The Company You Keep, Robert Redford‘s ninth film as a director, is about secrets, principles and the melting value of absolutes. In dramatizing the present-day, assumed-identity circumstances of a group of former anti-Vietnam War radicals who in real life in the 1960s and ’70s advocated the overthrow of the United States government, it offers up a decidedly American story of graying moral certitude to match graying temples. If that sounds interesting, in a certain stage-crafted throwback fashion, it is. If that also sounds like it has the potential to be overly schematic, and turn into a parade of Notable Faces, well… it is that as well.



Redford stars in the film too, as public interest lawyer Jim Grant, a recently widowed single father in upstate New York who finds his life of quiet, ordered domesticity upset when Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon), a former radical fugitive having lived for decades as a housewife and mother, is arrested just prior to planning to turn herself in. With a strident federal agent (Terrence Howard) looking to shake the cold-case trees and roust old colleagues of Sharon’s who are still wanted on a murder charge for an act of protest gone wrong, Jim rightly senses his past may be about to catch up with him. Stashing his daughter with his brother Daniel (Chris Cooper), Jim flees.

Meanwhile, beaten to the initial story scoop, Ben Shepard (Shia LaBeouf), a brash young newspaper reporter eager to make a name for himself, starts plumbing his own set of contacts and digging into Grant’s past, which in turn unwittingly abets the FBI’s investigation. Working a scattered network of his old Weather Underground comrades (including Nick Nolte and Richard Jenkins), Jim tries to track down old girlfriend Mimi Lurie (Julie Christie), whom he believes will be able to exonerate him personally, and help him keep his daughter.

In collapsing the disparate viewpoints of a lot of different aging radicals and battered idealists into a streamlined dramatic vehicle, screenwriter Lem Dobbs, working from the novel of the same name by Neil Gordon, crafts a number of solid, morally inquisitive exchanges. There’s a real push and pull here; tough, honest questions are asked (where does complicity end, for instance, and can good acts outweigh a past transgression?), for which there are frequently no easy, pat answers.

The film’s framing device works a bit less successfully, though, as person after person who has no particular compelling reason to talk openly or honestly to Ben continues to do so. LaBeouf has a squirrelly persistence that tracks well with Ben’s indefatigability. It’s just that parties who’ve kept secrets for decades seem somehow checkmated by a cocky assurance and a couple crackerjack investigative moves.

The procession of recognizable actors and actresses — almost all dialed in, and punching out smart dialogue that defends their life choices — is what gives Redford’s movie its hold. There’s a lot to like here, but at the same time some performers are given so little to do that a longer treatment, perhaps even on stage, often feels like it would be a better servicing of the same material. Abdicating, especially in its conclusion, any cathartic punch of shown change, The Company You Keep spins a tale about heavy, universal issues — the weight of guilt, the shadows of regret and the shelf life of swallowed confidence. Would that all its pieces just fit together a little more precisely. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 125 minutes)

In conversation with a colleague recently, the subject of Stephen Dorff came up. With Dorff’s recent electronic-cigarette ads, his steady stream of light-lift, scruffy-faced straight-to-video roles and reputation for an offscreen life of, ahem, considerable enjoyment, he’s like the actor equivalent of a 1980s-era hair metal band that never packed it in, I opined. He’s an unapologetically dick-swinging actor — just livin’ the ring-a-ding dream, baby.



Despite cheap shots many might take, it’s not that Dorff doesn’t have talent, and isn’t capable of restrained work (see Somewhere) or even some interesting excess (um, see Shadowboxer). In the new Tomorrow You’re Gone, however, he assumes a series of increasingly empty noir postures and grimaces, expediting the plunge into frustrating pointlessness of this curious psychological drama.

Not that he’s the only one to blame — adapted by Matthew F. Jones from his own novel Boot Tracks, Tomorrow You’re Gone arrives the subject of considerable offscreen drama. A lawsuit by the author seeking, among other things, an injunction against its release accuses director David Jacobson (Down in the Valley) of sullying his work beyond redemption. So… who’s the chief culprit? It’s hard to say, and even harder to really care about, given the level of overwhelming indifference the movie engenders.

Out of jail after a four-year stint, Charlie (Dorff) gets set up in a dungy apartment courtesy of a shadowy contact/ex-colleague known as the Buddha (Willem Dafoe), who also tasks him with killing someone. Charlie promptly meets a woman with gold shoes on a city bus, Florence (Michelle Monaghan, cycling through a set of fairly beguiling if always symbolic emotional markers), and tells her his name is Samson. She’s an ex-adult film actress, and wouldn’t mind helping Charlie relieve some stress, but he’s all for car shopping and chaste dinner dates, which “keeps his head clear” and leaves him with more free time to mosey off to another neighborhood and do this killing. The additional rub? It’s clear Charlie is not of completely sound mind, and that his interactions with others may represent some sort of fractured reality.

Jacobson delivers a nice technical package, aided by some moody music from Peter Sallet. His composition and framing sometimes suggests Charlie stepping out of body and almost watching himself, which is interesting. But there’s simply no hook or appealing tension to this movie as it unfolds, only counterbalanced scenes of Dorff’s gruffness and Monaghan’s pinprick flirtations. Tomorrow You’re Gone is a muddled game of hardboiled pattycake that I’m certain even all the participants themselves would admit doesn’t convincingly or satisfyingly sell an absorbing story or point-of-view. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Image, R, 91 minutes)

Indie import Hunky Dory, starring Minnie Driver, may have been initially conceived before the hit small screen show Glee, but it suffers mightily in comparison to the pop cultural shadow of that series, playing like a mash-up of it and a decidedly retro version of High School Musical, as filtered through the gauzy lens of underclass-artistic-exuberance that’s plagued a certain subset of comedic-leaning British offerings ever since Billy Elliot.

The 1970s-set story of an idealistic drama teacher (Driver) who endeavors to fire up her apathetic students by staging a glam rock/pop adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Hunky Dory builds to an undeniably poppy and somewhat cathartic finale, but Laurence Coriat’s screenplay is a superb example of mere dutiful execution, lacking much distinctive flourish in either character or dialogue. The movie drags on too long as well, needlessly investing in backstories that aren’t that interesting and don’t add that much to the main plot of the production. When director Marc Evans is able to concentrate on some of the actual inventive musical stagings, there’s often a rush of wind under the film’s wings. Alas, that’s not frequent enough to fully redeem matters. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Variance Films, unrated, 110 minutes)

Obsession, in all its various shapes and forms, is a rich thematic vein when it comes to filmmaking. And of course labyrinthine myths and legends are integral parts of storytelling proper, but they also crop up and gather naturally around a variety of Hollywood productions — from ambitious but troubled blockbusters to the works of secretive and/or iconoclastic auteurs. All these swirling elements come together in Room 237, director Rodney Ascher’s nonfiction indulgence of a bunch of theories about the true meaning of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film The Shining — hypotheses that, ultimately, even Mel Gibson’s wild-eyed character from Conspiracy Theory or Jim Carrey‘s digit-fixated paranoiac from The Number 23 would have trouble believing.



