Agreeably cast but burdened with an overly predictable narrative and junior flyweight comedic punching power, New York-set indie Hannah Has a Ho-Phase is one of those post-Bridesmaids laffers (no matter its exact date of origin) that tries to put a Title IX spin on (slight) raunchiness and sexual acting out. In the zeitgeist shadow of works with much more strongly defined voices, however, like Lena Dunham‘s HBO series Girls, this slice of mock-shock has little going for it except for that great title and a few likable performances.



While her roommate and best friend Leslie (Genevieve Hudson Price), a pole-dancing instructor who digs no-strings-attached flings, frequently keeps her up at night with her bedroom antics, 25-year-old advertising associate Hannah (Meredith Forlenza, above left) finds herself in a bit of a dry spell. She’s dating a guy, but not having sex, and so after she spots said dude at a bar making out with another girl, Hannah impulsively accepts a bet from Leslie that she can more easily bed 10 guys in six weeks than Leslie can go without sex for the same time period.

Ergo, titular sexual oat-sowing ensues. All this coincides, of course, with an assignment at work where Hannah is paired with ladies man Donny (Quincy Dunn Baker) to research a potential campaign for a branded, vanity vodka line that a rapper wishes to launch. As Hannah starts to inch closer to hitting her target number, though, she begins to wonder if developing feelings for Donny are, a) sincere, and b) requited. Freed up from base-level attraction, meanwhile, Leslie accepts a date offer from schlubby, mustachioed Seth (Mike C. Nelson), but then struggles to convince him of the genuineness of her romantic interest.

Co-directed in flatly shot fashion by Nadia Munla and Jamie Jensen, from a script written by the latter, Hannah Has a Ho-Phase (and yes, that hyphen kind of bugs me) surfs along on a somewhat saucy wave, but it lacks the relative sophistication — and certainly the Dorothy Parker-esque dialogue snap — of films like Lola Versus or L!fe Happens, to name but two other femme-centric comedies of sexual exploration, acting out and/or consequence. A bit of the frank sex talk is funny, but once Hannah enters her blue period, the film’s qualified chasteness comes through; there’s no nudity herein, making for some awkward sex scenes that run counter to the dialogue. Munla and Jensen also seem afraid to mine supporting characters for laughs; the whole idea of the rapper, and especially him wanting to name his brand “Get It,” as a sexual come-on, is amusing, but the character appears once, as a third act throw-away.

Thankfully, though, the performances are for the most part enjoyable. Forlenza — who physically favors a mash-up of Rachel Weisz and Nia Vardalos — has a certain girl-next-door coquettishness, and a nice rapport with Price. Nelson, though, rather quietly steals the show. He’s gifted with a few funny lines (as when Seth queries Leslie as to her “art stance” when they visit a museum), but also nails the probing humor and deferential physicality of a guy punching up above his number. If only the rest of Hannah had his same slyness. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Hannah Has a Ho-Phase is also available on iTunes and across VOD platforms. For more information, click here to visit its website. For the full, original review, click here. (Hourglass Entertainment/Kitty Kat Productions, R, 93 minutes)

A choppy adaptation of Max Brooks’ beloved novel of the same name, World War Z, starring Brad Pitt, aims for a putative classy, ruminative sweet spot somewhere between pandemic thrillers like Contagion and Children of Men and pulse-quickening zombie survival tales like Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later and its sequel. But it ignores or fudges various geopolitical realities, and in fumbling away one of the chief strengths of its source material it morphs into just another anonymous quasi-post-apocalyptic blockbuster.

A poorly reasoned first act gives way to a number of admittedly crackling, professionally mounted set pieces largely unburdened by any necessary unification, but the degree of satisfaction with World War Z for many viewers will be inversely proportional to their familiarity with the source material — or indeed, even just a desire for intelligent complexity. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Paramount, PG-13, 116 minutes)

The evocative title conjures up an immediate sense of intrigue, and Twenty Feet From Stardom, a new documentary about the unique lives and role of back-up singers, does not disappoint. Directed by Morgan Neville, this fascinating and eminently watchable little movie shines a deserving spotlight on those for whom singing is often chiefly about just sharing in a sense of harmonic enlightenment, not competition or means-to-an-end fame.

The subjects at the heart of Twenty Feet From Stardom are a varied bunch, but the film predominantly centers around five talented women. There’s 71-year-old Darlene Love, one of the bricks in Phil Spector‘s groundbreaking “Wall of Sound,” and a back-up singer to heavy hitters such as Frank Sinatra, Sam Cooke and Dionne Warwick; Merry Clayton, a preacher’s daughter whose voice has colored everything from Lynyrd Skynyrd‘s “Sweet Home Alabama” and Carole King’s “Way Over Wonder” to the Rolling Stones‘ “Gimme Shelter;” Lisa Fischer, who has a Grammy-winning solo album under her belt but tours with the Stones and Sting; Judith Hill, a back-up singer for Michael Jackson at the time of his death; and Tata Vega, whose turbulent career was improbably revitalized by The Color Purple.

Neville uses the interview recollections of these women as the backbone of his movie, but livens it up with a smartly curated collection of archival footage (and tunes, of course) that buoys their stories. More recognizable faces like Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, Stevie Wonder, Sheryl Crow (herself a former back-up singer) and Bette Midler also pop up, sharing their thoughts both generally and specifically on back-up singing; Jagger and Clayton’s intercut reminiscences of the latter’s summoned-in-the-middle-of-the-night contributions to the unforgettable “Gimme Shelter” provide the film with an electric high point.

Like a great melody, Twenty Feet From Stardom sticks around in one’s head for a while, and stands a chance of popping up unannounced in a thought, weeks later. Its characters are lively, intelligent and articulate women who in several instances bear the marks of a system that took undue advantage of them. Perhaps this is why the mere cursory manner in which Neville touches on some of the racial and sexual components of his protagonists’ stories is by comparison so disappointing. The women here share a lot in common (backgrounds in church choirs, for instance) and yet Neville seems afraid or unable to dive past the surface of some of these similarities and examine them in relation to the music industry, and its legacy of a certain exploitation.

