A compassionate drama that wants to sift through and examine notions of expanded family, Run & Jump flirts with being a lot of different things, but succeeds in being none of them. The debut feature film of co-writer and director Steph Green, this Irish import — featuring one of two dramatic turns by ex-Saturday Night Live star Will Forte this season — has a rooted sense of place, but lacks the resolution and fortitude to push past pretty, dressed-up surface conflict and into areas that might leave a lasting mark with viewers.

Telling the story of emotional issues stirred up when a buttoned-up American doctor (Forte) gets a research grant to stay with an optimistic wife and mother (Maxine Peake) whose husband (Edward MacLiam) is suffering the aftereffects from a personality-altering stroke and coma, Run & Jump unfolds with much warmth and consideration, but seems skittish of pushing its characters into deeper conflict or friction. Content to play around the edges, Green’s film fritters away viewers’ attention. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sundance Selects, R, 101 minutes)

Solid acting and filmmaking technique breathe a good bit of life into triple-hyphenate Blake Robbins’ The Sublime and Beautiful, a Slamdance Film Festival world premiere and narrative feature competition title. But there’s ultimately not enough of distinguished merit to save the movie from a screenplay that trades in rote, plodding dramatic developments and say-nothing symbolism. While not without a couple moments of nicely observed quiet heartache, too much of this impressionistic tale of survivor’s guilt — built around a drunk driving accident that robs a small town couple of their three children — is balanced alongside meandering story beats that resonate as vague, indistinct, phony or some combination thereof. The result — a work of enervated, representational moping — is an enormously frustrating viewing experience. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Vitamin A Films/Through a Glass Productions, unrated, 93 minutes)

An engaging documentary about the transformative power of the sort of teacher who is able to connect with and inspire teenagers, If You Build It illustrates the benefits of the practical application of alternative education, and the ripple effects that it can often create for a community — if and when that community is ready to embrace it. Telling the story of a pair of architectural designer-activists who alight upon a rural burgh with dwindling economic opportunity, the film is a bittersweet exploration of outreach and advocacy.

Directed by Patrick Creadon, If You Build It unfolds in the small town of Windsor, North Carolina. Idealistic partners in both business and life, college-educated architects Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller arrive with a different sort of curriculum. Their two-semester, off-site high school class is called Studio H — so named for “humanity, habitats, happiness and health” — and it involves the creative planning, refinement and construction of a number of projects for a small group of students, about 10 in number. First they’ll make “cornhole” (also known as beanbag toss) boards, then chicken coops. Their third project — with $150,000 in grants covering equipment and supplies — is a yet-to-be-determined structure for the community, which ends up being a farmer’s market pavilion.

In its passionate subjects, If You Build It would have enough to easily appeal to sympathetic viewers who fall hard for inspirational tales, and especially those involving adolescents. But Creadon, the director of Wordplay and I.O.U.S.A., is a gifted filmmaker with an intuitive understanding of how to complement and bolster his main narrative arc with compelling details, as he does here with an interwoven revelation about lessons learned by Miller from his post-graduate thesis work in Detroit.

Perhaps surprisingly, while interviews with the students at various points over the course of more than a year greatly inform the movie, If You Build It doesn’t delve into the home lives of its subjects in the way that recent Medora did, for instance. That film, about a hapless small town Indiana high school basketball team trying to secure their first victory in more than a year, was much more a metaphorical exploration of the wheezing death rattle of trickle-down economics. If You Build It, which could easily chart a similar course, largely eschews this tack. It’s a choice, but for the most part it works fine for this film.

Things break down a bit in the last third, though. The film paints a picture of a school board that is change-resistant or possibly worse. We see an abandoned elementary school, renovated two years prior to being closed down, and when the county superintendent, a supported of Miller and Pilloton, is fired, the intimation is that his prescriptions for change were somehow too radical. (The pair subsequently each forfeit their $40,000 salaries in their entirety, to keep the class afloat). Creadon doesn’t dig down into the politics of the school board, however, and how widely or deeply their efforts might be supported.