So does that make Room 237 — its title referring to a notably spooky suite in the film — a waste of time, or even boring? No, not at all. Even though several of these analytical readings don’t pass a cursory smell test, and all have been pretty much debunked by Leon Vitali, the late Kubrick’s personal assistant on The Shining, that doesn’t dint the film’s power as a testament and kind of paean to the sticky psychological hold of great art. One interviewee views Kubrick’s liberal adaptation of Stephen King’s bestselling novel as an indictment of the U.S. government’s treatment of indigenous peoples, while for another — seeing significance in the number 42, and its divisibles — it is a sweeping parable about the Holocaust. Still another sees The Shining as an elaborate confessionary lament on the part of Kubrick for his involvement in faked space exploration footage with the government. (“I’m not saying we didn’t go to the moon,” he says, before opining that he’s setting himself up for an audit. “I’m just saying that what we saw was faked, and it was faked by Stanley Kubrick.”)

What Ascher doesn’t do, for better and worse, is offer up push-back or analysis of this conjecture, or query his nine different subjects about whether any of these theories might in fact be mutually exclusive. (In fact, Ascher doesn’t even show his subjects, some of whom are interviewed over the phone, it’s evident.) A movie of more intellectual rigor or ambition might have tackled that. Instead, Room 237 is a platform for their compulsions and fixations, and in its unironic embrace of their singular truths it sometimes takes on the feeling of trying to engage a schizophrenic bus passenger on their own conversational terms.

Still, the flipside of this is that Room 237 kind of ably conjures up the isolation and disorientation of The Shining itself, abetted by a great score from Jonathan Snipes and William Huston. It’s also just a good deal of fun, in its own wonky, slurry way. Powered by a deep and abiding affection for both The Shining and Kubrick in general, Room 237 is an amuse-bouche of remix culture — a very specific film that is also about the dance of intention and interpretation in art. In his scrupulous avoidance of debunking, it’s clear that Ascher’s aim, essentially, is to throw a spotlight on interpretive criticism and embrace, and underscore that the relationship between art, artist and the culture at large is a complex one, with frequently hazy boundaries. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Midnight, unrated, 104 minutes)

A winning little dramedy hung chiefly on the solid peg of Lou Taylor Pucci‘s lead performance, The Story of Luke offers up an experiential snapshot of adult autism without descending into cloying sentimentality or didactic moralizing. Written and helmed by first-time feature director Alonso Mayo, the movie is mostly a comedy, but one that largely eschews outlandishness and never drifts too far from recognizable human feeling.



When his grandmother dies and his senile grandfather (Kenneth Welsh) is no longer able to care for him, 25-year-old Luke (Pucci) is taken in by his Uncle Paul and Aunt Cindy (Cary Elwes and Kristin Bauer), in a move that further stresses their already strained marriage. His cousins (Tyler Stentiford, Mackenzie Munro) are fairly welcoming, but the autistic Luke is thrown by all the sudden change. He knows he needs to grow up (“I can’t watch cooking shows for the rest of my life — I want to screw”), but he’s uncertain of how.

Taking some advice from his grandfather, Luke heads to a temp agency and quickly becomes enamored with Maria (Sabryn Rock) — or more specifically, her breasts. Placed in the mailroom at a nondescript company, Luke makes an unlikely friend in the boss’ son, the virulently antisocial Zack (Seth Green), who is also not “neuro-typical,” but comes around to Luke’s attention to detail. Zack decides to share his special proprietary invention — a computer program that reads and responds to the facial expressions of those with autistic-spectrum disorders (“I programmed her to be a bitch because that’s what you’re up against”), in order to help coach and nudge them toward “normal.” Nominal hijinks ensue, of course, as Luke screws up the courage to ask out Maria, but the movie also spends an equal amount of time showing both Luke and his “new” family feeling their way through a grander socialization with one another.

With his fey, sing-song voice and buttoned-up fashion, Pucci delivers an indelible performance that doesn’t cheat on the anxiety Luke feels — which swells considerably when considering the abandonment of his mother. If Green, angry and wound up, plays much more of a type, their interactions are still amusing, and give The Story of Luke a fresh, off-kilter comedic vibe that one doesn’t expect to see in a story that could easily be a lot more staid, and typically plotted.

Some may scoff at this mixture of tones, but since Mayo is resolutely true to Luke’s wobbly steps toward independence, it mostly works. Though it’s not as much of a relationship two-hander, The Story of Luke bears some characteristics in common with Max Mayer’s Adam, starring Hugh Dancy and Rose Byrne. Even though that film took a young man with Asperger’s Syndrome as its protagonist, both movies are robustly invested in an exploration of the often bewildering gaps in social recognition and body language between “NTs,” or neuro-typicals, and those with less functional social skill sets.

An engaging character study about a differently-wired guy learning to navigate the already choppy waters of young adulthood, The Story of Luke is a sweetnaturedly pleasant and optimistic coming-of-age tale that highlights much that we share, amidst all our differences. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. The Story of Luke opens in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Music Hall, but in addition to its nationwide theatrical engagements the film is also available on VOD. For more information, click here to visit its website. (Gravitas Ventures, unrated, 95 minutes)

Playing like a M.I.A. song come to life, Sally El Hosaini’s British import My Brother the Devil transcends the gangland melodrama of its roots courtesy of a convincingly sketched setting, and rich veins of class identity, faith, political belief and sexual identity, all of which jostle and compete with the main narrative plotlines for attention.



In the ethnically mixed and socioeconomically depressed Hackney neighborhood of London, teenager Mo (Fady Elsayed, above left) idolizes his charismatic older brother Rashid (James Floyd, above right), a low-level drug peddler. The death of a friend, however, triggers a rising reticence in Rashid about the direction (or lack thereof) of his life. After forging a bond with photographer Sayyid (Said Taghmaoui), Rashid begins to envision making enough money to stake a “legit” life — possibly for his girlfriend Vanessa (Elarica Gallacher), but definitely for his brother and struggling, Egyptian-born parents. Old turf wars and unsettled accounts with a rival gang leader, Demon (Leemore Marrett, Jr.), however, seemingly foreclose an easy exit, while at the same time Mo starts doing drug runs behind his brother’s back.

There’s a certain feeling of laid-track narrative that hangs over My Brother the Devil, at least when it’s peddling the siren song of gang life to Mo. This story — enthralled, impressionable youngster caught up in the psychological undertow of a n’er-do-well older sibling — is very familiar, and that fact, combined with El Hosaini’s deliberate pacing, has one feeling every one of the movie’s first 20 or 30 minutes double-time, no matter the clarity of its observance.

But a funny thing happens on the way toward tedium, as My Brother the Devil starts vacuuming up new story strands and buoying details like a Hoover. El Hosaini workshopped the movie at three different Sundance Institute labs (Middle Eastern, Screenwriting and Directing), and the benefits of those continual, disparate fine tooth combings benefit the material, particularly in its attention to detail. My Brother the Devil feels rooted and real, and less concerned with chest-thumping braggadocio than other gang flicks. The hoods in El Hosaini’s world have lives and feelings outside the parameters of any of their illegal actions; they at one point argue about bacon, and a charge of terrorism is brought up as a feint — a cover for something a distraught Mo deems much worse.