In short, Twenty Feet From Stardom seems largely content to trade on its anecdotal punching power. The chasm in psychology and personality between would-be lead singer and back-up singers is frequently evoked and discussed, but only up to a certain point, in a kind of thumbnail fashion. In this manner, Neville’s film leaves one wanting just a bit more. Fortunately, though, its stories are so rich in detail — and, alternately, humor, heartache and triumph — that one will leave never quite being able to listen to the FM dial in quite the same way. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Radius-TWC, unrated, 90 minutes)

From Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone to The Simpsons Movie and Stephen King’s Under the Dome, the notion of an area being impenetrably sealed off from contact with the outside world is a well-worn one, full of rich and easy dramatic veins through which to explore notions of human fallibility and transcendence. Unfortunately, said concept gets a tired workout in writer-director Julian Roman Pölsler’s plodding adaptation of Marlen Haushofer’s eponymous 1962 novel — a German/Austrian import so weighed down by a stereotypically angst-ridden voiceover of emotional numbness and philosophical despair that one could be forgiven for thinking Werner Herzog wrote it as a goof.

Set against a beautiful and at times stark northern Austrian mountain landscape, The Wall tells the tale of a nameless woman (Martina Gedeck) who finds herself suddenly and inexplicably cut off from all human contact when an invisible barrier surrounds the cabin where she’s vacationing. At first her only companion is a loyal dog, Lynx. Later, there’s a cow she comes across and names Bella; later still, a kitten she dubs Pearl. The only people she sees, however, exist frozen in time, outside this bubble. After only a couple rather cursory attempts at breaching the wall, the woman focuses her time on survival (changing weather continues unabated in said space) and channels her psychic energies inward; the film then cuts back and forth in time, as she records in a diary notes from her stay of several years.

Certain critics have praised The Wall as intensely cinematic, but apart from its natural scenery and superb sound design (the wall is given an electromagnetic hum) this could scarcely be further from the truth. Rather than even try to let his audience live, labor and panic alongside Gedeck’s character Pölsler instead ports over or invents large swaths of morose narration marked by maddening equivocations. A typical passage goes like this: “I sometimes think X. (pause) I don’t believe that, though — I just wish it so.”

The result is a movie that feels antsy, uncomfortable in its own skin and, somewhat paradoxically, intellectually manic — a schematic exercise in theory and philosophy, with writ-large Metaphorical Import. It takes place in the wild, but is disconnected from it. For a much more interesting portrait of the unforgiving nature of the wild, consider Herzog’s Happy People: A Year in the Taiga instead. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In Los Angeles, The Wall opens at the Laemmle Royal, the Laemmle Pasadena Playhouse 7 and the Laemmle Encino Town Center 5. (Music Box Films, unrated, 108 minutes)

The idea of an Earth-bound fistfight between a foul-mouthed God and equally lewd Satan, complete with shots to the groin, sounds anarchic and wild. And certainly the participation of a roster of comedically gifted talents inspires some level of buzzy expectation. But in a post-South Park world, lazy execution of a ribald, potentially controversial concept will not suffice — especially not when the apocalypse is being handled with much more wit, vim and verve just across the megaplex, in the form of This Is the End. Thus the judgment of hearty disappointment falls upon Rapture-Palooza, a yawning, slapdash, would-be laffer in which a twentysomething Seattle native grapples with the discomfort and awkwardness of finding herself the object of the Anti-Christ’s affection.

After several billion people are raptured up to heaven, Lindsey (Anna Kendrick) and her boyfriend Ben (John Francis Daley) find themselves left back on Earth, with all the other heathens. The young couple tries to continue to lead some semblance of a normal life, amidst the downpours of blood, pot-smoking wraiths, and cursing crows and locusts, but it’s not that easy. Ben’s sycophantic father (Rob Corddry) has gone to work for the Anti-Christ (Craig Robinson), a garrulous taskmaster born Earl Gundy but who now goes by the moniker of Beast. When he whimsically settles on Lindsey to be his new bride, threatening to kill everyone she knows unless she assents, Lindsey and Ben concoct an on-the-fly, four-part plan to foil the Beast and cage him for 1,000 years.

Written by Chris Matheson and directed by Paul Middleditch, Rapture-Palooza locates a lot of its comedy in polarity. The Beast is a filthy-mouthed asshole who sings songs about his penis and spouts coarse come-ons like, “I bet your vagina tastes like pistachio mint ice cream” (and much worse). Shy-gal narrator Lindsey, meanwhile, is removed in a what-are-you-gonna-do? sort of manner, while the perpetually frustrated Ben finds himself in the awkward position of having his manhood undercut by Satan-in-waiting. To the extent that Rapture-Palooza is appealingly cast, this tack works in fits and starts.

The problem is that the Kevin Smith-type or South Park-y, sacrilegious stuff doesn’t play, because it’s not elevated, smart and specific enough. Plus, there’s no inner logic, even given the very low ceiling of the conceit. With the collapse of civilization, the idea of Ben and Lindsey saving money to operate their own sandwich cart so they in turn can afford to buy a house seems off. Presumably there would be lots of homes newly available, yes?

The movie is basically one big extended, inch-deep riff. It establishes the Beast’s infatuation with Lindsey in short order, gives her eight hours to decide a course of action, and then has she and Ben devise and then attempt to implement said plan to take him down. Laden with voiceover, a compacted first 15 minutes sketches out some of the specifics of this particular post-apocalyptic world, but Rapture-Palooza ignores much fun that could be had with the notion of the Anti-Christ as a former politician, even in ancillary fashion. In fact, pretty much every good idea it has — the notion, for instance, that Lindsey’s mom (Ana Gasteyer) is sent back to Earth after complaining too much at the gates of Heaven — it abandons in short order (frequently in favor of some bit of borderline obscenity from Robinson), as if it’s engaged in a game of plot-point hot potato.

The film’s high point, for those who remember the fifth season “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons, and its glorious Sideshow Bob rake-to-the-face bit, involves a litany of repeated shootings when Lindsey and Ben’s plan goes sideways. In its sheer over-the-top absurdity, it elicits out-loud laughs. Unfortunately, it’s too little, too late for Rapture-Palooza, a movie bogged down in a tedious spin cycle of crassness. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Lionsgate, R, 85 minutes)

A recent world premiere at the 16th annual Dances With Films, the Los Angeles-set Us offers up an unusual yet sympathetically pitched examination of mental illness through the rubric of a weird love triangle. Anchored by a superlative lead turn from Alanna Ubach, this micro-budgeted, worthwhile indie feature could, given a wide enough audience, serve as an important pivot-point for the actress, leading her into more dramatic terrain.

