Filmmakers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have been accused of plenty of crimes against cinema in their careers, so one might not think that their latest effort, Best Night Ever, would necessarily hold much surprise. As the writer-directors behind slapdash spoofs like Date Movie, Disaster Movie, Meet the Spartans and others — overwhelmingly critically panned, all — they’ve traded in creatively bankrupt, stick-poke, air-quote satire for more than a half-dozen years.



And yet Best Night Ever is notable, in that it’s essentially the duo’s first nominally original, non-directly-referential screenplay. So does the film, a wisp-thin, gender-inverted rip-off of The Hangover and Project X, open in forced-outrageous fashion, with auto-tuned synth music and the black-barred member of a male stripper flopping about in circles? Yes, yes it does. And it’s almost entirely downhill from there.

What’s right about Best Night Ever pretty much begins and ends with the cast. The four lead actresses here have an across-the-board likeability and genuine rapport; each inhabit the broad constructs of their disparate, clashing personalities with aplomb, and bring a lot of energy to the proceedings. Unfortunately, after just a bit of early promise, Friedberg and Seltzer’s film quickly settles into a groove that is manic, nonsensical and yet also familiar. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Best Night Ever is also available on iTunes and across VOD platforms. (Magnet Releasing, R, 82 minutes)

From the opening jazzy riffs of musical accompaniment to Love Is In the Air, about bluebirds and the spring, it’s clear that director Alexandre Castagnetti’s French import, starring Ludivine Sagnier and Nicolas Bedos, is going to be a cinematic approximation of lives less ordinary. And so it is. Its story treads well-worn ground, certainly, but this robust exercise in romantic comedy formula has such pleasing, engaging performances and such a breezy, deft touch with push-and-pull gender dynamics that it escapes the over-determined nature of its final reel and by and large trumps most like-minded American product. Lovers of buoyant, improbable love stories will love Love Is In the Air. It has vivacity and enough authenticity to make us believe its sweet fabrications. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films/Focus World, R, 96 minutes)

Lest one think that all the playboy comedies tangentially inspired by 1996’s Swingers, about entertainment industry aspirants and the “beautiful babies” of which they’re in hot pursuit, had finally dried up, witness writer-director Herschel Faber’s Cavemen, a blockheaded, sigh-inducing retread, starring Skylar Astin and Camilla Belle, that evinces neither any particular originality nor freshness of telling. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Well Go USA, R, 86 minutes)

Discerning moviegoers certainly have many reasons to be wary of cinematic adaptations of toy brands. And given their enormous name recognition with the elementary school set, it would be easy to assume that The Lego Movie, based on the popular tiny interlocking plastic bricks, is little more than another slick cash grab with a boilerplate narrative and anything-goes sensibility. But the film, a smoothly blended concoction of spry sensory pleasures and considerable heart, is a terrific family-friendly adventure with sincere verve and pop. Co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street) mine a deep reservoir of genuine pan-generation feeling absent in most adolescent-targeted entertainment, while also working in sly digs at consumer culture, and paying homage to Legos’ enduring appeal to retro collectors. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Warner Bros., PG, 100 minutes)

A predetermined audience demographic shouldn’t be the guiding principle behind creative decision-making, but it’s so hard to get a clear read on the target viewer for At Middleton, a bittersweet adult romance starring Andy Garcia and Vera Farmiga, that that thought is the one which keeps returning to one’s mind for the duration of its running time. A bewildering dramedy in which two temperamentally contradictory parents meet while accompanying their teenage children on a college visit, this unusual film alternately charms and frustrates, in nearly equal measure.