Director of photography David Raedeker does a wonderful job of capturing this urban landscape with a simple, unshowy poetry, and the lead performances here are rich and full bodied. My Brother the Devil covers some familiar ground, it’s true, but El Hosaini locates the commingled struggle and quiet beauty of the quotidian, where opportunity and hope are frequently too little nourished. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Paladin/108Media, R, 111 minutes)

A fairly clever little indie film that shrewdly marries the popular but well-worn “found footage” framing device to a prurient storyline, the NC-17-rated Lucky Bastard may not win any awards, but it puts an imaginative spin on what is too often a sloppy low-budget aesthetic, easily outstripping charges of empty gimmickry.



After an opening consisting of crime scene footage that tips viewers off to some dark events, the rest of the film is presented as the behind-the-scenes footage from a porn shoot for a website called “Lucky Bastard,” where each month a member fan is chosen to have sex with an adult film star. The starlet in this case is Ashley Saint (Betsy Rue), a single mother who reluctantly agrees to the scenario only after much cajoling (and an increased payday) by producer-director Mike (Don McManus). After viewing a couple submission videos, Ashley and Mike agree on a winner — sad-sack Dave (Jay Paulson, above left), who looks like he could be a cousin of Kenneth Parcell from 30 Rock. The crew pick up Dave and head over to a rented house but when Dave calls Ashley by her real name it freaks her out, and she wants to call things off. She eventually relents, but more problems pop up.

Director Robert Nathan, working from a script co-written with Lukas Kendall, colors and shades his film in a nice way, as well as mixing in other smaller characters — including an uptight real estate agent and a male porn star called in on short notice when things with Dave prove to be difficult. Lucky Bastard doesn’t suffer the same sense of narrative suffocation that so many other found footage films do — wherein the framing device is used as a crutch of convenience to absolve its creators from having to do the heavy lifting of character development. Nathan is a television veteran of both Law & Order and ER, and his experience with tightly structured acts is on ample display.

The film’s conceit, of course, rather cleverly masks the shortfall in production value when stacked up against a typical independent movie, though there is above-average consideration given to framing and shot selection — abetted by the aforementioned production house, outfitted with cameras.

Likewise, the acting mostly can’t, or at least shouldn’t, be judged in traditional dramatic metrics, but rather by how believably these actors inhabit a series of postures knowing full well that cameras are on them. When events later go sideways things change, but it’s a fairly difficult juggling act that for the most part the cast excels at. Especially good in this regard is McManus.

Its subject matter alone dictates that it won’t be for some audiences but perhaps the highest compliment one can pay Lucky Bastard is to say that it’s effective and also quite believable for the story it chooses to tell — well sketched out, and sincere in its characters’ motivations. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Rated NC-17, Lucky Bastard opens this Friday in Los Angeles at the Vintage Cinemas’ Los Feliz 3. For more information on the film, meanwhile, click here to visit its website. (Vineyard Haven Productions, NC-17, 94 minutes)

Supernaturally tinged Norwegian mystery-horror import Thale unfolds, on a narrative level, like some weird hybrid of Sunshine Cleaning, Splice and Lady in the Water — a work that dances around a couple moods and genres without ever really wholeheartedly committing to one in particular. Telling the story of a surprise woodland contact between a pair of guys and an awakened, captive huldra — a nymph-like creature of Scandinavian folklore — writer-director Aleksander Nordaas’ work gives off a certain eerie vibe that, along with its regional specificity, add up to give the movie something of a pungent originality. But Thale is ultimately all wind-up, failing to take its characters to more interesting places.



The unflappable Leo (Jon Sigve Skard) heads up “No Shit Cleaning Service,” a crime scene scrubbing company. Perhaps against better judgment, he’s thrown a bit of work to his friend Elvis (Erlend Norvold), with vomitous consequences. Tasked with finding the scattered remains of an old man at a cabin in the woods, Leo and Elvis instead discover a most unusual mute girl (Silje Reinåmo, above) and a bunch of audio tapes in which said man can be heard talking about the girl’s highly adaptive nature, and how she’s “different than” her sisters. As Elvis starts to seemingly become able to bridge the communication gap they also make a rather shocking discovery in a freezer, leading them to question just how dangerous this girl might be.

If there’s a nice fog of intrigue that surrounds Thale for a good long while, there’s also an imperturbability to the entire movie, which kind of dawdles and drags. For a long time Thale isn’t really a horror movie, even in any Gothic sense, but instead just a mystery about this girl’s origins, and how she’s survived seemingly on her own for an indeterminate length of time. This works, but only up to a point. At around the 45-minute mark, there’s a nice conversation between Leo and Elvis in which some of their vulnerabilities are stripped bare, and for a moment it looks as if Thale is going to dive headlong into a story of fraternal drift, with its mysterious title waif serving only as a joint kickstarter and metaphorical connection for the two.

At a certain point, the movie’s slow-peddled nature either becomes wholly mesmeric or a bit of a put-on. For me it was the latter — it felt like a lot of artful dodging in service of a story that wasn’t really fully fleshed out, or at least not taken in interesting directions. Thale doesn’t really delve substantively into mythology — its characters aren’t scientists, admittedly — so when others come looking for the same-named girl, plunging Leo and Elvis into a greater danger, it feels like a leap into tension unearned, nipped from some screenwriting manual.

Serving as his own cinematographer, camera operator and editor, Nordaas delivers an enigmatic aria in many respects. A director like Brad Anderson would be able to turn this into a work of suffocating anxiety, though. As is, Thale is a movie that’s less than the sum of its parts — interesting around the edges, but not fully developed, and lacking any sort of revelatory punch. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Thale screens in theaters this week in Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Denver and Portland — check your local listings, as they say — and then arrives on home video and VOD later in the month, on April 23. (XLrator Media, R, 77 minutes)

I guess to call Detour, director William Dickerson’s micro-budgeted drama of confinement and descent into madness, by a more accurate moniker, Mudslide, would be to court an unfortunate array of jokes centered around bodily excretions. But, seemingly taking Buried and Danny Boyle‘s 127 Hours as its inspiration, the movie spends most of its time trapped in a SUV covered with the detritus of a muddy landslide. While not lacking for decent acting or technical execution, the movie’s lead and de facto host is, as written, something of a cipher, leaving one wishing for MacGyver, or even MacGruber, to tackle a similar dilemma. The impulse to fight for survival is buried within all of us, but Detour lacks a compelling enough arc to sustain what might have worked much better as a short film. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the film, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Gravitas Ventures, unrated, 86 minutes)

A couple attractive Aussies whose respective stars are on the upswing, Teresa Palmer and Liam Hemsworth, try to help anchor Love & Honor, a well meaning but essentially dopey period piece flick that tries with increasingly diminishing effectiveness to meld an anti-war message with Nicholas Sparks-type romance. By all means, though, for the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Films, PG-13, 96 minutes)

After bowing at Cannes, writer-director Adam Leon‘s Gimme the Loot was a 2012 festival staple, and it’s easy to see why. A slim, low-budget coming-of-age tale whose richness lies entirely in its interstices, it’s a keenly observed work that celebrates the unfettered joys of youth, and rewards viewers by reminding them of the power of a simple tale told well.