At first glance, Margaret (Ubach) seems like just a garden variety alcoholic — another thirtysomething wounded bird who drowns her unhappiness in booze and unfulfilling sexual encounters with seedy and abusive men. When she comes to after having blacked out in a bar, a lonely employee there, Jeff (Patrick Russell), lets her out before locking up. Later, a sympathetic social worker named Walker (Michael Navarra) happens upon Margaret on the street, and after a bit of conversation, leaves her his phone number. Once sober, Margaret relents to a proper date with him. Though cautious at first, she even begins to entertain the idea of having a real relationship.

One problem, however, lies in Margaret’s multiple personality disorder, which keeps Walker at bay and feeds an often less-than-healthy decision making process. The additional rub is that Jeff becomes a sort of guardian angel stalker — though not a very good one. Margaret finds out about Jeff’s peeping-Tom trailing of her, and invites him in for tea and conversation. Their strange and uneasy platonic bond, then, eventually intersects with Walker’s efforts to intervene in what he views as Margaret’s downward spiral into self-destruction.

In his feature debut, writer-director Sam Hancock concocts an interesting prism through which to refract a more serious mental illness; it obviously says something about both Walker and Jeff, and their co-dependence, that they’re drawn toward Margaret. The chief problem is that these supporting characters are so thinly and problematically sketched. For a supposed social worker, there’s a downright implausible lack of insight to Walker’s understanding and treatment of Margaret as he gets to know her better (“She’s moody,” he says at one point, after he should know much better). Jeff, meanwhile, is kind of a cipher — a vaguely free-form loner version of Wes Bentley’s disaffected character from American Beauty, minus any daddy issues or videocamera equipment. Despite game efforts from Navarra and Russell, these characters don’t rise to multi-dimensionality. As such, Us doesn’t feel like an equilaterally apportioned narrative but rather just a character piece with a couple wobbly wheels.

Thankfully, though, Us has Ubach. Better known for her comedic performances in movies like Legally Blonde, Meet the Fockers and Waiting…, Ubach brings a full-bodied complexity to Margaret, capturing both her vulnerability and the steely resolve and investment she has in protecting the walls she’s built up around her. She’s abetted by a script that really understands the relationship between a multiple personality disorder and sexual acting out (“That’s how people respond to me,” says Margaret at one point), as well as the character’s real angst and panic at the idea of letting go of the personalities, of letting them “die” (“They’re all I know!” she later rages).

In its atypical focus, Us does the broader issue of mental illness a great service. It showcases the impaired thinking that can lead to a variety of bad and dangerous situations. But it also examines the inwardly reflected insecurity that comes with trying to cope with such problems absent any greater support structure. When Margaret says, “You don’t want me — you want some cleaned-up, stripped-down version of me,” it’s heart-piercing in its directness, and the cold truth that informs Walker’s good-hearted desire to “fix” her. Us knows human complication, and puts a light on it. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on Us, click here to visit its website. (Umbrage Entertainment, unrated, 107 minutes)

A recent world premiere at the 16th annual Dances With Films, the evocatively titled micro-budget indie film Steve Chong Finds Out That Suicide Is a Bad Idea tries to put a bearded, decidedly fraternal spin on the whole Return of the Secaucus 7 sub-genre, wherein young adults gather and grapple with changes in life and their relationships. If there’s a certain easygoing charm to the movie, there’s also a lack of forward-leaning momentum or insight to make these characters stick to the psyche.

Scripted by Owen Hornstein, from a story concocted by his other three male costars and director Charlie LaBoy, Steve Chong breezes along nicely, a kind of down-tempo riff on The Hangover, in which guys get together, imbibe alcohol and give each other some shit. (Fear not, neither tigers nor Mike Tyson make an appearance. Sadly, neither does Heather Graham.) Big-punchline jokes aren’t really on the agenda here, but rather comedy of awkwardness and humiliation rooted in grudges over an old love triangle and the like.

Unfortunately, while the title holds true in the literal sense, Steve (Stanley Wong, also an editor on the project) is mostly a cipher, and interesting details regarding the other characters remain half-sketched. Most frustratingly, though, the film doesn’t really try to tap deep into Steve’s pathological shyness, or any of the cultural considerations that may inform it. So is it a comedy, or a drama? It’s sort of both, really, but without much punch or bite in either direction. Lacking much in the way of dynamism, the movie merely bobs along — pleasantly, for the most part, but in ultimately forgettable fashion. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Steve Chong The Movie LLC, unrated, 81 minutes)

Fleshing out their unreleased 2007 short film Jay and Seth vs. The Apocalypse, multi-hyphenate Seth Rogen and co-producer Jay Baruchel delve into end times with the winning, unabashedly vulgar This Is the End, in which a bunch of comedic Hollywood actors, playing themselves, cope with panic and paranoia while Armageddon unfolds outside around them. Befitting the backslapping nature of its casting, there are inside jokes and side-winding conversational riffs aplenty, but Rogen and his cowriter-director, Evan Goldberg, honor the conceit in all its zonked-out glory, studding their movie with slapstick gore, eccentric supernaturalism, some skewering of disaster and horror movie conventions, and lots of smart digs at particularly masculine vanity and insecurity.

While a lot of the humor in This Is the End trades in baser instincts (there are drugs, projectile vomiting and even point-of-view footage from a decapitated head, and an array of phalluses also make appearances, including the largest glimpsed onscreen since Watchmen), all the irreverent bickering and lashing out leads to some terrifically funny bits. And the movie gets in enough shots at horror films and the recent glut of siege tales to partially qualify as genre parody. Mostly, though, This Is the End is a relationship picture, with an improbably sincere ribbon of fraternal feeling and uplift. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Sony, R, 106 minutes)

Hardcore fans of Dancing With the Stars may find ancillary enjoyment and reward in the nonfiction offering Kumpania, which just enjoyed a Los Angeles premiere at the 16th annual Dances With Films. A concise documentary look at flamenco dancing and music, director Katina Dunn’s movie is a subcultural curio invested with much depth of feeling. Those with a predetermined investment in its rhythms will want to get up and dance along. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Piece O’ Work Productions, unrated, 61 minutes)

The directorial debut of multi-hyphenate Livia De Paolis and a mid-week world premiere at the Dances with Films Festival, Emoticon 😉 (yep, smiley face included, technically) delves into early-onset mid-life uncertainty by way of a career-minded woman’s unexpected pregnancy, and the unlikely friendships she develops with the two teenage kids of her much older lover. Professionally mounted and attractively photographed, this independent production is a fresh, off-the-beaten-path conceit that gets mileage from its willingness to examine notions of non-nuclear family and changing identity.

