an expanded backstory for Krueger here, but not much in Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer’s screenplay to make one feel anything very deeply. The introduced notion of “micro-naps” (a sort of auto-sleep function of the human brain that kicks in after two-plus days without sleep, and results in auditory and visual hallucinations) provides a ready-made template for some interesting narrative hiccups and head feints about how Krueger enters the consciousnesses of his victims, but the filmmakers massively drop the ball in this regard. Neither does the script have any sort of genuine, fevered investigative pop. Apart from a cursory dab of over-emoting spread thinly over two scenes, none of the characters seems particularly thrown for a loop that, you know, there is a character (at this point they don’t even know he is essentially the spirit of a real person) who can physically kill them only in their sleep; at one point Quentin just blurts out, “If you die in your dreams, you die in real life,” which seems like lazy self-diagnosis, even for a horror film that doesn’t particularly seem to aspire to anything beyond a healthy opening weekend gross. In making the thrust of the movie a search for who Krueger is rather than why he is suddenly tormenting them, A Nightmare on Elm Street comes across like nothing so much as a boring, gory junior detective procedural.

Bayer, the director of some of the most seminal music video clips of the past quarter century, including Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” has a firm grasp of the technology at his disposal, no doubt; he lights effectively for mood, and figures out a few evocative framing devices, though I could have done without the re-up of the iconic ob-gyn-style point-of-view bathtub shot, which manages to come across as both skeevy and inappropriately humorous at the same time. Chiefly, though, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a misfire of imagination. Its sound effects-driven “boo scares” evoke a small clutch of familiar responses, but Haley’s voice, as Krueger, is so heavily processed and amplified that it has a divorcing effect from the darkness of the plotline, which is the enveloping swirl of psychological trauma resulting from child abuse. That’s a real horror, and this Nightmare on Elm Street glosses over it entirely, using it only for cheap, gimmicky effect. (Warner Bros./New Line, R, 96 minutes)

Brendan Fraser makes a play for family audiences with Furry Vengeance, a slapstick misfire of epic proportions. Even by downwardly adjusted expectations and more forgiving standards of movies in which anthropomorphized animals do battle with humans, Furry Vengeance is witless and wince-inducing. Unsuspecting family audiences could be roped in during its debut weekend, but the movie should otherwise sink with deadly word-of-mouth, finding second wind in ancillary markets only as an innocuous video babysitter. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Summit, PG, 91 minutes)

Its string of lesser sequels coined the derisive term “Death Wish cinema,” as well as unfortunately relegating Charles Bronson to something of a joke, but tony revenge tales with well-groomed or otherwise unlikely protagonists, from Jodie Foster’s The Brave One to last year’s first-quarter smash hit Taken, continue to crop up at the rate of three or four a year, and will always be a part of moviemaking as long as people have reason to fear for their families (which is to say as long as people have families). The gritty, engaging Harry Brown again proves this sub-genre is not purely some aggressive Stateside phenomenon. Michael Caine has cycled through his share of kindly butlers and gruff mentors of late, but his starring role as the titular avenging pensioner helps give this tale a robustness, mooring and social relevance lacking in many such films.

Harry Brown unfolds in London’s East End, against a backdrop of marauding, tension and despair. After his old pal Len Atwell (David Bradley), a fellow retiree, gets beaten to death by a group of thug teenagers, 76-year-old veteran Harry is devastated, and more than a bit scared. He doesn’t immediately start taking measures to try to make sure those responsible are brought to justice, however; like Len, he’s set upon at night, returning home from a local pub. His first act of violence is also one of defense, stabbing his attacker with a bayonet from an old Army rifle.

Meanwhile, dedicated and by-the-book detective inspector Alice Frampton (Emily Mortimer), along with her more skeptical partner, Andrew Childs (Iain Glen), are tasked by their boss with bringing this area under control, before its tensions completely boil over. They interview Harry, and arrest a gaggle of local ne’er-do-wells in Len’s death, including sneering sociopath Noel Winters (Ben Drew). Unable to completely crack their wall of silence, however, they eventually have to let the kids go. It’s at this point that Harry becomes a more proactive force of violent counterweight. Alice has suspicions about what Harry is up to, and works to bring him to justice, but isn’t able to seal the deal before a mini-riot at the neighborhood’s high-rise dwelling puts many more people in jeopardy.

Working with cinematographer Martin Ruhe (Anton Corbijn’s Control, Julie Delpy’s The Countess), debut feature director Daniel Barber crafts an unnerving, kinetic, point-of-view opening to the movie (some of the kids take cell phone video-camera footage of their exploits), but never allows Harry Brown to tip over into a jittery piece of caffeinated vengeance. It’s perfectly modulated, balanced between austere and modern. The grimy, brown-and-grey color palette convincingly communicates a setting that is oppressive and stifling for all those involved — it conveys the squalor, lack of opportunity and attendant acting out for adolescents, while also capturing the resultant fear of a general, law-abiding populace who has to keep their eyes down lest they be accused of looking askance at someone.

Martin Phipps and Ruth Barrett’s score ably portends doom, rumbling like an ominous church organ at times, and while Gary Young’s script isn’t necessarily revelatory, it does allow for a small handful of twists. Its chief asset may actually be its cleanly delineated structure, which allows for a couple remarkable long-play scenes to unfold slowly and naturally — one in a drug den, where Harry goes to try to secure a gun, and another an interrogation sequence in which Alice remains cool and collected in the face of Ben’s nasty rants. While matters of violence are at its core, Harry Brown isn’t a movie that feels the need to goad or prod viewers all that unnecessarily with flashes of stylistic excess, and this works quite well, in lockstep with its shuffling protagonist. It’s a kind of urban western, in a way. Things only get a bit hairy in its gone-to-hell finale, which (unsurprisingly, I guess) favors brawny crescendo over something more muted.

Through this all, Caine delivers a performance befitting his experience, and in line with some of his strengths — an ability to convey anxiety or swallowed fear within physical stillness. Informed by the crumbling social structures around him, Harry’s journey is an honest one. It may not be marked by choices all of us would make in our own lives, but it rings true. Because, after all, the capacity for violence exists in all of us. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 101 minutes)

Brian Cox and Paul Dano, costars in Michael Cuesta’s arresting L.I.E., reteam for Icelandic filmmaker Dagur Kári in the form of The Good Heart, a spare drama of unlikely mentorship that makes good use of its two actors’ talents and rapport, but ultimately comes off as a self-conscious collection of grimy, fringe-dwelling “types.” The rising profiles of its two stars — including Dano’s lauded turn in There Will Be Blood, and Cox’s commercial recognizability from X2 and two of the three Jason Bourne films — will help lend Stateside arthouse intrigue and credibility to what is otherwise a fairly thinly sketched tale of fated emotional awakening. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Magnolia, R, 94 minutes)