Bronx teenagers Malcolm (Ty Hickson) and Sofia (Tashiana Washington) are best friends but not romantically involved. Instead, they’re bound together by their love of tagging. When a rival gang of graffiti artists deface one of their beloved creations, they hatch a scheme to “bomb” the celebratory apple that pops out at home games after every home run by the hated New York Mets (they’re Yankees fans), and thus generally win all sorts of attention and respect.

The problem is they need a quick $500 to launch their big plan. After dealer Donnie (Adam Metzger) refuses to front him any cash, Malcolm slyly rips off a bit of dope, looking to sell it and make ends meet. He then winds up at the apartment of Ginnie (Zoë Lescaze, above left), an entitled college student. Flirtation ensues, and Malcolm is torn between the possibility of a more immediate servicing of his libidinal needs and the idea of nabbing her parents’ jewelry collection. Sofia, meanwhile, deals with the theft of her bicycle, and getting hassled by some of the aforementioned rivals.

Leon’s film, not unlike Jim McKay’s underappreciated Our Song, the film debut of Kerry Washington, is a simple little movie that is perceptive of and in tune with adolescent whim. McKay’s movie followed three Crown Heights teenagers over the course of an entire summer; Gimme the Loot is more condensed, unfolding over two days. Both, however, share a quasi-documentary style that isn’t ostentatious, but instead just devoted to capturing the sleepy rhythms of juvenilia, as punctuated by flashes of bickering. It lovingly captures New York City, in composed fashion, but without giving off an air of self-regard.

Some of the dialogue has an amusing anecdotal snap, but most of Gimme the Loot is just teenage jostling and posturing; the $500 and limited-window time constraint are essentially head feints, or just the skeleton for this colorful urban adventure. Eliciting engaging, naturalistic performances out of his cast of newcomers, and using a soundtrack of R&B and gospel, Leon subverts the expectations of this plot, which could easily spin off into more dire territory given a different pivot or two. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Gimme the Loot opens in Los Angeles at the Nuart Theatre. For more information, click here to visit its website. (Sundance Selects, R, 81 minutes)

A disjointed exercise in cosplay action theatrics that evidences the worst instincts of cobbled-together Hollywood overindulgence, G.I. Joe: Retaliation by and large ditches the characters of its first big screen iteration, 2009’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, in favor of a new story of square-jawed elite military defense against terrorism. It may well make a good chunk of money, but it’s hard to imagine anyone getting particularly, legitimately passionate about this flick, which awkwardly attempts to service both nostalgia and the uninvested interest of newcomers, to generally yawning effect.



The film picks up after events of The Rise of Cobra, though it’s not exactingly rigid in its adherence to canon, given the significant turnover in cast. After Duke (Channing Tatum) leads the elite military Joes in securing a loose nuclear weapon from a destabilized Pakistan, they’re framed by Zartan, who’s still impersonating the President of the United States (Jonathan Pryce), and working on a scheme for terrorist organization Cobra. After Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee) and Firefly (Ray Stevenson) break Cobra Commander out of his state of suspended imprisonment, the latter promptly resumes focus on world enslavement.

Standing in Cobra’s way are Roadblock (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), Flint (D.J. Cotrona) and Lady Jaye (Adrianne Palicki), who try to first unravel the conspiracy surrounding their framing and then extract proper revenge for their fallen comrades. Enlisting the assistance of the “original Joe,” General Colton (Bruce Willis, always looking like he just woke up), these Joes craft a strongly worded treatise appealing to the Cobra Commander’s core human decency. Nah… just kidding. Stuff gets blowed up good!

Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick labor to awkwardly fold in source material mythology, as it relates to both a mission by Jinx (Elodie Yung) and Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Storm Shadow’s disillusionment with Cobra, but this chiefly results in a lot of clunky, hilarious scenes in which RZA shows up as Blind Master, and butchers a bunch of already gracelessly expository dialogue.

Forgetting for a moment the movie’s many slick but false moves, and the manner in which it contrives to put Palicki in first workout clothes and then a cocktail dress, what’s most notable about Retaliation is the litany of small indignities it foists upon its big-stakes, wham-bang conceit, like the fact that the American President’s national popularity is said to soar after, in the wake of a nuke going missing, he decides to push for a worldwide nuclear disarmament summit; or that Israel — who’s never officially admitted to possessing nuclear weapons — is part of the gathering, along with global pariah North Korea. Forget the intellectual heavy lifting of any cogent write-around that might serve its story; time and time again, Retaliation opts for whatever’s easy and convenient, sense be damned.

If the movie was proportionately staked (instead of the entirety of London being destroyed) and just more fun, that might work. Director Jon Chu is a gifted visual filmmaker, and in Step Up 2 the Streets and then Step Up 3D he showed a nice handle on action choreography. Here, however, Chu’s gifts are handcuffed, and less evident. He has a lot of fun with a balletic, vertical, mountainside chase-and-swordfight sequence that summons memories of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But while Chu orchestrates action sequences with a certain zest, Retaliation‘s scenes too frequently lack a properly delineated space.

When, in the movie’s final siege, Roadblock tabs himself to handle “the perimeter,” it sets up a discrete, rampaging tank sequence that doesn’t cut together well at all with the rest of the Joes’ attack. (Maybe this was part of the movie’s purported re-shoots.) And when Roadblock takes on Firefly, the confrontation goes from land to sea and then land again, culminating in a silly, combination fistfight-firefight, where each party occasionally elects to throw punches with a loaded weapon.

The Rock provides a suitable steely yet wry charisma as Roadblock, and he and Tatum have a nice rapport while it lasts. But other characters are complete ciphers, and Cotrona and Palicki are wan substitutes for any of a number of cast members from the first film, which offers up more punchy fun than this sequel. Maybe if there were more of a sense of actual nefarious plotting, G.I. Joe: Retaliation might have a more legitimate scope, and a bit of the grand, army-versus-army feeling of something like The Avengers. Instead, it’s just another loud action movie, but not one particularly marked by any memorable catharsis. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Paramount, PG-13, 110 minutes)

Muriel’s Wedding director PJ Hogan and star Toni Collette reunite to considerably less winning effect with Mental, a mad, garrulous little slice of alt-nanny comedy. As imaginative as it is indefatigable, the film nonetheless puts an overall unconvincingly quirky Australian spin on fractured-family mental health movies like Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck‘s It’s Kind of a Funny Story, Dustin Lance Black’s Virginia and Ryan Murphy’s 2006 adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors. All three of those tales, among many others, take inspiration from memoirs of coming-of-age amidst mental illness, and touch on parentalized adolescents. Mental tries to mine that same terrain for both laughs and drama, but comes across as just frenzied and bipolar.