The story centers around Elena (De Paolis), a 33-year-old PhD. candidate whose boyfriend, Walter (director Michael Cristofer, taking a turn on the other side of the camera), is a divorced father in his 60s. His two kids — teenagers four months apart adopted from separate birth mothers when they were babies, Mandy (Diane Guerrero) and Luke (Miles Chandler) — are at first wary of the presence of yet another new woman in their dad’s life, but when it seems like Elena will be sticking around they open up a bit and Elena wins them over. After having never wanted children previously, meanwhile, when Elena becomes pregnant, she weighs whether her attitude has changed.

Working from a script co-written with Sarah Nerboso, De Paolis proves herself to be a capable filmmaker and an interesting writer, at least from a theoretical perspective, as Emoticon avoids a lot of the pitfalls of vanity writer-director-actor projects, wherein supporting characters get shunted off to the sides. There’s an easy, unforced quality to in particular the adolescent performances here, and Emoticon connects early on for these very reasons. It’s rooted in character, and not concerned with the overly rigid dictates of a capital-N narrative.

Unfortunately, once Elena’s pregnancy is introduced, the film’s plotting starts to lean more heavily on artificial construction. There’s forced parallelism (a pregnancy scare involving Luke’s girlfriend), and when Elena suffers her own tragedy, both Walter and Elena’s mother (Sonia Braga) have to offer up inappropriate and/or tone-deaf responses, in order to baldly goose the dramatic stakes. This is kind of a shame, just because it feels like a punt — the trading in of a messier, more interesting reality for something less honestly derived from character, and more about unnatural catharsis.

Overall, Emoticon isn’t bad, but it also doesn’t reach down quite deep enough for something gritty and true. Its title — which on the surface seems like an odd fit — relates to Elena’s putative research into teens’ use of social media, and how it shapes their relationships, but De Paolis, who has a generally appealing on-screen presence, doesn’t dig deep enough into her character’s intellectual endeavors. When it’s kicking around on the fringe, Emoticon flirts with some interesting things to say about the shifting nature of identity and how it’s tethered to other groups, and even fertility. Too bad that the movie doesn’t bound off into the weeds, but instead stays too close to the familiar, carved garden path. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Circus Road Productions, unrated, 79 minutes)

Four separate magic performers come together, Avengers-style (“Magicians assemble!”), in Now You See Me, a jaunty, Ocean’s-style heist thriller with comedic overtones. Smart casting, agreeable performances and a fresh narrative backdrop power this facile, twisty treat, helmed by Louis Leterrier. If the Robin Hood-esque redistribution-of-wealth undertaking which its protagonists undertake remains a bit undersketched and opportunistic, it barely dents the momentum of this rolling, pleasure-delivering puzzlebox, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, Mark Ruffalo and Morgan Freeman, among others. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Summit, PG-13, 115 minutes)

Its title conjures visions of mythological battle or perhaps a questing journey, but the story at the core of the animated family film Epic is actually a much more familiar, environmentally-friendly tale. Centering on a teenage girl who gets shrunken down to a couple inches and must then band together with a whimsical set of characters in order to protect a surrounding forest, Epic takes aim mostly at the lowest-hanging fruit of entertainment, and achieves serviceable delight around the edges. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG, 102 minutes)

For a work that sold fairly poorly upon its 1925 publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby — perhaps the original American #RichPeopleProblems novel, about misplaced male ambition and romantic longing, and the perils of female drivers — has enjoyed a remarkable afterlife. It remains, of course, a staple text of high school reading lists, spawning along the way a Broadway play, no fewer than four television iterations, film adaptations in 1926, 1949, 1974 and, now, director Baz Luhrmann‘s own interpretation, a glitzy Jazz Age cocktail starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

The tale unfolds in flashback through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), a would-be writer who in 1922 arrives in New York City, lands a job on Wall Street, and takes a rental cabin across the bay from his cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) and her philandering, blue-blooded husband Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), and next door to the mansion of a self-fashioned and enigmatic young millionaire, Jay Gatsby (DiCaprio). Daisy and Tom live in “old-money” East Egg; Gatsby is nouveau-riche, and throws all sorts of lavish parties in West Egg. What is initially unknown to Nick, but becomes quickly apparent, is that Gatsby and Daisy used to have a fling, prior to his going off to war, and he’s taken up residence at precisely that location so that he might gaze longingly at the green light at the end of the Buchanan’s pier. When Gatsby uses his burgeoning friendship with Nick to arrange a meeting with Daisy, infidelity, heartache and tragedy ensue.

Working in a mashed-up, 3-D Art Deco fantasy world, Luhrmann (working with his longtime production/costume designer and offscreen partner Catherine Martin) brings a pinch of the same “jukebox musical” sensibility he impressed upon films like Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet. Ergo, Gatsby‘s assault-on-the-senses opening party scene may cause no small amount of bewilderment, with its Jay Z-assisted soundtrack that ranges from tweaked hip-hop and organ-inflected original compositions to a pumped-up version of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Given the reverence accorded most period pieces, The Great Gatsby takes a while to get into. Once one does, there’s a pleasant groove that lasts for a nice spell, but the movie never catches fire as something special.

It imparts the fizzy decadence and all that, and sounds the cautionary notes of achieving the material American dream. In many respects, though, Luhrmann’s re-imagination doesn’t go far enough — it’s a colorful mile long, but about an inch-and-a-half deep. For all the artifice and stylistic overload, certain sequences seem slavishly close in their design and staging to previous big-screen adaptations. Others, crucially, fail to crack the nut of the most difficult hurdle of the novel’s adaptation — its deeply interior qualities.