Early on, this is perhaps for the best; If You Build It, after all, is more interested in the elemental bond forged between high school kids and the type of instructor who is willing to move beyond the drill sergeant oversight of rote memorization of facts and embrace the role of mentor. Too much time spent in the weeds, as it were, would be time wasted, and take away from that focus. But in the home stretch, as deadlines loom and Pilloton and Miller’s future in the town becomes a topic of debate, these unaddressed subplots and sidebars seem conspicuous in their absence.

Overall, though, Creadon’s film touches a viewer’s heart because of the manner in which it so roundly showcases the reality that kids aren’t blind to the social rot around them. They crave answers and self-betterment and the opportunity for stability and upward mobility, just like adults. There’s a forlorn quality to If You Build It, but in its small, to-scale triumph there is also a glimpse — and a hope, really — of seeds planted for even greater future change. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, click here to visit its website. (Long Shot Factory, unrated, 86 minutes)

Maybe it’s my fault, really. Perhaps I should have watched The Grounded, Alaskan wildlife filmmaker Steve Kroschel’s documentary about the purported healing powers of simple physical, bare-skin contact with the Earth, on a laptop outdoors, on my back, shirtless, and with my feet dug into the soil. Maybe that would have made it make sense. Unfortunately I did not, and so the aims and claims of this rambling nonfiction effort — the filmic equivalent of the jittery, well-meaning neighbor on whom you can’t quite get a read — remain so hazy as to circumvent embrace from even the most sympathetic and open-minded viewers.

The Grounded is at least nominally a first-person, crusading affair, albeit one with all sorts of blurred lines and focus. Kroschel lives in Haines, a small, snow-swept town of 1,700, and after seeing or hearing some random New Age-y news report, he crawls underneath his house in sub-freezing temperatures, strips naked and lies down in the dirt (a sequence he recreates for the movie). The next morning, he’s free from all joint stiffness and pain. The Earth, a “source of free electrons,” has healed him of pain.

Deeming this “an undeniable phenomenon,” Kroschel then conducts some experiments with plants (“Guess which lily kept its petals the longest?”), and bounds into advocacy like an eager puppy. Why isn’t this natural treatment more widely known, he wonders. The Grounded does include some interview chats with figures of repute (Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, and Canadian science broadcaster Dr. David Suzuki), but it mostly indulges an array of figures of dubious qualification or achievement, plus unexplained trips to Stonehenge, and a sequence where Kroschel lets his teenage son and his ill-equipped girlfriend interrogate a physicist. When he’s not tossing off important-sounding yet inescapably vague proclamations (“Gothic cathedrals often times were built exactly on energy hot spots”), Kroschel is busy passing out brown paper bags full of mysterious “grounding materials” to the townspeople of Haines, who later sing the praises of this treatment in curing arthritis, chronic back pain, torn rotator cuffs and more.

Ignoring the fairly questionable scientific method on display, Kroschel’s film mainly just has a hard time explaining or focusing on anything for more than two or three minutes. Some time is given to scientific pushback, but there’s just nothing of much intellectual substance on either side of any debate that might be had about homeopathic electron therapy and its effect on human physiology; The Grounded is an emotional work whose passion is outstripped by its incoherence. For more information on the movie, which opens this Friday in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, click here to visit its website. (Kroschel Films/One Paw Productions, unrated, 74 minutes)

A Slamdance Film Festival world premiere and documentary competition title that delves into a subset of the disastrous aftereffects of the April, 2010, British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Vanishing Pearls: The Oystermen of Pointe à la Hache is a devastating piece of community portraiture, and a look at the diminished choices of the working poor. Directed by Nailah Jefferson, this modestly scaled but no less heartrending work is instructive about the different public faces that corporations will try on, depending on how many cameras are on them and what best suits their most pressing purposes. There is no one easy answer or solution that emerges from Vanishing Pearls — no single decision that, if reversed, would bring stability to its subjects. And maybe that’s what’s saddest of all — that the exploitation of the poor takes many shapes, but that they are also among the most economically susceptible to forces of change beyond their control. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Perspective Pictures, unrated, 88 minutes)