Unhappy housewife Shirley Moochmore (Rebecca Gibney) copes with the lack of support and perpetual absence of her small town mayor husband Barry (Anthony LaPaglia) by withdrawing into a fantasy world built around The Sound of Music and the happy Von Trapp family. Her five girls are certain she’s nuts, and that they’re not far behind — one self-diagnoses as schizophrenic, the other as a sociopath. Barry finally commits Shirley to a mental institution for a stint of indeterminate length. But since he hardly knows his daughters’ names much less how to relate to them, he picks up an eccentric hitchhiker, Shaz (Collette), and tasks her with becoming their nanny and controlling them. Much scene-chewing then ensues, as Shaz, like a foul-mouthed, Mad Hatter Mary Poppins, upends both the girls’ lives as well as their views and opinions of themselves.

Hogan, whose Stateside studio filmography includes My Best Friend’s Wedding and Confessions of a Shopaholic, has a colorful pop sensibility which trends decidedly toward the manic, and that’s part of his undoing here. Mental has a wild, live-wire energy, and comes out of the gate like a freight train; it’s the sort of movie that uses the foleyed sound of a cuckoo clock to underscore a point. The problem is that this full-frontal assault is a bit wearying, and it creates an emotional disconnect that widens to a chasm when, 45 minutes in, the film tries to pivot into more baldly melodramatic territory. There’s no honest attachment to the characters, so Mental‘s plays at sympathy ring hollow — if always loudly.

There is some funny material here, including the forced familial freak-out of an uptight neighbor and a scene where Shaz holds forth on Australia’s history as a penal colony and how, while there are certain “control mice” (Kylie Minogue, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and Russell Crowe) sent abroad to play nice, most of the entire country is actually insane. But Hogan, in trying to cram in as many autobiographical details and strands as possible, overloads Mental, including a needlessly complicated subplot involving the avuncular shark adventurer boss, Trevor Blundell (Liev Schreiber), of skittish oldest daughter Coral (Lily Sullivan). Putting a bow on Shaz’s personal history isn’t a necessity, but down that rabbit hole Hogan ill-advisedly goes.

As Shaz, Collette is a total, gum-smacking force of nature. If there was an Aussie Erin Brockovich giving an audition for a Down Under production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, I’d like to see her top this. But Mental so prizes sound and fury over rigorous and clear plotting that even Collette can’t off the dramatic lift for which Hogan aims with his third act. Still, if one wants to see the actress light a fart on fire, this may be the only chance they get. Plan accordingly. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Dada Films/Arclight Films, R, 116 minutes)

In addition to his evocative showcasings of oddballs and outcasts, writer-director Harmony Korine’s work has always exuded a strong sense of place, and in his latest film, the audacious, neon-veined Spring Breakers, the often confrontational auteur transforms St. Petersburg, Florida into a decidedly modern synth-pop mélange of ecstatic heaven and drugged-out hell. In knee-jerk fashion, detractors will take aim at Korine’s proudly prurient work as an empty glorification of brainless adolescent posturing, but it’s actually a rich, smartly tied together provocation — an allegory for the corruption of innocence and the fear of blossoming female sexuality, powered by a hallucinatory musical score from Drive composer Cliff Martinez and the throbbing electronic dance music of Skrillex.



Good girl Faith (Selena Gomez) has been friends with Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Cotty (Rachel Korine, Harmony’s wife) and Brit (Ashley Benson) since grade school. Bored at college, they anxiously await their spring break vacation, but are short on cash. So with Cotty driving getaway, Candy and Brit rob a restaurant. From there, loot in hand, the girls head off to Florida, where pastel scooters and all manner of bikini-clad debauchery awaits. After a police bust lands the girls in jail, they’re bailed out by a local drug peddler/rapper/arms dealer, Alien (a delightfully skeevy James Franco, sporting cornrows along with an assortment of tattoos and garish jewelry), looking for some angels. Faith is unnerved by his scuzziness, but the other girls gravitate toward Alien’s wealth and outlandish displays of machismo, as well as the danger he represents, unwittingly getting sucked into a turf battle between Alien and his former friend and mentor, Big Arch (Gucci Mane).

From its poppy, peppy opening — with heaving bosoms, the shotgunning of much beer and the fellating of popsicles — on through much darker terrain, Spring Breakers exudes a stylistic adventurousness of a certain piece with something like Oliver Stone‘s Natural Born Killers (a film that, thematically, feels like something of a cousin), even though it’s shot, by Belgian cinematographer Benoît Debie, entirely on celluloid. Korine is intent on making viewers never forget that they’re watching a movie — and having to process that, along with the actual narrative and the sheer, careening joy and swagger of its overall packaging. In darkly satiric sum, the film then forces viewers to consider the folly of slick, guns-and-tits entertainment.

Korine doesn’t really take a traditional approach to character development; he trades here largely in snapshot moments, and embraced attitudes and wild gestures. The movie also commingles fantasy sequences with its plot proper, returning again and again to the bacchanalia that serves as its opening — the teens’ idealized vision of the new horizons that spring break affords. It’s not for nothing that Faith is seen getting “jacked up on Jesus” at a church youth group meeting, while another character repeats over and over, “Just pretend you’re in a videogame; act like you’re in a movie or something.” In taking aim at the impact of entertainment and pop culture, as well as its general hypocrisy and some of its more soul-deadening qualities, Korine offers up his most compelling and fully rounded big screen vision yet, along with a collection of characters every bit as fascinating as those Kids from his screenwriting debut. In Spring Breakers, he threads the needle between character specificity and stand-in attributes.

In one of the film’s more memorably quotable passages, Alien — an avatar of celebratory materialistic ignorance — holds forth as a backwater, Rap Age Scarface, ranting in sing-song fashion about his various possessions. It’s a call-back of sorts to a moment earlier in the movie, when Candy, literally rolling in stolen cash, opines that “money makes [her] pussy wet, and tits look bigger.” In offering up this portrait of girls gone really wild — with unicorn ski masks and semi-automatic weapons — Korine is reflecting in exaggerated fashion the abundant, free-flowing energy of youth culture, and specifically toying with the overwhelming feelings of panic and uncomfortableness that assertive young women coming into their own sexual ripeness engender. It’s an exercise in gonzo metaphor that triggers tripwires of both titillation and alarm. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (A24 Films, R, 92 minutes)

A good number of actresses, including Penelope Cruz, have worked for years in multiple languages. And while it seems a bit less common with actors, recent James Bond villain Javier Bardem scored a Best Actor Oscar nomination for 2010’s Biutiful while speaking in his native tongue. But apart from Kristin Scott Thomas — and recently Will Ferrell, who took up Spanish for the comedy Casa de Mi Padre — few native English speakers aim to flex their bilingual skills on the big screen. And that’s a big part of the reason writer-director Ana Piterbarg’s Everybody Has a Plan, starring Viggo Mortensen in what is actually his third Spanish language film, is interesting, given the otherwise slow, dangling drama of its assumed-identity conceit.

Agustin (Mortensen), a married pediatrician in Buenos Aires, is on the precipice of adopting a child with his wife (Soledad Villamil), but still gripped by a suffocating malaise. When his terminally ill twin brother Pedro (Mortensen again), from whom he is estranged, shows up, Agustin decides to slip into his identity, returning to the bayou-like Tigre Delta where they grew up as boys. Pedro worked there nominally as a beekeeper, but also as the muscle for a local thug (Daniel Fanego) operating kidnappings and other schemes. Agustin, as Pedro, then feels his way through a flirtation with a girl (Sofia Gala Castaglione) helping with his honeycombs, while also trying to carve out a safe haven for his new life.