Purely in terms of its scope, The Great Gatsby offers up enough eye-candy to keep from getting boring. But while there are lots of jaunty uses of “old sport” (Gatsby’s exclamation of choice) and arguably a thin, shimmering ribbon of homoerotic fascination, the film doesn’t dig into the core of what it is that attracts and binds Nick and Gatsby to one another, and their relationships with idealism. There’s the nagging problem, too, of the fact that Daisy is such a spineless cipher and a fairly terrible person — an unworthy object of held obsession for our protagonist. (There’s only one mention of the daughter she shares with Tom, too, and a single brief sighting of the young girl at the film’s end, which is another issue.)

The performances range in quality. Carraway is ostensibly the audience’s guide — both within and without of the world he inhabits, but Maguire, with a perpetual expression of wood-carved wonderment, conveys nothing so much as himbo, go-with-the-flow presence. There’s not enough substance to carve out a contrasting commentary on self-reliance. DiCaprio fares better, by degrees. He’s played a number of wing-ding assholes (Frank Abagnale of Catch Me If You Can comes to mind), and is fast cornering the market on rich, insecure and intensely private men of power (J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes). So he has the affected mannerisms and clenched cheeks (both sets) of besieged and at times nervous entitlement. The problem is that some of his choices lean toward the obvious. A perfect illustration of this is the scene in which Gatsby goads Daisy into telling Tom she never loved him (it’s not enough to have re-won her heart), only to be undone by a blow-up. DiCaprio’s seething anger and resentment is all surface emotion, which, when contrasted with Robert Redford’s icy demeanor in Jack Clayton’s 1974 film version, only highlights its failure to tap into Gatsby’s deep well of neediness. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 143 minutes)

A companion piece to fine art photographer and director Deborah Anderson’s book project of the same name, Aroused is an uncommonly intelligent nonfiction exploration of the inner lives of 16 women in the adult film industry. This type of hybrid endeavor is hardly a novel concept — see also Michael Grecco’s scatterbrained Naked Ambition and David Palmer’s slightly more successful America Stripped: Naked Las Vegas, which cast a wider net by looking at “regular” (i.e., mostly non-adult industry) folks posing for a nude coffee table book — but Anderson’s effort has an easy, unforced quality to go along with its acuity, keeping prurience at arms’ length and allowing the humanity and vulnerability of its subjects to come through.



Anderson’s interviewees span different levels of professional experience, ranging in age from their early 20s to their early 40s — including Alexis Texas, Allie Haze (above), Katsuni, Lexi Belle, April O’Neil, Ash Hollywood, Belladonna, Brooklyn Lee, Misty Stone, Francesca Le and more. Almost all have something to contribute as they discuss how and why they got into pornography to begin with, but perhaps most interesting is Kayden Kross, who intriguingly posits that a lot of girls find their way into the adult industry not because they’re damaged per se, but owing to “not having a father or others around to disappoint” in their lives — and that a lack of those front-line barriers helps make the seemingly tough or daunting decision much easier.

Anderson sprinkles her film with the sort of requisite interstitial title cards of attributed quotations one might expect from a self-consciously serious work (“In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it’s a fact” – Marlene Dietrich, and “The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting” – Gloria Leonard), but, crucially, Aroused has the brains to back up any puffed-up sense of importance that might seep through its seams. Anderson is obviously a sympathetic and solid interviewer, but equally important and insightful to her chats with the assembled porn stars is her well-integrated conversation with Fran Amidor, an industry talent agent who offers up smart observations unencumbered by judgment.

Aroused digs into the psychology of its subjects, but, rather curiously, apart from a standalone anecdote from Teagan Presley, doesn’t really address the body modification (be it breast augmentation, other plastic surgery and collagen injections, or something as simple as tattoos) rampant among women in the adult industry. “Would-have-been” weather girl Jesse Jane talks about not getting into the sex trade until she was 22, and even waiting to lose her virginity until she was married (of course, that was at age 17…), while other interviewees speak candidly about assuming a different persona on camera, life on set in general, the difficulties of making relationships work with significant others (or “civilians,” as Stone dubs them), and more.

The film has great production value, too. Anderson has an active camera — the latter half of the movie unfolds in a series of extreme close-ups and suggestive tracking shots — but also has clearly thought through a visual framework that abets a certain emotional narrative arc. Early on, as the women get ready for their photo shoots in make-up chairs, Aroused is lensed in black-and-white, and tracks more or less along the lines of biographical or general interest questions. At the mid-way point, as the movie shifts to its boudoir setting where she coaches them through her photo shoot, Anderson makes a switch mostly to color — embracing a style that reflects some of the more intensely personal musings. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Aroused is also available on iTunes and across several VOD platforms. For more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Ketchup Entertainment, unrated, 69 minutes)

Crackerjack popcorn entertainment done overwhelmingly right, Iron Man 3 is a robust example of what Hollywood can do right when it puts its mind to it — bringing tremendous resources to bear upon a larger-than-life story, entrusting it to smart, capable people, and turning them loose with fully invested confidence. A fun ride brimming with nice character details that fit together in comfortable and occasionally savvy ways, writer-director Shane Black takes over the franchise reins with a breezy aplomb, delivering a movie packed with both thrills and amusement.

But the performances here are highly enjoyable (in addition to the regulars, young Ty Simpkins scores highly as Harley, a kid whom Stark befriends), and the rakish Iron Man 3 accomplishes the rare three-quel feat of actually leaving you wanting even more from a franchise. (Disney, PG-13, 129 minutes)

The story at the core of this curiously directed and somewhat misleadingly titled documentary — an adaptation of Peter Bergen’s excellent, bestselling book — is an innately fascinating one. Unfortunately, as either a primer on America’s terrorist takedown infrastructure or a megaphone for the insights of the (many female) analysts who helped untangle the ambiguity of information in aid of that cause, director Greg Barker’s messy Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Osama bin Laden, premiering May 1 on HBO, doesn’t forcefully connect, and as such remains a frustrating viewing experience.



The story of the ALEC Station group — the first CIA team tasked with finding bin Laden, formed in 1995 — is an engrossing one, and the putative leaping-off point for this nonfiction inquiry, whose strongest selling point may be the array of direct interviews with these former intelligence analysts. The regret and guilt is evident on the officers’ faces as they recall the weeks following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, for which they were suddenly “responsible” in the words of many pundits outside of government and several voices within it — even though their clear warnings about bin Laden had either gone largely unheeded and/or lacked operational intel. There was a “foundational change in organization” post-September 11, of course, and sharing information rather than compartmentalizing it became the de facto governmental position.