Sometimes a film need not totally work in order to win you over. Case in point: Appropriate Behavior, which heralds the arrival of a fresh talent in the form of multi-hyphenate Desiree Akhavan. Reminiscent of Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein’s Lola Versus, starring Greta Gerwig, Appropriate Behavior will draw some barbs as just another single-girl-in-the-city comedy, but it puts a wry spin on gender politics and Persian-American assimilation. Akhavan stars as Shirin, a closeted bisexual Iranian-American who, fresh off a breakup with Maxine (Rebecca Henderson), stumbles through some dubious personal decisions and gets roped into teaching a Park Slope film class for unruly 5-year-olds.

As a cogent whole, Appropriate Behavior can’t quite decide what story it wants to tell; it’s caught between being a story of romantic dissolution, sexual coming out and a more mordant satire. Still, it crackles scene to scene, with warped meet-cutes (“I find your anger incredibly sexy — I hate so many things too”) and other off-kilter delights. Akhavan has an observant sense of humor and a great touch with dialogue. Part Sarah Silverman, part Molly Shannon, she’s equally at home with garrulousness and deadpan awkwardness. For the original capsule review, from Paste, click here; to get all up in the film’s website, click here. (Parkville Pictures, unrated, 82 minutes)

Amateurishness outstrips earnestness by a wide margin in writer-director Sydney Freeland’s Drunktown’s Finest, a Sundance premiere in the NEXT category. A coming-of-age triptych that makes the obligatory third act play for interwoven significance, this Native-American-centric drama has a hearty helping of festival cred (it was work-shopped at various Sundance labs, and Robert Redford serves as an executive producer), but seems unlikely to find a much wider home, even with arthouse audiences, given Freeland’s tin ear for dialogue and extraordinarily poor grasp of how addictive impulses inform behavior. For the original capsule review, from Paste, click here. (Dry Lake Productions/Indion Productions, unrated, 90 minutes)

Patton Oswalt‘s fifth stand-up special finds the comedian in strong form, humorously putting under the microscope his perceived strengths and shortcomings as a father, while also pondering the future of America and humankind as a whole. In large measure an engaging, curated trip into the performer’s own commingled personal and professional lives, Patton Oswalt: Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time is proof that wit, intelligence and innate narrative instincts are often a better foundation for comedy than rapid-fire jokes built around discrete subjects.

Oswalt is a personable storyteller, and as with many of his previous shows and appearances, Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time unfolds as a narrative-based effort, with long-ish, shrewdly observed yarns punctuated by occasional pin-prick asides. It isn’t powered by jokes in the traditional sense, though when Oswalt drops one (“Part of getting old for a man is suddenly becoming interested in World War II, for no reason”) it tends to connect just fine, like a sharp jab.

Director Bobcat Goldthwait, meanwhile, oversees an unfussy technical package, shot on location at San Diego’s Spreckels Theater, that eschews any lengthy filmed set-up, and instead uses changes in background lighting to serve as visual counterpoint to some of the more natural partitions in Oswalt’s show. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Tragedy Plus Comedy Equals Time world premieres on Epix on Friday, January 17 at 10 p.m. Eastern time, and replays throughout the month. For more information, visit the channel’s eponymous website. (Epix, unrated, 55 minutes)

A well-intentioned coming-of-age drama, based on a true story, about a teenage delinquent’s flirtation with more permanent ruination, indie offering Jamesy Boy features a grounded, engaging lead performance from newcomer Spencer Lofranco, against an equally solid technical backdrop. Unfortunately, while its redemptive arc offers minor chord catharsis for those predisposed to embrace adapted tales of real salvation, the movie never pushes past a comfortable orbit of earnestness in search of deeper truths.