While from Dead Ringers on through dozens of other examples on the big screen identical twins have been used to juicy effect, here they’re in large part a catalyst for… brooding. Everybody Has a Plan — rather ironically titled, since neither Agustin nor any other character really seems to have one — is a work of mist-shrouded atmosphere. So inscrutable are Piterbarg’s interests, in fact, that even calling it a mood piece is to elevate the movie to a plateau of psychological certitude it doesn’t really achieve.

Mortensen grew up in Venezuela and Argentina, so he has a great grasp of not only the language but seemingly some of the in-the-marrow cultural ambiance the movie seems to want to channel or explore. Piterbarg, though, in her feature film debut, doesn’t have a keen sense of how to exploit the danger with which she lines her narrative. The wan, incomplete result is a story stretched too thin, across a running time of nearly two hours. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Fox International, R, 118 minutes)

In 2003, legendary music producer Phil Spector — the man responsible for the pioneering “wall of sound” technique, and hit songs and albums from everyone from the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers to the Beatles — was arrested and charged with the murder of Lana Clarkson, a would-be actress found dead at his home. Writer-director David Mamet’s new film, which takes the name of the man and bows this weekend on HBO, is a snapshot of part of Spector’s first murder trial, which would result in a hung jury, followed by a conviction in 2009.



Mamet’s film has already drawn some flak, and probably deservedly so, for a pre-title card posturing that Phil Spector is a work of fiction, and “not based on a true story.” This is a rather audacious claim (not the least given the title of the work), and if anyone other than the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mamet was front-and-center attempting to peddle this particular line of bullshit, it would certainly be more roundly debated and likely more widely derided. So almost from the get-go, one has their head cocked and brow arched watching Phil Spector, the willful obstinance of its purposefully hypothetical and blinkered construction evident from early frames.

I can’t speak to the claim that a few critics who covered the real-life trial(s) have had — that the movie soft-peddles some of the evidence in order to paint Spector in a more favorable light — but Phil Spector is a movie that certainly goes to considerable lengths to very much avoid being about the time period during which it is set. As such, it’s a strange thing — a film that at times feels like it’s trying to cancel out the very reason for its existence. It’s most definitely not a biography, but neither is Phil Spector a courtroom drama, or even a compressed character study.

When original lead defense attorney Bruce Cutler (Jeffrey Tambor) seemingly can’t fully devote his time and energy to the Spector case, he brings in Linda Kenney Baden (Helen Mirren). She’s at first hesitant to commit, both because she’s physically sick and has an overseas vacation already on the schedule. But Linda eventually relents and mounts a passionate defense, grappling with notions of reasonable doubt and juror prejudice — the latter by way of some interesting scenes of legal focus group research.

At the core of the movie is Linda’s relationship with Spector (Al Pacino), who’s potentially an egomaniac and certainly an autodidact given to pretentious, wheel-spinning pontification (“First time you got felt up — guess what?! You were listening to one of my songs”). Much of Phil Spector unfolds out of the courtroom, but it has the feeling of a series of lectures and monologues, unconnected to much of unifying substance. Mamet’s vision of events is tightly focused — almost too much so at certain times, putting Linda in a hermetically sealed bubble every bit as much as her client, absent the input of other characters.

What makes Phil Spector work at least a little bit is the magnetic watchability of its two leads — even if their dances often seem to amount to two solos rather than a duet. Pacino captures Spector’s mercurial brilliance, and Mirren — who replaced Bette Midler after the latter had to withdraw two weeks into shooting due to back problems — a steadfast commitment to the principles of the law. The final act also catches fire, as the film works its way toward Linda’s begrudging acceptance of the fact that she might have to put her eccentric client on the stand if she wishes to argue a particular theory regarding his innocence. A contentious mock cross-examination (with Chiwetel Ejiofor) registers powerfully, and if the idea of the dramatic revelation of Spector’s frizzy afro — a homage to Jimi Hendrix, he insists — seems silly as a payoff, well, Mamet makes it work. And that was based on a true event, actually. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (HBO Films, unrated, 92 minutes)

A delightfully deadpan relationship comedy that plays like a cross between something from Quentin Dupieux and Jared and Jerusha Hess, Somebody Up There Likes Me is an imaginative paean to world-weary nonchalance. Directed by Bob Byington, this subversive little treat flirts with absurdism but never tips over into hipster posturing in chronicling a bunch of domestic ennui and professional unhappiness that its characters pretty much seem to all shruggingly accept.



After listless waiter Max Youngman (Keith Poulson, looking like a cousin of Jack White) catches his first wife (Kate Lyn Sheil) in bed with another guy, Max tries to get back in the dating game. In his breadstick-loving co-worker Lylah (Jess Weixler), Max promptly finds weirdo love. They promptly marry (“All right, well, let’s give this thing a try and see who gives out first,” he says on their wedding night), and Max and Lylah eventually even have a son, before temptation in the form of their babysitter-turned-nanny Clarissa (Stephanie Hunt) helps scuttle things and send Lylah into the arms of Max’s best friend, Sal (Nick Offerman, above right).

Somebody Up There Likes Me, though, isn’t a movie of emotional realism, much less hand-wringing. Behavior and plot twists that would be played for drama in your average indie film are here things to be talked about from a sort of befuddled remove. Characters have trouble remembering the names of people they’ve known for years, instead referring to them by description. Byington’s film also flashes forward several times in segments of five years, but he makes no great effort to mark the time in anything but the most cursory of fashion.

Part of the movie eventually tries to address this pause of measurement, but to call it a pay-off is to overstate matters, since it’s chiefly a shrug-inducing cutesy quirk almost irrelevant to the film’s charms and beguiling hold. Somebody Up There Likes Me isn’t a movie of much outwardly apparent depth, but it does have a philosophically playful streak that warmly embraces the futility of so much human endeavor. There’s some conventional repartee, but Byington’s film is marked mostly by a motley assortment of inappropriate, oblivious and off-the-wall soliloquies and exchanges, the common thread being a tone of detached puzzlement.

With an original score from Vampire Weekend’s Chris Baio that nicely encompasses a wry leitmotif, and a series of animated vignettes by Bob Sabistan (of A Scanner Darkly) that blend together the jumps in time, Somebody Up There Likes Me is a brisk, fun and funny little bauble that doesn’t overstay its welcome. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Denver and Austin, Somebody Up There Likes Me is also currently available nationwide on VOD platforms. (Tribeca Film, R, 75 minutes)

There’s a unique, chilly vibe that hangs over Come Out and Play, an unnerving, humid slice of elemental horror that definitely has nothing to do with the old song of the same name by the Offspring. Summoning up disparate recollections of George Romero, Children of the Corn and even, fleetingly, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, this artful genre entry works the mind like a punching bag before finally playing a hand that, narratively, isn’t as much of a winner. The odd story behind this film (dedicated to the martyrs of Stalingrad!) and its singularly named anonymous director, Makinov, may sound (and ultimately be) worthy of a movie itself, but shouldn’t totally overshadow the things about Come Out and Play that work.