Bergen’s book, while comprehensive, is far from unwieldy, even as it chronicles bin Laden’s rise from his tangles with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan up through bombings on the USS Cole and American embassies. The movie version of Manhunt, on the other hand, is a thicket of distracted impulses, themes and half-litigated theses. While analyst interviewees like Cindy Storer and Barbara Sude, as well as Marty Martin, the former senior CIA case officer in the Middle East who became the day-to-day manager of the organization’s worldwide operations against al Qaeda, give Manhunt an undeniable insider authenticity, the movie ping-pongs from an early, 1990s study of Al Qaeda (quite interesting) to the terror attacks and the CIA’s embrace of black site foreign prisons (“Let’s just say boutique locations,” says one subject), before alighting back on Bergen and Peter Arnett’s March 1997 CNN interview with bin Laden, in which he first formalized his declaration of war on the United States.

Other parts of the film cover CIA analysts moving on to work as “targeting officers” in various war theaters (Nada Bakos, for instance, heads to Iraq, where she spends so much time hunting brutal Al Qaeda in Iraq emissary Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that soldiers jokingly start referring to him as her boyfriend). There’s trenchant analysis buried amidst these competing threads, as when retired Army General Stanley McChrystal says of the United States in general, “We haven’t taken the time to not be blind, deaf and dumb in areas of the world that matter to us.”

But Manhunt can’t decide if it wants to tell a history of Al Qaeda, the story of the overhaul of the American security and spying apparatuses post-September 11, the story of the enhanced interrogation/torture debate and American foreign policy adventurism more broadly, or just the Abbottabad OBL raid. The success of the book — distilling the essence of each of these strands, and connecting them — proves too difficult a lift for Barker, who employs a couple empty directorial tricks to try to enliven a graphic depiction of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, but doesn’t winnow his sources effectively. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend against anyone watching Manhunt. But there are also better resources — starting with Bergen’s tome, and inclusive of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty — that chronicle the search for bin Laden from 2001 until his death. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 102 minutes)

Unfolding in the urban slums of India, documentary The Revolutionary Optimists attacks the notion that where one is born should alone determine their prospects for health and happiness. If Whitney Houston’s soaring voice once awakened a populace to the notion that children are our future, The Revolutionary Optimists again highlights the fact that the best chances for change lie not in the simple rescue of adolescents, but in empowering them to become agents of change.

The movie centers on Amlan Ganguly, an ex-lawyer and the charismatic founder of Prayasam, a Kolkata-based NGO. Known as “Dada” to all the kids of the neighborhood, Ganguly pushes and cajoles them, demanding that they help work for better futures. He’s up against some difficult and troubling statistics; 12 percent of children ages five to 14 in India work, and 47 percent of girls are married by their 18th birthdays. These and other factors contribute to a deficit of hope, a tamping down of aspiration levels, Ganguly admits.

Co-directed by Nicole Newnham and Maren Grainger-Monsen, The Revolutionary Optimists doesn’t quite wrestle to the ground a more focused dramatic through line; in focusing on the lives of several kids, it’s sometimes rather unclear in marking time or elucidating consequences, which impacts its connection a bit. But neither does the film ever lose its capacity to casually shock or move a viewer, as when Ganguly shares with the children that he was raped by a family caretaker when he was six years old. It’s a stunning moment, rendered more amazing by Ganguly’s explanation of how he used that terrible moment to focus his life. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie itself, click here to visit its website. (Shadow Distribution, unrated, 85 minutes)

Rocker-turned-writer-director Rob Zombie has, in a fairly interesting and definitely surprising manner, carved out a certain multi-media genre niche for himself, spinning off horrific visions both original (The Devil’s Rejects) and adapted (his Halloween remakes). His latest film in some ways seems like a no-brainer, the type of easy-fit movie Zombie could churn out every 18 months or so if he desired. In it, a Salem, Massachusetts radio deejay starts having strange flashbacks of her town’s violent, witchy past after receiving a mysterious record addressed to her at work. Could it be… Satan?! Or maybe just some of his minions?

Zombie’s wife, Sheri Moon Zombie, again serves as his leading lady, playing Heidi, the obligatory shot of estrogen alongside morning zoo radio show partners Whitey (Jeff Daniel Phillips) and Herman (Ken Foree). After a guest, author Francis Mathias (Bruce Davison), appears to discuss his latest work, said package arrives. On its heels follow entrancing visions, as well as a couple increasingly awkward interactions between Heidi, her landlady Lacey (Judy Geeson), and her landlady’s friends, Megan (Patricia Quinn) and Sonny (Dee Wallace). After that, more ominous stuff happens, and the bodies start accumulating.

Zombie, as one might expect, has a nice sense of aural construction. The metronomic bass thump of the tune which puts Heidi in a trance is mesmerizing in its own way; Zombie also sneaks in some classical music as well. The Lords of Salem, too, is definitely a movie of considerable production design (hat tip to Jennifer Spence), insofar as its nightmare sequences pack a to-scale punch of jangly, unsettling discomfort.

But while Zombie trots out a few interesting and provocative premises (“A lack of sensory pleasure is the principle root cause of violence,” intones the TV in the background in Heidi’s apartment), he fails to fully chase down and wrestle to the ground any of these themes in an engaging or meaningful way. Instead, The Lords of Salem basically just works its way through very familiar notions of rekindled pagan idolatry and evil. The movie charts a weekly timeline, but there’s not really much of a ticking clock driving the plot, so its swan-dive into arbitrariness from the second act on is fairly complete.