At Middleton has a workable, if fanciful conceit, but co-writer-director Adam Rodgers and his writing partner Glenn German deliver a screenplay with a lot of exposed seams. And yet when Garcia and Farmiga rip into one of the five or six scenes in the film that really work and connect, none of that matters. This is most roundly evidenced in a sequence in which their characters, after getting busted eavesdropping on an acting class, are given an improvisational exercise by the instructor, and then proceed to lay their souls bare. It’s a master acting class in miniature, and it makes everything else almost worth one’s time. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Anchor Bay Films, R, 100 minutes)

The clarion call of a grander moral calling anchors the documentary We Are the Giant, and in large part saves it from its own overstuffed passion. Profiling a handful of activists involved in Arab Spring uprisings in Libya, Syria and Bahrain, the film mixes unsettling firsthand protest footage with involving stories of self-sacrifice. For the original capsule review, from Paste, click here. (Passion Pictures/Motto Pictures, unrated, 90 minutes)

“This is what the ghetto produces,” says one of the satellite bit-players of the arresting, compact new documentary 12 O’Clock Boys, director Lotfy Nathan’s look at a Baltimore subculture of young African-American dirt-bike enthusiasts who view their hobby as a ride-or-die proposition — a dangerous way to act out proxy battles with authority. He’s speaking of the film’s pugnacious adolescent protagonist, Pug, but also all the churning despair, angst and pessimism wrapped up inside him. Youthful anguish and risky acting out are relative constants across geography and time, of course, but this film, which skirts the line between urban dirge and socio-cultural curiosity, paints a compelling portrait of a kid slipping through the cracks.



The film takes its name from the eponymous band of mostly teens and twentysomethings who rowdily parade through Baltimore’s city streets each Sunday, on four-wheel ATVs and tricked-out mopeds. They, in turn, are named for the daring wheelies their riders pop, in which they rear back and stretch their bikes’ front wheels toward the sky. 12 O’Clock Boys unfolds over the course of more than three years, from 2010 to 2013, chronicling the charismatic Pug as he transitions into teenagedom, fools around with his bike and endeavors to gain acceptance into the group.

Pug’s home life is tumultuous; his single mother, Coco, is a former exotic dancer with four children. Pug loves animals, and has dreams of being a veterinarian. His main obsession, however, is dirt bikes. Like many his age, he’s captivated by the carousing misadventures of the 12 O’Clock Boys, who rack up thousands of YouTube views from all over the globe and taunt police — who have a no-chase policy, in order to preserve pedestrian safety in the wake of a series of accidents — with their antics.

In a city with many worse temptations and vices, 12 O’Clock Boys gives voice to those who argue that this outlaw brand of weekend and summer “release” is a way to remain neutral in gang-controlled areas, while also not shying away from the fact that a big part of the dirt-bike culture seems like an only slightly less dangerous pressure release valve for perpetual tension with law enforcement. With the serial antagonization of police officers, things are not going to end well.

Some of Nathan’s slow-motion footage lionizes the 12 O’Clock Boys, playing out like a music video. But he also makes some extraordinarily interesting and seemingly counterintuitive editing choices that pay off in big ways. When Pug’s older brother Tibba dies from an asthma attack, one would expect the movie to grind to a halt as the family copes with the grief. Young and unexpected death, though, is a frequent visitor in poorer areas of Baltimore, and so the movie quickly pushes past this, adhering to its main focus (Pug’s obsession with dirt bikes) and equally apportioned chronological tack.

Years later, then, when Pug is stopped by cops who ask him about his older brother, he points to the back of his airbrushed T-shirt honoring Tibba, and presses one of the officers as to how he knows Tibba. It’s a heartbreaking moment that wouldn’t have the same impact had Nathan delved further into Tibba’s story; in painting this death as an adjunct to all the other drama surrounding Pug, his film speaks quiet volumes about the manner in which what are in retrospect even causal tragedies are often white noise in our more of-the-moment pursuits.

The ending of 12 O’Clock Boys, which blurs the lines between fantasy recreation and indulgence, is thought-provoking, but also feels a bit like a ripcord pulled too soon. Still, Nathan’s film is a gripping portrait of youthful passion as well as opportunity’s doors slowly closing. One hopes Pug can slip through before some of the better options swing shut. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. 12 O’Clock Boys opens this week in Los Angeles at the Crest Theater and Laemmle Playhouse. (Oscilloscope Laboratories, unrated, 75 minutes)