During a romantic getaway to Mexico, Francis (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) insists on taking his pregnant wife Beth (Vinessa Shaw) to a more serene locale. So they rent a boat and head toward what they believe to be a charming little island. Once there, however, an atmosphere of unease sets in — the restaurant and hotel they find are abandoned, and the duo feel they’re being watched. Smiling and giggling kids pop up here and there, but no adults. And those kids aren’t innocent, it turns out — they’re murderous. A fight for survival ensues, as Francis tries to get Beth safely off the island.

The Russian-born Makinov, who wore a variety of masks during filming in order to protect his anonymity, updates Juan José Plan’s 1976 Spanish film El Juego De Niños with an eye and mind toward austere travelogue realism. (And Soon the Darkness and Melissa George’s overlooked 2010 film Triangle are other vaguely similar mood pieces, though the latter less for its doom-loop plot than simply its equally spare setting.) The location settings ooze authenticity, and yet even in this openness he manages to locate some claustrophobia, with over-the-shoulder hallway tracking shots and a panicked auto escape. With a score that drifts into Moog and theremin, and conjures up the distorted low hum of a bi-plane, Makinov succeeds in creating a mood of looming dread.

A little of this goes a long way, though, and Come Out and Play kind of plateaus once Francis and Beth figure out the depths of danger these spooky, silent kids represent. The narrative is almost by definition painted into a corner that requires the introduction of awkward exposition, but the manner in which this is handled — once the pair meet another adult who’s survived a night of brutal attacks — is rather deflating. Even in streamlined form, this tale loses its grip. Still, the ominous effectiveness of its set-up and middle portion beckons, heralding the possible arrival of a bizarre new international talent in the thriller-suspense genre — one whose skill with the language of fear supersedes the need to speak English. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Cinedigm, R, 75 minutes)

Man want to feel wanted, useful. Mostly by woman, in the loincloth, but also, later, by family. This feeling at center of The Croods, new animated movie. Croods not too complicated. Kind of like cross between Ice Age and Year One, in some ways. Characters move in funny quadruped/biped hybrid gait, and seem to have invented parkour. But Croods tell pleasant story about family, utility of man, and letting go.



Movie open several millions of years ago, which definitely throw Sarah Palin and others for loop. Earth is crazy and inhospitable place, like South to liberals. Croods are cave family. Like, literally. Dad Grug (Nicolas Cage) have unibrow that would impress Anthony Davis. Grug take care of family, which consist of feral baby, stupid son Thunk (Clark Duke) and headstrong daughter Eep (Emma Stone). There is wife, too, Ugga (Catherine Keener), though she do nothing. Almost forgot about her. Oh, and mother-in-law Gran (Cloris Leachman), who is kind of like meth addict version of that witch from Brave. Grug secretly always hopes she die, which is funny.

Grug have many mottos like, “Darkness brings death, we know this!” And, “Never not be afraid!” Fear is not the little death for Grug. It keep him alive, he feel. Grug only let family out of cave to help him hunt. Eep, though, seek broader social horizon and meaning in life, which is very confusing to Grug. Eep sneak out, meet Guy (Ryan Reynolds), who have much better hair, less sloping forehead. Guy have baby sun! (This turn out to be called fire.) Guy also have animal belt that talk, which very confusing.

Guy no live in cave, which also confuse Grug. Guy then talk of strange place, “tomorrow,” and foretells of end-of-world prophesy, which he maybe picked up from Roland Emmerich movie? Anyway, group separated from cave, so then road trip happen, and crazy things. Grug maybe realize some rules primitive, so he tries to find some change he can believe in.

Croods co-directed by Chris Sanders — who make Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon, both with big heart — and Kirk DeMicco, who make Space Chimps. Space Chimps piece of crap, but hey, everyone gotta eat. As on Dragon, Sanders use Roger Deakins as “visual consultant” on Croods. Good decision. This guy Deakins smart. Helps give film nice look. Croods have fantastic array of colorful creatures. Croods kind of like a Flintstones-era cousin of The Lorax or something. Its 3-D also not just rip-off — good in scenes of scope, and inventive with dust particles tracking toward camera.

One problem with Croods is no real fear of death, or looming consequence. Lots of slapstick-y bits in battles with creatures. (Could use more nut shots, though.) Some slip-ups in wording, too. Grug at one time tell Eep she “grounded,” but how that different than her normal life? Croods could be smarter, or have stronger inner logic. It could explore more confused reaction of Croods to entire new world. But it find fun mostly in family dynamic, so viewer not mad.

Some of words characters say funny (“Stay inside the family kill circle!”), and voice acting good. Funny to think about Cage going apeshit with grunts and such in booth. Or maybe he was recorded leaving Romanian nightclub? Anyway, Croods tell simple story but do it well. Smaller people like it most. Just no get them talking animal belt for birthday — world not need that. For full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (20th Century Fox/DreamWorks, PG, 96 minutes)

Filmmaker Michel Gondry has always been a visionary of visual style, dating back to his groundbreaking work in the music video format. Less noted is his soft spot for underclass underdogs and those existing on the margins of society, as found in his features like Be Kind Rewind and The Science of Sleep. That predilection gets a more direct exercising in what may be Gondry’s most narratively straightforward and direct movie yet, which charts a city bus ride home for a group of New York high schoolers on the last day of class before summer break.



The result, The We and the I, is the product of a two-year collaboration between Gondry and actual students at a Bronx after-school arts program, and it’s sort of like Laurent Cantent’s 2008 Palme d’Or winner The Class by way of Steven Soderbergh’s minor canon social-portrait riffs, like Full Frontal and The Girlfriend Experience. Marked by a flurry of adolescent energy, where kids can’t not talk for five seconds, the film works more as a caffeinated conveyance of feeling than an actual plotted story.

When the spring semester school bell rings for the last time, a motley crew of teenagers pile aboard and basically take over a city bus. The driver (Mia Lobo) occasionally attempts to enforce some discipline, but is also co-opted by free pizza, leaving other passengers to fend for themselves as the voluble kids gossip, gloat, brag and bully. What ensues is a litany of lover’s quarrels, clowning of old people, text messaging drama, “Sweet 16” party planning, games of truth-or-dare and general bickering, shining a light on rivalries, anxieties and friendships both true and perhaps significantly less so.

The We and the I has the potential to be like an emotionally combustible cross between Kids and the self-contained parts of Speed, but there’s a counterbalancing innocence to Gondry’s film — Young MC’s “Bust a Move” opens the movie, and other old-school hip hop flavors interstitial bits and editorial pivot points — and the violence that crops up never escalates past a certain point. There’s no charged threat of doom here, in other words, for both better and worse.

Instead, Gondry aims for an artful, scrambled blend of youthful connection and hormonally charged carousing. Cinematographer Alex Disenhof’s inventive camerawork and framing — sometimes incorporating telltale Gondry in-camera cross-cuts of stories being told — matches the inquisitive and boisterous nature of his subjects. The dialogue is sometimes funny (“The Dalai Lama says you gotta be fearless in matters of food as well as love — I have an email from my sister saying he said that”) and occasionally piercing and sad (“You three are the only ones that talk to me, and it’s never anything I wanna hear”), but mostly it’s less deeply insightful than just loud, jocular and unending — just like much real teenage conversation, in essence.