The best of Zombie’s big screen efforts have a sense of leering, organized chaos — of merrily depraved yet finely calibrated manipulation. The Lords of Salem, though, feels… well, tame isn’t the right word. Zombie exploits the history of the Salem Witch Trials a bit, but not in quite as wild and memorable a manner as one might expect. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay, R, 101 minutes)

As an avowed, no-nonsense peddler of cinematic excess, director Michael Bay would in some respects seem to be the ideal candidate to bring to the big screen the deliciously weird and over-the-top true crime story at the center of Pain & Gain, starring Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson. Unfortunately this down-and-dirty air-quote character piece, a florid and casually misogynistic action dramedy that marks Bay’s least expensive production since his debut film, comes unglued early on, and then spends two hours-plus thrashing about wildly, to only middling effect. Madly trading off rambling voiceover narration from character to character, like a relay race baton, Pain & Gain takes the tale of a group of brutal yet idiotic criminals and twists it into a series of hyper-masculine poses masquerading as some sort of statement on the new American dream. It’s like Bottle Rocket by way of Savages, but not really in a good or interesting way. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (Paramount, R, 129 minutes)

On April 20, 2011, 40-year-old photographic journalist and filmmaker Tim Hetherington was killed by mortar fire in Misrata, Libya, where he was covering that country’s bloody civil war. His death marked the end of a brilliant and difference-making career during which he covered conflicts in Liberia and Afghanistan, and helped notably reshape notions of war photography.

Helmed by his friend and co-director on the Oscar-nominated Restrepo, Sebastian Junger, and debuting on HBO in conjunction with “Sleeping Soldiers,” an outdoor exhibition of Hetherington’s work at the International Center of Photography next door to HBO’s headquarters in New York City, Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington serves as a fitting capstone for a warm-hearted man who saw the best in people during some of the worst circumstances.



Hetherington, who with his crooked but quick smile sort of favored a taller Daniel Tosh, was born to well-off parents in Great Britain, but gravitated toward photography in some of the world’s most war-ravaged regions. His work received several major awards, including four World Press prizes. Integrating multiple media formats in his work, Hetherington had a special gift for forging sympathy with his subjects; he rejected as nonsense the notion that interaction with his subjects ruined the objectivity or sanctity of images, noting, “I’m a big white guy in their country, it’s stupid to pretend I’m not.”

From 2007 through 2008, in eastern Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, Junger and Hetherington holed up with the Second Platoon, Battle Company, at a remote outpost named for a fallen comrade. The resultant film of the year-long embedding, Restrepo, would debut at the Sundance Film Festival and go on to be nominated for a Best Documentary Academy Award. After many years in Liberia and other spots, the movie was in some ways the culmination of Hetherington’s quest to understand and document the different human emotions crystalized in armed conflict. (One of his favorite photos from the time period, entitled “Man Eden,” underscored what someone would later tell Hetherington — that war represents men’s best, most socially acceptable chance to express and receive unconditional love.)

Junger, who sits for interviews but doesn’t try to impress his own stamp of personality on the film, also doesn’t try to inject a lot of stylistic flash into Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? After all, there’s no need to. Hetherington’s life was an interesting enough one that it stands on its own, and the footage here — inclusive of his time in Liberia, outtakes from Restrepo, and his time in Libya, and buoyed by reminiscences from family and colleagues — is engaging, thoughtful stuff, no matter its surface narrowcast appeal. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 78 minutes)

A visually gorgeous dystopian sci-fi think piece from Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski, Oblivion is far more ruminative than the average action flick of its ilk, but it collapses under the weight of its own webby, familiar plotting, which is little more than an expensive grab-bag of genre tropes wrapped around a characteristically invested and empathetic performance from Tom Cruise. A boldly rendered film with faulty nuts, bolts and wiring is still, at its core, a movie that doesn’t work when it eventually comes time to pay off narrative set-up and beats.



Set on Earth in the year 2077, following a nuclear decimation that was part of a last-ditch effort to fend off an invading alien race that had already destroyed the moon, Oblivion centers around a restless drone mechanic, Jack Harper (Cruise), who lives thousands of feet up in the sky in a nice little Jetsons-type condo with his communications officer partner and lover, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough, quite good, if purposefully cool). They make “an effective team” the latter consistently assures Sally (Melissa Leo), from whom the pair receive daily directions and oversight via satellite, while Jack jets off to and fro, repairing the flying guardian weaponized robots that help keep the remaining alien “scavs” (or scavengers) away from the technology humans are using to harness energy from Earth’s remaining resources.

It’s just a couple weeks before Jack and Victoria are supposed to join the rest of what remains of humankind up in the monolithic “Tet,” after which point they’ll all repair to Titan, a moon of Saturn. Victoria is all ready for the reunion, but Jack is more restless. He’s plagued by dreams of Julia (Olga Kurylenko), a mysterious woman who may or may not be from his past, prior to his mandated five-year “memory wipe.” He also eventually crosses paths with Malcolm Beach (Morgan Freeman), who, you know, is also mysterious. It doesn’t give things away to say that along with the external threat, a confrontation with his own past ensues for Jack.

It’s far too early to consign Kosinski to the bin of Zack Snyder — that is to say, a visually gifted filmmaker who should be kept away from screenwriting software and simply steered to story ideas more fully developed by others. He obviously has a broad imagination, encompassing both physical worlds and bigger ideas. But Kosinski has a rather leaden, conventional touch with character and sets up his world — Karl Gajdusek and Michael DeBruyn take screenplay credit, but Oblivion is based on an unpublished graphic novel co-wrote — via some exposition-heavy voiceover, which means that the sludgy conveyance of these thoughts tip his film’s direction long before the plot has a chance to fully ripen.

Oblivion dreams big — its canvas is expansive. (Special IMAX presentations only enhance this effect.) Shot largely on location in Iceland, the film has a great look and mood, particularly in its opening hour, which has moments of trance-inducing beauty. Working with cinematographer Claudio Miranda and composers Anthony Gonzalez (of M83) and Joseph Trapanese (who collaborated with Daft Punk on the great Tron soundtrack), Kosinski trades in declamatory storytelling that lacks the more overt pomposity of something from Michael Bay. He aims to attach naked feeling to evocative imagery and sound; it’s like he’s aiming for involuntary audience response, akin to a doctor’s knee tap.