Flashing back and forth between periods before, after and during incarceration, the film tells the story of James Burns (Lofranco), a troubled nascent teenager who — after attempts by his mother Tracy (Mary-Louise Parker) to get him enrolled in and settled at a normal high school — runs away from home and falls under the sway of drug dealer Roc (Michael Trotter). The rest of the characters in James’ world slot into recognizable roles. There’s the bad girl, Crystal (Rosa Salazar), whose wild behavior and uncouth come-ons (“Let’s get out of here, and go find a place to fuck”) are part of the siren song of life on the wild side; the good girl, Sarah (Taissa Farmiga), whose affectionate gazes seemingly represent safer ground, if not a way out; the gruff yet wise convict, Conrad (Ving Rhames), whose elucidated regret helps tame James’ recalcitrance; and the mousy fellow inmate (Ben Rosenfield) who of course has to die to help redeem James’ sins.

While director Trevor White, working from a script co-written with Lane Shadgett, doesn’t commit the typical cardinal sin of constantly overarticulating his characters’ feelings and tragic pasts, neither does he quite punch through to an elemental awakening. (The fact that the real-life Burns is a co-producer on the film likely doesn’t help matters.) Apart from a few cursory domestic scenes, James’ relationship with his mother and younger sister — a potential outlet for significant drama — is largely ignored, in favor of more difficult to convey scenes which throw a spotlight on James’ love of writing, specifically poetry.

Similarly, while James’ introduction and connection with Roc is nicely sketched out, the manner in which he drifts away after hooking up with Sarah feels arbitrary. (Drug-dealing kingpins aren’t typically big on freelancers making their own hours, one presumes.) The split structure doesn’t totally work, either. White and Shadgett mis-budget some of their focus, and at 109 minutes, the movie drags, in large part since so many of the characters take on such heavy representational qualities. We know where this is going, so it would be better for all parties involved if it got there quicker.

Despite the fact that it can’t quite cut through a low-hanging fog of narrative familiarity and inevitability, Jamesy Boy still features some nice performances. Salazar and Farmiga each imbue their characters with small moments of feminine coercion believably informed by their respective fractured backgrounds. And Lofranco, recently cast in a supporting role in Angelina Jolie‘s sophomore directorial narrative feature film, Unbroken, gives an intuitive performance that is mindful and in line with the unseen angel sitting on his character’s left shoulder. A young actor with more blustery, outwardly manifested angst could tip the film over into insufferability, but Lofranco is impressively restrained; he (rightly) plays James as a character hiding his pain from the world. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Jamesy Boy is also available across VOD platforms. (XLrator Media/Phase 4 Films, R, 109 minutes)

When a director is so utterly disheartened with a finished product that, regardless of whether they had final cut, he or she takes measures to actually remove their name… well, that really says something. And such is the case with Reasonable Doubt, a labyrinthine legal thriller that starts off with an interesting enough premise but quickly devolves into a ramshackle delivery vehicle for Dominic Cooper‘s misadventures in accent and the sort of disinterested glowering bullcrap that Samuel L. Jackson reliably pulls out for paycheck gigs devoid of character or sense. Director Peter Howitt (Sliding Doors, Antitrust, Laws of Attraction) was the man behind the camera for this, but the name viewers will see (or not, if they’re wise) credited at the end of the film as director is Peter P. Croudins.



The story centers around district attorney Mitch Brockden (Cooper), who has a promising career, and a new baby daughter with his wife Rachel (Erin Karpluk). So when he strikes and wounds a man with his car after a night of drinking, he swallows hard and makes a quick, bad decision, calling an ambulance but leaving the man alone on a snowy street. When car mechanic Clinton Davis (Jackson), an apparent good Samaritan who picked up the man in his van, is charged with murder in his subsequent death, Mitch feels compelled to throw the case — something he does with the assistance of his ne’er-do-well, recently paroled stepbrother Jimmy Logan (Ryan Robbins). His compromised and halfhearted effort, though, arouses the suspicion of Detective Blake Kanon (Gloria Reuben).