What the non-professional cast lacks in experience they for the most part make up for with raw, unfiltered charisma. But, in its third billed chapter, or act, when the movie pivots into a bit of moralizing payoff, the lack of formal training undercuts some of The We and the I‘s putative lessons learned. Still, an off-speed curveball with less inherent narrative appeal from Gondry is interesting in ways that dozens of more rigorously plotted films aren’t. Plot your route and purchase your fare accordingly. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Paladin/108 Media, unrated, 100 minutes)

A tender, impressionistic coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of the Cold War in Great Britain, Ginger & Rosa is a colored pencil sketch of a movie distinguished by its acting — in particular young Elle Fanning, the actress at its core. Giving off the feeling of a short story, it’s not necessarily wildly revelatory, but instead small and intimately observed.

Writer-director Sally Potter (Orlando) has a great gift with mood and melancholy, which gives her story strong roots. In capturing early on the stolen private moments of her titular pair, Potter taps into the same sort of uniquely mad, combustible energy of female adolescents as on display in movies like My Summer of Love and Heavenly Creatures. This mooring helps the movie mostly — though not entirely — cut and shove its way through the melodrama of its late second and third acts, which shares some trace similarities with An Education. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (A24 Films, PG-13, 90 minutes)

Saddled with a terrible, clunky title and a programmatic narrative that represents a fairly unpersuasive blend of the familiar and contrived, Los Angeles-set indie romantic comedy Dorfman in Love connects most fitfully as a vehicle for the charms of star Sara Rue. Penned by Wendy Kout and directed by Bradley Leong, the big-hearted movie is a sort of Bridget Jones’s Diary by way of (500) Days of Summer, though without the apexes of cleverness and flair found in those films. It’s charming enough in spots, but doesn’t overwhelm in execution or insight.

Rue stars as Deborah Dorfman, an accountant and single, Jewish, San Fernando Valley girl who works with her brother Daniel (Jonathan Chase), constantly picking up his slack. She also takes care of her widowed dad Burt (Elliott Gould), who’s still in a funk over the death of his wife over a year ago. Deborah’s long-time crush, her Daniel Cleaver, is Jay (Johann Urb), a dashing and adventurous reporter. When he gets summoned away on assignment, Deborah offers to cat-sit at Jay’s new, as-of-yet undecorated downtown loft for a week-plus, figuring she’ll fix it up to wow him and win him over.

Downtown Los Angeles in like another world to Deborah, who’s both frazzled and exhilarated by the change. While trying to juggle and manage the needs and wants of the other men in her life, her brother and dad, she opts for a makeover and also meets painter Winston “Cookie” Cooke (Haaz Sleiman), which causes Deborah to have to reevaluate the nature of her obsession with Jay.

Dorfman in Love is essentially a generous, slightly fizzy character study of a woman on the verge — though on the verge of what exactly even she isn’t sure. What gives the movie its pop, though, is its grey linings, and the fact that Rue’s winning performance is rimmed with a relatable sadness and vulnerability. Deborah is a one-time big girl who’s extraordinarily professionally competent, but still carries around feelings of unworthiness, and still misses her mom. Some of the rest of the acting is uneven, but Rue is simply great — engaging, and really tuned into the tiny, faultline behavioral consequences that years of a father’s sex-based favoritism can breed.

Yet Kout and Leong don’t allow Deborah (or anyone else) to truly fall apart. Most of the movie charts Deborah’s blossoming self-confidence, so sunniness is the order of the day. But even in darker moments, when Daniel cheats on his wife Leann (Keri Lynn Pratt), the infidelity is treated as but a hiccup — the impetus for a couple dramatic scenes, but nothing to leave a mark. It’s hard knocks, perhaps, to ding a putative comedy for not being more of a drama, but that’s where most of Dorfman in Love‘s best moments lay — far less in any would-be romance, which unfolds with a yawn, but instead in its subject’s sometimes bumbling and sometimes self-effacing attempts to fully embrace the realization that she has a right to pursue her own happiness. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Brainstorm Media, PG-13, 91 minutes)

A moving chronicle of some of the traits that should be more widely venerated in a media and pop cultural landscape too driven by the elevation of the trivial, director Scott Mactavish’s documentary Murph: The Protector honors and celebrates the life of ex-Navy SEAL Lieutenant Michael Murphy, paying tribute to his personality, selflessness and service without succumbing to a less interesting, more knee-jerk wholesale lionization of the military. This is a tightly focused, deeply personal account of one man and soldier that, in rooting down into what made him so special to his friends and family, illuminates the best of American character.

Born in 1976, Michael was the type of guy in high school who would lash out at bullies trying to stuff another kid into a school locker. When his uncle passed away and his female cousins came to live with his family, Michael gladly gave up his room to them. Later, at Penn State, he made fast friends with a wide variety of folks. As his time at college wrapped up, Michael ditched plans for a legal career, deciding he wanted to try to join the Navy SEALS. He succeeded, and would serve honorably for several years before his life was claimed in a firefight in Afghanistan on June 28, 2005, the result of a tip to Taliban forces on the supposedly secret insertion of a four-man reconnaissance squadron of which Michael was the leader. In 2007, he would be posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, for his efforts to protect and save his men.

Murph: The Protector is built mostly around interviews with Murphy’s parents, Maureen and Dan, other family members and assorted friends, but also includes some parallel biographical stands from Hector Velez, the first recipient of a scholarship fund set up by Michael’s parents in his honor. Despite its somber ending, there are actually plenty of light moments along the way, like Michael’s friends recalling their shared childhoods and Maureen recounting Michael’s story to her about having to punch a hyena in the face during a late night run while on assignment in Africa.

Most moving, though, are the portions of the movie which detail the military’s outreach to Michael’s family, as well as the return of his body to Dover Air Force Base and Michael’s eventual funeral, which highlights the special fellowship of different types of first responders. Murph: The Protector isn’t a particularly sexy or dazzling movie; it eschews macro politics and the moves and ambition of statement filmmaking. It’s a simple portrait of true heartbreak, however, and sometimes that’s enough. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more general information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Mactavish Pictures, unrated, 77 minutes)

The action movie equivalent of the guy who, a couple years on from university, is still concerned with the sort of empty, cock-of-the-walk masculine posturing typically associated with teenagers, Olympus Has Fallen, or “Die Hard in the White House” as the pitch meeting surely went, attempts to graft geopolitical seriousness onto a swaggering siege tale, to ridiculous effect. A slick technical packaging by director Antoine Fuqua can’t offset the lumbering plotting and patchwork quality of producer-star Gerard Butler‘s vehicle — the first of two movies this year in which a Secret Service agent has to rescue the American president from a paramilitary takeover of his highly fortified residence. (The other, Sony’s White House Down, starring Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum, arrives this June). The thrill of the original Die Hard, the filmmakers seem to have forgotten, lay truly more in its brains than brawn. For the full, original review, from Screen Daily, click here. (FilmDistrict, R, 117 minutes)