But Oblivion’s source material, and many antecedents, give it the feel of a cobbled together greatest hits album being dutifully plugged through by a reconstituted rock ‘n’ roll band. The Matrix, The Island and Total Recall are among the big touchstones here, but there are echoes of Moon, Solaris and THX-1138 as well. Even with its extraordinarily distinctive visual telling, paradoxically, little of the movie gives off the scent or vapor of originality. When it’s not papering over more interesting offshoot questions it raises, its narrative is busy ponderously cycling through clichéd dramatic obstacles on its way to a very familiar stand-off and climax. Cruise invests this tale with much intensity, but there’s not a depth or matching verve to the storytelling itself. (Universal, PG-13, 125 minutes)

A quirky but unfulfilling Canadian-Danish horror-comedy that offers up neither quite the deliciously mad slapstick-y gore of its title nor a more penetrating treatment of its character-rooted instincts, writer-director Boris Rodriguez’s Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal has a substantial helping of originality on its side, but not much in the way of inspired execution.

A one-time darling of the art scene, inspiration-starved, foreign-born painter Lars (Thune Lindhardt) takes a teaching position in the small, snowy town of Koda Lake, where he’s enthusiastically received by a school headmaster, Harry (Al Goulem), seeking to put his burgh on the map. His class comes with Eddie (Dylan Smith, resembling a brawny John Turturro), the lumbering, cereal-obsessed mute son of an important patron, and when she dies Lars agrees to take him in in order to preserve the promised funding in her will. It’s only then that Lars discovers the docile Eddie has a sleepwalking problem, during which he tends to, well, kill and eat things.

The rub? This bloodletting rekindles Lars’ artistic flame — so he’s less appalled than intrigued, and invested in figuring out a way to abet its continuation. When Eddie’s symptoms seem to wane, Lars mulls over whether this burst of creativity has been enough, and if he should instigate unease in Eddie in order to try and revive his murderous disorder.

Even though it possesses a rather vivid title that seems to offer up a wink of knowing parody, Eddie is mostly rooted in a realistic tone. And despite the seemingly outlandish nature of its concept, there’s actually a good deal of intrigue baked into the story, which reads like a twisted, modernized spin on an old Edgar Allan Poe tale. It’s just that this is a thin, gruel-like version of it — even a pair of post-dénouement, add-on twists land with more of a pat than an oomph — not funneled with enough energy and cleverness through a singular viewpoint.

Working from a story by Jon Rannells, Rodriguez delivers a script that, in its streamlining, is downright malnourished for clarifying background and detail. There’s meant to be a connection in all the bloody violence to Lars’ past prolific period, which brought him such fame and acclaim, but Rodriguez fumbles away the chance to delve into this with any satisfying depth. The film’s set-up is utterly perfunctory (“It happened so long ago I didn’t think I needed to tell you — Eddie has always been… different”), and its dialogue and plotting so mechanical as to invite various flights-of-fancy as to whether this is all part of some elaborate rope-a-dope scheme.

Lindhart (Keep the Lights On) is an appealing enough peg upon which to hang this tale, and Georgina Reilly (rejoining her Pontypool co-star McHattie, who cameos as Lars’ frustrated agent, Ronny) is cute and engaging. But the acting isn’t strong enough to cancel out such lethargic, incomplete storytelling. In better hands, this could be a wickedly engaging story of outsized ambition and misguided inspiration by way of sort of a hybrid cross of Fargo and Warm Bodies. As is, it’s a mildly stimulating concept that never achieves imaginative lift. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal is also available on VOD. (Music Box Films, unrated, 83 minutes)

The story of Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 broke baseball’s tacit color barrier, and thus in many ways helped lay the groundwork for the untangling of Jim Crow laws and other racial prejudices that would stretch out over the Civil Rights era, is a remarkable one — full of compelling resolve and steadfast character in the face of real, sustained nastiness. Written and directed by Brian Helgeland, 42 (so named for Robinson’s jersey number, retired by every major league baseball team) skims pleasantly enough along the surface of this potentially roiling drama, a biopic of carefully crafted but ultimately superficial uplift.



Chadwick Boseman (above) stars as Robinson, and the movie is mostly built around the plan for his ascension to the major leagues, as first crafted and then implemented, by Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford), starting in 1946. Wooing Robinson from the Negro League’s Kansas City Monarchs, Rickey goes against the advice of some of his consultants, putting the speedy, five-tool player on a fairly fast track for the big leagues, routed through the Dodgers’ Montreal Royals farm league squad.

Come 1947, Rickey’s plans seem momentarily waylaid by the year-long suspension of the Dodgers’ manager at the time, Leo Durocher (Christopher Meloni), a no-nonsense guy sympathetic to Robinson as much because he wants to win as anything else. Rickey presses ahead however, tabbing Wendell Smith (Andre Holland), a Pittsburgh Courier baseball beat writer and fellow African-American, to try to help ease the transition.

Boseman has an undeniably engaging screen presence, and it’s nice to see Ford — chomping cigars and buried under some bushy fake eyebrows — fully engaged, and diving wholeheartedly into an actual character, something he’s never really done. Many of the supporting players, too, are well rendered; John C. McGinley makes a nice impression as radio announcer Red Barber, while Alan Tudyk registers in effectively uncomfortable fashion as Philadelphia Phillies manager Ben Chapman, a racist, heckling foil of Robinson’s during an early season series.

But there’s a posed and overly polished quality to almost all the drama, not much aided by composer Mark Isham’s relentlessly prodding score. Helgeland builds his screenplay around a lot of smartly chosen moments — a player coming to Rickey with a piece of hate mail, only to discover the much larger amount Robinson himself has been receiving; another teammate attempting to talk Robinson into showering at the same time at the rest of them, instead of self-isolating — but these moments are as often as not undercut by simpleton staging, with blocked-off, back-and-forth medium shots and close-ups. When Rickey tells off a fellow team owner over the phone, Ford faces forward the entire time, performing for the camera. Similarly, platitudes flow freely in the dialogue.

The film’s division feels roughly right — the first half covers both Rickey’s rationale for integration (money, with a pinch of nobility) and Robinson’s minor league assignment, while the latter hour covers Robinson’s arrival in the majors, with a heavy emphasis on the first week — but there’s precious little inner boil here, no captured translation of the ongoing psychological toll on its protagonist, apart from an awkwardly conceived breakdown scene on the hidden inner steps of the dugout. Instead, Helgeland invests more heartily in Robinson’s domestic life, with his wife Rachel (Nicole Beharie) and their new baby boy. This plays fine enough but seems kind of yawning, desultory and generic given the rich potential for something a bit more chaotic and genuine. 42 dutifully elicits sympathy, but lacks the sort of grander multi-dimensionality its subject merits. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 129 minutes)