Metaphor and opacity get a workout in The Wait, an inscrutable drama of commingled supernatural and psychological elements, starring Chloë Sevigny and Jena Malone as at-odds sisters coping with the death of their mother. Writer-director M. Blash marshals considerable atmospheric forces, but his film collapses under the weight of oblique logic and plotting, lacking in either effective emotional payoff or the more skilled observational touch of a rumination on loss. The Wait leaves viewers poised on a precipice, waiting for a revelation or catharsis that never comes. For the full, original review from Screen Daily, click here. (Monterey Media, R, 97 minutes)

That Awkward Moment, the latest bro-tastic laffer which attempts to thread the needle between twentysomething sexual exploration and acting out and relationship comedy (read: accepted “male” and “female” genres) is an awkward mash-up, but in the end will represent nothing more than a momentary, wholly understandable blip on the respective filmographies of its talented young cast. A stab at blended American Pie and Swingers-type antics, writer-director Tom Gormican’s film banks heavily on the ample chemistry of its players, to intermittent but largely unmemorable effect.



The movie unfolds in New York City, and centers around a trio of guys who are best friends. Jason (Zac Efron) and Daniel (Miles Teller), who work together at a publishing house designing book covers, are your classic player-types, who enjoy the bar scene and take extraordinary measures to develop a rotation of girls and avoid being pinned down in a relationship. When their doctor pal Mikey (Michael B. Jordan) discovers his wife Vera (Jessica Lucas) has been cheating on him and wants a divorce, Jason and Daniel vow to reintroduce him to single life, and enter into a pact to avoid getting into a relationship with any whiffs of exclusivity.

Things get complicated, however, when Daniel tumbles into the sack with his female wingman Chelsea (Mackenzie Davis), who’s apparently smitten by all his witty talk of receiving blowjobs from other girls. Jason, meanwhile, meets cute with Ellie (Imogen Poots) and, after their first night together ends in sex, transcends the awkwardness of mistakenly thinking she’s a prostitute. The more he gets to know her, the more Jason likes her. But when unexpected tragedy befalls Ellie, Jason blanches at comporting himself in the manner of a boyfriend, and jeopardizes a shot at maintaining a place in Ellie’s life. Can any of these guys grow up and find happiness in a monogamous relationship?

In his feature debut, Gormican basically serves jointly as ringmaster and a turbo-charged pace car, pushing his actors through rat-tat-tat dialogue, and hoping that the movie’s high-volume joke quotient wins over viewers. In a game cast — especially the talented Teller, who wins the day — the director has a lot going for him, but Gormican’s script, which was spotlighted as one of the top unproduced comedy screenplays in the 2010 Hollywood Black List, is a vessel of breezy banter, confidence and energy more than a cogent, well-rooted narrative.

Daniel and Chelsea’s burgeoning relationship doesn’t really pass the smell test, and Mikey seems most defined by shaking his head at Daniel and Jason and telling them that they’re idiots, which he does at least a half dozen times. Overall, the film seems inordinately preoccupied with proving its bawdy bona fides, by way of a good bit of cock-centric humor. Some of this works (Jason showing up at what he thinks is a costume party in a compromising guise, only to discover it’s a tony affair), but many other bits (I’m looking in your direction, confusion of self-tanner with hand lotion) feel like hijackers of tone, robbing the movie of any honest momentum or flow.

Certain sequences work quite nicely, and exhibit a keen observational touch; Jason and Ellie’s first date proper is a scene which nails the pushback and gentle mocking buried in as-yet-consummated flirtation. But Gormican seems afraid or unable to focus on honest emotion for too long, and when he contrives to deposit four of his characters in a bathroom at a Thanksgiving party — the scene most emblematic of That Awkward Moment‘s unfortunate unraveling — it becomes robustly apparent that his film is yet another example of a modestly smart movie felled by adherence to formula and dictums that don’t align with its raison d’être. (Focus, R, 94 minutes)

In sports, relationships and indeed life, sometimes it’s the little things that end up mattering most — the hustle down the first baseline on a routine grounder, the changed windshield wiper blades as an unsolicited favor for a loved one, and the extra-pass proofreading of a job search query letter. Lest we forget, such can be the case with cinema, too. For all the Hollywood obsession with high-concept and special effects, sometimes there’s something enchanting about a simple story simply told, and a movie of small rather than grand gestures.