Sounds passably intriguing, right? Well, that’s merely the first act of Reasonable Doubt, which then tosses any notions of character-rooted suspense out the window in proceeding to rifle through plot developments seemingly generated by some special game of Moral Quandary Mad-Libs. Clinton, it turns out, may be guilty of crimes much worse than with what he was charged, leading to all sorts of games between he and Mitch which it’s very clear were described both to and by various producers as “cat-and-mouse.”

I’m not privy to the particulars of why and how Howitt got his name removed as director, but there are very large structural problems in Peter Dowling’s script. Yes, it takes 11 minutes of a slow end credits crawl to get this flick to 91 minutes, suggesting happy scissorhands on the part of at least one of the nearly two dozen producers on Reasonable Doubt. But the vague characterizations, insipid dialogue and chicken-wire stabs at parallelism had to be present to some degree from the start, as well as the decision to magically confer the status and skill set of a forensic investigator upon Mitch.

Shot on location in Winnipeg and Chicago, Reasonable Doubt makes nice use of some wintry environs but seems to lack any unifying visual aesthetic, and otherwise suffers from extraordinarily cheap production design (it’s courtroom is laughably bare bones), and production value in general. Composer James Jandrisch contributes some nice music — he has a way with syncopated unease — but this film is otherwise one big, snowy slog through Stupidville. It piles implausibility on top of implausibility, without ever downshifting out of its very self-serious tone. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Lionsgate, PG-13, 91 minutes)

An inert buddy cop action comedy that induces more sighs than hilarity, Ride Along tries to wring laughs from an attempt to curry favor with a future in-law, but only manages to serve as a showcase for what 50 percent effort and even less imagination looks like. In a movie full of exasperating missteps given the talent involved, it’s perhaps most frustrating that, even though its story is admittedly rather lazily built around the accepted public personas of its two stars (Ice Cube‘s glowering and Kevin Hart’s voluble nattering), no one involved can figure out how to put an interesting twist on that formula or even just remain true to the characters they establish. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 99 minutes)

Screeching meets social-minded speechifying in Black Coffee, which can’t decide whether it wants to be a fluffy and disposable romantic comedy about kicking a gold-digger to the curb and finding love with a likeminded young professional, or a slightly more serious-minded relationship movie-cum-treatise on the present-day African-American urban experience.

It’s obviously important to writer-director Mark Harris that Black Coffee makes a statement about African-Americans supporting African-American entrepreneurs and businesses, which is fine. But this theme is rather unsophisticatedly interwoven, and Harris’ film is too shot through with trite expressions of familiar scenarios, and additionally weighed down by phony redemption and catharsis pegged to its significantly boorish supporting characters, to connect in any meaningful way. It may be packaged slightly differently, but this Coffee is a cheap, tepid store-brand blend, of dubious quality. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (One Village Entertainment, PG-13, 85 minutes)

Nature may abhor a vacuum, but it seems lawyers also abhor arenas of life untouched by their professional advice or air-quote helpfulness, which goes a long way to helping explain the $50 billion a year cottage industry in (often contentious) divorce. A back-stiffening look at this sprawling problem — somewhat unsurprisingly unique to the United States in terms of its cost — director Joe Sorge’s documentary Divorce Corp., narrated by Dr. Drew Pinsky, makes a persuasive case for the reform of family law court, and in particular an attempted decoupling of money from issues regarding parental custody and visitation rights. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Candor Entertainment, unrated, 93 minutes)

A competently made, moderately engaging franchise placeholder that doesn’t strike out and take enough chances with its supernatural possession story, ancillary spin-off Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones mainly marks time until the enormously lucrative found-footage genre series ostensibly returns to the roots of its main story later this year. Aimed in concerted fashion at Hispanic audiences, which have helped make the Paranormal Activity films a big box office success, the movie achieves a feeling of realistic socio-cultural milieu but suffers from an under-sketched narrative and a timidity born of parceled-out corporate profit protection. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Paramount, R, 84 minutes)