Case in point: the pleasant and enchanting Brightest Star, a narratively slight but well acted and keenly observed romantic dramedy about a twentysomething guy’s amorous fumblings and occupational uncertainty. Starring Chris Lowell, Rose McIver and Jessica Szohr, debut director Maggie Kiley’s Brightest Star isn’t a movie of conventionally structured catharsis. But it does understand, on an intuitive level, the enormous weight of young adult ambivalence, and how that can be a suffocating thing in its own right. And sometimes there’s warmth and value in such reflection. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Gravitas Ventures, unrated, 80 minutes)

If one needed a reminder that “different” is not synonymous with “good,” an ample reminder arrives in the form of writer-director Jeremy O’Keefe’s Somewhere Slow, a very self-consciously serious independent production about an emotionally fragile thirtysomething woman (Jessalyn Gilsig) acting out a life crisis by opportunistically plunging into a road trip with a dodgy, wayward Mormon teenager (Graham Patrick Martin).

Somewhere Slow actually shares a decent bit in common with another cracked road trip of emotional awakening that centers around an older woman and younger male — Natural Selection, in which Racheal Harris plays a character who discovers her coma-stricken husband long ago fathered a son (Matt O’Leary) she never knew or met. But O’Keefe’s script is a precious bundle of mannered eccentricities, and a frustrating non-starter. Its characters don’t circle one another; they fall into a make-nice rapport too easily. That puts viewers on a slow train to Posed Self-Actualization, with too many stops along the way. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Screen Media Films/Logolite Entertainment, unrated, 96 minutes)

An unusual and gripping piece of minimalist experimental cinema, Charlie Victor Romeo dramatizes the cockpit voice recordings of a half dozen actual airline emergencies. Directors Robert Berger and Karlyn Michelson — working in concert with actor/producer Patrick Daniels, who helmed the stage version of this New Frontier world premiere from last year’s Sundance Film Festival — craft a psychological thriller that blends low-fi technique with high-tension situations, and wrings a real rooting interest out of viewers.



Filmed in front of live (though never shown) audiences over the course of three days during one of its 2012 stage runs, Charlie Victor Romeo deploys a small repertory company of actors playing the various roles of the pilots, co-pilots and other flight crew members grappling with six discrete disasters. The situations unfold at different lengths, and include incidents with icing, birds, bulkhead rupture, hydraulic system failure and other mechanical malfunctions.

Brief interstitial title cards provide relevant information about the type of aircraft in each scene, and the passengers and crew on board. Otherwise, the black-box staging of the material provides a fixed, straight-on point-of-view of the cockpit, though with a couple camera angles and very occasional, tightly framed cutaways to the profiles of assisting, overheard air traffic controllers. It’s a very spare approach, but the telling suits the material. It forces a subjectivity upon the viewer which compels them to create all the surrounding elements — the passengers and scrambling ground crew — in their mind.

The acting is (appropriately) clipped and professional, though not without small moments of humor and humanity; the movie’s opening sequence includes some flirtation between pilot and stewardess. There’s profanity, too, understandably. The aviation jargon, meanwhile (“over-speed alarm,” “elevator control,” etcetera), summons forth memories of the panicked punch of television hit ER, which gave plenty of viewers their first real glimpse into the crisis reaction of frontline medical professionals. It’s considerable, this terminology, but since the scenarios are authentic it’s not distracting; the gist of all the problems in each event is always readily apparent.

By using actual “black box” voice recording transcripts (only condensing some material for time, not changing any of it) and recreating these scenes of extreme duress, Charlie Victor Romeo doesn’t so much provide a snapshot of heroic professionalism (though there is a good pinch of that) as much as plumb the valley between human frailty and our remarkable capacity for disaster response. The result is a unique and unsettling film. For the full, original review from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its New York City engagements, Charlie Victor Romeo opens in Los Angeles on January 31 at the Downtown Independent. For more information on the movie, meanwhile, visit its eponymous website and/or Facebook page. (Collective: Unconscious/3-Legged Dog, unrated, 81 minutes)